Book Read Free

Christina Queen of Sweden: The Restless Life of a European Eccentric

Page 41

by Buckley, Veronica


  Christina had been two and a half years in Hamburg, and she was ready to go home, not to Sweden – never again to Sweden – but home to her Palazzo Riario among the ilex and the sweet-smelling jasmine. Late in the summer of 1668, she began to make the preparations. She had nothing to show for her time of exile. There had been no progress on the question of her income since Adami had worked his miracles, without her assistance, almost three years before. In time of war, it would not be guaranteed, and her own impolitic behaviour had made the Swedish regents less inclined to help her now than they had ever been. True to form, Christina persuaded herself, in the teeth of the evidence, that it had all been a resounding success. ‘Things are going so well for me,’ she wrote to the Cardinal. ‘It’s all going just the way I want.’ By the end of the autumn she would return, she said, ‘in glory and triumph’ to Rome.

  Azzolino knew enough to read between the lady’s loud protesting lines. He shrugged his shoulders, but his cousin Adami, less wise or less experienced, decided to disabuse the Queen of some of her more costly delusions. He drew her attention to the doubtful activities of the Marchese Del Monte, in which, apparently, even Father Santini was now involved. Refusing to accept that she had been duped yet again by someone whom she had trusted absolutely, Christina sent a furious flurry of letters to the Cardinal, berating the cousin he had recommended to her. Once a marvel whom she ‘could not admire enough’, the loyal Marchegiano had metamorphosed into ‘that infamous Adami’. ‘If you knew how badly he has served me,’ she wrote, ‘you would hardly be able to keep yourself from stabbing him with your own hand.’28 But she stayed her own hand long enough to hear the story out, and at length was obliged to believe him. Her fury was now transferred to the ‘treacherous, criminal, thieving’ Marchese, and he was swiftly dispatched to Rome for judgement.

  The Marchese set off unconcerned, carrying in his own pocket the Queen’s letter of condemnation. It was effectively a list of his misdeeds, loudly entitled ‘Principal Accusations Against the Marchese Del Monte’. The list, in numbered paragraphs, was as follows:

  That he is the Cardinal’s deadly enemy.

  That he and Don Matteo Santini have been selling my interests and secrets to anyone curious enough to buy them, and that they are the Cardinal’s deadly enemies.

  That they betray me in every way that servants can betray their mistress.

  That he sent goods worth 5,000 écus to his wife.

  That he gave 1,000 ungari to the Chevalier Castiglione, when he was here, to take to his wife.

  And she concluded, ‘On all these counts, the said Marchese must exonerate himself, or, if he is guilty, he must die to expiate such enormous crimes. That is the reason for his journey to Rome. It is up to the Cardinal to condemn him or to find him innocent, and up to me to carry out his sentence.’29

  Despite the pseudo-legalism, the list is not very specific, and it might be almost comical if Christina had not offered to put the Marchese to death. It is also a list of surprisingly mild failings, considering the other crimes imputed to him at about this time – embezzlement, extortion, seduction, kidnapping, and even attempted murder. Here, as elsewhere, Christina does not seem to have much cared what her servants did, as long as they were loyal to her. Del Monte himself cannot have taken the whole thing too seriously; not only did he carry the letter himself to Rome, but he also handed it over, in person, to the Cardinal.

  The letter is not really any kind of ‘case for the prosecution’. More than anything else, it is a latter-day defence of Christina’s own actions in the Monaldeschi affair, and it circuitously reveals her continuing need to justify herself on that count. The unspecified betrayals mirror those of that other, less fortunate Marchese, which were never clarified. They are equally levelled at Santini, who seems to have escaped scot-free. And the letter, addressed personally to Azzolino, refers more than once to ‘the Cardinal’, as if it had been intended for other eyes, possibly even for publication. Christina must have known, as the Marchese clearly did himself, that Azzolino would never condemn him to death; she was even sending him with business instructions to relay at the same time. But he had proved disloyal and untrustworthy, outwitting her again and again. She did not know how to deal with him, so she sent him, as she now referred all her difficulties, to Azzolino.

