In all these matters, Michelangelo, the devout student of the Bible and the disciple of Savonarola, shared Vittoria’s sentiments.  His nature, profoundly and simply religious from the outset, assumed a tone of deeper piety and habitual devotion during the advance of years.  Vittoria Colonna’s influence at this period strengthened his Christian emotions, which remained untainted by asceticism or superstition.  They were further united by another bond, which was their common interest in poetry.  The Marchioness of Pescara was justly celebrated during her lifetime as one of the most natural writers of Italian verse.  Her poems consist principally of sonnets consecrated to the memory of her husband, or composed on sacred and moral subjects.  Penetrated by genuine feeling, and almost wholly free from literary affectation, they have that dignity and sweetness which belong to the spontaneous utterances of a noble heart.  Whether she treats of love or of religion, we find the same simplicity and sincerity of style.  There is nothing in her pious meditations that a Christian of any communion may not read with profit, as the heartfelt outpourings of a soul athirst for God and nourished on the study of the gospel.

Michelangelo preserved a large number of her sonnets, which he kept together in one volume.  Writing to his nephew Lionardo in 1554, he says:  “Messer Giovan Francesco (Fattucci) asked me about a month ago if I possessed any writings of the Marchioness.  I have a little book bound in parchment, which she gave me some ten years ago.  It has one hundred and three sonnets, not counting another forty she afterwards sent on paper from Viterbo.  I had these bound into the same book, and at that time I used to lend them about to many persons, so that they are all of them now in print.  In addition to these poems I have many letters which she wrote from Orvieto and Viterbo.  These then are the writings I possess of the Marchioness.”  He composed several pieces, madrigals and sonnets, under the genial influence of this exchange of thoughts.  It was a period at which his old love of versifying revived with singular activity.  Other friends, like Tommaso Cavalieri, Luigi del Riccio, and afterwards Vasari, enticed his Muse to frequent utterance.  Those he wrote for the Marchioness were distributed in manuscript among his private friends, and found their way into the first edition of his collected poems.  But it is a mistake to suppose that she was the sole or even the chief source of his poetical inspiration.

We shall see that it was his custom to mark his feeling for particular friends by gifts of drawings as well as of poems.  He did this notably in the case of both Vittoria Colonna and Tommaso dei Cavalieri.  For the latter he designed subjects from Greek mythology; for the former, episodes in the Passion of our Lord.  “At the request of this lady,” says Condivi, “he made a naked Christ, at the moment when, taken from the cross, our Lord would have fallen like