The flowers of Italian literature: language, imitation and gender debates in Paolo Giovio's Dialogus...

The flowers of Italian literature: language, imitationand gender debates in Paolo Giovio’s Dialogus de

viris et foeminis aetate nostra florentibus

Jessica Goethals

Shortly after the brutal Sack of Rome in 1527, Paolo Giovio made his way fromPope Clement VII’s side in the besieged Castel Sant’Angelo to safety in theIschian home of Vittoria Colonna.1 After witnessing Rome’s ruin, the human-ist historian surely found the contrast sharp. The rampageous Spanish andGerman soldiers of Emperor Charles V still held the pontiff and his citycaptive – capturing, torturing, and often killing its residents at will, includingillustrious writers, thinkers, and artists. Ischia in contrast represented anisland haven governed by aristocratic women that provided visiting men tem-porary respite from the storm of war. From this Edenic setting, and at hishostess’s urging, Giovio undertook a new literary project intended to surveythe landscape of Italian culture in the wake of such crisis. The Dialogus de viriset foeminis aetate nostra florentibus [Notable Men and Women of our Time], dedi-cated to the datary Gian Matteo Giberti, conducts this survey through thedebate of three interlocutors: Giovio (Iovius); the imperial commander,Alfonso d’Avalos Marquis del Vasto (Davalus); and the Neapolitan juristAntonio Muscettola (Musetius). Set against the Sack and anxiety over Italiandecline, the text draws together a vast catalogue of contemporary figures inorder to evaluate men of arms (Book One), men of letters (Book Two), andwomen of high culture (Book Three).

Book Two has enjoyed praise by no less a critic than Carlo Dionisotti as afundamental work within Renaissance literary historiography despite missingits introductory and concluding pages.2 While such recognition is perhaps due

I wish to thank Kenneth Gouwens for his generosity in encouraging this project and for commenting on anearlier version.

1 For a history of the 6 May 1527 Sack, see Judith Hook, The Sack of Rome 1527 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,2004). On its cultural impact, see André Chastel, The Sack of Rome, 1527, trans. Beth Archer (Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 1983); Kenneth Gouwens, Remembering the Renaissance: Humanist Narratives of the Sackof Rome (Boston: Brill, 1998); and Massimo Miglio, Vincenzo De Caprio, Daniel Arasse, and Alberto Asor Rosa(eds.), Il Sacco di Roma del 1527 e l’immaginario collettivo (Rome: Istituto Nazionale di Studi Romani, 1986). OnGiovio’s Ischian period, see T. C. Price Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio: The Historian and the Crisis of Sixteenth-CenturyItaly (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 86–105.

2 Carlo Dionisotti, ‘Calderini, Poliziano, ed altri’, Italia medioevale e umanistica 11 (1968), 154.

Renaissance Studies Vol. •• No. •• DOI: 10.1111/rest.12108

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to its having been published separately within Girolamo Tiraboschi’s earlyStoria della letteratura italiana, it generally shares in the broader scholarlyneglect of the dialogue.3 Never published in Giovio’s lifetime – though theauthor had approached Isabella d’Este for assistance in bringing it to press –the dialogue was first printed in Latin only in 1984.4 Recent translations byFranco Minonzio and Kenneth Gouwens have begun the important project ofexpanding the readership and analysis of a work that offers modern observersan encyclopaedic consideration of the leading men and women of the early-to-mid sixteenth century, that evaluates the cultural consequences of theItalian Wars and the Sack, and that both complements and promotes Giovio’sHistories of those events – a work that receives lavish praise from the charactersD’Avalos and Muscettola (and a lengthy, rather self-congratulatory, explica-tion by Giovio himself) in Book Two as an instance of exemplary writing andscholarship.5

The dialogue’s first commentators have been especially drawn to thehomage Giovio pays to Vittoria Colonna. Book One’s review of Italiancondottieri culminates in an extended encomium of the imperial general Fer-nando Francesco d’Avalos, Colonna’s recently deceased husband, while BookThree concludes with a brilliant verbal portrait of Colonna as a pre-eminentfigure in the social and literary fabric of Italy.6 As is well noted, Colonna wasdeeply invested in immortalizing her husband’s memory and carefully con-structing her own public persona.7 The role played by Book Two’s debate onletters within this campaign is less readily apparent. Though one cannot saywith certainty what the missing introduction and conclusion might haveincluded, the text as is does not contain any notable tribute to Colonna or hercircle beyond a brief, rather uncomplimentary mention of Pompeo Colonna.The criticisms it levels at vernacular literary activity and its consumers – thelatter a group pointedly populated by female readers – sit uncomfortably nextto Book Three’s praise of elite, educated women and of Colonna as both aninductee into the world of Latin literature and a composer of vernacular

3 Girolamo Tiraboschi, Storia della letteratura italiana, Vol. 7, Pt. 2 (Milan, 1824), 2444–99.4 Paolo Giovio, Pauli Iovii opera, Vol. 9, ed. Ernesto Travi and Mariagrazia Penco (Rome: Società Storica

Comense and Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, 1984), 147–321.5 Paolo Giovio, Dialogo sugli uomini e le donne illustri del nostro tempo, ed. and trans. Franco Minonzio, 2 vols.

(Turin: Aragno, 2011); Notable Men and Women of Our Time, ed. and trans. Kenneth Gouwens (Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 2013), here 294–311. All citations are from the latter. I follow Minonzio’s designationof the work’s three sections as Books rather than Gouwens’s as Dialogues to reduce confusion.

6 See Kenneth Gouwens, ‘Meanings of Masculinity in Paolo Giovio’s “Ischian” Dialogues, I Tatti Studies in theItalian Renaissance 17 (2014), 79–101; by the same author, ‘Female Virtue and the Embodiment of Beauty:Vittoria Colonna in Paolo Giovio’s Notable Men and Women’, Renaissance Quarterly 68 (forthcoming, 2015);Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio, 89–102; Carlo Vecce, ‘Paolo Giovio e Vittoria Colonna’, Periodico della Società StoricaComense 54 (1990), 67–93; Diana Robin, ‘The Breasts of Vittoria Colonna’, California Italian Studies 3 (2012),1–15.

7 See Virginia Cox, ‘Women Writers and the Canon in Sixteenth-Century Italy: The Case of Vittoria Colonna’,in Pamela Joseph Benson and Victoria Kirkham (eds.), Strong Voices, Weak History: Early Women Writers and Canonsin England, France, and Italy, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 14–31; Abigail Brundin, ‘TheMaking of a Renaissance Publishing Phenomenon’ in Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the ItalianReformation (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 15–36.

2 Jessica Goethals750 Jessica Goethals

works. Giovio here follows in the steps of early sixteenth-century works such asAngelo Firenzuola’s Epistola in lode delle donne (1525, pub. 1548) and PompeoColonna’s Apologia mulierum (1526–29), which argue for the parity of the sexesand advocate opening up intellectual and public circles to women.8 At thesame time, however, Book Two echoes the conservative positions of pro-Latinists in the questione della lingua debate such as Lilio Gregorio Giraldi,whose De poetis nostrorum temporum (circa 1515–51) expresses the ultimatelyfutile desire to restrict membership in the Republic of Letters to Latinists orat most those few vernacular writers who shared their models, methods, andmarket – company which many female writers might find it difficult to join.9

While this tonal discontinuity may be attributable in part to Book Two’sfragmentation, it nevertheless highlights Giovio taking positions within thelanguage and gender debates that are difficult to square.

The current article traces the question of literary enterprise in Notable Menand Women in our Time by exploring the manner in which Giovio responsivelyweds three controversies of the day: the issue of female authorship andreadership, the questione della lingua, and the debates on imitation. Confront-ing a literary environment he fears is in decline due not only to the turbulenceof war and the mounting listlessness of Latinists but also to the rise of ver-nacular writers who indecorously borrow and translate from antiquity for theeasy prizes awarded by undiscerning audiences, Giovio reframes the commonmetaphors associated with the imitation debates (flowers, gardens, garlands,mosaics) in order to articulate a pro-Latinist position on language that deni-grates the vernacular’s relationship to exemplars. Though he criticizes femaleaudiences, he endeavours to resolve his ideological knot in Book Three by,first, praising the aristocratic women who study classical and neo-Latin litera-ture and, second, by endowing Vittoria Colonna herself with the positivequalities he associates with Latin. By casting her as an ideal reader and writer,he distances her from the general class of women and from his censure of thevernacular. She embodies the ideal of Latin – in its proper relationship toancient models, in its exhaustive educational background, in its masculinizedvitality – even as she wields the vernacular pen.

