Gaspara Stampa

Gaspara Stampa (b. c. 1523–d. 1554) was born in Padua to Bartolomeo, a wealthy jewel merchant, and his wife, Cecilia. From an early age Gaspara, her sister, Cassandra, and her brother, Baldassarre, received an extensive education. When Gaspara’s father died, her mother moved the entire family to Venice. By the mid-1540s both Gaspara and Cassandra were renowned for their skill in music, and their household had become a famous musical and literary salon. Stampa’s verse was composed for such performances. In the late 1540s she met the person who would become the principal subject of her poems, Count Collaltino di Collalto, the member of a prestigious family of feudal lords from Treviso. Stampa’s love affair with Collaltino—complicated by the difference in their social status and by Collaltino’s frequent absences for military campaigns or visits to his feudal estates—lasted for several years. A different love interest, Bartolomeo Zen, the subject of a dozen of Stampa’s love poems, seems to have taken Collaltino’s place after that relationship ended. Stampa’s unconventionality in replacing one love interest with another, as well as her openness in describing her relationships and her desires, prompted a scholar in the early 20th century, Abdelkader Salza, to advance the hypothesis that she may have been a courtesan, and the question still remains unsolved. Similarly unclear is the way in which Stampa performed her own verse and that of other poets, such as Petrarch (b. 1304–d. 1374). What is known is that, despite her fame as a virtuosa in Venice, Stampa’s verse was not disseminated in print during her lifetime. When Gaspara Stampa died in 1554, only three of her poems had been published, and the first collected edition of her poems, Rime di Madonna Gaspara Stampa, was published posthumously in 1554 thanks to the efforts of her sister, Cassandra.