Laura Battiferri
Her father was a wealthy cleric and nobleman of Urbino named Giovanni Antonio Battiferri and her mother was Maddalena Coccapani from Carpi, his concubine.
Her father ensured her education, resulting in her literary familiarity with Latin, love of vernacular classics, and companionship with the Bible.
Despite her illegitimate birth, Giovanni recognized Laura as his daughter and had her and two of his other children legitimized by Pope Paul III on 9 February 1543, and eventually she would become his rightful heir.
Laura loved living in Rome, and expressed these feelings in her ode (translated from Italian to English): Lofty, sacred hills, flowering and gentle, under whose great and glorious empire your sons embraced the whole world, may our skies be eternally clear and may you be ever free from heat and frost; and you, lovely, flowing, silvery river, you make Rome even more beautiful; may your sun be never so strong as to dry your green tresses.
In the early 1550s, Laura's husband, Bartolomeo was commissioned for architectural works by Pope Julius III in Rome, which he achieved with the help of Michelangelo and Giorgio Vasari.
Meanwhile, Giorgio Vasari had established himself among a group of illustrious artists in Florence and he invited Bartolomeo to join him, having found him a new patron in the area.
She wrote about her unfortunate departure from Rome and her wish for her name and reputation to live on in this poem (translated from Italian to English): Here am I, belonging to you, inviolate, noble ruins, yes, here my very self— oh cruel destiny— about to leave you; alas, will my deep sadness ever come to an end?
In fact, whenever members of the Florentine artistic community came together for a large public event such as wedding, birth, battle victory, or funeral, Laura participated by contributing occasional poetry, almost always as the sole woman.
Each member of the Intronati adopted a humorous, antiphrastic pseudonym, Laura's being “la Sgraziata” or “the Graceless,” a characteristic contrary to her critiques.
[4] In her younger years, Laura aggressively sought recognition for her art, and actively forwarded her career but in her later life she withdrew from the public eye.
She spent most of her days meditating, praying, or composing unprinted spiritual poetry in the private chapel that Bartolomeo had built for her at their villa in Camerata.
Her late productions—hundreds of spiritual sonnets, biblical narrative poems, and her incomplete epic on the Hebrew kings—was entrusted to the Biblioteca Casanatense in Rome and nearly none of it ever came to light.