THE ITALIAN CULTURAL LANDSCAPE

While Giovio exhibited interest in publishing his dialogue at least twice overthe following decade, his failure to do so mirrors the similarly surrenderedendeavour of Pierio Valeriano for his De litteratorum infelicitate.10 Both authorspenned their works against the grim backdrop of the Sack of Rome and the

8 Angelo Firenzuola, Opere, ed. Adriano Seroni (Florence: Sansoni, 1958), 175–84; Pompeo Colonna, Apologiamulierum libri in Studi e ricerche sull’umanesimo italiano (Testi inediti del XV e XVI secolo), ed. Guglielmo Zappacosta(Bergamo: Minerva Italica, 1972), 159–264.

9 Lilio Gregorio Giraldi, Modern poets, trans. John N. Grant (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press,2011). On the work’s dates, see xxv–xxviii.

10 The publication attempts were in 1530 and 1535. See Giovio, Dialogo, LV–LXXI.

Paolo Giovio’s Dialogus 3Paolo Giovio’s Dialogus 751

Italian Wars, and in each case their modern editors have hypothesized thatamong the various obstacles to publication loomed the works’ historical speci-ficity.11 Their evaluation of the state of political-military and cultural affairs nolonger fit the altered diplomatic and literary environment that followed the1530 crowning of Charles V by Clement VII in Bologna – even while Gioviomay have revised Day Two of the dialogue in light of the scholarly debates thattook place there12 – in which themes of consensus and forward-looking(however forced) as well as a mounting enthusiasm for the vernacular tendedto carry the day. The horrors Giovio narrowly escaped in Rome surfacethroughout the dialogue via the interlocutors’ eyewitness recollections of theSack and its aftermath:

[The city] had been so robbed of every pristine honor and adornment and sodisfigured by the revolting and horrible stench of unburied corpses, by thedevastation of all other things, and by a miserable foulness, that I [D’Avalos] wasunable to hold back my tears, even as the barbarians were glowering at me.13

Discourse on the disastrous fall leads the men to measure the diminution ofItalian strength in arms, pre-eminence in literature, and virtue and excellencein women. D’Avalos introduces within his early survey of military men thedialogue’s overriding question – has Italy’s recent catastrophe been theproduct of a ‘corrupt generation’ (corrupt(um) saecul(um)), an ellipses of sorts,or has she begun to grow barren (sterilescere)?14 In other words, Giovio seek toassess just how accurate is it to speak of decline. Is Italy fading, or are thereareas in which she flowers still?

References to flowering and flourishing – past, present, potential – springup insistently throughout a text whose title advertises its focus on ‘viris etfoeminis . . . florentibus’. In over two dozen passages throughout the dialoguecontaining explicit references to such blossoming, the interlocutors measurethe cultural – and, in the case of women, literal – fecundity of the Italianpeninsula. For example, surveying the artistic triumphs of the Tre- and Quat-trocento – a crescendo of talent from Giotto to Donatello – Giovio claims thatin this invulnerable Italy ‘we continuously flourished in a glorious competitionof all the excellences’ and would be ‘flourishing brilliantly and blessedly now

11 See Pierio Valeriano on the Ill Fortune of Learned Men: A Renaissance Humanist and his World, trans. and ed. JuliaHaig Gaisser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 70–71; Julia Haig Gaisser, ‘Pierio Valeriano’s Delitteratorum infelicitate: A Literary Work Revised by History’, in Paolo Pellegrini (ed.), Bellunesi e feltrini traUmanesimo e Rinascimento: Filologia, erudizione e biblioteche (Rome: Antenore, 2008), 121–78; Gouwens, ‘FemaleVirtue and the Embodiment of Beauty’.

12 Gouwnens, ‘Female Virtue and the Embodiment of Beauty’; Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio, 96; Giovio, Dialogo,lv–lxxi.

13 ‘adeo omni pristino honore atque ornatu spoliatam, tamque taetro ac horribili insepultorum cadaverumodore ceterarumque omnium rerum strage et mirserabili foeditate deformatam ut nequiverim fletum tenere etcohibere lacrimas, vel torve respectantibus barbaris.’ Giovio, Notable Men and Women, 20–21.

14 Ibid., 62–3.


too’ had pugnacious men not initiated the Italian Wars of the Cinquecento.15

In contrast, D’Avalos conjectures (not entirely convincingly) that the imperialintervention into Italy will ultimately find the latter ‘flourishing in a securepeace’.16 In reflecting on the women he had met while living in Florence,Giovio notes that some have passed away ‘in the flower of . . . youth’ andothers have left ‘the flower of the highest beauty to the new brides succeedingthem’.17 Yet lest one think that all of the finest women were of yesteryear,D’Avalos chides Muscettola for praising too many Neapolitan ladies when‘many more beauties flourishing in fame and virtuous qualities’ in other citieswere necessarily passed over.18 Muscettola protests that Naples is above allother cities ‘especially fertile’ in beautiful women and that if Giovio haddedicated his speech to the memory of those whose lives or beauty hadwithered, is it not right that he acknowledge ‘those women who are not onlyliving but also flourishing brilliantly’?19 Book Three’s measurement of femalebloom is also punctuated by descriptions of Italian gardens: Alfonso II’smarvellous villas that so famously enchanted Charles VIII amidst his 1495conquest of Naples20; the Rucellai gardens in Florence, where Giovio hadpartaken in the philosophical, political, and poetic discourses; the Queens’Rocks, a series of islets that under the cultivating hands of Neapolitan noble-women had bloomed into paradisiacal gardens lush with flowers that now lie‘neglected and disfigured’ amidst the tribulations of recent years but serve asBook Three’s setting and thus help frame Giovio’s never-quite-answered ques-tion of whether Italy is in a permanent decline or remediable lull.21

This preponderance of floral and garden allusions was entirely appropriateto a work set on surveying the Italian cultural and political landscape. AsClaudia Lazzarro has underscored, from Dante’s depiction of the peninsula asa wasted garden onward, early modernity witnessed a metaphoric kinshipbetween the cultural-political and verdurous environs: ‘Italy is a garden andthe Italian garden is Italy’.22 Book Two grafts this figurative tradition to thatassociated with debates on imitation and language. While this section main-tains the same pattern as Book One of naming those who are now or – like thehumanists in Rome – were once thriving, it poses a question less obviouslypresent in the other two parts of the dialogue, namely: What precisely consti-

15 ‘in glorioso semper virtutum omnium certamine floruimus’; ‘luculentius atque beatius floreremus.’ Ibid.,54–5.

16 ‘Italiam secura pace florentem videamus.’ Ibid., 158–9.17 ‘in primo aetatis flore; ‘succedentibus novis nuptis ipsum summae pulchritudinis florem . . . reliquerunt.’

Ibid., 430–31.18 ‘quas multo plures formae gloria virtutibusque florere credendum est.’ Ibid., 462–3.19 ‘feracior’; ‘non modo vivas sed maxime etiam florentes.’ Ibid., 464–5.20 Ibid., 436–9. On the Duchesca and Poggio Reale gardens see George L. Hersey, Alfonso II and the Artistic

Renewal of Naples, 1485–1495 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 58–75.21 Giovio, Notable Men and Women, 336–7.22 Claudia Lazzaro, ‘Italy is a Garden: The Idea of Italy and the Italian Garden Tradition’ in Mirka Benes and

Dianne Harris (eds.), Villas and Gardens in Early Modern Italy and France (New York: Cambridge University Press,2001), 30. My thanks to Kate Bentz for her suggestions in thinking about gardens.


tutes ‘flourishing’? In this book the interlocutors consider not only thoseworthy of esteem but also those whose prosperity is perhaps unmerited. Giovioties such ill-gotten gains to an improper, weedy relationship with language,audience, and emulative practices.

ARRANGING THE FLOWERS OF LITERATURE

The extant version of Book Two opens with Muscettola’s companions urginghim to speak on literary men of acclaim. He concedes, noting the need to treatboth Latinists and their vernacular counterparts. The conversation evolves intoan overview of literary figures as well as a debate on the questione della lingua, withGiovio taking a decided though not militant pro-Latin stance and Muscettolasetting out – but not precisely advocating – the vernacular position.

Muscettola’s companions ask him to articulate why writers have begun toabandon Latin for Tuscan. The underlying premise of his, and the dialogue’s,remarks on the subject is that Latin letters – like the gardens of the Queens’Rocks – are beginning to perish from neglect,23 while the vernacular is bloom-ing (efflorescat).24 Though the jurist proffers an assortment of reasons for thisdisparity – for example, as the language of familial and public life, the ver-nacular is less taxing and exclusionary – and while he allows that it haspractitioners who may ultimately assume places of honour alongside classicalauthors, his portrait is not entirely favourable. To the contrary, even as theputative defender of the vernacular and (like D’Avalos) someone who dabblesin it himself, he underscores two of its more objectionable qualities in the eyesof its detractors.25

One complaint is that the vernacular is the linguistic product of militarydefeat: ‘Italy, which was devastated so many times and saw the glory of itsempire snatched away by barbarians, received from its conquerors a languagethat is a confused hodgepodge of many different tongues.’26 Muscettolaechoes Flavio Biondo’s ‘theory of catastrophe’, which argued that the vernacu-lar derived from a Latin corrupted by the barbarian invasions.27 In bothhistorical and fictionalized debates on language, opponents of a literary ver-nacular (including Ercole Strozzi in Bembo’s Prose and Lazzaro Bonamico inSperone Speroni’s Dialogo delle lingue) reiterated this theory in order to notonly underscore the vernacular’s inferiority but also to associate it with a

23 Giovio, Notable Men and Women, 250–51.24 Ibid., 252–3.25 As will be seen, I would temper Zimmermann’s assessment that Muscettola is a ‘resourceful defender of the

vernacular’ and that with this dialogue Giovio ‘readily concedes the coming triumph of Italian’. Zimmermann,Paolo Giovio, 96.

