Ruler of Correggio for thirty-two years, poet, and patron of literature and the arts
By the middle of the sixteenth century Veronica Gambara was the most frequently published woman poet in Europe, with the exception of Vittoria Colonna. Her poems appeared in no less than eighty poetry anthologies between 1505 and 1754.The fTequent citation of Gam-bara and her poetry by the most renowned writers of the later Italian Renaissance represents another measure of her celebrity. Ariosto praised her as “the darling of Phoebus and the choir of Muses” (Orlando Furioso, canto 46.3). Bernardo Tasso invoked the power of her art in his Amadigi. The prolific Neapolitan poet Laura Terracina dedicated her Il discorso sopra il princi-pio do tutti i canti di Orlando Furioso (1549) to Gambara, and Lucia Bertana and Vittoria Colonna also eulogized her in their sonnets. A widow for most of her adult life, she worked at building alliances with the most powerful princes in Europe to safeguard her small state, once defending her kingdom alone against the armed attack of a powerful neighboring lord. As ruler of Correggio after her husband’s death, Gambara transformed her court from the cultural backwater it had been to a magnet for writers, artists, and musicians. Eminent men and women came from all over Italy to pay her court. At the same time, her correspondence and friendships with prominent intellectuals of the period suggests an interest in, if not engagement with, the reformist ideas of the radical theologians Juan de Valdes and Bernardino Ochino, who would later be condemned as heretics. On a par with Gaspara Stampa and Vittoria Colonna, Gambara continues to draw praise from modern critics as one of the three greatest women lyric poets of her era.
Born in Prataboino near Brescia a generation after the noted Brescian humanist Laura Cereta, Veronica Gambara came from a powerful literary lineage. Daughter of Count Gian-fancesco da Gambara and Alda Pia, she saw a role model in her father’s aunt, the famous humanist scholar and writer Isotta Nogarola. On her mother’s side, she was the niece of Emilia Pia, the principal female interlocutor in Cas-tiglione’s II Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier, published in Venice in 1528). She received the kind of humanist education that most men and some women of her class were given to equip them for their roles as the future governors of their states: her studies included Greek and Latin literature, history, philosophy, scripture, and theology. In 1502 she began to correspond with the most influential proponent of Petrarchanism of the early sixteenth century, the poet Pietro Bembo, whom she looked to not only as the chief architect of her poetic style but as her mentor in forming her literary circle.
In 1509, Gambara married the soldier and nobleman Giberto X, lord of Correggio, and from the marriage she had two children: Ip-polito, who followed a military career like his father, and Girolamo, who took orders in the church. The unexpected death of her husband in 1518 marked the turning point in Gambara’s life. While Giberto ruled, the state of Correggio had remained loyal to King Francis I of France, even after 1512 when the forces of the French king had brutally attacked Brescia, Gambara’s hometown, sacking the city, desecrating its churches, and raping its townswomen. But in 1520, Gambara broke with France and pledged her fealty to Charles V and to Spain. In 1529, when Pope Clement VII sent her brother Umberto Gambara to Bologna as his ambassador, she traveled to that city herself, where in 1530 the pope crowned Charles V, officially endowing him with the title Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. Ingratiating herself with both the pope and the emperor in Bologna, in whose retinue Gambara’s older brother, Brunoro, was already serving, she cultivated new friends from Venice, Rome, Mantua, and Florence, many of whom she would later receive at her court in Correggio. CharlesV came to Correggio on 23 March 1530 on his return fTom Germany. In return for the lavish reception with which Gam-bara welcomed Charles, the emperor promised to safeguard her state from foreign invasion, forbidding his generals to travel through Correggio without his permission. In January 1533 Gambara again entertained Charles at her court when he returned to Italy for a new round of talks with the pope. The following year she negotiated the marriage contract of her son Ip-polito with Chiara di Correggio, daughter of her cousin Gianfrancesco, to ensure that upon her death Ippolito would succeed to the lordship of Correggio unchallenged.
When Galeotto Pico della Mirandola invaded Correggio in 1538, Gambara herself marshaled an army to expel him from her city, and when plague and famine struck her city and the neighboring towns of the Po valley the same year, she mounted a successful campaign to bring relief to her citizens. Meanwhile she continued to craft a good relationship for herself, her signory, and her sons with Clement’s successor Pope Paul III (Alessandro Farnese) and his powerful nephews, Pierluigi and Ottavio Farnese, who was the duke of Parma and Piacenza and the husband of the emperor’s daughter, Margaret of Austria. Among Gambara’s other staunch friends and allies during this period were Marchese Alfonso d’Avalos delVasto and his wife Marchesa Maria d’Aragona of Milan and Naples, and Marchesa Isabella d’Este of Mantua, after whose death she traveled to Mantua accompanied by her daughter-in-law for the wedding of Francesco III Gonzaga and Caterina of Habsburg in 1549. The painter Titian and the poets Bernardo Tasso, Bembo, and Ariosto visited her flourishing court, where the artist Antonio Allegri (known as Correggio) came under her protection and painted a portrait of her that would be celebrated in future centuries. The highly influential publisher’s agent and senior editor of the Giolito press inVenice, Lodovico Dolce, never traveled to Gambara’s court in Correggio, but her collected correspondence reveals an exchange of letters with him in April 1537, notable because Giolito and his associates in Venice published Gambara’s poetry repeatedly in the popular anthologies they marketed and sold between 1545 and 1560. Gambara was one of the few women poets to be inducted into one of the exclusive literary clubs that virtually defined urban culture in sixteenth-century Italy: the Academy of the Sonnacchiosi of Bologna (Fahy 2000, 444).
