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What Kind of Voice Made Itself Heard in the Rime Di Madonna Gaspara Stampa When the Volume Was Published Posthumously in 1554 By

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What Kind of Voice Made Itself Heard in the Rime Di Madonna Gaspara Stampa When the Volume Was Published Posthumously in 1554 By VOLUME EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION THE OTHER VOICE hat kind of voice made itself heard in the Rime di Madonna Gaspara WStampa when the volume was published posthumously in 1554 by the small Venetian press of Plinio Pietrasanta? This was a voice that almost wasn’t heard, as the author’s sister, Cassandra, tearfully confesses. So painful was evoking the memory of her beloved Gaspara that were she not con- strained by infl uential men to “gather together whatever verses of hers I could fi nd,” the Rime would never have been published at all. Only three of Stampa’s 310 poems had been published before Stampa’s death, in one of the numerous “raccolte” popular in Italy, and especially Venice, during the 1550s and 1560s.1 And despite Cassandra’s efforts, very few of them were anthologized thereafter, at least not until that energetic doyenne of women’s literature, Luisa Bergalli, made Stampa the star of her Componimenti poetici delle più illustri rimatrici d’ogni secolo of 1726. With Antonio Rambaldo di 1. Three of Stampa’s poems were published shortly before her death, in Girolamo Ruscelli, ed., Il sesto libro delle rime di diversi eccellenti autori, nuovamente raccolte, et mandate in luce. Con un discorso di Gi- rolamo Ruscelli (Venice, 1553): “Vieni Amor’ ” (51), “Ò hora, ò stella dispietata e cruda” (70), and “Fa ch’io rivegga Amor’ ” (75). All three poems reappeared in the Rime diverse d’alcune nobilissime, et virtuosissime donne, raccolte per M. Lodovico Domenichi (Lucca: Vincenzo Busdragho, 1559), along with what would become 243 to Jacopo Bonetto, previously unpublished, included in this vol- ume in Appendix A. The year after Stampa’s death, the poem to Giovanna d’Aragona (268) ap- peared in Del tempio alla divina signora donna Giovanna d’Aragona (Venice: Plinio Pietrasanta, 1555), edited by Girolamo Ruscelli, who presumably commissioned it from Stampa for the collection. All fi ve of these separately published poems were subsequently included in Rime di cinquanta illustri poetesse, edited by Antonio Bulifon (Naples, 1695); my thanks to Jessica Goethals for her help in locating this volume. Finally, what I would consider the spurious capitolo “Felice in questa e più nell’altra vita,” included in this volume in appendix A, was fi rst published in an anthology edited by Cristoforo Zabata in 1573, Nuova scelta di rime di diversi begli ingegni (Genoa: Copyright © 2010. University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. of Chicago Press. © 2010. University Copyright Christofforo Bellone), and attributed to Stampa. 1 Stampa, GasparaTower, TroyTylus, JaneTylus, Jane. 2010. The Complete Poems. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Accessed May 17, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central. Created from auckland on 2017-05-17 20:14:09. 2 Volume Editor’s Introduction Collalto, Bergalli went on to edit the complete poems twelve years later, thereby ushering in a reappraisal of Stampa’s role in the literary canon.2 That Stampa was virtually ignored for almost two centuries, and that she has acquired such prominence since—she is not infrequently called the fi nest woman poet in the Italian language—makes one question all the more the nature of the poems when they fi rst appeared and the voice behind them. In the case of Stampa, the notion of “voice” takes on special signifi - cance. From the handful of dedicatory verses appended to the Rime, it would seem that Gaspara’s reputation rested mainly on her musical activities. Gior- gio Benzone, who assisted Cassandra in editing the volume, asks when he will hear again such “concento / dolce” (sweet harmony), while Torquato Bembo, son of the more famous Pietro, imagines Stampa singing in the heavenly choir. Two other contributors, including the indefatigable Bene- detto Varchi whose Sonetti would be published by Pietrasanta the following year, refer to her as a new Sappho, with Varchi suggesting that like the dove and swan, two birds of song, she died too young.3 And, indeed, other sources identify Stampa as one of many virtuose in mid- sixteenth- century Venice who entertained audiences in private homes with their lute playing and song. The “voice” of Stampa best known in her own time was thus that of a musician—albeit one who, like the lute-playing Sappho, could com- pose her own rhymes. And albeit one who, as Giulio Stufa insists, while she 2. See Componimenti poetici (Venice: Antonio Mora, 1726), 1:77–100. Bergalli brought together thirty- fi ve of Stampa’s poems with the works of 113 other women. The selection of Stampa’s works outnumbers that of any other poet, including Vittoria Colonna (with twenty- six) and Veronica Gambara (eighteen). See Stuart Curran, “Recollecting the Renaissance: Luisa Bergalli’s Componimenti poetici (1726),” in Strong Voices, Weak History: Early Women Writers and Canons in England, in France and Italy, ed. Pamela Joseph Benson and Victoria Kirkham (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 263– 86; and Adriana Chemello, “Le ricerche erudite di Luisa Bergalli,” in Geografi e e genealogie letterarie: erudite, croniste, narratrici, épistolières, utopiste tra Settecento e Ottocento, ed. Adriana Chemello and Luisa Ricaldone (Padua: Il Poligrafo, 2000), 69–88. Along with Count Antonio Rambaldo di Collalto, Bergalli edited Rime di Madonna Gaspara Stampa con alcune altre di Collaltino e di Vinciguerra conti di Collalto, e di Baldassare Stampa (Venice: Francesco Piacentini, 1738). 