rdinal Pole,
Giberti, Sadolet, Bernadino Ochino, Pietro Carnesecchi, and in touch
with Renee of Ferrara and Marguerite of Navarre, yet she could not, like
many of her friends, break away from the church of Rome, and later she
sacrificed her sympathies to her faith.

Michelangelo knew her about 1535, but their friendship did not really
begin until the end of 1538. She was then forty-six years old and he was
sixty-three.

It was a serious and devout friendship. They met on Sundays in the
church of S. Silvestro at Monte Cavallo, and there they had those noble
discussions which the Portuguese painter, Francis of Holland, has
preserved for us in his four "Dialogues sur la Peinture," which took
place in Rome in 1538-1539 and were written in 1548.

Then Vittoria, driven by her religious doubts, left Rome in 1541, to
retire first to Orvieto to the cloister of S. Paolo and later to Viterbo
to the cloister of S. Caterina near Cardinal Pole, her friend and
spiritual guide. She returned to Rome from time to time to see
Michelangelo and she wrote to him. We have only a very few of these
letters which Michelangelo sacredly preserved. They are affectionate,
but cold, and we feel that she was much more detached from him than he
was from her. He often complains that she does not answer him. She wrote
him:

"Magnificent Messer Michelangelo--I did not reply earlier to your letter
because it was, as one might say, an answer to my last; for I thought
that if you and I were to go on writing without intermission according
to my obligation and your courtesy, I should have to neglect the Chapel
of S. Catherine here, and be absent at the appointed hours for company
with my sisterhood, while you would have to leave the Chapel of S. Paul,
and be absent from morning through the day from your sweet usual
colloquy with painted forms, the which with their natural accents do not
speak to you less clearly than the living persons around me speak to me.
Thus we should both of us fail in our duty, I to the brides, you to the
vicar of Christ. For these reasons, inasmuch as I am well assured of our
steadfast friendship and affection, bound by knots of Christian
kindness, I do not think it necessary to obtain the proof of your
good-will in letters by writing on my side, but rather to await with
well-prepared mind some substantial occasion for serving you. Meanwhile
I address my prayers to that Lord of whom you spoke to me with so
fervent and humble a hea