The Beauty and the Terror by Catherine Fletcher

Author:Catherine Fletcher [Fletcher, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473553156
Publisher: Random House

This oration hints at her view, expressed elsewhere, that scholarship and marriage were not compatible; she did, however, marry in 1499, after which little of her writing survives. It is possible that by this stage she was no longer able to trade on a reputation for youth and beauty that had sustained her earlier career: even in the fifteenth century the appearance of a woman in the public eye was expected to conform to certain expectations. In 1556, at the age of ninety-one, she gave a rare public oration for the visit to Venice of Bona Sforza, queen of Poland (daughter of Gian Galeazzo Sforza, the young duke of Milan whose demand to rule his home city had been the catalyst for the Italian Wars). In it Fedele expressed admiration for Bona’s ‘singular prudence in ruling your people during peacetime and the fortitude of your admirable mind amid the winds of war’.30

The early years of the sixteenth century saw a number of treatises in defence of women, though the most prominent were by men. In the 1520s Galeazzo Flavio Capra wrote on the ‘Excellence and Dignity of Women’ (Della eccellentia e dignità delle donne, 1525), while Cornelius Agrippa wrote a treatise on the ‘Nobility and Pre-eminence of the Feminine Sex’ (De nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei sexus, 1529) which got a translation from Latin into the more widely read Italian in 1549. Cardinal Pompeo Colonna wrote an Apology for Women around 1529 (‘apology for’ here means ‘defence of’). The men were not to maintain their monopoly, however. Several women rose to prominence in the literary world of later Renaissance Italy. Among them was Cardinal Colonna’s cousin, Vittoria. The wife of Fernando Francesco d’Avalos, marquis of Pescara and commander at Pavia, Colonna became a celebrated poet and lady of letters, corresponding with Michelangelo and Baldassare Castiglione among others, especially after she was widowed. (The marquis died in late 1525, perhaps owing to the ongoing impact of wounds sustained in warfare.) Colonna was the daughter of another condottiere, Fabrizio, famed for his role at the Battle of Bicocca, and of Agnese di Montefeltro, a member of the old ruling family of Urbino. Prior to her marriage she had spent time at the court of her fiancé’s aunt, Costanza d’Avalos, whose palace enjoyed a fine location on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples. Costanza was noted both for her ‘beauty and refinement’ and for her skill as a political administrator, and enabled Colonna to meet prominent intellectuals from the Neapolitan court; she subsequently based herself in Rome, where she was likewise part of literary circles.31 In his Notable Men and Women, Paolo Giovio wrote that ‘not only has Vittoria raised herself marvellously beyond womanly capacity, but she has equalled the most widely esteemed and wisest men’. That said, his assessment of Vittoria’s virtues also included praise for her household management, and an extensive section on her physical appearance, including a detailed paragraph about her ‘most delicate cleavage’ and breasts ‘swelling with heavenly nectar’.

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