Venice: Mal De Mare

Ladies, you who find yourselves still free and unbound

The Venetian poet Gaspara Stampa was born 500 years ago. In her lifetime she was hailed as the greatest female voice of the Italian Renaissance: a sought-after singer and performer at the accadamie, the literary salons, she was dubbed a “Sappho de’ nostril dì” (a Sappho of our days) not only but most notably by fellow poet Benedetto Varchi. Like the ancient Greek singer, Stampa too was a poet of love, of loss and recollection, and like Sappho’s, her poems were of great musicality: to be sung and performed. Her only published work, Rime di Madonna Gaspara Stampa, which tell of her suffering from an unhappy love affair with a noble man, appeared in 1554, six months after the aforementioned lover had announced his marriage to another woman, and six months after Gaspara Stampa’s sudden death at thirty-one.

The book was published in a hurry – most likely to benefit from the scandal her presumed suicide caused in the Venetian society. Stampa was only thirty-one, childless and unmarried. The parish register of Santi Gervasio e Protasio recorded the cause of death as mal de mare, seasickness.

Despite the book’s instant success, Stampa soon fell into oblivion. When she was re-discovered, in the late 18^th century, the literati of the early enlightenment romanticized her as the devoted, suicidal lover, or discredited her as a courtesan; in any case they belittled her work. With the honourable exception of R.M. Rilke, it was only within the last two decades that the multi-layered grandezza of Stampa’s work been rediscovered, and her name restored as a confident, idiosyncratic poet. Stampa was not (only) a female, but a feminist voice that addressed the obstacles women faced then, and half a millennium later, still do.

Weep, Ladies, and may Love weep with you, since he who hurt me does not cry.

Stampa’s legacy has too long been overshadowed by the question of her sexuality. Much energy has been put into proofing that a woman who writes as beautifully and lovingly could not have been a courtesan. But to answer this question, after 500 years, we must pose many more questions, and most importantly ask ourselves: Why do we need to know so urgently?

Like her contemporaries, Stampa wrote in the Petrarchan tradition, but undermined the patriarchal codes through female agency and sensuality. Whereas Petrarch adored his Laura from afar, Stampa lay in her lovers’ arms. Whereas Laura was voiceless, Stampa spoke as a woman to women. While Petrach’s gaze was male, Stampa did more than gaze: She lived. She lived in Venice, a city embedded in the sea.

If the city of Venice is shaped like a fish, then Stampa’s neighbourhood, now called San Trovaso, is the gills. Indeed, water in all its forms plays a vital role in her poetry: tears, rain, fountains, waves, and, of course, the Adriatic Sea.

Stampa’s Venice is not the city of lavish, stuccoed palaces, but the foggy lagoon. L’umor, liquidity, represents the female, the nurturing, the all-embracing element. In its progression, from spring to sea, water symbolizes life, and in its eternal spiralling outwards, self-realisation. As pelago, the stormy sea, it stands, in Stampa’s poetry, for love, death, and oblivion.

Water, like life, like love, is ungraspable. But to Stampa, a highly educated Renaissance woman, water was not bestowed with any magic or divine powers, as it was according to the hitherto popular (medieval) teachings of Natura Magica. Nature was not governed by occult celestial forces anymore, but had become explainable, calculable, comprehensible through our senses.

A century before Galileo, Venice had pushed God from the pedestal as the “unmoved mover, il motore immobile already. The Venetian Republic was pioneering in natural sciences, as the long list of inventions – from double-entry book-keeping to quarantine laws to the first factory line – proves.

Philosopher and scientist Bernardino Telesio, teaching at the time at the near-by university of Padua, then the most renowned university of the Western world, postulated that the world was made up of two forces – the sun, hot, and the earth, cold. Water, he said, is the only state for us to comprehend the incomprehensible.

In the run of 310 poems that make up the collection Stampa’s identifies her lover as the nobleman and mercenary Count Collaltino di Collalto. That Stampa positioned her alter ego Anasilla as the active, desiring lover in a consumed, yet unrequited love affair with a real man, demonstrates the oxymoronic standing of women in Venetian society.

The city was torn between a stark catholic veneration of the Virgin Mary and of Venus Anadyomene, the goddess rising from the sea, who served as the city’s icon. In the 16^th century, the long tradition of eroticism in Venetian art culminated in Titian’s portraits of the Belle Veneziane, Venetian Gentlewomen with their breast exposed, or Tintoretto’s Gloria del Paradiso at the Palazzo Ducale, which alludes more to an orgy than to an angelic convention. Even altar pieces and church ceilings were peopled with saints in the throes of passion: Taunt skin over bulging muscles, as seen in the Fumiani’s ceiling painting at church San Pantaleone, or in Titian’s assumption of the Virgin Mary in the chiesa Sta Maria Assunta, where he depicted the angels flanking Virgin Mary in the throes of passion.

Arousal seemed to be the end of Venetian poetry as well, as demonstrated in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, or the obscene writings of Pietro Aretino. If Stampa wasn’t as explicit as these two superstars of the 16^th century literary scene, she left no doubt:

Venice’s Virgin-Venus-dichotomy can also be expressed in numbers: For a population of 180,000, there were 138 churches, and, as an English traveller in the 17^th century wrote home, 11,000 courtesans. The number of courtesans might have been exaggerated. Not all of the so-called honourable or honest Courtesans, cortigiane oneste, were listed in the “Catalogo di tutte le principali e piu honoreate cortigiane di Venezia,” a kind of telephone book for upper class men, or a travel guide for noble gentlemen from abroad. Gaspara Stampa’s name is not in the book.

