Women in the Shadows: Costanza, The Instrumentalist, and The Maiden of Florence
WRITTEN BY KATHERINE MEZZACAPPA
Three historical women you may never have heard of are given center stage
Three novels were published this year with, at their centre, a female protagonist who is an actual figure from history you may never have heard of. All three women were Italian, from the city states of Florence, Rome and Venice. Two were orphans, brought up in ostensibly charitable foundations in Venice and Florence; the third, from the cadet branch of a noble family, was the wife of a Roman sculptor’s assistant; that sculptor was Gianlorenzo Bernini, and she was his mistress. All three have their place in history due to their connection to men more powerful and well-known than they, and all three were exploited, thwarted or physically harmed by this power dynamic. In all three novels – Rachel Blakemore’s Costanza (Dialogue), Harriet Constable’s The Instrumentalist (Bloomsbury) and my own The Maiden of Florence (Fairlight) – the narrative is firmly in the point of view of their central characters.
We only know what one of them looked like, thanks to Gianlorenzo Bernini’s marble bust of Costanza, now housed in the Bargello in Florence. It depicts a somewhat dishevelled woman, her mouth slightly parted, her eyes alert. Some commentators have opined that this is in fact the portrait of a woman who has just had sex. Convinced that she had done just that with his brother Luigi, in 1638 Bernini sent a servant to slash her face with a knife. Costanza recovered, though she was subsequently imprisoned for adultery, released only to be entrusted to her husband. She lived until her late fifties, achieving significant success as an art dealer.
Anna Maria della Pietà, the protagonist of The Instrumentalist, was consigned in 1696 to the Venetian orphanage which gave her the only surname she ever possessed. Due to a long musical tradition, most known to us through the tenure of Antonio Vivaldi as maestro di violino, female children with musical talent would be trained as singers or instrumentalists, to entertain benefactors at fund-raising concerts (much as Händel did with the children of the Coram Foundation in London); those not so gifted worked as lace-makers or were indentured as servants – or married off to a stranger, a fate Anna Maria puts all she has into avoiding. Vivaldi’s compositorial output whilst at the Pietà was prodigious. But was it all his? Nothing survives that can be definitively ascribed to Anna Maria, yet she was known in her lifetime (passed entirely within the Pietà) as an accomplished violinist as well as adept with four other stringed instruments, plus the oboe and the harpsichord. Vivaldi wrote work specifically for her to perform, she obtained coveted and competitive titles within the orphanage’s musical hierarchy and ultimately taught the younger girls. Constable quotes in her endnotes a heartsore letter from another orphan, Lavinia, whose cantatas, concertos and other works had to be composed in Vivaldi’s style: “You must understand … that I could not do otherwise … they would not take me seriously, they would never let me compose. The music of others is like words addressed to me; I must answer and hear the sound of my own voice. And the more I hear that voice, the more I realise that the songs and sounds which are mine are different… Woe betide me should they find out.” In The Instrumentalist, a core theme is the perceived threat to Vivaldi’s musical dominance posed by Anna Maria’s talent.
Giulia Albizzi, protagonist of The Maiden of Florence, was the illegitimate child of a noble Florentine family whose fortunes were on the wane, brought up in a Dominican-run orphanage under pretty much conventual conditions. In 1564 she was removed from there on the orders of the Medici Grand-Duke, Francesco, and taken to Venice incognito. She was to serve as a test of the virility of Vincenzo Gonzaga, heir to the Duchy of Mantua, a condition of his marriage to his cousin, Eleonora de’ Medici. The rationale behind this was that his first marriage, to a Farnese princess, had been annulled for non-consummation. Though a slew of physicians had attested to Margherita Farnese’s malformation, an “obdurate hymen”, Eleonora’s stepmother had reasons for wishing to humiliate the Gonzaga family by bringing into question Vincenzo’s capabilities as a bridegroom. What happened next, a twenty year-old’s first sexual experience under semi-public conditions, is recorded in eye-watering detail in the correspondence Francesco’s minister sent back to Florence. Giulia was rewarded, or rather the husband subsequently chosen for her was, with a sizeable dowry, but once her purpose was fulfilled, she disappears from history. My novel reconstructs the “Congress of Venice” and then tells the unknown story of the marriage of two people very much pawns in the hands of their rulers.
