or
set to work to make, a crucifix for her use, and two drawings,
perhaps in preparation for it, are now in Oxford.... In many ways
no sentiment could have been less like Dante's love for Beatrice
than Michael Angelo's for Vittoria Colonna. Dante's comes in early
youth; Beatrice is a child, with the wistful, ambiguous vision of a
child, with a character still unaccentuated by the influence of
outward circumstances, almost expressionless. Vittoria is a woman
already weary, in advanced age, of grave intellectual qualities.
Dante's story is a piece of figured work inlaid with lovely
incidents. In Michael Angelo's poems frost and fire are almost the
only images--the refining fire of the goldsmith; once or twice the
phoenix; ice melting at the fire; fire struck from the rock which
it afterwards consumes."

Visconti notes that among Italian poets, Vittoria Colonna was the first
to make religion a subject of poetic treatment, and the first to
introduce nature's ministry to man into poetry. Rota, her Italian
biographer, states that she died in February of 1547, in the Palazzo
Cesarini. This palace is in Genzano, on Lago di Nemi, and has been one
of the Colonna estates; but from Visconti and other authorities it is
evident that she died in Rome, either in the convent of Santa Anna or in
the palace of Cesarini, the husband of her kinswoman, Giulio Colonna,
which must have been near the convent in Trastevere, the old portion of
Rome across the Tiber. Visconti records that on the last evening of her
life when Michael Angelo was beside her, she said: "I die. Help me to
repeat my last prayer. I do not now remember the words." He clasped her
hand and repeated it to her, while her own lips moved, she gazed
intently on him, smiled and passed away. This translation has been made
of Vittoria Colonna's last prayer:--

"Grant, I beseech Thee, O Lord, that I may ever worship Thee with
such humility of mind as becometh my lowliness and such elevation
of mind as Thy loftiness demandeth.... I entreat, O Most Holy
Father, that Thy most living flame may so urge me forward that, not
being hindered by any mortal imperfections, I may happily and
safely again return to Thee."

It is recorded by an authority that her body, "enclosed in a casket of
cypress wood, lined with embroidered velvet," was placed in the chapel
of Santa Anna which has since been des