Rethinking Gaspara Stampa in the Canon of Renaissance Poetry

Unn Falkeid, Aileen Feng

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781472427069
• eBook ISBN: 9781317064206
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Despite the fact that Gaspara Stampa (1523?-1554) has been recognized as one of the greatest and most creative poets and musicians of the Italian Renaissance, scholarship on her work has been surprisingly scarce and uncoordinated. In recent years, critical attention towards her work has increased, but until now there have been no anthologies dedicated solely to Stampa. Rethinking Gaspara Stampa in the Canon of Renaissance Poetry aims to set a foundation for further Stampa studies by accounting for her contributions to literature, music history, gender studies, the history of ideas, philosophy, and other areas of critical thought. This volume brings together an international group of interdisciplinary scholars who employ varied methodologies to explore multiple aspects of Stampa's work in dialogue with the most recent scholarship in the field. The chapters emphasize the many ways in which Stampa's poetry engages with multiple cultural movements of early modern Italy and Europe, including: Ficinian and Renaissance Neoplatonism, male-authored writing about women, Longinus's theory of the sublime, the formation of writing communities, the rediscovery of Aristotle's writings, and the reimagined relation between human and natural worlds. Taken as a whole, this volume presents a rich introduction to, and interdisciplinary investigation of, Gaspara Stampa's impact on Renaissance culture.

PART I
The Sublime

Chapter 1
Naming Sappho: Gaspara Stampa and the Recovery of the Sublime in Early Modern Europe

Jane Tylus, New York University

The female lover who looks out to sea and yearns for the departed, at times treacherous, beloved is a convention in antiquity canonized in the Heroides—fictional letters purportedly penned by mythological figures such as Ariadne, Medusa, and Dido but really written by Ovid. With some exceptions, it was mainly through the Heroides that the greatest woman writer of antiquity, Sappho, was introduced to medieval and Renaissance Europe, as she laments her abandonment by the young ferryman Phaon, a figure largely invented by Ovid, before she throws herself off the Leucadian cliff.¹ The unrequited lover thus became an indelible part of Sappho’s fascination for early modern readers, particularly when so tantalizingly few of her actual lyrics survived.

Yet in 1554, Sappho burst onto the European scene in a very different way. In the fall of that year, Sappho’s “He is a god to me,” what has become known as Fragment 31, was published by the scholar Francesco Robortello in Basel. Found in the pseudo-Longinian treatise On the Sublime (Dionysi Longini rhetoris praestantissimi liber de grandi sive sublimiorationis genere), this was only the second substantial poem of Sappho’s in print; it followed the publication in 1508 of the first century BCE treatise On Literary Composition, with Sappho’s “Ode to Aphrodite.” Also in 1554, the six one- to two-line fragments by Sappho preserved in the second century CE (?) Greek writer Demetrius’s work, On Style, were published by the Aldine press in Venice. But “He is a god to me” was different. Among other things, it was instantly recognized as the background text to Catullus’s well-known poem, “Ille mi par esse deo videtur” (“He seems to me to be equal to a god”), by Marc-Antoine Muret, who in November 1554 included “the most charming lyric of the poetess Sappho” in his Catullus, et in eum commentaries M. Antonii Mureti. This was a discovery Muret claimed to have made while undertaking a translation of On the Sublime into Latin.² Two years later, the renowned French editor Henri Estienne came out with the first “complete” edition of Sappho’s now eight extant fragments, along with the odes of Anacreon and other Greek poets.³ Finally, Remi Belleau also published in 1556 his (mediocre) French translation of Fragment 31, the first time the poem appeared in a vernacular language.⁴