Gambara’s poetry represents a synthesis of the Petrarchan style filtered through Pietro Bembo and the Augustan poets Virgil and Tibullus. She favored the sonnet form, but she also wrote a madrigal, a ballad, and stanzas in ottava rima. Among the Petrarchan love poems she addressed to her husband, she wrote a sequence of two sonnets and a madrigal on the beauty of his eyes. Virgilian pastoral verses on the beauty of her native city, typically Augustan themes on the vanity of human wishes, the brevity of life, and the enduring happiness to be found in the pleasures of country living also mark her work. She wrote political sonnets to Charles V, urging him to pursue a policy of peace, and to the pope, exhorting him to oust the Turks from Europe. Her poems warning Pope Paul III that the church of Rome was like a flock without a shepherd and a ship without a pilot indicate that she too espoused certain reformist sentiments common among Italian intellectuals at midcentury, though her religious poetry also includes conventional devotional works as well. In addition, Gambara dedicated numerous poems to women, among whom were Vittoria Colonna, Marguerite de Navarre, Maria d’Aragona, and Isabella d’Este.
Gambara’s published letters, including her long correspondence with the notorious poet and sometime pornographer Pietro Aretino, provide a rich document of her life and culture. One of the most cantankerous figures of the period, Aretino ultimately lambasted Gambara in print, dismissing her as nothing more than a “meretrice laureata” (erudite whore; Russell 1994, p. 149; Luzio and Renier 1900, 347). Among other events, her letters comment on the wedding of Catherine de Medicis and Henry II in France, Ochino’s flight from Italy, and the dashing young Cardinal Ippolito de Medici’s death by poison (a widely held allegation that was never substantiated).
Gambara died in Correggio in 1550, leaving an ®uvre of sixty-seven poems and one hundred and fifty letters, most of which were not published during her lifetime. Although Gambara’s poems were printed and reprinted in sixty-eight anthologies in the sixteenth century (Bullock 1989, 100-101), no solo edition of her works appeared in print until Rizzardi’s edition of her Rime in 1759.A modern critical edition of her complete poetic works is now available by Alan Bullock (1995).
Diana Robin
See also Art and Women; Colonna, Vittoria; Music and Women; the subheadings Salons, Salon-nieres, and Women Writers; Sonnet Writing (under Literary Culture and Women).
Bibliography
Primary Works
Gambara, Veronica. Rime. Edited by Alan Bullock. Florence: Perth, 1995.
Gambara, Veronica. Rime e lettere. With a Vita by B. C. Zamboni. Edited by Francesco Rizzardi. Brescia: Rizzardi, 1759.
Stortoni, Laura Anna, ed. Women Poets of the Italian Renaissance: Courtly Ladies and Courtesans. Translated by Laura Anna Stortoni and Mary Prentice Lillie, 23-27. New York: Italica Press, 1997.
Secondary Works
Bozzetti, C., P. Gibellini, and E. Sandal, eds. Veronica Gambara e la poesia del suo tempo nell’Italia settentrionale. Atti del convegno Brescia-Correggio, 17-19 ottobre 1985. Florence: Olschki, 1989.
Diana, Robin. Publishing Women: Salons, the Presses, and the Counter-Reformation in Sixteenth-Centuy Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Fahy, Conor. “Women and Italian Cinquecento Literary Academies.” In Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society. Edited by Letizia Panizza, 438-452. Oxford: Legenda, University of Oxford, 2000.
Luzio, Alessandro, and Rodolfo Renier. “La cul-tura e le relazioni letterarie d’Isabella d’Este Gonzaga. 3. Gruppo lombardo.” Giornale storico delle letteratura italiana 36 (1900): 325-349.
Pignatti, Franco. “Gambara, Veronica.” In
Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani. Vol. 52. Pages
68—71. Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Ital-
Iana, 1996.
Poss, Richard.“Veronica Gambara:A Renaissance Gentildonna.” In Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation. Edited by Katharina M. Wilson, 47—65.Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987.
Rabitti, Giovanna.“Lyric Poetry, 1500—1650.” In A History of Women’s Writing in Italy. Translated by Abigail Brundin. Edited by Letizia Panizza and Sharon Wood, 37—42. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Russell, Rinaldina.“Veronica Gambara
(1485—1550).” In A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook. Edited by Rinaldina Russell, 145—153. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994.
World History
