Prolific Petrarchan lyric poet, virtuosa (professional singer), and salonniere
Because relatively little is known about the life of the Padovan poet Gaspara Stampa, scholars have been tempted to recreate that life from her three hundred and eleven posthumously published poems. And the fact that the poems, as Benedetto Croce remarked almost a century ago, tease us with their intimate, epistolary nature has led readers like Croce to assume that the task is not necessarily a difficult one and the artistic nature of the poetry not particularly subtle: “Her collection... is nothing other than the letters and diary of her great love that ravished her for three years and. . . gave her, along with grief, joy greater than she could have imagined, joy in which she found the only meaning and value of her life.” Croce’s contemporary, Rainer Maria Rilke, made Stampa the primary example of unrequited love in the first of his Duino Elegies, and the early twentieth-century editor of Stampa’s works, Abdelkader Salza, concluded from the amorous affairs that Stampa charts in her poems (not one, but two) that Stampa must have been one ofVenice’s many infamous courtesans who profited from their beauty, education, and cultural versatility.
While Salza’s characterization of Stampa as a courtesan has been amply challenged, it is also the case that it is difficult to categorize her. She does not fit comfortably into early modern norms: an acclaimed and unmarried virtuosa who sang and played the lute, she frequented
Venice’s most elegant social circles and carried on a very public affair with one of the city’s leading aristocrats, to the extent that she chose for her academic pseudonym the Latinized name of the river on his estate. Her first biographer, Alessandro Zilioli, wrote of her in the late 1500s, “having given herself to converse freely with well-educated men, she brought such scandal to herself that had not her great talents and the honor of her poetry concealed and almost cancelled her failings, it would be necessary to cover her with blame rather than include her here within this temple of honor among such valorous women.” Blame aside, Zilioli manages to capture, as Marina Zancan comments, the “transgressive nature” of Stampa’s figure—a figure who eludes those who would understand her. Certainly her writing conveys far more intimacy than that of female contemporaries, such as Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara, despite the fact that all three were shaped by Petrarch’s Canzoniere and in turn Pietro Bembo’s petrarchismo. There are many pangs of unrequited love in the Rime, although pace Rilke, there are also moments of consummation, as in the famous sonnet (104) in which Stampa calls the night her friend and wishes that she was like Alcmene, Jupiter’s lover, for whom the rising sun had been stayed by Apollo.
What is known about her life as pieced together from correspondence and civic records is that Stampa’s father, a well-off jewel merchant, was anxious to have her educated in Latin and Greek, along with her sister Cassandra and brother Baldessar, and hired a tutor for that purpose. When her mother became widowed in the early 1530s, she moved her three children from Padova to Venezia, and by the mid-1540s the sisters were both acclaimed for their musical skills; one singer called Gaspara a “divine siren,” and the organist Gerolamo Par-abosco asks in his Lettere amorose of 1545,“who has ever heard such sweet and elegant words? . . . and what will I say of that angelic voice that struck the air with its divine accents and made such sweet harmony that it awakened spirit and life in the coldest stones?” The death of Gaspara’s brother at age nineteen prompted from his friends the outpouring of works dedicated to Gaspara, including an edition of Boccaccio’s Ameto. Such attention in Venice’s elite circles suggests that the Stampa home had become something of a salon or ri-dotto, at which the sisters performed for their guests. Stampa seems to have participated in the meetings of one ofVenice’s literary academies, the Dubbiosi (doubtful ones), and attended the salons of others, including that of the powerful if bedridden Domenico Venier, who in his old age patronizedVeronica Franco. Stampa’s collection, in fact, includes sonnets to Venier, the Florentine poet Luigi Alamanni, the critic and cultural arbiter Sperone Speroni, and numerous petrarchisti—as well as Catherine de Medicis, only a few years older than herself, and Catherine’s husband, Henri II of Valois. These largely occasional verses suggest that Stampa was a familiar figure in Venetian cultural life, and they also, of course, show her embracing the life of poet as well as musician.
But it is with Stampa’s emergence as a poet that her biography becomes entangled with her writing. At one ofVenier’s salons she met Count Collaltino di Collalto, a knight who was to fight for the king of France on several occasions and a member of a prestigious fam-ily. The liaison, which initially sparked hopes of marriage, was punctuated by Collalto’s lengthy visits to his estates and his service to Henri II. Well over two hundred poems in the collection are focused on Collalto, who seems to have definitively broken off the affair by 1552. Another romantic attachment with a Venetian patrician, Bartolomeo Zen, seems to have followed; some sixteen poems are dedicated to Zen, including one in which his name is spelled out using the first letters of each line. Virtually nothing is known of this affair, but shortly after it ended, fever claimed the apparently fragile Gaspara, and she died, thirty years old, in April 1554.
Her sister Cassandra published a volume of Gaspara’s poems six months later, with a dedication to the poet and future cardinal, Giovanni della Casa, a frequent visitor to the Stampa home, and a letter by Gaspara herself to Col-lalto. But the book seems to have passed largely unnoticed. While three of Stampa’s sonnets had been included in an anthology of 1553 entitled II sesto libro delle rime di diversi eccelenti autori, the Rime marked the first and, for almost two centuries, the only edition of Stampa’s collected writings. The rediscovery and reedition of the text by a descendant of Collalto in 1738, featuring portraits of Stampa and Collalto himself (and a selection of his poems revealing his poetic talents as mediocre at best, despite Gas-para’s claims to the contrary), helped launch the romantic reception of Stampa as the passionate woman whose love for the haughty Collalto was, as Croce would later say, the great joy of her life. Salza’s early twentieth-century edition, as has been noted, made of the passion a profession, citing among other things a letter by the gadfly Pietro Aretino as proof (and ignoring the fact that Aretino had also accused that paragon of female virtue, Vittoria Colonna, of being a whore).