Instead, Stampa likened herself to Mother Mary. On the occasion of Christmas 1548, which happened to be the time she met her lover, Count Collaltino for the first time, Stampa allegorizes her heart to the virginal womb:

In this stanza, Virgin Mary is not merely the vessel, but the a virginal creator, the single producer of God’s human form. Stampa depicts her heart as a womb that cradles however not a lover, but love per se – an important distinction: while Mary is sanctified as Mother of God, Stampa makes herself Mother Of Love: she places love above the lover.

In a reversal of traditional roles, her male lover becomes her muse, and not her Lord. While she gets to speak, to write, to act, her Count Collaltino is not given a voice. He goes down in history as Stampa’s doubtable lover.

Apparently, Stampa never hoped for a child. In her time, pregnancy was a life-threatening state for a woman. Aware of the high risk of death during childbirth, women wrote their will with every pregnancy – starting at an early age and writing many wills in the run of their fertile years. Stampa never wrote a testament – her poetry is testimony enough of her suffering:

Stampa’s poems are of an extraordinary passion – rivalling Rumi in his heart break, and yet, her suffering does not lead to spiritual delivery or heavenly assumption. Her suffering is immediate, physical, existential.

In a mercantile society like the Republic of Venice everything was purchasable. Art, faith, and love were business like any other, in form of commissioned art, sacral art, arranged marriages and prostitution.

Prostitution was regarded a source of income for the city. The courtesans’ taxes filled the city’s coffers, and, with tourism already a major economic driver, their fame and the prospect of sexual adeventures attracted noblemen from all over Europe. Besides, the image of the honest or honourable courtesan, a beautiful, sophisticated, and independent woman, served Vencie well flaunting the legendary personal liberties the city supposedly afforded her citizens through everlasting peace and democracy.

The courtesans’ social standing differed wildly from that of the lowly prostitute. Courtesans were highly educated, polyglot, trained musicians and fashion-trendsetters – often charging for their services (conversation, music, or sex) separately. Honest courtesans were unaffordable but for the highest echelons of Venetian circles and more often than not hailed from wealthy families themselves, the mother acting as go-between for her daughter. Forming part of intellectual circles, and often hosting salons themselves, they were well-known socialites, performers, poets, and musicians in their own right.

Although in earlier centuries prostitution had been heavily regulated, the city administration changed its policy in the 16^th century due to a rise of homosexuality within the population. Considering female prostitution the lesser evil of the two, they started actively supporting brothels. At the Ponte delle Tette (Bridge of tits) prostitutes were decreed to advertise themselves bare-breasted, a sight believed to convert young men to heterosexuality.

Homosexuality was not the only thing on the upswing in the 16^th century. So were book publishing and vernacular literature. The rising number of independent printers and publishers made literature easily accessible, also for those traditionally barred from education: women.

While social mobility and personal freedom in a mercantile democracy were indeed greater than in the aristocratic or feudal city states, women were excluded from politics and public life. Only men were citizens; only men bore arms; only men could be lords or kings. Women were subject to their fathers, then to their husbands or – since the costly dowry system afforded even in patrician families only the first-born daughter to get married – a convent. Sumptuary laws explicitly regulated women’s outfit, from hairdo to jewellery and clothes, precisely indicating their marital status. A woman was but a daughter, a wife, a nun.

Apart from some but by no means all convents, the demi-monde was hence the only place for women to achieve erudition and self-realisation. Outside the restrictions of society, as courtesans, they could live in economic independence at least for their working years.

It was however a freedom that came with precarity: Exposed to sexually transmittable diseases, to scorn and contempt, to rape and violence. With no set of laws to protect them, they were at the mercy of a protector, a wealthy man, who might change his taste in women any day. If as lovers they were desired, as wives they didn’t qualify – something hasn’t changed, at least not until Pretty Woman.

Count Collaltino famously married someone else, but Stampa didn’t die from a broken heart as the romantically inclined would like it. Her alter ego Anasilla indulges in her suffering, but then finds herself a new lover in whose arms she lies in the final poems of the collection.  Poem 57 reveals an astonishingly ambivalent picture of her adoration:

Recent research has revealed that many of the love poems believed to be addressed to Count Collaltino, where in fact directed towards Giovanni della Casa, whom she tried to flatter by calling him count. Della Casa had recently published “Il Galateo”, a popular and influential book on formal etiquette and good manners. Indeed, Stampa’s writing was to a much greater extent geared towards improving her social standing, expressing the hope of being embraced by society and not by a specific, single man. She demanded the standing of a man, not a man.

It is probably in this sense that one must read her solidarity when she warns other women — and probably courtesans — of the moody waters of the lagoon: that the moments of equality were short and limited to soirées at the accademie.

At various occasions Stampa addresses her bassezza, her lower social standing (Egli è nobile, e bel, tu brutta, et vile/ egli larghi, tu hai li cieli avari: he is noble and handsome, you are ugly and base, with him the sky is wide open, for you depressing) and it is through talent and wit and erudition that she in her poems puts herself on par with Vergil, Petrarch, and Sappho. As Rilke would later put it, she earned her gravitas, dignity, through her passion for the infinito – the infinity of her suffering, but not from a broken heart, but from a broken world – a blurred distinction in both poets.

Stampa’s mental health was reported to become increasingly fragile, and short before her sudden death, she suffered a nervous breakdown, or, as it would be called today, a burn-out.