All these attachments, however, were to be eclipsed by his friendship with Vittoria Colonna. She was the daughter of Fabrizio Colonna, Lord of Paliano, Prince of Tagliacozzo, and of Agnesena di Montefeltro, daughter of the great Federigo, Duke of Urbino. She had married Ferrante Francesco d'Avalos, Marquis di Pescara, the victor of Pavia, who treated her badly, but whom she loved. A widow since 1525, she had turned for consolation to religion and poetry. Her sonnets, in which she sang her idealised love, had been well known throughout Italy since 1530 and had won for her a fame unique among the women of her day. She was a friend of all the great poets and great writers: Bembo, Castiglione who entrusted to her the manuscript of his "Cortegiano," Ariosto who celebrated her in his Orlando, Paul Jove, Bernardo Tasso and Ludovico Dolce. But after 1534 religion absorbed her and she was carried away by the movement for the reform and regeneration of the Catholic Church. Although she was a friend of all the men who personified in Italy this spirit of religious freedom, Cardinal Contarini and Cardinal Pole, Giberti, Sadolet, Bernadino Ochino, Pietro Carnesecchi, and in touch with Renée of Ferrara and Marguerite of Navarre, yet she could not, like many of her friends, break away from the church of Rome, and later she sacrificed her sympathies to her faith. Michelangelo knew her about 1535, but their friendship did not really begin until the end of 1538. She was then forty-six years old and he was sixty-three. It was a serious and devout friendship. They met on Sundays in the church of S. Silvestro at Monte Cavallo, and there they had those noble discussions which the Portuguese painter, Francis of Holland, has preserved for us in his four "Dialogues sur la Peinture," which took place in Rome in 1538-1539 and were written in 1548. Then Vittoria, driven by her religious doubts, left Rome in 1541, to retire first to Orvieto to the cloister of S. Paolo and later to Viterbo to the cloister of S. Caterina near Cardinal Pole, her friend and spiritual guide. She returned to Rome from time to time to see Michelangelo and she wrote to him. We have only a very few of these letters which Michelangelo sacredly preserved. They are affectionate, but cold, and we feel that she was much more detached from him than he was from her. He often complains that she does not answer him. She wrote him: