![]() ![]() The language is direct, highly wrought, and poetic. Colonna's Plaint is a highly personal meditation (“I see the sweet mother,” “For me,” “I believe”), and is her response to the Pietà, an inner vision she has of the Virgin Mary seated below the cross, with the dead Christ lying in her arms, a scene either imagined or an image actually before her. (The edition used for the present translation is the Aldine edition of 1557.) In the Oration, Colonna uses the Hail Mary for a line-by-line discussion of her own relationship with the Virgin Mary, stressing the Virgin's integral role with that of her son in the Redemption, and her role as mediatrix. The Plaint was published first in Venice in 1556, together with a further prose meditation by Colonna on the Virgin Mary, the Oration on the Ave Maria. The precise circumstances in which the work was written are unknown, but it has been suggested that Colonna may have been inspired by the drawing of the Pietà, given to her by Michelangelo, around the same date. The Fra' was Colonna's friend and spiritual mentor until, accused of heresy, he fled to Geneva in 1542. ![]() A meditation on Christ's Passion, Vittoria Colonna's Plaint or prose lament was composed between 15, and probably originally as a letter to Ochino since there are first-person addresses in the manuscript copy. ![]()
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