What is perhaps most striking about this recovery of Sappho is the coincidental publications of the works of two of Europe’s greatest women poets, Louise Labé and Gaspara Stampa.⁵ The first elegy in Labé’s Euvres of 1555 opens with Labé’s claim that Apollo has given her the lyre that once sang of “l’amour Lesbienne”—Lesbian love, an indirect reference to Sappho. And a dedicatory ode to the volume, written in Greek, declares that Labé has restored the poems of Sappho “destroyed by the force of all-devouring time.”⁶ Stampa’s Rime of a year earlier is prefaced by two dedicatory verses likening her to a new Sappho. Or, in the phrase of the poligrafo Giulio Stufa, she is “de’ nostri dí Saffo novella” (“the new Sappho of our day”).⁷ Along with Labé’s and Stampa’s allusions to Sappho within their respective volumes, these dedications demonstrate a more intense engagement with the female Greek poet than comparisons made regarding Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Anne Bradstreet in the seventeenth century, when the “old continent” looked to these American wonders as la decima musa, or the tenth muse.⁸

Sappho indeed was the recovered female voice of the mid-sixteenth century, in the same way that, on a more massive scale, the many women writers featured in The Other Voice series represent voices recovered over the last two decades.⁹ As Joan DeJean and more recently Leah Chang have reminded us, hers was a voice that was recovered textually and philologically, through Robortello’s and Muret’s editions. It was a voice even more tantalizing for its fragmentary presence. Chang argues that Labé’s Euvres embodies what she calls a new “desire for Sappho” that emerged in the wake of these editions: a nostalgia for a pure Greek female presence that was orchestrated nonetheless by a largely, and perhaps exclusively, male cultural elite.¹⁰ On the other hand, Stampa’s Rime appeared in November 1554, the same month as Muret’s Catullus, a month or two after Robortello’s Longinus, and six months after Stampa’s sudden death in April. Its dedicatory verses championing Stampa as the modern Sappho, and Stampa’s occasional allusions to Sappho’s poems, could be construed as one final salvo to the old Sappho, composed before editors in Basel, Paris, and Venice brought “Sappho back to poetic life,” in the words of Chang. And, of course, the Ovidian plaint of Sappho mourning the departure of her young lover was very much a part of Stampa’s repertoire, as Patricia Phillippy has convincingly demonstrated.¹¹

Nor should the association between Stampa and Sappho particularly surprise. Both were women, both were poets, both were musicians. Sappho, who calls upon her “tortoise shell” to sing with her, is often referred to in antiquity as simply the player of the plectra or lyre while Stampa was best known during her brief lifetime as a virtuosa, a lute player and singer. Hence when Giulio Stufa claims that Stampa is not only “the new Sappho of our day,” “equal to the Greek poet in her Tuscan idiom, but chaster than she was, just as she was more beautiful” (“Pari a la Greca nel Tosco idioma,/ Ma più casta di lei, quanto piu bella”¹²), he is undeniably thinking of the musical talents for which others praised her more explicitly. Girolamo Parabosco asked in his Lettere amorose of 1545, “who has ever heard such sweet and elegant words? … and what will I say of that angelic voice that struck the air with its divine accents and made such sweet harmony that it awakened spirit and life in the coldest stones?”¹³ Stufa also puts his finger on another comparison that could be made between Stampa and Sappho: their presumed promiscuity, the function no doubt of Ovid’s fictional letter from the Heroides on the one hand, and of Stampa’s unconventional lifestyle on the other. Alessandro Zilioli, writing in 1599, claims that only Stampa’s Rime saved her from an unsavory reputation: “Having given herself to consort freely with well-educated men, she brought such scandal to herself that had not her great talents and the honor of her poetry concealed and almost cancelled her failings, it would be necessary to cover her with blame rather than include her here within this temple of honor among such valorous women.”¹⁴ So does Zilioli capture, as Marina Zancan comments, the “transgressive nature” of Stampa’s figure as it was apparently received in the late Cinquecento—a woman who “consorted” with men in the privacy of her own and others’ homes, in a city known for its courtesans.¹⁵

