A feminine view of the mysteries and secrets of Rome

Women are the focus in the Le Donne di Roma exhibition in the Eternal City celebrating the renowned and unknown

Courageous, superb, proud, sensual, dominating, brilliantly intellectual, martyrs and saints, icons of absolute, perfect, disenchanted beauty, femmes fatales... they are the Women of Rome. From the Roman Empire to 1860 (Donne di Roma. Dall'impero romano al 1860), the centrepiece of an interesting exhibition running until June 15 in the halls of Ariccia's Palazzo Chigi.
The curators are Francesco Petrucci and Marina Natoli. This is a fascinating look at women's universe, a history declined in the feminine that leads us back through centuries, unveiling dark, secret plots, court intrigues, absolute dedication to power, marriages and passion for art, culture, painting, and music. The list includes Artemisia Gentileschi, Lucrezia Borgia, Margherita d'Austria and Beatrice Cenci, Olimpia Maidalchini Pamphilij, the terrible Pimpaccia, Olimpia Aldobrandini, Paolina Borghese, Anna Maria Ribeiro (Garibaldi's Brazilian wife), and Ortensia and Maria Mancini, the beautiful and extravagant nieces of Cardinal Mazzarino, the Prime Minister of King Louis XIV: "among the most beautiful women in the French court", as Madame de La Fayette wrote.
However, the exhibition also commemorates more anonymous faces, of women who left their mark on history without even realizing it. These are mostly courtesans, lovers, or mistresses, immortalized in a painting or a sculpture or simply mentioned and remembered in the exhibition. People like Fulvia, spy and agent for Cicero; Sempronia, linked to Catilina, who relied on her (and her friends) for corrupting or provoking attacks; Fillide Melandroni, the courtesan loved by Caravaggio; Costanza Bonarelli, inseparable from Bernini (whose bust is on display at Palazzo Chigi); Vittoria Caldoni, famous model from Albano, immortalized by artists like Thorvaldsen, Vernet, von Hesse, Ivanov, Overbeck, and Lapcenko, a Russian painter who married her. Hers was a typically Italian type of beauty, always portrayed against a backdrop of ruins or pristine nature.
There was something enchanting in the Eternal City. Maybe it was the climate, or the sweet melancholy of a landscape that still preserved the traces of a glorious past. The temptation to live there, even for a few months, was irresistible in the 19th century, even if "the ruling class is bigoted, dissolute, gambling, incapable and ignorant...", as prefect Camille de Tournon and Napoleonic official Norvins wrote at the time. Many foreigners chose Rome as their second home.
Goethe, Madame de Stael, Montesquieu, Mozart, Winckelmann, Boccherini, Piranesi, Fragonard, Angelica Kauffmann (extraordinary portraitist received with honours at the major courts of Europe), Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun (a protégée of Queen Marie Antoinette since an early age, forced to leave France after the revolution), and Juliette Récamier, linked to French writer Francois René de Chateaubriand.
Even earlier, Maria Casimira Marysienka, the widow of the king of Poland, with her niece Clementine, neglected spouse of James Edward Stuart, pretendent to the throne of England, and Christine of Sweden, who lived for many years at Palazzo Riario. She hosted a veritable salon with visitors like Descartes, Grotius, Scarlatti, and Corelli.
For many of these women, fashion was a fundamental imperative. Scholar and researcher Maria Paradiso explains this in an essay included in the catalogue, remarking that in Rome, "for vestals, courtesans, nuns, aristocratic ladies, princesses, artists or intellectuals, the dress was a sign of distinction, precious and sophisticated."
Svetonius wrote of vestal Maxima: "She was sumptuously dressed in purple red, with so many armillas at her ankles and wrists that she walked slowly with the help of two maidens..." And what about Lucretia Borgia, new duchess of Ferrara, who brought with her 86 pairs of shoes, many of which inlaid with gold and silver?
Dresses were designed with immense necks with golden and silver laces, while wigs were huge, adorned with feathers, flowers in papier-mâché, silk and Murano glass.
On every apparently nonchalant attitude rules the opinion of great French author Stendhal, in love with Italy and its women. Writing about Clelia Conti and duchess Sanseverino, protagonists of his The Charterhouse of Parma, he clarified with subversive wit: "Clelia might have appeared as one of the beautiful figures of Guido... While duchess Sanseverino, on the other hand, was a little too 'ideal' in her beauty, and her face, exquisitely Lombard, reminded the voluptuous smiles and tender melancholy of Leonardo da Vinci's Herodiades."

Publication Date: 2003-05-25
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=2749