3. The dedicatory poems appear in the fi rst fourteen pages of the Rime di Madonna Gaspara Stampa (Venice: Plinio Pietrasanta, 1554). Giorgio Benzone writes in the fi nal tercet, “Chi vedrà più bellezza, ò udrà concento / Dolce . .?” (Who will ever see beauty again, or hear such sweet conceits? f. 6r); Varchi in the last two lines of his fi rst of three poems to Stampa writes, “La Cerva, e ’l Corvo lungo tempo scampa / Ma’l Cigno tosto, e la Colomba more” (The hind and the crow survive a long time, but the swan and dove too quickly die; f. 4r). In the same poem, which is directed to Benzone, Varchi connects Stampa with Sappho: “Benzon, se’l vero qui la fama narra, / Che così chiara, e così trista suona, / Terra è, lasso, tra voi la bella e buona, / Saffo de’ nostri giorni alta GASPARRA” (Benzone, if it’s true what Fame tells us as it rings so loud and sad, alas, the Sappho of our days, the beautiful and good, the exalted Gaspara, is now earth Copyright © 2010. University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. of Chicago Press. © 2010. University Copyright among you). Giulio Stufa also links Stampa to Sappho when he calls her “Questa de’ nostri dì Saffo novella” (This new Sappho of our time). Stampa, GasparaTower, TroyTylus, JaneTylus, Jane. 2010. The Complete Poems. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Accessed May 17, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central. Created from auckland on 2017-05-17 20:14:09. Volume Editor’s Introduction 3 is “equal to the Greek in her own Tuscan idiom, / she is more chaste, just as she is more beautiful.”4 There will be reason to return to Sappho, whom Longinus associated with the experience of the sublime in a treatise that was reintroduced to Eu- rope the year of Stampa’s death. But Stufa’s emphasis on Stampa’s chastity, to be echoed by Luisa Bergalli, is hardly beside the point. Unmarried, circu- lating in Venice’s high society, and if we are to believe poems and indepen- dent testimonies from other writers, involved for several years with the noble Count Collaltino di Collalto (1523– 68), Stampa was an unconventional fi g- ure, and her verse—often surprisingly immediate and frank about desires both fulfi lled and unfulfi lled—tends to be unconventional as well. Her so- cial status would have prevented the count from ever taking their affair seri- ously, an affair that the sexually explicit nature of some of her rhymes makes clear was not a platonic one. Nor is the count the only man whom Stampa addresses in the pages of her Rime. Thus Stampa’s collection was distinctly different from that of the Roman aristocrat Vittoria Colonna, who memorial- ized her dead husband and her fi delity to him as his widow in her “rime amo- rose.” Could these glaring differences between the century’s most prominent woman poet and Stampa have led to her largely being ignored by her con- temporaries, even if her fi rst biographer, Alessandro Zilioli, suggests that her verses redeemed her lifestyle: “Having given herself to converse freely with well- educated men, she brought such scandal on herself that had not her great talents and the honor of her poetry concealed and almost canceled her failings, it would be necessary to cover her with blame rather than praise”?5 4. “Pari à la Greca nel Tosco idioma, / Ma più casta di lei, quanto più bella,” Rime di Madonna Gaspara Stampa, f. 5r. 5. Cited in Abdelkader Salza, “Madonna Gasparina Stampa e la società Veneziana del suo tempo: Nuove discussioni,” Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 69 (1917): 230: “poichè datasi a conversar liberamente con gli uomini dotti, indusse tanto scandalo di sé, che se la molta virtù sua e la onorevolezza della poesia in particolare non avesse ricoperti e quasi cancellati i manca- menti suoi, sarebbe da stimarsi degna di biasmo, che di lode alcuna,” from Alessandro Zilioli’s Historia delle vite de’ poeti italiani, a manuscript copy of which was in possession of Apostolo Zeno when he and Luisa Bergalli began compiling the edition of Stampa’s verse. See, however, the continuation of Zilioli’s remarks, in which it seems that his initial appraisal, as Virginia Cox put it to me in a personal communication, is snide at best: “Ma questo è il premio nobilissimo de’ virtuosi, et altro giammai non ricevessero dalla fortuna, che i vizi loro, o restano totalmente nascosti, od almeno escusati, e difesi dalla virtù: onde l’acquisto di essa si rende tanto più de- siderabile, e meritevole d’essere con ogni fatica da tutte le condizioni d’uomini procurato.” (But this is the most noble prize of these virtuosos, and they receive nothing else from fortune other than that their vices either remain completely hidden or are excused and defended by their vir- tuosity: whence its acquisition becomes even more desirable and worthy of being pursued with Copyright © 2010.
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