  So Del Monte set off for Rome, ‘to exonerate himself or to die at your feet’. He did neither. Azzolino no doubt reprimanded him, but he continued in the Queen’s service, defrauding her cheerfully for another twenty years, in fact for the rest of his life. Adami resigned, but Santini carried on, blessing Christina when in priestly mood, and otherwise writing letters for her in his beautiful copperplate handwriting.

  Glory Days

  Towards the end of November 1668, Christina arrived back in Rome. ‘I don’t expect you to come to meet me,’ she had written to Azzolino. ‘It will be enough if you don’t leave Rome yourself when I arrive.’ But when her entourage reached the little castle in the Sabine hills where she was to pause before entering the city, Azzolino was there, with 23 of his brother cardinals, and Christina’s friends in force, and thousands of flowers sent from the Pope himself, and a train of servants ready to prepare her a great, grand banquet. After a long and unhappy absence, she was welcomed home at last, and the following day, she rode into the grounds of her own Palazzo Riario.

  The garden was taking on the aspect of a soft southern autumn, with the last bright flowers fading into the green and gold. Inside, fragrant woodfires warmed every room, and Christina wandered smiling from one to the next, stopping to look again at her pictures, or to stroke a cool marble arm or head. In her private room hung her favourite work of all, the equestrian portrait which Sébastien Bourdon had painted of her as a young queen in Stockholm, when strength and confidence had pulsed in her veins, and everything had lain before her. There were few enough of those dreams left to her now, but she was home, safely ensconced in the middle of what she loved, and of those who loved her. The money from her rents was now as well assured as it could be, thanks to her new administrator, Johan Olivecrantz, who had replaced Azzolino’s cousin, Adami. Olivecrantz was a man in the same capable, honest mould, and Christina was now receiving a reliable 5,000 riksdaler from him every month, a solid if not sumptuous amount. To this was added a small pension from the Pope. As a kind remembrance of her friendship, he had awarded her the sum of 12,000 scudi per annum; it added an extra quarter or so to her income from Sweden.

  The pontificate of Clement IX was a golden time for Christina and Azzolino. The Secretariat of State was one of the highest Vatican offices, and the Cardinal was an able occupant, balancing his prestigious diplomatic work with the quieter steps of administrative reform. Christina received her own honours: private visits from the Pope, invitations to every grand event, a prominent place at official Vatican ceremonies. The Pope was her friend, and as eager as she was to see a flourishing artistic life in the city. There was not the money that there had been in the great early days of the century, but his outlook was liberal and his modest purse always open. They were generous and generous-spirited days.

  With Clement’s permission and encouragement, Christina now proceeded to promote a new theatre. It was intended for public performances of opera, and it was the first such theatre in the city. It filled a decided gap, since, where opera was concerned, Rome had been lagging behind other Italian cities. Lacking a secular court, and periodically hampered by popes unsympathetic to artistic extravagance, Rome had developed instead a tradition of private performances in the houses of the rich. They, and the influential Jesuit Colleges, were rather expected to sponsor the longer-established spoken theatre, and to turn their musical interests mainly to choral or instrumental music. The new theatre had been established by a member of Christina’s own household, the Comte Jacques d’Alibert, officially her French secretary, but in fact a talented and active impresario. He hoped to fund his venture by public subscription, in the style of the Venetian theatres, and intended t
o employ independent musicians rather than borrowing those attached to private houses. Summoning patronage and investment from every available source, d’Alibert had built the theatre on the site of the old Tor di Nona prison, and the name was retained for the new building, which became the Teatro Tordinona. Christina was not rich enough to be its only patron, but she did become the principal one, and half the operas commissioned during its short life were dedicated to her – like most other Roman entertainments, the theatre met its end when a villainously puritan pope arrived on the scene. The Tordinona was not an overnight success. For its first production – an opera about Christina’s hero, the Roman general Scipio Africanus – the house was only half-full, but in time it became very popular. Bernardo Pasquini provided most of its new works, chamber operas in the Venetian style, and Christina ensured their financing, largely through the subscriptions of her wealthy friends in the Vatican.