Yet Salza’s more damaging legacy was the rearrangement of the 1554 edition into two sections: the love poetry to Collalto and Zen, and rime varie—verses in various meters to Henri, Alamanni, Venier, and, at the end, God, the “Lord who hangs on the cross" In ending the Rime with what could be called Stampa’s penitential poems (“Crestfallen and repentant for my serious lapses, / for so much raving— so much of it thoughtless— / for having spent the little time/ our fugitive lives give us in vainly loving” opens the final sonnet in Salza’s edition), Salza created a narrative of passion and repentance. His and all subsequent editions of Stampa’s poems take us from Stampa’s Christmas Day encounter with Collalto that (sacrilegiously?) turns her into Mary and Collalto into the lord who has found his nido within her, to the lover’s belated turn to God and confession of her errors. The 1554 version contains no such narrative, since its divisions are based on differing metrical forms. The sonnets are followed by capitoli and madrigals, and the collection ends with an attack on the god Amore, who pitilessly leaves the narrator without recompense—even, she says, without life (poem 240 in Salza). Returning to the 1554 volume demands that we confront the fact that Stampa’s own version of the Petrarchan can-zoniere offers us not a life that moves from uncontrollable love to penitence, but a rich, sometimes bewildering array of feelings, poetic voices, and literary and mythological personae. The original edition may not have been authorized by Stampa, but one can speak of it as a kind of collaboration between Gaspara and her sister, who was persuaded by “many gentlemen of intellectual gifts” to publish the results of Gaspara’s “honored labors.”
These are labors that went against the tide of mid-sixteenth-century poetry even as they bore the stamp of Petrarch—including an opening modeled on Petrarch’s valedictory poem: “You who hear in these troubled rhymes, / in these troubled, in these dark accents, / the sound of my amorous laments / and my sufferings that vanquish all others’: // wherever valor is prized and esteemed, / I hope to find glory among the well-born: / glory, and not only pardon. . . .’’Yet even these opening lines suggest a difference: Petrarch had sought “pity” from his well-heeled reader, while Gaspara seeks the gloria and fame that the 1554 edition’s engraving of her, perhaps a rendering of a painting by Titian, proleptically bestows: she is seated with books to her left and a laurel wreath on her head. And it is the pena (pain) that she suffers for a beautiful but cruel Collalto that she hopes will find an outlet in her penna (her pen), thus enabling her to write in a “new style.” The style, as Croce, however, dismissively noted, is often colloquial and conversational, as Stampa frequently soliloquizes, addressing alternately her “happy heart,” courtesy, love, an unnamed friend, the donne who read her poems, and, of course, Col-lalto himself, whom she addresses in one of her most lacerating sonnets not as the formal voi but as an equal: tu. Conventions abound, some of them tiring, but the majority of the verse is notable for its directness and avoidance of the pedantic. This “new style” in turn finds its parallel in the poems’ startling content. Collalto may be a handsome and worthy knight, but he is cruel in love; and, as we hear of his prolonged absences and infidelities, we realize he is no idealized beloved but a human with considerable foibles, some of them unforgivable. Thus not only does Stampa present us with a poetic sequence in which she takes on the role of the desiring woman in pursuit of a reluctant male (one sonnet opens, “he flees me; / I follow him, while others destroy themselves for me”) but the male himself is finally unworthy of her love. In the sonnet where she first addresses Collalto as tu, she calls him “cruel, uncivilized, disdainful, inhuman and unkind”— but only to her, as he turns his “spirit, thoughts, heart, soul, and gaze” to others. Shakespeare’s dark lady, it would seem, has made her first appearance in the figure of Collalto. And given the wide range of emotions that the speaker expresses as she identifies herself with Echo, the shepherdess/river Anasilla, and, after falling in love with Zen, as Dido (there are hints of “I recognize the trace of an old flame” in several poems), she seems an interesting precursor for Shakespeare’s Will.
And a persona, of course, is what Stampa creates in her poetry, despite the Rime’s convincing production of intimacy as Stampa indulges her readers’ desire for the authentic voice of the virtuosa in an age of sprezzatura and the emergence of professional women artists. Yet it is a production. The poet’s voice conceals as much as it conveys through its superb control of and challenge to the period’s conventions and its play with the musicality and suspenseful rhythms of the newly legitimized volgare.
Jane Tylus
See also Morra, Isabella di; the subheadings Salons, Salonnieres, and Women Writers; Sonnet Writing (under Literary Culture and Women).
Bibliography
Primary Works
Stampa, Gaspara. Rime. Edited by Maria Bellonci. Milan: R. C.S., 2002.
Stampa, Gaspara. Rime di Gaspara Stampa e di Veronica Franco. Edited by A. Salza. Bari: 1913.
Stampa, Gaspara. Rime di Madonna Gaspara Stampa. Venice: Pietrasanta, 1554.
Secondary Works
Bassanese, Fiora. Gaspara Stampa. Boston:Twayne, 1982.
Jones, Ann Rosalind.“Bad Press: Modern Editors Versus Early Modern Women Poets (Tullia d’Aragona, Gaspara Stampa, Veronica Franco).” In Strong Voices, Weak History: Early Women Writers and Canons in England, France, and Italy. Edited by Pamela Joseph Benson and Victoria Kirkham, 287—313. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005.
Jones, Ann Rosalind. The Currency of Eros. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.
Zancan, Marina. “Gaspara Stampa: Rime.” In Let-teratura Italiana: Le Opere. Vol. II. Edited by Aldo Asor Rosa, 407-436. Milan: Einaudi, 1992.
World History
