Bitter Tears, Carnal Traces: Female Poets at Michelangelo’s Funeral

Laura Battiferra degli Ammannati played a signal role in commemorating Michelangelo after his death. In July 1564 she was at the high water mark of her literary reputation having just published her translation of the penitential psalms. The experience enhanced the confidence, authority and appetite for risk evident in her poems to honor Michelangelo. While the only female participant in the extensive verse and rhetoric published soon after the artist’s San Lorenzo funeral she was deeply networked within the overlapping cultural and political communities who produced it. She had accumulated a sophisticated understanding of the Florentine state at a fragile moment of dynastic succession. Battiferra’s poems in the commemorative funeral booklet stand apart not just in length but also in their conception of loss, yet in important ways she was not a lone female voice. Battiferra continually draws on the legacy and language of Vittoria Colonna and the shared capacity of poetry and the visual arts to probe deceptive appearances and create new life. Michelangelo’s sonnets for Vittoria Colonna often positioned her as the focal point for personal spiritual insight but also agonizing doubt. Battiferra strategically deploys her gender identity to conceive sculpture in carnal terms, to speak for it, and the city of Florence, as an abandoned beloved. Battiferra moves beyond gender binaries and the familiar tropes of Art as the rival of nature to define the moral power of Michelangelo’s innovative achievement as something much more paradoxical, boundary-destroying and strange.