as a poetess, that the
name of Vittoria Colonna herself is remembered outside the borders of
Italy. With her wealth, her culture, her virtue and her unique position in
the world of rank and of letters, it is nothing marvellous that so
fortunate and gifted a mortal should have become the idol of the leading
persons of her day. She belonged, in fact, to a brilliant and famous group
of which she was the soul and centre; of which she was at once the patron,
the disciple and the teacher. That great master of Italian prose, Pietro
Bembo, set a high value on her powers of criticism; other men, almost as
distinguished as the Venetian cardinal, besought her for advice on
literary subjects. Foremost in her circle of admirers appears of course
the great Michelangelo, with whom the immaculate Vittoria condescended to
indulge in one of those cold platonic pseudo-passions which constituted
the true _divino amore_ of the idealists of the Renaissance. So here was
nothing to cavil at, nothing to arouse base suspicion. Considered the
greatest man and the greatest woman in all Italy, both were of mature age,
he in the sixties and she in the forties, when Michelangelo first
professed himself seized with a pure but unquenchable love and devotion
for the widowed Lady of the Rock.

The last days of Vittoria, which were chiefly spent within the walls of
the Convent of Sant' Anna at Rome, were clouded by ill-health and sorrow.
The death of the young Marchese del Vasto, "her moral and intellectual
son," was an irreparable loss, for which her boundless fame and popularity
could offer little real consolation. At length the poetess, feeling death
approaching, moved to the house of Giulia Colonna, her relative, and there
expired in February 1547, in the fifty-seventh year of her age. To the
last her death-bed was surrounded by sorrowing and adoring friends,
amongst them being Michelangelo, who is said to have witnessed with his
own eyes the last moments of his beloved Lady. And the famous sculptor,
painter and poet--perhaps the most stupendous genius the world has yet
produced--is reported to have bitterly regretted in after years that on so
solemn an occasion he had not ventured to imprint one chaste kiss upon the
forehead of the woman he had adored so ardently, yet so purely during
life. By her expressed wish the body of the poetess was buried in San
Domenico Maggiore at Naples, the finest and least spoiled of all the
Neapolitan churches, where a