26 ‘Evastata enim totiens Italai, post raptum a barbaris imperii nomen, a victoribus sermonem accepitpermixtum et confusum ex variis linguis.’ Giovio, Notable Men and Women, 250–51.

27 See Angelo Mazzocco, Linguistic Theories in Dante and the Humanists: Studies of Language and IntellectualHistory in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance History (New York: Brill, 1993), 39–50.


shameful chapter in Roman history.28 It is little wonder, then, that the freshhumiliation of Rome in 1527 prompted some to vocally protest the burgeon-ing use of the vernacular using similar terms. A prime and influential examplecan be found in a pair of Latin orations delivered by Romolo Amaseo at the1530 coronation of Charles V in Bologna. In these harangues delivered to theintellectual who’s-who assembled for the grand occasion – an audience thatincluded Giovio29 – Amaseo railed against embracing a language engenderedby defeat and urged his listeners to ‘fight for these remains of your Empire’.30

Muscettola, supposedly the representative of the vernacular in Giovio’s dia-logue, reprises this anxious association of Biondo’s linguistic theories onantiquity with contemporary military misfortunes when he laments that theamalgamation of tongues within Italy will necessarily continue since, ‘as aresult of our madness, it seems that there’s no end in sight to this insanewillingness of ours to bow to foreign nations.’31

The implied criticism that there is something unappealing about the ver-nacular’s origins is coupled with a reproof of its implementation by somepractitioners. Muscettola attributes the volgare’s rising popularity to its facili-tating an easy appropriation of Latin works and style:

First of all, it appears extremely convenient for someone writing in the commonor Tuscan tongue to use the finest inventions and ideas of the ancient and evenmodern Latin authors to enrich and embellish his compositions which, beingwritten in the vernacular, can be hammered out more smoothly and with lessdifficulty. For he can unashamedly borrow very pleasant passages from morepolished philosophers, imitate the brilliant turns of phrase, witticisms, and sub-tleties of the poets, and pluck for pleasure and at will the flowers he seesanywhere in the entirety of the Latin language.32

Describing this plucking from the classics, Muscettola switches metaphors:

Once all these things have been sweetly translated and prominently and suitablyarranged in the manner of the most luminous mosaics, they so shine among thetender amusements of the vernacular tongue and stir up such admiration that to

28 Pietro Bembo, Prose della volgar lingua; Gli Asolani; Rime, ed. Carlo Dionisotti (Milan: TEA, Editori associati,1989); Sperone Speroni, ‘Dialogo delle lingue’, in Trattatisti del cinquecento. Tomo 1, ed. Mario Pozzi (Milan:Ricciardi, 1978).

29 Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio, 105–12. Zimmermann hypothesizes that Giovio revised Day Two and contem-plated publishing the dialogue in response to his time at the Congress of Bologna. See pp. 96 and 107.

30 On Amaseo’s orations and their impact, see Cecil Grayson, A Renaissance Controversy: Latin or Italian(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), here 7.

31 ‘sicut etiam magis ac magis accipiet, quando vecordia nostra accipiendis in iugum externis gentibus nullusfinis futurus esse videatur.’ Giovio, Notable Men and Women, 250–51.

32 ‘Nam ante omnia communi vel Etrusca lingua scribenti pulcherrimis antiquorum et recentium etiamLatinorum inventionibus et sententiis inniti commodissimum videtur ad locupletanda vel exornanda scriptaquae blandius atque facilius vernaculis sermonibus excuduntur. Potest enim is pudore incolumi peramoenoslocos a politioribus philosophis mutuari, poetarum consectari lumina sales argutias et totius denique Latinaelinguae conspicuos flores ludenti et vaga manu impune decerpere.’ Ibid., 220–23.


some they seem more delightful and impressive in Tuscan than in Latin –particularly to those who, either because of other preoccupations or from lack ofability, have not gained entrance to the profound learning of classicalliterature.33

Where we might expect the image of a bouquet or a garland, we encounterinstead mosaics whose gleam attracts the readership of audiences uninitiatedinto the world of great literature. As shall be seen again in the debate onwomen, mosaic as a metaphor carries a negative valence for Giovio since whatseems beautiful from afar is revealed to be haphazard and crevice-riddenwhen examined more closely. Lest Muscettola’s characterization of vernacu-lar’s employment of ancient texts as ‘sweet’ and ‘suitable’ not be readilyunderstood to be rather ironic [at least as employed by Giovio-as-author], hefurther suggests that no Latinist would be so foolish as to engage in such apractice:

Certainly no one writing in Latin would be possessed by such insanity that hewould believe he had the ability to pluck out, borrow, and transplant anything hedesired without becoming a laughingstock. For only out of the most brazenimpertinence would anyone writing in the same language pilfer with licentiousfolly the words, ideas, and even entire lines from the best authors, or dare tothink that by putting differently their ideas and inspired thoughts he is going toexpress them better and more felicitously.34

Though Giovio will later point to just such a misguided Latin writer in PietroAlcionio, the passage makes an important distinction between the audiencesof vernacular and Latin writing.35 What the former applaud because theyremain oblivious to the presence of intemperate and impudent borrowing –confusing montage with invention – the latter would ridicule. Should themakeup of the vernacular reading publics not be fully apparent, Muscettolalater clarifies that Tuscan is ‘dear to the elderly, pleasant and convenient tothe young, and desirable and delightful to the dispositions of women’ and thatwith such literature in fashion, ‘everyone well versed in Greek and Latin isuniversally despised as a dullard, a rustic, and as someone entirely cut off from

33 ‘Quae omnia, mox dulcissime translata et opportunis in sedibus egregie collocata, instar ludicissimorumemblematum inter teneras vernaculae linguae lascivias sic refulgent tantamque excitant admirationem utEtrusca Latinis iucundiora simul et grandiora nonnullis videantur, et iis praesertim qui ad recondita optimarumlitterarum studia vel occupationibus vel ingeniorum imbecillitate minime penetrarunt.’ Ibid., 222–3.

34 ‘Neminem certe Latine scribentem tanta insania prorsus invaserit ut sibi pro libidine cuncta rapiendimutuandi transferendique potestatem sine risu concessam putet. Fieri enim nequit nisi impudentissime velineptissime ut quis in eadem lingua optimorum auctorum verba, sententias ac integros etiam versus stultalibertate suffuretur, aut illorum sensus et divinas cogitationes, elocutione commutata, se melius atque feliciusexpressurum esse confidant.’ Ibid.

35 Ibid., 326–27. On attacks against Alcionio’s intellectual honesty, see Gouwens, Remembering the Renaissance,36–9.


the human race.’36 Giovio seconds such sentiments, lamenting that the tastesof ‘women and the illiterate multitude’ are not directed toward oratory orgreat Latin comedy but instead the linguistic shenanigans of court buffoons.37

The criticism that the vernacular could be used to enthral undiscerningaudiences might be standard fare, but curiously, and unlike in the case againstits origins, the imagery Giovio employs does not derive from ongoing debatesover the questione della lingua per se. Rather, he has co-opted motifs fromdebates on literary imitation. And, in fact, imitation assumes a prominent rolein Book Two’s assessment of Italian letters – appropriately so, given the robustdebate waged in this period.38 Though long an interest bridging the ancientsand humanist literati, imitation’s transformation into the subject of polemicbetween the staunch Ciceronians and the Eclectics drew wide attention in the1480s via a letter exchange between Paolo Cortesi and Angelo Poliziano, whoexplicated the virtues and the limitations, respectively, of establishing Ciceroas an exclusive model of eloquence. Debate flared again in 1512–13 – the timeof Giovio’s arrival in the Ciceronian-dominant humanist circles of Rome –through the widely circulated letters of Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandolaand Pietro Bembo, who redeployed many of their predecessors’ images andarguments.39 While men like Poliziano and Pico advocated the developmentof personal style through the imitation of an array of exemplary classicalauthorities, Italian practices were increasingly associated with an uncriticalemulation of Cicero, a reputation famously dramatized in Erasmus’sCiceronianus (1528), a dialogue ridiculing certain Italians’ stylistic and linguis-tic slavishness.40

While temperately putting forth Cicero as the ultimate and indisputableexemplar, Giovio acknowledges that most men are not equal to such a loftymodel and so encourages a more varied practice in its stead:41

Truly, even the most impassioned intellects ought to consider it sufficientlyglorious and noble if they imitate accurately and elegantly the outward appear-ance of just one of the approved ancient writers. Or, if they are unable to do that– since it’s extremely difficult to imitate perfectly and to trace the outlines withprecision – then at least let them pick with a skilled hand certain proven flowersfrom them all, and tastefully weave garlands from them in order that stern and

36 ‘Sunt enim et gratae senibus et suaves et commodae iuventuti et feminarum ingeniis optabiles etperiucundae, ita ut quisque vel egregie Graecis et Latinis excultus litteris ab omnibus contemnatur velutinsulsus, agrestis, ab humanitate penitus alienus.’ Giovio, Notable Men and Women, 258–9.

