Battiferri, Laura

Laura, the illegitimate daughter of the noble lord and priest Giovanni Antonio Battiferri from Urbino , born of his concubine Maddalena Kokkapani from Carpi, was born on the day of Saint Andrew ^[2] . She was recognized by her father, who gave her a humanistic education, with knowledge of history, philosophy and theology. Signor Battiferi had many monetary benefits and a position in the Apostolic Chamber in the Vatican. On February 9, 1543, Pope Paul III issued a decree recognizing Laura as legitimate. From this act it is known that she also had a brother named Ascanio and a stepbrother named Giulio ^[2] . In her poems, she will mourn the loss of her father, but will not mention her mother or brothers.

Her biography is divided into three phases according to the number of cities where she lived (always revolving at the court): Urbino (1523–1549), Rome (1549–1555) and Florence (1555–1589) ^[2] .

Having received from her father a significant state and legal status, Laura married Vittorio Sereni, an organist in the service of Duke of Urbino Guidobaldo II della Rovere . Laura lost her first husband in 1549 . According to the surviving document dated July 20, 1549, after the death of her husband, the Duke Guidobaldo for her own safety forced her to the monastery so that she would wait for her father's arrival from Rome there, as she was left without any necessary female escorts. even without funds for food.

The second time she married at the age of 27 on April 17, 1550, she had to contend with her uncle, brother and heir to her father, who did not want her to pay the required amount. Her husband was the Florentine sculptor and architect Bartolomeo Ammannati , with whom she remained spiritually close throughout her life ^[1] . She met him in Rome, where he worked on the orders of Pope Julius III . The marriage ceremony was held under the direction of the father of the bride in the Holy House of the Virgin Mary in Loreto, one of the main Catholic shrines.

The social status of Laura is evidenced by the fact that her Roman correspondents and recipients of her poems included Pope Paul III, Libya and Ortenzia Colonna, Hercilia Cortes del Monte (niece Julius III), Lucrezia Soderini, Neapolitan singer Eufemia. With the death of Pope Julius III in 1555, her husband was no longer bound by orders and left for Florence, where he found a new patron in the person of Duke Cosimo I de Medici . Her lyrics of this period testify that initially, until she joined the circle of intellectual elite with the support of Warka, she felt very lonely.

For the most part, Laura lived in their villa in Mayano, near the city gates of Florence, sometimes she accompanied her husband on his travels related to orders, mostly to Rome. Information about these events of her life comes from her correspondence with the scientists Annibale Caro and Benedetto Warka , who were her close friends. She resorted to their help in resolving certain legal problems associated with her first marriage ^[1] .

She was elected to the Urbino Assorditi Academy, as well as to the Accademia degli Intronati Siena Academy, becoming the first woman among their members, and she chose the pseudonym La Sgraziata (“Awkward”) . She had no children, and her husband became her heir. She was buried on November 3, 1589, in the Jesuit Church of S. Giovannino, Florence, which they both helped to rebuild. For her burial, Ammanati ordered from Alessandro Allori the painting “Christ and the Haaneyans”, which is still in this temple and stores the departed image of an elderly woman with a book in the hands of the Haaneyans.

Laura’s literary debut took place in 1560 , when she released the Primo libro delle opere toscane, thanks to the help of the Florentine publishing house Giunti . In this company, she used the advice of Varcha. In a letter dated November 25 of the same year, Laura writes about how she found a title for a book composed of such heterogeneous works - poems of various sizes and prose passages. These are mainly sonnets, including the Fidia cycle ( Phidias ), dedicated to her husband, but also other sizes — madrigals, canzonetts, odes, sisters, canzonas, tercinae, ecloga. She also thanks him for his help in drafting the letter, which she sent along with the published book as a gift to Eleonora of Toledo , the wife of Cosimo Medici, to whom the publication was dedicated, along with the victories of her husband over Siena.

From that moment on, Laura continued to engage in literary activity. In 1561, her sonnets were included in Atanadzhi an anthology published by him in Venice on the occasion of the death of Irena di Spilimbergo. In 1564, she published her translation of a number of “Repentant Psalms” , also issued by Giunti - Salmi penitenziali di diversi . The publication also included several "spiritual sonnets" written by her own. The book was dedicated to Victoria Farnese , Duchess of Urbinsk. This comparison of her texts with the sacred Laura achieved the greatest success - the publication became popular (at least two more editions were released without her intervention - 1566, 1570, Giunti; also they were included in the collection published by Francesco Turchi at Giolito in Venice in 1568 ).

The main literary work of Laura on these works stopped, but her cultural activities continued. Several of her panegyric sonnets are found among homage writers in the prefaces to collections of works by Faustino Tasso (Turin, 1573), Benedetto Varca (Florence, 1573) and Annibale Caro (Florence, 1587), as well as in the collection Il secondo volume delle rime (Venice, 1587 ) and in Poesie Toscane Marco Colonna, where they are combined with the verses of Pietro Angelio under the year 1589.

