Laura Battiferra (1523–1589)

Laura Battiferra was born in Urbino, Italy, the illegitimate daughter of Giovanni Antonio Battiferri, a wealthy Italian aristocrat and cleric at the Vatican court, and Maddalena Coccapani. She received a humanist education, and became a gifted and prolific Renaissance poet acclaimed by many other writers in her lifetime. Her father recognized her as his daughter and arranged to have her legitimized by Pope Paul III; eventually she became his heiress. Her first husband was Vittorio Sereni, an organist from Bologna, who died about five years after their marriage. She was then married for 40 years to the well-known sculptor and architect Bartolomeo Ammannati. They moved to Florence, where her husband was a confidant and advisor to Grand Duke Cosimo I de Medici. She herself was a close friend of Eleanora di Toledo, Cosimo's wife, and part of a literary and artistic circle that included Benvenuto Cellini. She was a contemporary of Tullia d'Aragona. Laura wrote almost 550 poems and published two volumes of her collected poetry, The First Book of Tuscan Works (1560) and The Seven Penitential Psalms… with some Spiritual Sonnets (1564). See her portrait (c. 1560) by Agnolo Bronzino, with whom she conducted an intellectual flirtation in the form of sonnets the two wrote to each other. She also exchanged letters with historian and poet Benedetto Varchi that were first published in 1879.