37 ‘feminarum ac indoctae multudinis’. Ibid., 284–5.38 See Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discoveroy in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale

University Press), 171–96; G. W. Pigman, ‘Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance’, Renaissance Quartery 33(1980), 1–32; Ciceronian Controversies, ed. JoAnn DellaNeva, trans. Brian Duvick (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 2007); Martin L. McLaughlin, Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance: The Theory and Practiceof Literary Imitation from Dante to Bembo (New York: Claredon Press, 1995).

39 On Giovio’s 1512 move to Rome, see Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio, 20.40 Desiderius Erasmus, Ciceronianus: A Dialogue on the Ideal Latin Style, trans. Betty Knott. Vol. 28 in The Collected

Works of Erasmus, ed. A.H.T. Levi et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986).41 For a similar assessment, see Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio, 97.


censorious people may take pleasure from their agreeable and carefulentwinings and from the fresh and wonderful sweetness of commingled floralbouquets. If the mind itself, the eyes, and the ears are directed a bit more keenlyand intensely to accomplish this, we quickly develop in our style as we do in ourlooks and in the features of our whole face, that is, we turn out completely unlikeall others.42

With this passage – clearly set against that uttered by Muscettola above –Giovio offers the reader two competing interpretations of what it means topluck flowers from the ancients, with the garland/bouquet anticipated in thefirst passage materializing in the second. In both cases, he relies on a set ofimages connected to the question of imitatio with which his contemporarieswould have been well familiar.

G. W. Pigman delineated the array of imagery the imitation disputantswielded into three categories of metaphor: transformative (‘apian, digestive,filial, and simian’ language treating the accumulation and alteration models),dissimulative (camouflaging the relationship to the model) and eristic (com-peting against the model).43 We are concerned with the first category, givenGiovio’s repeated allusion to the gathering of flowers. Petrarch memorablyemployed the apian metaphor, for example, when arguing in the Rerumfamiliarum that since few men could achieve eloquence on their own accord,they ought to ‘imitate the bees which through an astonishing process producewax and honey from the flowers they leave behind’.44 The objective of thisimitation – in whose description Petrarch explicitly imitates Seneca – shouldnot be replication but transmutation: ‘Be careful not to let any of those thingsthat you have plucked remain with you too long, for the bees would enjoy noglory if they did not transform those things they found into something elsewhich was better.’45

The nature and purpose of such ‘plucking’ permeates these debates. TheEclectics charged that single-minded imitation of a sole author prohibited thedevelopment of individual style. When Cortesi sent Poliziano a collection of

42 ‘Satis etenim pulchrum atque decorum vel ardentissimis ingeniis esse putandum est si exacte atqueeleganter faciem unius ex probatis antiquis scriptoribus aemulentur; vel, si id nequeant quod perfecte imitariatque ad amussim delineare sit difficillimum, saltem certos ex omnibus erudita manu flores decerpant etcoronas ex iis decenter contexant, quibus severi et nasuti homines ab iucundis exquisitisque nexibus et a novaac admirabili confragrantium florum suavitate delectentur, cui rei perficiendae si mens ipsa, oculi atque aurespaullo acutius atque fervidius intendantur, tales stilo celeriter evadimus quales vultu et totius oris lineamentissumus, hoc est, a ceteris omnibus omnino dissimiles.’ Giovio, Notable Men and Women, 314–17.

43 Pigman, ‘Versions of Imitation’, 3–4.44 ‘apes in inventionibus imitandas, que flores, non quales acceperint, referunt, sed ceras ac mella mirifica

quadam permixtione conficiunt.’ Francesco Petrarch, Le familiari, ed. Vittorio Rossi and Umberto Bosco,Edizione nazionale delle opere di Francesco Petrarca, 4 vols. (Florence: Sansoni, 1933–42), I.8, 39. FrancescoPetrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters I–VIII, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo (New York: Italica Press, repr. 2005), Bk 1.8,41–2.

45 ‘Neve diutius apud te qualia decerpseris maneant, cave: nulla quidem esset apibus gloria, nisi in aliud etin melius inventa converterent.’ Petrarca, Le familiari, I.8, 44; Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters, 46. For a reviewof other apian examples, see Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought(Oxford: Claredon Press, 1996), passim; and McLaughlin, Literary Imitation, passim.


letters composed in the Ciceronian vein, the latter responded by admonishingagainst resembling the parrot, which ‘voice[s] what he does not understand’,or attempting to run by placing his feet ‘in other people’s tracks’.46 Cortesicountered that the Ciceronians did not parrot but rather developed a filialresemblance to a selected father.47 He further added that following othermen’s footsteps scatters seeds in the soul; should all of these seeds be permit-ted to germinate, the result – as happens ‘to anyone who plucks his sentencesand words from separate works and imitates no one’ – is ‘a most vicious typeof writing, since it now appears base and uncultivated, now brilliant andflowering . . . as though one had sown many types of seed, all extremely hostileto one another, in a single field’.48 This charge that eclectic imitation forestallsharmonious writing by either emulating inferior models or amassing bits andpieces from diverse authors was echoed by Bembo, who deplored ‘begging’rather than ‘embrac[ing] the entire form’ of a model.49 Both Poliziano andPico took pains to underscore that decorous emulation of multiple models didnot amount to stylistic mendicancy. Pico, for example, equated this beggar notwith the eclectic imitator but the Ciceronian parrot:

Begging and stealing are what people who grow old cutting up little clauses andhemstitches of some ancient author are best at. If it should happen that they setout from home alone without the one they worship or become entangled insome situation where they do not have access to him but are still obliged to write,they stop in their tracks; they cannot utter a word. But if they never speak exceptfrom their notebooks, or if they will never speak, or speak more sparingly thatthe Spartans, their oratory will deal with few matters or none. Shall we alwayshave to look for the power of rhetoric, the conciliator of human society, innotebooks? What laborious vanity, what incomparable servitude men endure!They are like birds shut up in cages, unable to utter a human sound or anysounds other than exactly the ones they have been schooled in by the ferule oftheir master.50

In contrast, his well-guided imitator gathers and transforms, yielding newdelights:

46 ‘proferentibus quae nec intellegunt’; ‘in alienis tantum vestigiis’. Ciceronian Controversies, 2–5.47 Ibid., 10–11.48 ‘qui ex singulis sensus et verba eruunt et neminem imitantur’; ‘ex quo nascitur maxime vitiosum scribendi

genus, cum modo sordidi et inculti, modo splendidi et florentes appareant . . . tamquam in unum agrum plurainter se inimicissima sparsa semina.’ Ibid., 12–13.

49 ‘mendicitate’; ‘totam complectitur scriptionis alicuius formam.’ Ibid., 58–9.50 ‘dicuntur imitari, non furari aut mendicare, quod ii praestant qui in concerpendis clausulis et hemistichiis

veteris cuiuspiam auctoris consenescunt. Ii ipsi, si forte eveniat ut sine illo quem colunt peraegre proficiscanturaut casu quopiuam impediantur, quo minus eius ipsius compotes sint, scribere illis nihilominus incumbat,haerent in vestigio nec hiscere verbum possunt. At si numquam loquantur nisi ex commentario aut numquamloquentur aut parcius omnino quam Lacones, deque aut nullis aut paucissimis rebus fiet oratio. Ergo visorationis, quae conciliatrix est humanae societatis, semper erit ex commentario petenda? O vanitatemoperosissimam, o servitutem incomparabilem hominum! instar avium caveis inclusarum, quae voces humanaset nullas, nisi quibus identidem ferulae etiam magisterio assueverint, reddere nequeunt.’ Ibid., 104–07.


