Sienese poet and civic leader
Born to parents whose families belonged to the Sienese elite, Laudomia Forteguerri came of age at a time when women were dominant actors in the cultural affairs of Siena. Forteguerri emerged as a prominent public figure, first in her twenties as a published poet and twenty years later as the leader of a women’s regiment during the siege of Siena. She was married twice: in 1535 to Giulio di Alessandro Colombini who died in 1542; and subsequently to Petruccio Petrucci.
A widow at twenty-seven and the mother of three small children, Forteguerri was active in both the Sienese literary salons and the city’s religious reform movement. Marc’Anto-nio Piccolomini’s dialogue (ca. 1537), which represents Forteguerri vigorously arguing against the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory with two other female intellectuals, Girolama Carli di Piccolomini and Frasia Marzi, cannot be read as a documentary. Nonetheless it suggests that on the eve of the Inquisition in Rome, elite women in Siena such as Forteguerri, Carli di Piccolomini, and Marzi were actively involved in freewheeling, even heretical readings and discusssion.
Forteguerri’s celebrity soon spread beyond Siena when the noted writer and cleric Alessandro Piccolomini delivered a lecture on one of her poems at a meeting of the prestigious Accademia degli Infiammati in Padua. Published with Piccolomini’s lecture in Bologna in 1541, Forteguerri’s poem was picked up by the Giolito press in Venice and reprinted in the first volume of what would eventually comprise a best-selling series of poetry anthologies. Forteguerri’s poem appeared in the Giolito anthology alongside the works of four female lyricists of the 1540s who were already widely acclaimed: Vittoria Colonna, Veronica Gambara, Laura Terracina, and the courtesan Francesca Baffa.
Forteguerri dedicated her anthologized poem (entitled Hora te ’n va superbo) to Margaret of Austria, Emperor CharlesV’s daughter, who was visiting Siena en route to Rome where her marriage to the pope’s grandson, Ottavio Farnese, was to be celebrated. The poem was part of a suite of five sonnets Forteguerri sent Margaret after her departure. The mis-en-scene in Forteguerri’s poetic suite is suggestive of the long Italian tradition of love lyric, from the Roman elegiac poets to Petrarch. Yet Forteguerri’s own poetic language is tempered. Her sonnets lack the Petrarchan images of erotic inflammation, icy chills, bodily pain, and psychological suffering that characterize the poems that such sixteenth-century women writers as Isabella di Morra, Gaspara Stampa, and Chiara Matraini addressed to their male lovers—images also found, though more rarely, in the published amatory poems that some women sent to one another in sixteenth-century Italy (Robin 2007; cf. Eisenbichler 2001). Forteguerri’s five poems to Margaret portray the drama of an emotional obsession, which begins with the poet’s request for a love token and ends with Margaret’s silence, the poet’s venting of her anger on the goddess Fortuna, and a prayer for divine intervention to bring about Margaret’s return.
In 1552, fourteen years after Forteguerri’s final meeting with Margaret, her father, Charles V, joined forces with Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici of Florence, and for three years they lay siege to Siena, bombarding the city with heavy artillery and laying waste to the surrounding countryside. Between 1552 and 1553, Forteguerri commanded a squadron of a thousand women who were constructing a fortress for the city’s defense. Blaise de Mon-luc, who led the French troops allied with the Sienese Republic against Charles V and Cosimo I, vividly described Forteguerri’s allfemale regiment as dressed in short velvet outfits that revealed the women’s buskins as they labored with picks and shovels and carried baskets of earth on their heads (Monluc 1617, 105-106; Sozzini 1842,279).
On 17 April 1555, the starving citizens of Siena, many of whom were ill and near death, surrendered their city to Florence and Charles’s imperial army. Though Forteguerri’s death date is not known, Cerreta believes she either died during the siege of Siena or soon after the surrender of the city (1960, 31), but Zarrilli (1997, 154) argues that Giuseppe Be-tussi’s eyewitness account of her bravery in his Le Imagini del tempio (1557, 32r—32v) indicates that she was still alive when he was in Siena in 1556 after the war was over.
Diana Robin
See also the subheading Sonnet Writing (under Literary Culture and Women); Margaret of Parma; Morra, Isabella di; Stampa, Gaspara.
Bibliography
Primary Works
Betussi, Giuseppe. Le imagini del tempio della signora Giovanna Aragona. Dialogo diM. Giuseppe Betussi. Venice: Giovanni de’ Rossi, 1557.
Monluc, Blaise de Lasseran-Massencome. Com-mentaires de Messire Blaise de Monluc. Mareschal de France 1521—1576. Paris: Martom Gobert, 1617.
Piccolominio, Alessandro. Lettura del S. Alessandro Piccolomini Infiammato fatta nell’Accademia degli Infiammati. Bologna: Bartolomeo Bonardo e Marc’Antonio da Carpi, 1541.
Sozzini, Alessandro. Diario delle cose avvenute in Siena dai 20 Luglio 1550 ai 28 Giugno 1555, scritto da Alessandro Sozzini con altre narrazioni e documenti relativi alla caduta di quella reppublica. Florence: Piero Viesseux Editore, 1842.
Secondary Works
Belladonna, Rita.“Gli Intronati, Le Donne, Aonio Paleario e Agostino Museo in un Dialogo Inedito di Marcantonio Piccolomini. Il sodo Intronato (1538)" Bullettino senese di storia pa-tria 99 (1994): 48-90.
Cerreta, Florindo. Alessandro Piccolomini. Letterato e Filosofo Senese del Cinquecento. Siena: Accademia Senese degli Intronati, 1960.
Eisenbichler, Konrad. “Laudomia Forteguerri Loves Margaret of Austria" In Same Sex Love and Desire Among Women in the Middle Ages. Edited by Francesco Canade Sautman and Pamela Sheingoran, 277-280. New York: Pal-grave, 2001.
Robin, Diana. Publishing Women. Salons, the Presses, and Religious Reform in Renaissance Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Zarrilli, Carla. “Forteguerri, Laudomia" Vol. 49: 153-155. Rome: Instituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1997.
World History