  The prelates came as well to her private soirées at the Riario, evenings of music or drama, often interspersed with an hour or two of pseudo-academic debate. Pasquini, a brilliant harpsichordist as well as a composer, was the most fashionable of the many musicians she employed; Christina called him ‘the Prince of Musicians’, and would often stop her carriage in the street to chat with him if she saw him passing by. But among the discerning it was the young ‘foreigner’ Alessandro Scarlatti, a frequent visitor from Naples, who claimed the highest laurels. Though he lived with the Bernini family, for several years he was attached to Christina’s court as her maestro di cappella, directing her orchestra, playing, and composing. He dedicated his second opera to her – as well he might; after a prim papal banning of his first, she had stormed a Jesuit College with a band of Swiss guards, and commanded him to begin playing, anyway. She wrote one opera libretto herself, in collaboration with a more experienced friend, and asked Scarlatti to provide the music for it, but it seems that he declined the honour.1 His years in her employ overlapped with those of another gifted young ‘foreigner’, Arcangelo Corelli from Ravenna. Corelli was a violinist, indeed the premier violinist of his day, and a leading composer for that instrument. He was living at the palazzo of Christina’s friend, Cardinal Ottoboni, and thence he was regularly borrowed to lead the Queen’s own orchestra. In Scarlatti’s absence he conducted a legendary performance at the Riario one evening, in honour of the English Ambassador: with 150 musicians, most of them violinists, the ensemble was the largest Rome had ever seen.

  ‘There be excellent Musicians at Rome,’ one of Christina’s servants recorded, ‘who are most them Castrated to preserve their Voices.’2 The Queen made use of them all, poaching them whenever she could from their bread-and-butter duties at the Sistine Chapel. But her favourite castrato, Antonio Rivani – Cicciolino – she kept in her own employ, paying him so well that he was quite soon able to buy a large estate in the country, which, however, she did not permit him to enjoy often. Lent for a time to the court in Savoy, Cicciolino made the mistake of outstaying his leave of absence, and even considered not returning to Rome at all. Christina’s response was true to form: ‘I want it to be known,’ she wrote to the agent charged with his recapture, ‘that Cicciolino is in this world only for me, and that if he doesn’t sing for me he won’t be singing for long for anyone else, no matter who they are. Get him back whatever it costs. They say he has lost his voice. I don’t care. Whatever has happened, he will live and die in my service, or he had better watch out!’3

  Cicciolino returned to Rome, where, with occasional reprieves at his country house, he continued to sing for Christina to the end of his days. From the heavenly choir, even she could not reclaim him.

  And when the music stopped, there were plays, Italian and Spanish, twice a week, always popular, always well staged, and according to contemporaries, generally sporchissime – very dirty. For one whole year she managed to engage the famous Scaramouche, on leave from Paris, whose own productions did nothing to raise the tone. There were sometimes ladies present – aside from the Queen herself – but on the whole they concealed themselves within small curtained boxes, with the visible audience comprising mostly cardinals.