Nor do I want him to pluck features out here and there and stitch together hisspeech from dissimilar styles like a patchwork quilt [centonem] out of differentpieces of cloth. All its elements should flow together, and your own dictionshould emerge, which is not at all like theirs, but coalesces in such a way as to bedistinguished and praiseworthy in its own right. Like bees sipping from differenttypes of flower, your diction will not express the flowers themselves but thesweetest mixture of Hymettian or Hyblaean honey.51

As does Giovio, Pico mixes the metaphors of the patchwork text and culledflowers. He here distances a generative form of imitation from a reductivereliance on the commonplace book. The latter, an organized reference col-lection of important transcribed passages – also known as a florilegium andassociated with the anthology (both terms etymologically meaning the gath-ering of flowers) – was a classically inherited tool that proved increasinglyuseful for the organization, retrieval, and redeployment of knowledge andthat broadened the scope of Renaissance imitation debates.52

Though some attacked the use of these notebooks, Giovio finds that thesecompilations ‘plucked on the authority of scholars’ can be beneficial, pro-vided that their application does not become obsessive or dampen thememory.53 But if the dialogue demonstrates an openness to the commonplacebook itself, it shares Pico’s derision of its occasional by-product, the cento orverse pieced together with borrowed words and phrases. Giovio proposes thatit is better to write with one’s own mediocre style than to flagrantly ‘assemblea patchwork of borrowed passages (centones) with laborious and worthlesseffort, or to put on a pitiful display of well-turned phrases appropriated fromCicero with laughable clumsiness’.54 The criticism is based on both ethics (thewriter having ‘stolen’ his phrases without the effort of humanistic study orre-elaboration) and aesthetics. Aspersion of the cento as disjointed and inhar-monious was common, as in Giraldi’s De poetis nostrorum temporum: ‘In sewingtogether patches of different colors, they use Indian thread or thread of sucha contrasting color that the join is quite obvious.’55 Erasmus writes disapprov-ingly in the Ciceronianus of the ‘begging and borrowing’ that can occur withexcessive use of the commonplace book, insisting that ‘one’s discourse shouldnot appear to be some sort of cento or mosaic, but an image breathing forthone’s mind or a river flowing from the fountain of one’s heart’ – a line

51 ‘Neque etiam volo, ut ex hoc et ex illo quicquam decerpat, ut ex modis loquendi dissimilibus ita orationemtamquam ex diversis pannis centonem consuat, sed ut conflentur omnia, exque iis ipsis tua propria phrasis,quae nulla sit eorum, praeclara illa tamen et digna laude coalescat, atque ita instar apum diversis ex floribus,non ipsos exprimes flores, sed dulcissimum illud aut Hymettium aut Hyblaeum mel coagmentatum.’ Ibid.,106–09.

52 Moss, Printed Commonplace Books.53 ‘arbitrio studentium excerpti’. Giovio, Notable Men and Women, 318–19.54 ‘Magis enim est ingenuum vel mediocriter a propria naturalis ingenii vena stilum deducere quam

impudenter et operoso vilique labore conficere centones et ridendas illas ex Cicerone rhapsodias infeliciterostentare.’ Ibid., 326–7.

55 ‘dum pannos varii coloris assuunt, filo utantur Indico vel longe diversi coloris, ita ut iunctura appareat.’Giraldi, Modern Poets, 158–61.


recalling the identification of such notebooks as composed in stile a mosaico.Erasmus was, of course, hardly adverse to the existence of the commonplacebook itself; in his De copia, he professed that when properly employed, suchbooks allowed one to ‘flit like a busy bee through the entire garden ofliterature’.56 But his contrast between transformative flow and inert appropria-tion allows us to return to Giovio’s mosaic more cognizant of some of theimage’s unfavourable colourings.

As another of the metaphors peppering discussions on imitation, onecommon to the anti-Ciceronians, mosaic was by no means exclusively nega-tive.57 A well-noted example in Leon Battista Alberti’s dialogue Profugiorum abAerumna Libri compares literary imitation to the crafting of mosaics in archi-tectural spaces. The inventor of this art, who forged something new from thefragments left from the construction of temples, becomes a model for themodern writer:

Nihil dictum quin prius dictum. E veggonsi queste cose litterarie usurpate da tanti,e in tanti loro scritti adoperate e disseminate, che oggi a chi voglia ragionarneresta altro nulla che solo el raccogliere e assortirle e poi accoppiarle insieme conqualche varietà dagli altri e adattezza dell’opera sua, quasi come suo instituto siaimitare in questo chi altrove fece il pavimento.58

In Alberti’s hand, mosaic becomes a metaphor for creative, transformativeimitation in a manner consonant with the apian imagery. Martin McLaughlinhas suggested that Poliziano later puts this theory of tessellation ‘into practice’as, for example, his discussion in the Miscellanea on appealing to high and lowaudiences:

just as those of rustic goatherd taste will be delighted by some of the unpolishedand cruder words in this work, words that have been hewn rather than carefullyfashioned, and which have not even experienced the rake or the hasp nevermind the file, so at the other extreme the occasionally chiselled pieces of dictionvaried with multicoloured mosaic stones, will capture those of more refined andpolished taste.59

Mosaic is here emblematic of pleasurable variety figured through the imag-ined materiality of imitation.

56 Erasmus, De copia, in The Collected Works of Erasmus, ed. C. R. Thompson (Toronto: University of TorontoPress, 1974), 639.

57 McLaughlin, Literary Imitation, 213.58 Leon Battista Alberti, Opere volgari, ed. Cecil Grayson 3 vols. (Bari: Laterza, 1960-66), II: Bk III, 160–61. Also

see Timothy Kircher, Living Well in Renaissance Italy: The Virtues of Humanism and the Irony of Leon Battista Alberti(Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2012), 270–71; Roberto Cardini, Mosaici: Il‘nemico’ dell’Alberti, (Rome: Bulzoni, 1999); and McLaughlin, Literary Imitation, 163–4. My thanks to TimothyKircher for his insights and suggestions on this point.

59 ‘Ergo ut agrestes illos et hircosos quaedam ex his impolita et rudia delectabunt, exasciataque magis quamdedolata, nec modo limam sed runcinas experta nec scobinas, ita e diverso vermiculata interim dictio et tessellis


If Giovio shows himself to be amenable to a certain eclecticism – with theproviso that at any rate Cicero is the superlative exemplar – why does he dividetwo of its metaphors, the mosaic and the kind of flower-gathering that resultsin garland crowns? In the latter case, he is comfortably in line with texts likeAntonio da Rho’s 1430–33 De imitationibus eloquentiae, which similarly givesprimacy to Cicero but allows for multiple models.

I am writing so that [students of rhetoric] can come to this compilation as to abeautiful little orchard and pluck from the many varied flowers there the noblerones, the prettier ones and the ones that smell the sweetest. With these they canweave and produce new garlands of eloquence.60

If Giovio draws together a set of metaphors belonging to the imitation debatesin a contradictory way, he does so in order to forge a new contrast – no longerbetween the eclectic and the Ciceronian imitator, but now between the ver-nacular and the Latin one.

Distinguishing his two iterations of the flower plucking image are the actor,the objective, the audience, and the execution of imitation. Muscettola looksat the vernacular writer who haphazardly and without re-elaboration amassesthose ancient passages most likely to attract and delight uninitiated readers.For Giovio, Latin writers who cannot quite attain perfect Ciceronianism mayimitate carefully selected and inventively intermingled forefathers in order tocultivate an individual style that will be enjoyed by ‘stern and censoriouspeople’, as cited above. Though disparaging those who dare even to recite astheir own the works of their flourishing (florentium) contemporaries, ‘not onlyfor noblewomen, but also . . . before exacting and very discriminating listen-ers’, Muscettola agrees that a distinguished poet borrows passages ‘not art-lessly and shamelessly, but with skill and moderation’, for no ‘liberallyeducated poet of our times will blush to have lifted things for present usewhen he has taken them with humility and positioned them with ingenuity’.61

Ultimately, that assorted flowers are picked and assembled matters less thanthe nature of the hand reaching out to grasp them. Muscettola’s vernacularauthor plucks from the garden of the ancients with an inconstant andunchecked hand (vaga manu impune decerpere), Giovio’s Latinist with a learnedone (erudita manu . . . decerp(ere)). Though Muscettola ultimately acknowledges

pluricoloribus variegata, delicatiores hos capiet volsos et pumicatos.’ Angelo Poliziano, Opera omnia, ed. IdaMaïer. 3 vols. (Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1970–71), I:214. Translation from McLaughlin, Literary Imitation,197–8.

60 ‘calamum verto quo his commentariis tamquam in ortulo quodam pulcherrimo ex multis diversisquefloribus nobiliores ac venustiores quosque sauviusque spirantes possint excerpere, quibus eloquentie nova sertaintexant atque conficiant.’ McLaughlin, Literary Imitation, 109. See a nearly identical passage AntonioPossevino’s Bibliotheca selecta (1593), Ciceronian Controversies, 200–01.

