Duchess of Tagliacozzo; patron of artists, poets, editors, and the printing industry; active in the religious
Reform movement in Naples
Giovanna d’Aragona, daughter of Duke Ferdi-nando di Montalto and Castellana Cardona and the granddaughter of King Ferrante of Naples, was born in 1502 in the castello on the island of Ischia, where her parents and the other members of the Aragonese court took refuge when Naples fell to the king of France and his army. There on Ischia, where Giovanna grew up, the forty-year-old widow Costanza d’Avalos gathered a circle of literary men and women around her, the poetVittoria Colonna, the wife of d’Avalos’s nephew Ferrante Francesco d’Avalos, among them. D’Avalos herself had taken up arms and had driven the French off the island when they attempted to lay siege to the castello.
In 1521 Giovanna d’Aragona married Vit-toria Colonna’s brother, Ascanio Colonna, in the Castel Novo in Naples. By then the French had left Naples, ceding the kingdom to the king of Spain. On their marriage, the couple inherited the titles duke and duchess of Tagliacozzo, a Colonna fiefdom in Abruzzo. Giovanna and Ascanio’s marriage brought together the interests of the powerful Colonna clan and the Aragonese royals in Naples. After the birth of her sixth and last child in 1535, Giovanna d’Aragona left her husband and withdrew with her children to the d’Avalos castello on Ischia, where she took part in the literary salon around Costanza d’Avalos and Vittoria Colonna. Despite attempts of many to reconcile the couple, Giovanna and Ascanio continued to live in separate domiciles for the rest of their lives.
Giovanna Aragona’s withdrawal to Ischia signaled a period of increasing closeness between Vittoria Colonna and her sister-in-law. Naples was already the epicenter of the religious revival in Italy at this time, even before the early months of 1536 when the Spanish theologian Juan de Valdes came to Naples and the spirituali movement he led was born. D’Aragona, her sister Maria, and the Colonna women, Vittoria Colonna and her cousin by marriage Giulia Gonzaga Colonna, were among the first to join the religious circle around Valdes. These women and their mentor Costanza d’Avalos remained inseparable, and together they constituted the core of Valdes’s followers in Naples. Giovanna d’Aragona’s long and close relationship with Vittoria Colonna took on a new dimension as they listened together to the sermons of Ochino and Valdes.
Colonna was unable to persuade d’Aragona to give the marriage another try, though at her urging, Paul III (pope 1534—1549) sent his own envoy to Ischia to influence Giovanna to return to Ascanio, but after two years the pope’s ambassador returned to Rome, his mission a failure. In 1539, Ascanio Colonna and other lords in the region extending from Abruzzo to Campagna refused to pay the new salt tax the new pope had levied. For two years both Vittoria Colonna and Giovanna d’Ara-gona worked behind the scenes, writing letters and meeting face to face with the pope’s envoys and the representatives of Emperor Charles V in their efforts to head off war between Paul and his vassals. But in March 1541, the Salt War began in earnest. The pope’s ten thousand men marched on Paliano. Early that summer they razed Ascanio Colonna’s fortifications at Marino, Rocca di Papa, and finally in January 1543 they destroyed Paliano. As-canio remained banished from his lands until 1549, only to be arrested and imprisoned five years later in Naples by an envoy of his former patron, Charles V, on charges of treason.
At the end of 1555, Giovanna d’Aragona found herself facing imminent danger from two fronts: the office of the Inquisition in Rome and the newly inaugurated pope, Paul IV (Gian Pietro Carafa), who was virulently anti-Reform and anti-Spanish—and no friend of the Colonna. By late summer that year Gio-vanna’s son, Marcantonio Colonna, and the viceroy of Naples had signed treaties of alliance with Spain and Milan, while Paul awaited massive shipments of men and materiel from France. A decade and a half after the Salt War of 1541, the pope and the Colonna were gearing up for a second war. Virtually hostages of the pope, d’Aragona and her entourage sat in the Colonna palace, a stone’s throw from the Vatican. On 31 December at around midnight, Giovanna walked through the city gates unrecognized in the coarse shawl and boots of a peasant, and from there she fled to Naples with her children, secretaries, and servants. D’Ara-gona’s flight fTom Rome and her treatment at the hands of Pope Paul triggered protests from the men of the presses in Venice, thousands of whose books the Inquisition had confiscated or destroyed. An attack on Giovanna d’Aragona— the patron of the presses, literary academies, and poets—was an assault on their own lives and work. Two major works paying tribute to Giovanna d’Aragona Colonna were published in Venice: the first, a 524-page anthology published in 1555 by Girolamo Ruscelli, containing commemorative works by virtually every living poet in Italy; the second, a dialogue by Giuseppe Betussi that came out in 1556.
By 1560, Paul IV and Ascanio Colonna were both long dead, the latter having died in prison in Naples where he languished for four years after his arrest. That year d’Aragona returned in triumph to her home in the Colonna palace in Rome. Though d’Aragona retained her Spanish-leaning politics and her ties with the Jesuits, she remained a prominent cultural figure in both Rome and Naples until her death in 1575.
Diana Robin
See also Aragona, Maria d’; Colonna, Vittoria; the subheading Literary Patronage (under Literary Culture and Women); Power, Politics and Women; Religious Reform and Women.
Bibliography
Primary Works
Betussi, Giuseppe. Le Imagini del tempio della signora donna Giovanna Aragona. Dialogo di M. Giuseppe Betussi.... Florence:Torrentino, 1556.
Colonna, Vittoria. Carteggio. 2nd ed. Edited by Er-manno Ferrero and G. Mueller, with a supplement by Domenico Tordi. Turin: Loescher, 1892.
Reumont, Alfredo.“Di Vittoria Colonna: a
Proposito dell’operetta Vittoria Colonna, par J.
Lefevre Deumier.” Archivio storico italiano, n. s. 5 (1857): 143-145.
Ruscelli, Girolamo, ed. Del Tempio alla divina signora donna Giovanna d’Aragona, fabricato da tutti i pin gentili Spiriti, & in tutte le lingue principali del mondo. Venice: Plinio Pietrasanta, 1555.
Secondary Works
Alberigo, Giuseppe.“Aragona, Giovanna d’.” Dizionario biografico degli italiani [DBI], 3: 694-696. Rome: Istituto dell’ Enciclopedia Italiana, 1961.
Alberigo, Giuseppe. “Aragona, Maria d’.” Dizionario biografico degli italiani [DBI], 3: 701-702. Rome: Istituto dell’ Enciclopedia Italiana, 1961.
Brundin, Abigail. Vittoria Colonna. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, forthcoming.
Caro, Gaspare de.“Avalos, Alfonso.” Dizionario biografico degli italiani [DBI], 4: 612-616. Rome: Istituto dell’ Enciclopedia Italiana, 1962.
Patrizi, G. “Colonna, Vittoria.” Dizionario biografico degli italiani [DBI], 27: 448-457. Rome: Istituto dell’ Enciclopedia Italiana, 1982.
Petrucci, Franca.“Colonna, Ascanio.” Dizionario bi-ografico degli italiani [DBI], 27: 271-275. Rome: Istituto dell’ Enciclopedia Italiana, 1982.
Robin, Diana. Publishing Women. Salons, the Presses, and Religious Reform in Renaissance Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Vassalli, Donata Chiomenti. Giovanna d’Aragona, fra baroni, principi e sovrani del Rinascimento. Milan: Mursia, 1987.
World History
