Le rime spirituali della illustrissima signora Vittoria Colonna Marchesana di Pescara. Alle quali di nuovo sono stati aggiunti, oltre quelli non pur dell’altrui stampe, ma ancho della nostra medesima, più di trenta o trentatre sonetti, non mai più altrove stampati, un capitolo, et in non pochi luoghi ricorrette e più chiaramente distinte. Venezia: alla bottega d’Erasmo appresso Vincenzo Valgrisi, 1548.
Call number: PQ 4620 .A6 1548 (Special Collections)
Case 2: “Illustrations of the Divine Comedy and its Legacy Throughout the Centuries”
[Translation of the title in English: “The spiritual rhymes of illustrious Mrs. Vittoria Colonna Marchesana of Pescara, to which more than thirty or thirty-three sonnets, never again printed elsewhere, in addition not only to those from other publications but to our own as well, and a chapter have been added, and in many places these rhymes have been corrected and made more clearly distinct.”]
(c. 1520)
Recently acquired by Special Collections, this work includes two hundred and thirteen poems by Vittoria Colonna (1492-1547). The first pirate edition of the Rime appeared in 1538 in Parma and led Colonna—the first woman to be given the opportunity to publish an entire volume of poems—to become notorious.
The item consists of a letter by Apollonio Campano presenting Colonna’s rhymes to the Princess of Salerno and a list of all the poems in alphabetical order according to the initial letter of their first verse. Petrarch’s influence is evident in Colonna’s rhymes, from the collection’s organization as a canzoniere to the spiritual atmosphere of the poems, their reflective dimension, and their search for one’s interiority. However, Dante’s presence is pervasive in the poet’s use of particular words at the end of lines, as well as in the content of certain verses. Specifically, Dante allows Colonna to introduce the female body within the spiritual dimension of her production, an aspect that Petrarch instead rarefies. Moreover, the Divine Comedy offers Colonna a path toward an internal purification and elaboration of the pain resulting from her husband’s death, similar to the way Dante does penance for his sins through his journey in the afterlife.
Colonna’s description of the Virgin Mary (p. 60) recalls the prayer to the Virgin Mary that Saint Bernard recites at the beginning of canto 23 in Dante’s Paradiso. The physical dimension that Colonna inserts in her collection is here quite evident to the point that, through the mediation of maternity, she identifies herself with the Virgin. She looks at Christ and God in a human way, markedly different than the spiritual essence that both Dante and Petrarch describe.