Yet this essay will argue that Stampa shows a sophisticated understanding of Sappho that goes beyond these biographical (or pseudobiographical) platitudes. Giorgio Forni has already observed that Stampa was a close reader of Demetrius’s widely circulated treatise On Style, where Sappho is praised for her charming use of repetition and hyperbole. Forni finds one of the six short fragments included for illustration, about the trampled hyacinth (105), echoed in Stampa’s Rime 188, “Quasi vago, e purpureo Giacinto” (“Like some lovely purple hyacinth”).¹⁶ Robortello’s edition of Longinus or Muret’s edition of Catullus would thus seem less removed from Stampa than they might appear, although the dates of these editions would seem to militate against Stampa’s having known Longinus and hence, Sappho’s “He is a god to me.” And yet Robortello, a scholar of Greek and Latin, taught throughout Italy in the 1530s and 1540s, settling in Padova in the late 1540s. There he taught Francesco Patrizi, whose Discorso sulla diversità dei furori poetici, published in 1553, is strikingly prescient of Longinus’s treatise, cited by Patrizi in his later works. Patrizi, moreover, seems to have been a friend of Francesco Sansevino—the same Sansevino who dedicated three works to Stampa in the mid-1540s after her brother Baldassare’s sudden death, among them an edition of Boccaccio’s Ameto and a lecture by Benedetto Varchi on a poem by Giovanni della Casa. And it was Varchi who wrote the second dedicatory poem for Stampa that links her to Sappho, calling her “the Sappho of our day” (“Saffo de’ nostri giorni, alta Gaspara”). In another verse written for the volume, Varchi claims to be consoled by the thought that Stampa “will live forever, so that Athens and Rome will see Sappho and Lucrezia descend from their thrones” (“e tal ch’Atene e Roma / Saffo e Lucrezia uscir vedran di sella”).¹⁷ As for Marc-Antoine Muret, even though he did not arrive in Venice until May of 1554, a month after Stampa’s death, he had access to a manuscript of Longinus long before that, thanks to the Cretan scholar Francesco Porto. Marc Fumaroli and Gustavo Costa have moreover discovered evidence of other copies of Longinus circulating in Rome prior to its publication by Robortello.¹⁸ All to suggest that in intellectual circles in Italy, there was not simply talk about, but access to Longinus and hence to Sappho before Stampa died in late April of 1554. That Stampa was part of those circles, thanks both to her brother’s acquaintances at the University of Padova and to her own connections with the elite aristocracy and Venice’s lively publishing world, is undeniable—enabling, among other things, what Diana Robin has called the “Latinity of her work” and her extensive use of Roman elegiac poets, especially Catullus.¹⁹

As a substantive new Sapphic fragment began circulating, first in manuscript, and then in print, in the years leading up to Stampa’s premature death, it is not inconceivable that Stampa or the poligrafi who assembled the volume of her Rime knew of its existence—much like the editors of Labé’s poems and possibly Labé herself.²⁰ In the following pages, I will entertain the hypothesis that Stampa and her editors were aware of Longinus’s text with its breathtaking Sapphic text. This in turn could lead to thinking in new ways about Stampa’s elusive role as a female poet in the very masculine world of the Venetian republic, and the even more elusive relationship between orality and textuality in the production of authorship and particularly female authorship. The secular female singer, lyre or lute in hand, had a tradition of inspiration behind her that may have challenged her ability to be seen as a poet in her own right, and that had to be carefully negotiated if not silenced. To what extent does the invoked muse take away from the singer’s autonomy and independence? At the same time, the muse was often understood to be a female figure defined by possession and a lack of control over her own words.²¹ If Sappho were to be seen as Stampa’s “muse,” the poet who even in fragmentary fashion lay behind Stampa’s efforts, how might Stampa’s attempts at authorship have been undermined as she sought to establish her credentials not as musician and performer but as poet?

By focusing on several of Stampa’s most “Sapphic” poems, we will consider how the presence of Sappho on the European scene in the mid-sixteenth century may have generated not simply excitement about this ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Rethinking Gaspara Stampa in the Canon of Renaissance Poetry
• Part I The Sublime
• Part II Real, Virtual, and Imagined Communities
• Part III Personae
• Bibliography
• Index