Being an artistic persona, she constructed the image of a laurel on the basis of her own name “Laura”, appointing herself at the same time the heir of Petrarch Tuscan, who sang the same-name lady ^[2] . Her fellow poets picked up this literary game, showered the new Daphne (nymph laurel) with compliments and practically canonized it as a new Sappho .

A feature of Laura's method is her scrupulous interest in the theoretical questions of the poetic metric, which distinguishes her from among her contemporaries-poets. The theme of her poems often became her love and respect for her spouse sculptor ^[1] . She composed, remaining within the framework of the Petrarch tradition ^[2] . Chronologically, the first dated works of Laura are a cycle of 9 sonnets in which she mourns the death of her first husband. Written under the influence of Vittoria Columns and Veronika Gambar , these widow's poems depict their creator as a new nymph, facing laurel, or as the eternal lady of Petrarch. Perhaps these poems were written during her stay in the monastery. Later, she continued to write on themes adopted by Florentine intellectuals, and in the later period, when she and her husband turned to the Jesuits, deeply religious themes penetrated her work. Her works demonstrate her extraordinary erudition.

Throughout life, Laura's work was surrounded by famous fame not only in Italy, but also at the imperial courtyards of Prague and Madrid. It was still praised by historians of literature of the 18th century, and it disappears from the works of the historians of the 19th century; the only exceptions are the rare references to her “Psalms” and autobiographical pastoral sonnets. All her legacy was forgotten, since what was already incomprehensible for her contemporaries praised her: classical education, mannerist wit, versatility of poems created for various occasions, as well as deep Catholic faith.

These works, as researchers now note, are undoubtedly minor in the general poetic heritage of the Renaissance, including it among the minor ( minore ) poets of the Renaissance. Such literary activity is more an expression of cultural friendship; her addressees and colleagues were part of the close fraternity of the Florentine intelligentsia. But although the works of Laura from the point of view of literary history are not important, her epistolary heritage turns her into an important figure in the Florentine correspondence, which gives us a lot of information about her era and environment ^[1] .

Works

• Primo libro delle opere toscane , 1560. An anthology of 187 poems, of which 146 are written by Laura and 41 by her male correspondents (Varca, Caro, Anton Francesco Grazzini, Agnolo Bronzino and Benvenuto Cellini ). Among them:
  • Sonnet with a dedication to Eleanor of Toledo
  • Oggi Signor che nel trentesimo anno , 1553, sonnet
  • "Hymn to Glory", attributed to St. Augustine (actually written by Peter Damiani ), translated from Latin - Inno alla gloria di S. Agostino
  • Orazione di Geremia Profeta ("Prayer to the prophet Jeremiah"), written by tertsinami
  • Eclogue "Europe"
• I setti salmi penitenziali del santissimo profeta davit tradotti in lingua toscana ... con gli argomenti sopra ciascuno di essi: insieme con alcuni sonetti spirituali ("The Seven Penitential Psalms of the Most Holy Prophet David, translated into Tuscan"
• The unfinished manuscript of the collection of poems - Le Rime - was re-discovered in 1995, demonstrating her desire to publish the third book ^[2] .
• “The Prayer at the Nativity of Our Lord” is her only prose work, meditation, inspired by Loyola ’s texts.
• Lettere a Benedetto Varchi , ed. Bologna, 1879

Her portrait by Bronzino , written in the years 1550-55, is one of the best examples of the portrait genre, it is called "one of the most amazing female portraits of the Renaissance" ^[4] . It is profile, referring to the portraits of such trecento writers as Dante or Petrarch ^[2] , as well as to the medal images of the quattrocento . The upper part of her body is crowned with a small head, disproportionately stretched and reinforcing the impression of her long hooked nose. Unlike most portraits of this time, the model avoids eye contact with the viewer. She holds an open book, pointing a finger at Petrarch’s sonnet to his beloved Laura, her namesake. Sonnet LXIV is written on one page - “Se voi potesti per turbati segni ...”, on the other - CCXL - “I'o pregato Amor, e 'l ne riprego ...”

Her other preserved image, on the religious canvas of Alessandro Allori (see above), does not demonstrate such an original appearance that makes the portrait of Bronzino so memorable. Her portrait by Hans von Aachen is lost.

• Victoria Kirkham. Laura Battiferra And Her Literary Circle: An Anthology.
• Victoria Kirkham. Creative Partners: The Marriage of Laura Battiferra and Bartolomeo Ammannati // Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 55, No. 2 (Summer, 2002), pp. 498–558
• Carol Plazzotta. Bronzino's Laura // The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 140, No. 1141 (Apr., 1998), pp. 251-263

• Lettere (unavailable link)