61 ‘non modo illustribus matronis sed . . . etiam apud subtiles et peracutas’; ‘non inepte atque impudentersed scite modesteque’; ‘profecto non erubescet quispiam nostrorum temporum poeta liberaliter institutus sialiqua ad praesentem usum verecunde sumpta atque ingeniose collocata sustulerit.’ Giovio, Notable Men andWomen, 328–9.


that a condemnable use of ancient and modern texts might be made by bothLatin and vernacular writers, his suggestion that this looting is more readilyassociated with the latter derives from the belief that translation facilitatessuch a ripping off (rapiendi) and charms readers unable to detect the fraud.62

In this manner one may win acclaim for ‘brief and unremarkable labours’ inthe vernacular.63 If within the context of the imitation debates Giovio acknowl-edges Cicero as the preeminent model but nevertheless upholds a moderateview edging toward that of the eclectics, he has displaced much of the criticismlevelled against the latter camp onto the field of vernacular writing. In otherwords, Giovio has shifted the metaphoric terrain so that it is no longer aboutwho is imitated but instead who imitates and for whom.

THE VIRILITY OF LETTERS

Not all Latin writers merit praise, of course – as illustrated by the case ofAlcionio – just as not all vernacular writers purloin the texts of the past in orderto draw soft audiences. With the Orlando Furioso, for example, Ariosto won theapproval of ‘not only ladies of leisure but also men of affairs’,64 whileMachiavelli’s works reveal him to be rich in talent though poor in goodfortune.65 But if the ease of composition consistently underscored byMuscettola as one of vernacular’s advantages is faint praise at best, moredeeply-rooted criticism at worst, Latin itself has been beset by a decline invitality expedited by the Sack of Rome. With a facetiousness neverthelesspointing to underlying concern, Giovio compares writers of epistles and minorworks to messengers who race from station to station but shy away from the ‘verydangerous labour’ of a long journey – an image that Muscettola seconds byrecalling Pontano’s comparison of men who ‘in a most cowardly way wererecoiling from the hard labour of the pen’ to irascible ‘urban gladiators’ whoexcel at street brawls but prove useless in battle, authors that D’Avalos chimesin to call ‘effete men of learning’.66 Authors shrinking from works of gravitas –together with the vernacular authors penning delightful love poetry for womenand other enfeebled audiences – compare unfavourably to the vigorous idealput forth by Giulio Pomponio Leto, founder of the Roman academy:

The glory and dignity of humane studies relies entirely upon three powers andprotections, namely, an abundance of vital juice, sinews that are strong butsupple, and a vivid, healthy complexion – things that we can see coexist in thephysical constitution of a regulated and sound human body. It was Pomponio’sclever idea to use the term ‘succulent’ for extensive learning, and to call a

62 Ibid., 222–3.63 ‘mediocres vigiliarum labores’. Ibid., 252–3.64 ‘non otiosarum modo matronarum sed occupatorum etiam hominum.’ Ibid., 264–5.65 Ibid., 268–9.66 ‘periculosissimi lavoris’; ‘eruditos homines stili laborem mollissime detrectantes’; ‘urbanos gladiatores’;

‘delicata ingenia’. Ibid., 292–5. On the ultimate cowardice of street fighters, also see Book One, 192–3.


muscular but flexible style the ‘sinews,’ and that polished and respectable deliv-ery of which we speak a ‘joyful complexion.’67

Giovio points to worthy exemplars, such as the graceful ‘sinews’ of AndreaNavagero,68 but also diagnoses why some able men have yet to ‘flex the muscleof their genius’: adversity, service, and sloth.69

Surveying the literary landscape of post-1527 Italy, Giovio therefore con-fronts the dystrophy of Latin resulting from internal languor, military tribu-lations, and competition from the vernacular. The well-formed, hearty,disciplined physique representing strong Latin writing contrasts especiallywith the image of vernacular; drawing together Muscettola’s cited criticisms ofthe volgare’s origins and implementation, one finds it to be ‘permixtum etconfusum’ – aptly translated by Gouwens as ‘hodgepodge’ – and mosaic. Insuch a representation – related to Giovio’s criticism of ‘patchworks’ – thevernacular author is a far cry from the svelte classical athlete imaged by Letoand more resembles the aforementioned court jester in his motley garb.

Nor is this the only passage comparing the stately and the miscellaneousbody. In Book Three, the interlocutors construct a verbal portrait of VittoriaColonna consonant with the poet’s own image campaign. Giovio indicatesthat he will need his finest rhetorical palette to do her justice:

But what fine tools, like those of the highest kind of sculpture, will allow us torender the true likeness, image, and character of our Vittoria Colonna? Whatapt, what choice colors of eloquence will enable us to relate the likeness of hermind to the special qualities of all her virtues, which belong to her like naturalbirthmarks? How, indeed, when all her limbs, precisely perfected by nature,match her singular grace, and it appears that in her the very qualities of a mostillustrious mind are assembled together with a certain indescribable harmony tocomplete the appearance of true virtue?70

If Colonna’s merits are assembled in one body with such harmonious perfec-tion that she almost eludes the artistic representation of the chisel, brush, orpen, so much more is this unity apparent when contrasted with the relativemélange of her female peers:

67 ‘humanorum scilicet studiorum decus et dignitatem tribus omnino facultatibus atque praesidiis sustentari– suco videlicet uberiore, validis ac explicatis nervis et, vivido suavique colore – ut in humani corporis temperatoet bene sano habitu concurrere videmus. Eleganter enim ille copiosam eruditionem sucum appellabat,robustum atque volubilem stilum nervos ipsos, laetum vero colorem illam de qua dicimus politam acadmirabilem actionem, quae duas res inter se coniugatas necessario comprehendit, vocem et gestum cum verbisatque sententiis ad commovendos animos congruentes.’ Ibid., 282–3.

68 ‘in qua nervi quidem validiores absque ulla austeritatis suspicione potius apparent quam emineant.’ Ibid.,278–9.

69 ‘movere ingenii lacertos’. Ibid., 310–11.70 ‘Sed quibus tamquam summae artis sculptoriae praestantibus instrumentis huius Victoriae Columnae

veram effigiem habitum figuram, quibus aptis atque delectis facundiae coloribus animi similitudinem adpeculiares virtutum omnium, tamquam naturalium naevorum, notas referre poterimus, cum in ea cuncti artusa natura definite perfecti ad singularem respondeant decorem, et excelsi animi clarissimae dotes, inenarrabiliquodam concentu, in se ipsas ad absolvendam verae virtutis speciem concurrere videantur?’ Ibid., 502–03.


And by God, it’s indisputably agreed that what our friend Giberti used to sayabout Vittoria is not only clever but absolutely true . . . he would say this abouther in comparison to other women: that it was the lot of all besides her alone tobe like the images of a mosaic composed of small pieces of stone. To thoselooking from a distance, the figures and human faces of this work of art seemadmirable and beautiful; but if you approach the work more closely and examineit more minutely and with focused attention, immediately seams appear to view,and both the enormous gaps and the crowded awkwardness, the almost haphaz-ard workmanship of the crudely inserted pebbles – all discerned clearly by theeyes – shatter one’s entire opinion of the work.71

The comparison between this passage and that disparaging vernacular prac-tices seems clear. Like the women who fall short of Vittoria, vernacular writ-ings relying on inexpertly plucked and translated flowers – or here clumsilyplaced pebbles – ‘stir admiration’ in those who examine them with an undis-cerning eye. Vittoria is to other women as fine Latin is to mediocre vernacular.Driving the point home, Giovio likens Colonna to ancient Rome itself, beforethe barbarian invasions trampled the empire’s linguistic and territorial might:‘this one woman prevails over all the others – just as Rome herself, whichadvanced to such great glory, surpassed in august renown all the individualstates of the world.’72

Giovio’s homage to Colonna praises all aspects of her harmoniousness,from her refined physical allurements to her decorous hospitality, from hercomposure in the face of her husband’s dalliances to her skilfully measureddance step.73 The encomium – and the dialogue itself – culminate in applausefor Colonna’s intellectual and poetic endowments:

Distinguished and elegant scholarship shines forth in her to the admiration ofmen – so much so that her famous gifts of exceptional character are reckoned asonly a part of her high glory and praise. This is the case because from a tenderage she imbued herself with an enormous desire for learning in nearly all fields,so that philosophers praise her argumentation and writing; theologians arethrilled as they listen to her; and poets and the devotees of humanistic studiesadmire her without reservation, since they believe that she has not imbibed hermany great thoughts from assiduous reading, but rather from her divine inspi-ration. Consider her Tuscan poems, which are in circulation despite her bashfulresistance and absolute unwillingness that this should be so. How beautifully

71 ‘Et hercle, id dictu perfacetum et re ipsa verissimum esse liquidissime constat, quod Gibertus noster deVictoria collata ceteris mulieribus dicere solebat, cum eam propterea sanctissime coleret magnoperequesuspiceret: omnibus scilicet feminis praeterquam uni huic, accidere ut musivi et tessellati operis picturis similesessent, cuius artificii figurae humanaeque facies procul spectantibus admirabiles atque pulcherrimae videntur;quod si propius succedas et clolatis oculis id opus subtiliter contempleris, laxiores commissurae protinusapparent, et calculorum ruditer insertorum hiatus enormes et frequentes tumultuariae prope artisinconcinnitates, quae cuncta manifeste oculis deprehensa, totam operis existimationem convellunt.’ Ibid.,504–05.

