by Alix Korn
Gaspara Stampa was born in Padua in 1523 to her mother Cecelia and father Bartolomeo Stampa, who had been a wealthy jeweler. She had two siblings, Cassandra and Baldassare. After the death of her father in 1530, the family moved to Venice.
Stampa was afforded an excellent education at the hand of Fortunio Spira, a grammarian and poet, who taught the children Latin, grammar, and possibly Greek. They were also taught lute and voice by the musician Pierrissone Cambio. Gaspara was noted for her lovely singing voice by Giolamo Parabosco. She would become an excellent singer, musician, and songwriter in addition to her poetry.
Between around 1535 and 1540, the Stampa household became a kind of salon, frequented by literary men like Giolamo Parabosco, Francesco Sansovino, Daniele Barbaro, Ludovico Domenici, Antonio Brocardo, Ortensio Lando, Sperone Speroni, and Benedetto Varchi.
After the death of her brother Baldassare, Stampa briefly disappeared from the public life of salons, and was at this time courted by Suor Angelica Paola de’ Negri, the abbess of the San Paolo Convent in Milan, who attemped to persuade Gaspara to join the convent. Stampa was unaffected, and continued to move in literary circles, adding to her acquaintances Torquato Bembo, Giorgio Benzone, Gerlamo Molin, il Tiepolo, and Domenicio Venier.
In 1548, she met Collaltino di Collalto, with whom she began an affair. It was an unhappy coupling as he left to go to France on a military expedition in 1549. He would return to Venice periodically, only to dash her hopes of reconciliation, as he would hardly ever respond to her letters when he was away. She would include her own poetry in her correspondence to Collalto, as it was custom when publishing or collecting any works for a manuscript to include a personal dedication. Their relationship officially ended when he was taken prisoner in 1552.
In 1550 Stampa became a member of the Accademia dei Dubbiosi using the pseudonym “Anaxilla” or “Anissilla.” This would also be the year that we can assume Gaspara suffered her first nervous breakdown, the beginning of a series of illnesses that would lead to her death.
Between 1551 and 1552, she met Bartolomeo Zen, a Venetian patrician with whom she began a romantic relationship.
In 1553, three of her poems would be published in Il sesto libro di diversi eccellenti autori.
Stampa would take ill again in 1544, coming down with a violent fever and dying within a fortnight. There were claims that she had committed suicide after learning of the plans of her former lover, Collaltino di Collalto, to marry Giulia Torelli.
Though her work was never made public during her lifetime, she produced at least 311 poems. After her death, her sister Cassandra edited a collection of Stampa’s poetry, with the help of Giorgio Benzone, and in October 1554, Pietrasanta published the first edition of Rime. It was dedicated to Giovanni della Casa. After the initial publication, her poems were neglected for almost two centuries, until one of Collaltino’s descendants had them republished in 1738.
Some of the content of her writing in addition to its multiple male addressees have led historians to speculate as to whether Stampa was one of Venice’s famous courtesans, but there is no conclusive proof of this. Amongst her more modern admirers is the German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, who refers to Stampa in the first of his Duino Elegies. She is now acknowledged to be one of Italy’s finest female poets.
Bibliography:
Bassanese, Fiora A. Gaspara Stampa. Boston: Twayne, 1982.
Bassanese, Fiora A. “Gaspara Stampa’s Petrarchan commemorations: validating a female lyric discourse.”Annali d’Italianistica. 22 (2004), 155-167.
Braden, Gordon. “Gaspara Stampa and the gender of Petrarchism.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language. 38:2 (Summer 1996), 115-139.
Broccia, Lillyrose Veneziano. “Woman on Fire: Mapping the Four Elements in Gaspara Stampa’s ‘Rime’.” Thesis Dissertation for PhD at Columbia University, 2008.
Feldman, Martha and Bonnie Gordon, eds. The Courtesan’s Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Otero, Ellan B. “The Fiction of The Rime: Gaspara Stampa’s “Poetic Misprision” of Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Elegy of Lady Fiammetta”. Thesis dissertation for PhD in English Literature at the University of South Florida, 2010.
Stortoni, Laura Anna and Mary Prentice Lillie, eds. and trans. Gaspara Stampa: Selected Poems. New York: Italica Press, 1994.
Tower, Troy and Jane Tylus, eds. The complete poems: the 1554 edition of the “rime,” a bilingual edition. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Resources:
Brooklyn Museum
Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art: The Dinner Party: Heritage Floor: Gaspara Stampa
http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/dinner_party/heritage_floor/gaspara_stampa.php
