Stampa, Gaspara

(ca. 1523-1554)

   Venetian poet and musician, noted both for her poems and for her singing and playing the lute. Born at Padua to a Venetian mother and an impoverished Milanese nobleman and jewel merchant, she and her sister and brother received from their father an education in Greek, Latin, modern languages, and music. After the father's death in 1531, the family moved back to Venice in order to promote the musical careers of both daughters. Gaspara wrote many sonnets and other lyrics dealing with love from a specifically female perspective, criticizing the way in which women were denied any independence in negotiating their own so-cial and romantic relationships. Her Rime, published posthumously by her sister in 1554, give much attention to the psychology of a woman in love. These poems reflect the poet's own attachment to a nobleman unwilling to marry a woman whose social position was lower than his own. Stampa was a disciple of the poetic theories of the Venetian humanist Pietro Bembo and, following Bembo's ideas, took Petrarch as her poetic model.