72 ‘Vincit enim haec una mulier ceteras omnes, sicut Roma ipsa, quae talem ad gloriam tulit, singulasterrarum orbis civitates augusta claritudine superavit.’ Ibid., 502–03.

73 On this encomium, see especially Gouwens, ‘The Beauty of Vittoria Colonna’.


have they been painted with flowers of tender eloquence! What sparkling gemsof lofty intellect have been interlarded among them! We may note too the metricskill that adorns them. Then there are her almost innumerable letters: whatauthority, what manly decorum, and what charm these display, written as theyare to the loftiest and most learned men and to the greatest kings, and concern-ing the most weighty and honorable matters? These accomplishments meritpraise that is neither fleeting nor perishable, but absolutely immortal. Thescholarship that so many and such great virtues have unquestionably placed inthe control of this one divine woman shines forth in such a way that it is certainlyvery like those massive fires which are stirred up by Egyptian kings at the summitof pyramids after great victories and periods of public rejoicing. For the higherthat those fires, already great in themselves, fly up from their lofty summit, themore widely are they visible to mankind, as far away as remote regions of Africa,and the mouth of the Nile Delta, and ships plying the waters of the sea.74

Those putting Colonna ‘in circulation’ were in fact Giovio and [likely]d’Avalos themselves, the former delivering her poems to Pietro Bembo inBologna and the latter disseminating them across the peninsula.75 As theconclusion to Book Three’s discussion on women, this passage ostensibly setsVittoria apart from her female peers. But it also highlights her as one of theage’s foremost writers and in so doing answers many of Book Two’s concernsabout the future of Italy’s literary climate.

The problem of imitation is set aside in the figure of Colonna. She inter-sperses the ‘flowers of elegance’ at her disposal with a hand moved by trans-cendent inspiration rather than slavish imitation. While exceptionally well-lettered, her education is foundational – the pyramid to her flame. WhenGiovio suggests in Book Two that none in this era are able to reach ‘the mostexalted summit of perfect eloquence’,76 Colonna becomes the contemporaryfigure (together with Giovio himself, we should remember) whose panegyricmost places her at such heights. Not deriving her thoughts (concepta) or stylefrom other texts, she has little need for the imitative practices presented in

74 ‘In qua adeo illustres atque elegantes litterae ad admirationem hominum refulgent ut praeclarae illaepraestantissimorum morum dotes vix in parte summae laudis et gloriae censeantur, quoniam ea sese a tenerisannis tanta discendi cupiditate omnium prope disciplinarum studiis imbuerit, ut disceptantem et scribentemphilosophi laudibus extollant; theologi prope rigentes auscultent; humaniorum vero studiorum cultores etpoetae penitus admirentur, quoniam tot et tanta non perpetuis hausta lectionibus sed divinis potius afflatibusconcepta fuisse credantur. Eius enim Etrusca carmina quae verecundo ipsius animo renitente ac penitus invito,circumferuntur, quibus nam tenerioris eloquentiae floribus depicta? Quibus interlita celsioris ingeniiluminibus? Quibusque numerorum artificiis exornata esse conspicimus? Quam porro gravitatem, quod viriledecus, quem denique leporem ferunt innumerabiles eius epistolae de gravissimis ac honestissimis rebus adsummos et doctissimos viros ex maximos reges conscriptae? Non fugacem enim haec et cito perituram, sedomnino sempiternam laudem promerentur. Litterae profecto in hac una divina muliere tot et tantis virtutibusimpositae sic elucent ut sint illis ingentibus ignibus omnino persimiles qui in cacumine pyramidum in magnisvictoriis et publica laetitia at Aegyptiis regibus excitantur. Ii enim, per se magni, quanto sublimius ab excelsoillarum fastigio sese attollunt, tanto eos latius homines ab remotis Africae regionibus ipsisque Nili ostiis etmaritimis cursibus contuentur.’ Giovio, Notable Men and Women, 530–33.

75 Vecce, ‘Paolo Giovio e Vittoria Colonna’; Tobia R. Toscano, Letterati corti accademie: La letteratura a Napolinella prima metà del Cinquecento (Naples: Loffredo Editore, 2000), 109.

76 ‘excelsissimum perfectae orationis apicem’. Giovio, Notable Men and Women, 314–15.


Book Two as the consolatory tool for those not blessed with such illuminatedtalents. She therefore wins the unrestrained admiration of her poetic peers.

Similarly, she is less ‘effete’ than many of her male contemporaries. Theattribution of masculine traits to Colonna – a prominent element of her imagecampaign most memorably presented in Michelangelo’s description of her as‘un uomo in una donna, anzi un dio’77 – are redoubled in Giovio’s portrait.Her nose is masculine in its noble aquilinity without detracting from herfeminine allure.78 Her virtue rivals that of the sagest men.79 She governs witha ‘manlike severity’.80 So too in horsemanship does she exhibit ‘masculinedaring’,81 while her ‘manly upbringing’ renders her so well-versed in militarymatters as to have proven a worthy advisor to her husband.82 In mind, body,and skill, then, Colonna exemplifies the robust physique of Leto’s well-tonedauthor. If Book Three corrects the historical underestimation of women’stalents by highlighting the present flourishing of female genius,83 arguing that‘literary studies make women equal to men’ and that when coupled withchastity ‘their majesty transcends their human form and they are completelydivine’84 – Vittoria Colonna emerges as an indisputable deity of the Italianliterary landscape.

If Giovio diagnosed contemporary literary culture as being plagued byunvirile poets and prosaists who shirking the labour of true literary enterprise,preferring the easy rewards offered by pliable audiences, Colonna’s ‘manly’but tender style, learned eloquence, and elite audience casts her as an impor-tant exception. The epithet of ‘divine’ propels her towards membership inthat ‘best class of writing’ that Giovio had indicated remains unmatched by themoderns.85 In short, Colonna is not just Giovio’s ideal noblewoman – in manyrespects he portrays her as his ideal writer.

But if Book Three argues persuasively on behalf of women as commissionersand composers of literature, it is nevertheless true that Book Two regularlydenigrates them as consumers of literature. Indeed, Giovio pointedly delimitsColonna’s audience to the choicest, most discerning eyes – philosophers,theologians, humanists, kings – and indicates that she reads the ‘right’ kindsof texts palatable to scholarly men. How can one square the praise lavishedupon Colonna – a vernacular poet – with the aspersions cast upon women

77 Michelangelo Buonarroti, The Poetry of Michelangelo, ed. and trans. James M. Saslow (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1991), 398.1.

78 Giovio, Notable Men and Women, 508–11.79 Ibid., 516–17.80 ‘virili servitate’. Ibid., 520–21.81 ‘virile ausu’. Ibid., 512–13.82 ‘viriliter educate’. Ibid., 522–3.83 Ibid., 346–7.84 ‘studia autem litterata feminas viris pares et admirabiles reddunt. Quibus dotibus si castimonia corporis

accesserit, tum demum humana specie augustiores et divinae penitus efficiuntur.’ Ibid., 376–7.85 ‘optimum scribendi genus’. Ibid., 314–15.


(together with the old, the young, and the undiscriminating members ofcourt) as contributors to vernacular’s often unmerited flourishing and Latin’sdecline?

The women Giovio praises for their intellect and education come fromnoble families with prestigious cultural reputations. In taking a friendly view oftheir endeavours, Giovio falls in line with other pro-Latin voices in thequestione della lingua debate, most notably that of Giraldi, who scathinglydenigrates vernacular writers as ‘barbers, cobblers, and other tradesmen,many drawn from the very dregs of society’ yet cannot but include their mostprestigious members in his survey, including Colonna and Veronica Gambara– ‘poets and princesses’ who rival men in talent and whose status as illustriousand widowed women legitimizes their literary endeavours.86 Even to stalwartsagainst the vernacular, the powerful coupling of Colonna’s quality verse andsocial standing demanded that space be yielded to her (and women like her)on the sparse list of acceptable practitioners.

However, Giovio takes care to buffer Colonna even from his elite cast ofnoblewomen, as we have seen in the mosaic image. When Muscettola lauds oneDorotea Gonzaga’s beauty, education, patronage of estimable poets, skilledconversation, and dignified widowhood – all characteristics that might makeher a rival of Vittoria, who shared her Neapolitan social circle – and suggeststhat Dorotea might be honoured as the best of women, he earns the censure ofD’Avalos for nearly forgetting about Vittoria. Muscettola recovers by insistingthat he always excludes Colonna from his consideration of other women: ‘shemust surely be picked out at once from the multitude of women and deservedlyintroduced into the foremost ranks of the best males.’87 Not only does such adescription further divide Colonna from the crowd (turba) of women, howeverdeserving of praise they might individually be, it also shields her from any ofthe critiques levelled at them in Book Two. In other words, Giovio is generallya critic of the vernacular and its audiences but is also a client of Colonna’s; toreduce the dissonance between these positions he largely lifts her outside ofthe language debate, distances her from her female peers, and imbues her withthe virtues he associates with fine Latin composition.

