“Ritratto di signora”. Tullia d’Aragona in alcuni trattati coevi sull’amore

Abstract

The celebration of Tullia d’Aragona’s Florentine residence as an intellectual coterie – a “universal and honored academy” where the leading exponents of the political and cultural life of Cosimo I’s Florence used to meet –, which closes the Dialogo della infinità di amore (Venice 1547), far from being merely a rhetorical amplification of the social and intellectual virtues of the author, offers a testimony that goes in the same direction as those, similar ones, given back to us by contemporary documents and literary pages. Both Sperone Speroni’s Dialogo d’amore (Venice 1542) and the treatise of the same name written by the Friulian jurist Cornelio Frangipane in 1541 and not printed until 1588 are in fact set in d’Aragona’s Venetian home. Both texts elect “Signora Tullia” as the protagonist of the debate, restoring to us – albeit in literary fiction – character traits and attitudes that confirm the portrait of the woman “of spirit” known from other testimonies of the time, but above all from the author’s self-portrait delivered to us by the Dialogo della infinità di amore. This essay will explore the different images of the woman, courtesan, author and her relationships – often asymmetrical – with the other protagonists of the dialogic discussion, showing how the project of affirmation and social redemption pursued by the author at the time of the publication of her philosophical treatise and love songbook is realized in d’Aragona’s Dialogo.