Tea at Trianon: The Remarkable Painting Nun

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, March 4, 2021

The Remarkable Painting Nun

From ArtNet:

Thanks to an unexpected bequest, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art now boasts the largest collection of works by the Mannerist painter and nun Orsola Maddalena Caccia (1596–1676) outside the artist’s native Italy.

Upon hedge-fund manager Errol M. Rudman’s death last year, he surprised the Met with a gift that included three works by Caccia, whose art is rarely represented in US museum collections—or even outside of the convent in Moncalvo, Italy, where she lived and worked.

“I knew next to nothing about her when the gift came to us,” David Pullins, the Met’s associate curator in the department of European painting, told Artnet News. “Obviously, it’s extremely exciting.”

Caccia’s father, Guglielmo Caccia, trained her as an artist and she went on to use her work to support her religious community. A convent was constructed as an extension of the family home and painting became an important part of its income. (Read more.)