ASSEMBLING AN EXEMPLARY BOUQUET

D’Avalos’ admonishment of Muscettola for nearly overlooking Vittoria assuperlative is one of several moments that call into question the jurist’sdialogic choices. In Book Two, for example, Muscettola’s decision to begin hisdiscussion of vernacular poets with Bernardino Accolti – called l’Unico

86 ‘tonsores enim et sutores opificesque sellularios, multos etiam ex faece haustos’; ‘principes et poetriae’.Giraldi, Modern Poets, 188–9, 194–5.

87 ‘post unam Victoriam Columnam, quam optimo iure semper excipio, propter admirabilem in eapraestantissimarum virtutum concursum, adeo ut eam omnino eripiendam e turba mulierum, et in primosoptimorum virorum ordines merito deducendam esse iudicemus.’ Giovio, Notable Men and Women, 458–9.


Aretino for his love affairs, celebrity, and performed translations – promptsGiovio to interrupt him: ‘Come, now! Do the romances of queens, the playfullute, the ears of princes, and for that matter the very appellation “Unico”figure large in your census of poets?’88 This interjection, and insinuations byboth Giovio and D’Avalos that Accolti did not enjoy his peers’ admiration,undermines his exemplarity, his nickname and immortalization inCastiglione’s Cortegiano notwithstanding (or perhaps even in direct contesta-tion thereof).89 The exchange undermines our sense of Muscettola’s ownjudiciousness as a reader. He returns to his catalogue with a more acceptableintroductory figure, Ariosto.

Similarly, and as seen above, D’Avalos scolds Muscettola for naming toomany Neapolitan beauties in Book Three. While this abundance of fair ladiesserves to flatter Giovio’s Ischian hosts, it is nevertheless couched within acommentary on the process of selecting and presenting exemplars. In contrastwith Muscettola’s exhaustive enumeration, Giovio has pointed to ‘only themost select’ women while D’Avalos himself had singled out the best four.90 Hedirects Muscettola on how to participate more fittingly in their dialogue:‘Keep away from those women who aren’t at all worthy to be placed in thenarrow first class, and stick to the even tenor of our established procedure.’91

Muscettola responds that he should be allowed to sketch as many women as hepleases, provided he do so ‘using only charcoal, without any colour’.92 Giovioconsents as long as he set aside ‘pigments . . . and paintbrushes’93, but whenMuscettola recounts the sordid death of one woman’s impassioned admirerhe interjects that his friend ‘must adhere to what we have promised; right atthe beginning you seem to have shamefully failed, for that agile(/hasty orhurried) hand of yours is fashioning with colors and also with a playful brush– and not with charcoals – not only conditions of body and states of mind, butalso the results of unhappy loves.’94 These passages welcome a comparison

88 ‘In quota ergo parte poetici census numerantur reginarum amores, lyra lasciviens, principales aures etipsum etiam Unici cognomentum?’ Ibid., 262–5.

89 The Cortegiano famously circulated in manuscript thanks to Vittoria Colonna herself, and Giovio wouldhave very likely seen it. On the relationship between the two texts, see Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio, 90, 92 and 94;and Gouwens, ‘Female Virtue and the Embodiment of Beauty’.

90 ‘anguste eas’. Giovio, Notable Men and Women, 462–3.91 ‘Abstineto . . . ab iis quae minime sunt dignae ut in angusta prima classe collocentur, et aequabilem

institutae rationis tenorem observato.’ Ibid.92 ‘solo slatem carbone absque ullis omnino coloribus’. Ibid., 464–5.93 ‘pigmenta . . . et . . . penicilli’. Ibid.94 ‘promissis est standum, in quorum limine defuisse pudendum videtur. Pigmentis enim, et lascivo etiam

penicillo (ne dicam carbonibus), non modo corporis ac animorum habitus, sed etiam amorum infeliciumeventus properanti illa tua manu figurantur.’ Ibid., 466–7. Bracketed addition is my own. Minonzio alsotranslates properanti as agile but directs his reader to Sonia Maffei’s commentary in Paolo Giovio, Scritti d’arte:lessico ed ecfrasi, ed. Sonia Maffei (Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore, 1999), 267–8, where the word is insteadtranslated as veloce (fast). Maffei associates the artistic terminology Giovio employs in this passage with ‘excessivestylistic elements, affectation, or less negatively, seductive artificiality’ and highlights the connections to therepresentations of vernacular literature. That said, she would seem to somewhat misread the scene as one inwhich the use of said colours is primarily condoned, overlooking the parallels with the passages in Book Twoon Leonardo da Vinci discussed directly below.


with both Giovio’s ‘choice colors of eloquence’ in his literary portrait (verameffigiem) of Colonna and his discussion of artistic imitation in Book Two. As anexample of how one learns to imitate well, Giovio had pointed to Leonardo daVinci’s practice of forbidding his students ‘brushes and paints’ until they hadmastered ‘copying with the simplest strokes’ using the ‘pencil alone’ in orderto ‘prevent the ardent talents of young men from being enticed by theattraction of brushes and the charm of colors before they had learned throughpractice . . . to create proportionate likenesses of all things, properly andwithout models’.95 Similarly, ‘avid and eager intellects must take care not toventure out too hastily, like unfledged nestlings whose wings are not quite dry’but should instead ‘walk this straight, albeit painstaking and difficult, path tothe genuine labor of writing’.96 The echoes between these passages implicitlycompare Muscettola’s oratorical flourishes to the exuberance of Leonardo’spupils and of inexpert literary imitators, all of whom require some reigning in.Though generally recognized as an eloquent and successful Latinist by Giovio,his character – like the vernacular writers for whom he speaks – is herepresented as not yet having the trained, measured eye needed to select orproperly portray exemplars.

While Muscettola portrays many women – and the gossip that surroundsthem – with a free or hurried hand (properanti illa tua manu), D’Avalos com-mends Giovio’s more selective praise: ‘I’ll be damned, Giovio, if these verywomen didn’t please me too, above all the rest whom you’ve selected, like themost beautiful flowers of all, not only with your shrewd judgment but also withextremely skilled hands.’97 His words return us to the terms of imitationpresented in Book Two. If the vernacular writer culls his exemplars with aninconstant and unchecked hand (vaga manu impune decerpere) and a goodLatinist with a learned one (erudita manu . . . decerp(ere)), Book Three uses thebouquets of women to show the question of selection put into practice;Muscettola, who here plays the ‘defender’ of the vernacular, employs anuntamed and fast hand, while Giovio, the proponent of Latin, grasps thesubject with expert hands (argutissimis manibus decerpsisti).

In a dialogue dedicated to enumerating and emulating models – in arms, inletters, and in female society – we return to Book Two’s criticism that thetrouble with vernacular’s flourishing is that its audiences and authors often donot know how to pick, implement, or discern well. In their hands what should

95 ‘Illis namque . . . penicillis et coloribus penitus interdicebat, cum iuberet ut plumbeo graphio tantum . . .simplicissimis tractibus imitando . . . scilicet ut non prius avida iuvenum ingenia penicillorum illecebris etcolorum amoenitate traherentur quam ab exercitatione longe fructuosissima commensuratas rerum omniumeffigies recte et procul ab exemplaribus exprimere didicissent.’ Giovio, Notable Men and Women, 320–23.

96 ‘Adhibenda enim est cura cupidis et alacribus ingeniis ne ut implumes aviculae non plane siccatis alisfestinantius provolent . . . Hoc itaque directo tramite, quamquam fastidioso atque difficili, ad verum scribendilaborem.’ Ibid, 320–21.

97 ‘Dispeream, Iovi . . . nisi eae ipsae super ceteras omnes mihi summopere placuerunt, quas tu singillatimtamquam flores longe omnium pulcherrimos non acuto modo iudicio, verum etiam argutissimis manibusdecerpsisti.’ Ibid., 402–03.


be harmonious risks becoming hodgepodge or patchwork. As the author,Giovio himself has undergone an extensive process of picking and assemblingto bring this catalogue of contemporaries together. The floral metaphor thatbinds the dialogue’s three books and responds to the anxieties of the post-Sack Italy also interlaces ongoing debates on the vernacular, imitation, andgender in a way that draws a comparison between languages and ladies. As anembodiment of a Latin ideal, Colonna is herself plucked out of the field ofvernacular writers and of women as a superior exemplar, a flower of Italianwriting and living within a cultural garden whose future in the face of politicaland military crisis is not yet clear.

University of Pennsylvania


The flowers of Italian literature: language, imitation and gender debates in Paolo Giovio's Dialogus...

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