What is striking about two of these stories is that their authors discovered them accidentally. In Constable’s case, she was on holiday in California and chanced on a book about Venetian orphanages which mentioned Vivaldi’s role at the Pietà, teaching exclusively women and girls, some of whom “went on to become some of the greatest musicians of the 18th century… I was surprised, and mildly enraged, that I’d never heard about this.” In my own case, I’d accompanied my son to a medical appointment, we were late, and I’d gone out without a book. Reduced to riffling through the gossip magazines, I found a clinical journal, dedicated to erectile dysfunction. It had a tiny historical column giving the bare bones of Giulia’s story, but describing it as Decameronesque. That really annoyed me; this was a real girl, not a character in a fable. I had to write her story.
Constable’s family background and her own musical upbringing inspired her to give Anna Maria the gift of synesthesia, the ability to see music as colours: “I wanted her to be able to grab [the notes] and tug them to the page as she composes…” My own first academic formation was in Renaissance history of art. Vincenzo Gonzaga was long known to me as the foremost collector of his time: after his death a significant part of his collection was acquired by Charles I of England, only for it to be substantially dispersed in the Cromwellian period. He was also the original of ‘The Duke’ in Verdi’s Rigoletto. But when I was an undergraduate, the History of Art was overwhelmingly the study of male artists. The few exceptions were defined in relation to those men or by life events not related to their talent. Thus, Artemisia Gentileschi’s fame (or notoriety might be the better word) for long rested on the facts of her rape by another artist, more than on her talent as a painter, one which outstripped that of her father Orazio, her teacher. Gwen John was often mentioned primarily as “the sister of Augustus John,” for he had a greater talent for what we’d now call taking up air time. Both John and the sculptor Camille Claudel were for too long in the hulking shadow of Auguste Rodin, the lover of both. Two recent books, reviewed for Historical Novels Review, seek to give Gentileschi and John their rightful place as artists: Elizabeth Fremantle’s Disobedient (Michael Joseph, 2023) and Maggie Humm’s Radical Woman: Gwen John and Rodin (Edward Everett Root, 2023). My protagonist Giulia Albizzi was not an artist but a much humbler figure who would not even have been taught to read and write in the orphanage.
The prompt to write about Costanza is a different one: specifically the 2021 kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer. As Blakemore puts it, “Every day, remarkable, curious, clever, brilliant women are hurt and killed at the hands of men [yet] when I first heard Costanza Piccolomini’s story she was not named… we must name these women, and name the violence against them.”
In all three books a sense of place is crucial. Constable spent a month in Venice, a city because of its geography substantially unchanged. I live a train journey from Florence, but the challenge there was to see past the 19th-century depredations that swept away substantial parts of the medieval city, notably around the present-day Piazza della Repubblica. Thus I came to rely on the closest we have to Renaissance interiors, notably the Palazzo Davanzati and the Museo Horne (readers who have been there will recognise the former, though I shifted the location). Blakemore accompanies her readers through the streets of Rome with Costanza, a smaller and somehow more teeming city than at the present day, and one where everyone seems to know everyone else’s business and is prepared to use this in furtherance of self-interest or revenge.
In all three novels there is a sense that the author wants to get justice for her protagonist. Blakemore explicitly stated to me that her book is not just about violence to an historical figure but also about the victims of acid attacks worldwide, the multiple rapes of the drugged Gisèle Pélicot, the death by burning of Rebecca Cheptegei and the rape and murder of an Indian doctor within the walls of her medical college, a few examples from a shamefully long list. As Blakemore adds, “I wanted to erase the male gaze, and instead see them through the female gaze.” All three books help immerse the reader in a vanished age, but they do something more. They resonate with all readers who have been told to “move on” from unwanted sexual attention of all degrees of severity, any woman who has witnessed a work idea appropriated by a male colleague, any woman who has in some way been told to “know her place” or been told that the exercise of her talent, or simply her aspirations, is somehow not feminine.
About the contributor: Katherine Mezzacappa is an Irish writer living in Italy. Her latest novel, The Ballad of Mary Kearney, will be published in January 2025 by Addison & Highsmith. Writing as Katie Hutton, she has published four historical novels with Zaffre Books.
Published in Historical Novels Review | Issue 110 (November 2024)
