Artemisia sulla soglia

This essay provides a reading of the proemial sonnet from the verses written by Vittoria Colonna on her husband’s death, based on the first reception of the cycle by Ariosto (the proem to canto xxxvii of "Orlando Furioso"), praising the poetess as an exemplary widow, a sort of a new Artemisia. This rhetorical and inter-textual analysis of the sonnet tries to show coincidences between Ariosto’s praise and Colonna’s self-fashioning, insisting on the endorsement of the typically classicist values of «sprezzatura» and the ars est celare artem principle, which is exploited to create a grim, introspective auto biographical mask.