Sonnets for Michelangelo: A Bilingual Edition

Modern Language Review, The, Oct, 2006 by Marco Maggi

Sonnets for Michelangelo: A Bilingual Edition. By VITTORIA COLONNA. Ed. and trans. by ABIGAIL BRUNDIN. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 2005. xxxii 197PP. 17 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 0-226-11392-2.

For at least three centuries, Vittoria Colonna's spiritual poems have been read in unauthorized publications; the most complete of these, the Venetian printing by Valgrisi of 1546, was followed by Alan Bullock in his 1982 edition of Colonna's Rime. It was only in 1840 that Pietro Ercole Visconti published an edition consistent with some manuscripts, regarded as true representations of the author's will. Abigail Brundin has now published and translated into English a corpus of 103 spiritual sonnets contained in a manuscript prepared by Vittoria Colonna herself, around 1540, as a gift for her friend Michelangelo: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. Lat. 11539.

The unquestionable progress towards a closer adherence to the intentio auctoris is only the least of the merits of this edition. If the meaning of a literary work lies (also) in the history of its interpretations, we shall still have to continue referring to the unauthorized editions of Vittoria's spiritual poems, the only form in which her religious poetry was accessible to generations of readers. Rather, Abigail Brundin's translation is important because it renders accessible to the English reader for the first time a significant collection of poems by the most celebrated woman writer of the Italian Renaissance.

But it is the choice of the Vatican manuscript itself that makes Brundin's edition so valuable, and not only to English-speaking readers. First, this text shows, as it were in vitro, a phenomenon of double 'cross-fertilization': on the one hand, between Colonna's poetry and Michelangelo's (in the name of Petrarch, as Carlo Vecce has pointed out); on the other hand, within Colonna's poetry itself, between Petrarchism and Evangelism, as Brundin shows in her introduction (pp. 13-18). Second, this manuscript gift enables us to know more about the parallel between Michelangelo's art and Colonna's poetry, a topic already discussed by Emidio Campi and, on the occasion of a recent exhibition ('Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo', Florence, Casa Buonarroti, 2005), by Monica Bianco and Vittoria Romani. These scholars focused on the presence, in Colonna's canzoniere, of themes relating to three famous drawings prepared for her by Michelangelo; but this issue is far from being exhausted, and Brundin's edition will surely encourage new efforts in this direction. To provide only a first example, Michelangelo's sculpture, too, could shed light on the enigmatic sonnet which concludes Vittoria's collection of religious poems, both in the Vatican manuscript and in the Valgrisi edition. In these verses Vittoria has doubts about the possibility of establishing an authentic form of communication through poetry: 'Di giovar poca, ma di nocer molta | Ragion vi scorgo' (Sonnet 103, p. 139: 'I perceive little reason why they [my verses] should be of use, | but much evidence that they do harm'). In Sonnet 45 (p. 93) earthly forms, even those created by the hand of the holiest of painters, Saint Luke, appear to her as 'partial and imperfect'. So in Sonnet 73 (p. 115) she concludes: 'Thus I inscribe upon these pages a dark shadow | instead of that dazzling sun, and I speak to others here | of heavenly things with broken and inadequate words.' The artistic metaphor leads quite naturally from these 'voci rotte e frali' (and rotte is preferable to the roche, 'hoarse', of the Valgrisi printing; see Bullock's edition, S1:65) to Michelangelo's unfinished Prigioni.

MARCO MAGGI

LICEO CLASSICO STATALE 'CARLO BOTTA', IVREA