The Elegiac Origin of Vittoria Colonna’s Exemplarity: Echoes of Heroides 13 in the Pistola and beyond

In this essay, I examine how Heroides 13, Laodamia to Protesilaus, served as a source for Vittoria Colonna's earliest surviving poem, "Eccelso mio Signor, questa ti scrivo," or the Pistola. Although this elegiac epistle has long been considered a poetic outlier from Colonna's corpus, I here suggest how we might reconceive the Pistola as a coherent starting point from which to appreciate Colonna's subsequent evolution as a writer. Depicting a virtuous married noblewoman mourning the absence of her faithful and fearless military husband, Ovid's poem not only provided masks for both Colonna and d'Avalos independently, but also offered an ideal model for the exemplary (and monogamous) marriage that Colonna sought to depict in her verse and to project publicly.