Margherita Costa

Margherita Costa
Born	c. 1600 Rome, present-day Italy
Died	after 1657
Occupation	Singer, writer, performer

Margherita Costa (c. 1600 – after 1657) was an Italian Baroque singer, performer, and writer active in Italy and France.

Biography

Costa was born in Italy, mostly likely of Roman origins. She and her sister Anna Francesca began their careers as singers and perhaps courtesans in Rome, where they received the patronage of families such as the Aldobrandini. In 1628, Costa moved to Florence, where she began her literary career. At the ducal court she established relationships with Ferdinando II de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, Vittoria della Rovere, and other members of the Medici family. She may have also married the court buffoon Bernardino Ricci, who went by the name "Tedeschino, the Cavalier of Pleasure" and to whom she dedicated a 1641 comedy entitled The Buffoons. During this period Costa also published several volumes of poetry, a drama, and a collection of love letters. Also printed under her name was a historical account of Ferdinando's 1627 voyage to Germany, but because Costa acknowledged that she received her information from a member of the ducal court, her detractors accused her of not having composed the work herself.

In 1644, Costa left Florence and returned to Rome. Here she cultivated a relationship with Francesco Barberini, to whom she dedicated a sacred poem about the Roman Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music. Costa briefly left the city the following year in order to assume a post as a singer at the court of Duchess Christine of Savoy. Costa would later portray the Turin court in a collection of poems dedicated to the duchess and published in 1647, at which time she had been invited to travel from Rome to France in order to join Parisian court of the young Louis XIV of France under the patronage of Cardinal Mazarin. In her French period, Costa continued to both sing and write. Over the course of that year, she published a volume of poetry in honor of the king's mother and regent, Anne of Austria, and the text for an equestrian ballet dedicated to the cardinal, as well as the volume for Christine of Savoy.

While Costa would publish one last work, an opera libretto, in 1654 for the dukes of Brunswick-Lüneburg, little is known about the latter part of her life.

List of works

• Istoria del viaggio d'Alemagna del serenissimo Gran Duca di Toscana Ferdinando Secondo (in Italian), Venice, c. 1630 
• La chitarra (in Italian), Frankfort: per Daniel Wastch, 1638 
• Il violino (in Italian), Frankfort: per Daniel Wastch, 1638 
• Lo stipo (in Italian), Venice, 1639 
• Lettere amorose (in Italian), Venice, 1639 
• Flora feconda poema (in Italian), Florence: Massi e Landi, 1640 
• La flora feconda drama (in Italian), Florence: Massi e Landi, 1640 
• Li buffoni (in Italian), Florence: Massi e Landi, 1641 
• Cecilia martire poema sacro (in Italian), Rome: Mascardi, 1644 
• La selva di Diana (in Italian), Paris: Craimoisy, 1647 
• Festa reale per balletto a cavallo (in Italian), Paris: Craimoisy, 1647 
• L'amore della luna (in Italian), Venice: Giuliani, 1654 

References

• Costa-Zalessow, Natalia (2005), "Margherita Costa", in Albert N Mancini and Glenn Palen Pierce, Seventeenth-Century Italian Poets and Dramatists, Detroit: Gale Cengage Learning, pp. 113–18 
• Cox, Virginia (2008), Women's Writing in Italy, 1400–1650, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 
• Martino, Capucci (1984), "Costa, Margherita", Dizionari Biografico degli Italiani (in Italian) 30, Rome: Instituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana 

External links

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