Chapter 6. Grace and Labour: Michelangelo Buonarroti and Vittoria Colonna

2020 ◽  
pp. 142-180
Keyword(s):  
Michelangelo Buonarroti ◽  
Vittoria Colonna

Vittoria Colonna

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abigail Brundin
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Religion And Literature ◽  
Michelangelo Buonarroti ◽  
Pietro Bembo ◽  
Vittoria Colonna ◽  
Literary Figure ◽  
Close Friendship ◽  
Successive Generations ◽  
High Level

Vittoria Colonna (b. 1490/2–d. 1547) made her name as the author of numerous lyric poems in the Petrarchan style in 16th-century Italy. Her poetry was widely published in printed editions in her lifetime and after, as well as being set to music by many composers. She was admired as an impeccable stylist who manipulated the sonnet form with considerable agility while also demonstrating the appropriate decorum and gravity. At the same time, especially in her later spiritual verses, Colonna pushed the genre in new, innovative directions that proved very influential for successive generations of poets. Although she always claimed to have no desire to see her work circulate beyond a close group of friends, Colonna’s reputation as a literary figure was considerable by the time of her death in 1547. She began composing poetry early in life, but her renown as a Petrarchist grew in the wake of her husband’s death in 1525, when mourning became the dominant theme in her lyrics. She was promoted by Pietro Bembo, who admired her style and seriousness, and she corresponded with many of the major literary figures of her day. Her involvement with the religious controversies of the 1530s and 1540s brought a decidedly evangelical flavor to much of her mature poetic production, and was also integral to her close friendship with Michelangelo Buonarroti. Notably, Colonna was the first secular woman to achieve a high level of literary status in Italy for vernacular production, and her example opened the way for subsequent women writers to publish in all manner of genres. In this she was greatly aided both by her aristocratic status and by her widowhood, which conferred on her a degree of independence and wealth that allowed her the space to write. She resisted a second marriage and devoted her later years to religion and literature, producing some of her most striking spiritual poetry in the years before her death. She also wrote a number of prose meditations, expressing a female perspective on the reformed faith that so influenced her.

The Authenticity of De Hollanda's Dialogos em Roma

PMLA ◽  
1946 ◽  
Vol 61 (4-Part1) ◽  
pp. 1018-1028
Author(s):  
Robert J. Clements
Keyword(s):  
Good Friend ◽  
Michelangelo Buonarroti ◽  
Vittoria Colonna

Francisco de Hollanda has been assured a modest paragraph in the ledger of history for three principal merits: he was a competent miniaturist, he was one of Portugal's most enthusiastic humanists, and he was a friend of Michelangelo Buonarroti. Curiously enough, it was this latter acquaintanceship which constituted his chief claim to fame. In the month of October, 1538, Francisco was present at three conversations on art and aesthetics in which participated, among others, Michelangelo and his good friend Vittoria Colonna. Francisco recorded these conversations for posterity. Together with a fourth dialogue in which Michelangelo does not figure, these Dialogos em Roma form the latter half of Francisco's Da pintura antigua, published at Lisbon in 1548.

The Grace of the Italian Renaissance

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ita Mac Carthy
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Social Harmony ◽  
Vittoria Colonna ◽  
The World ◽  
Changing World

‘Grace’ emerges as a keyword in the culture and society of sixteenth-century Italy. This book explores how it conveys and connects the most pressing ethical, social and aesthetic concerns of an age concerned with the reactivation of ancient ideas in a changing world. The book reassesses artists such as Francesco del Cossa, Raphael, and Michelangelo and explores anew writers like Castiglione, Ariosto, Tullia d'Aragona, and Vittoria Colonna. It shows how these artists and writers put grace at the heart of their work. The book argues that grace came to be as contested as it was prized across a range of Renaissance Italian contexts. It characterised emerging styles in literature and the visual arts, shaped ideas about how best to behave at court and sparked controversy about social harmony and human salvation. For all these reasons, grace abounded in the Italian Renaissance, yet it remained hard to define. The book explores what grace meant to theologians, artists, writers, and philosophers, showing how it influenced their thinking about themselves, each other and the world. It portrays grace not as a stable formula of expression but as a web of interventions in culture and society.

Cultural Clientelism and Brokerage Networks in Early Modern Florence and Rome: New Correspondence between the Barberini and Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger*

2007 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 729-788 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janie Cole
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Music Theater ◽  
Michelangelo Buonarroti ◽  
Cultural Brokers ◽  
Early Modern Italy ◽  
Significant Area ◽  
Archival Documentation ◽  
Cultural Brokerage ◽  
Significant Figures

AbstractThis study draws on the unpublished correspondence between Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger, a Florentine poet and grandnephew of the artist, and the Barberini family, in an attempt to examine the wider concepts of cultural clientelism and brokerage networks in the early modern process of cultural dissemination (in the areas of literature, music, theater, painting, architecture, and science) in Florence and Rome. Reconsidering the definition and role of a Seicento cultural broker added to the traditional model of patron and client, it analyzes Michelangelo the Younger’s activity as broker, patron-broker, and broker-client in connection with such significant figures as Maffeo Barberini (the future Urban VIII), Galileo, and the painter Lodovico Cigoli, exploring the ways in which these roles supported his personal commitment to promote his family’s social status and revealing the fluidity of roles in the patronage system. By obtaining Barberini patronage for his theatrical works and public recognition of the mythology of his illustrious forebear, Buonarroti’s cultural brokerage supported these dynastic ambitions. Spanning nearly half a century, this archival documentation casts new light on a little-known, but significant, area of Italian social relations and suggests directions for further research on other Seicento cultural brokers and new definitions for a broader concept of cultural brokerage in early modern Italy.

Vittoria Colonna

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vittoria Colonna
Keyword(s):  
Vittoria Colonna
Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document