  But the most illustrious of all Christina’s artistic acquaintance in these years was not an actor, nor a playwright, nor a musician, nor a composer, but the great Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Neapolitan born, long resident in Rome, most lavishly gifted, and as pious as any cardinal to boot. A legendary figure even in his youth, he had been the virtual creator of the Baroque style, and he was now its uncontested master. John Evelyn has left a picture of his capacities:

  A little before my Comming to the Citty, Cavaliero Bernini, Sculptor, Architect, Painter & Poet…gave a Publique Opera (for so they call those Shews of that kind) where in he painted the Seanes, cut the Statues, invented the Engines, composed the Musique, writ the Comedy and built the Theater all himself.4

  Scene painting was by now behind him, but Bernini did not disdain the lesser arts of design and decoration. Christina herself possessed a beautiful gilt-framed mirror made by him, and she had financed her journey to France on the strength of the magnificent carriage he had made for her at the Pope’s request. The very face of Rome was largely of his making; his churches and fountains stood everywhere, and at the heart of the city, before the great Basilica of St Peter’s, his wonderful oval piazza curved around Rome’s oldest obelisk, seized from Egypt in the days of the emperors. As for his sculptures, in the words of the overwhelmed Evelyn, they were ‘plainely stupendious’.

  Christina thought so, too, and made no bones about her reverence for Bernini’s genius. She visited his workshop frequently, and was once caught bestowing a kiss upon a discarded smock which the master had worn. She loved his fiery temperament and his quick imagination, and he was good company, too, ‘a very acute conversationalist, with a very special gift of expressing things in words, with his face, and by gesture’.5 An artist’s status at the time was generally humble – not so long before, the young Andrea Sacchi had been listed in his master’s books along with ‘three slaves, a gardener, a dwarf, and an old nurse’ – and, though Bernini was famous and rich, Christina’s deference to him is nonetheless remarkable. In social or diplomatic matters, she was extraordinarily, almost morbidly insistent on her royal status, but where artists were concerned, she gave place without demur. It was not a question of noblesse oblige – in any other respect, she could never have condescended so far. Rather, it was a genuine recognition of abilities that she valued, and did not possess – and, no doubt significantly, abilities to which she herself did not aspire.

  Though she had no creative gift, there is no doubt of her own artistic sensibility. Bernini himself paid her the highest compliment he could have paid, and it would have pleased her, perhaps, above any other. While visiting Paris, where he had come to complete the design of the Louvre, he was asked about his friend the Queen of Sweden, whose reputation in France had never risen beyond her savage deed at Fontainebleau. Bernini made no comment about Monaldeschi’s death, but replied simply to his enquirer, ‘She knows more about sculpture than I do.’

  Admiring the man, and admiring his work, Christina was nevertheless unable to become his patron. Sculpture, let alone architecture, was too expensive for a northern Pallas with a few modest rents from Norrköping and Pomerania. After twenty years, she possessed only a few of his drawings and paintings, none important, none especially valuable. Curiously, she declined Bernini’s own gift of his very last sculpture, a marble bust, larger than lifesized, of the Salvator Mundi. By way of explanation, she told him that she was ‘not worthy’ to receive it – not worthy of the artist, perhaps, rather than of the subject, for she was still, as she had always been, utterly without devotion to the person of Christ.

  There is a bronze bust of Christina herself which is attributed to Bernini’s hand. She stares alarmingly out from it, and this, together with her tangled Baroque wig, makes her rather Medusa-like. The two young Dutchmen who had once seen her in Paris had been struck by the proud expres
sion of her bright blue eyes, and had remarked that only the very bold could have endured her gaze for long. Perhaps, in her happy Riario days, it was, at least sometimes, still true.

  Unable to commission sculptures, and unable to carve them herself, Christina decided to dig some up. Inspired perhaps by her archaeologist librarian, Benedetto Mellini, or perhaps by Athanasius Kircher, whose unearthed Roman obelisk was now the centrepiece of Bernini’s great fountain in the Piazza Navona, she took to archaeology. The Pope granted her permission to excavate the ruins of the palace of the Emperor Decius, infamous for his persecution of Christians, on the Viminal Hill. As yet, archaeology was less an investigation of a vanished way of life than a sort of treasure hunt for valuable flotsam, and Christina found some – no martyrs’ bones, but mosaics from the Roman period, and several statues, including a beautiful Venus with a dolphin. In the custom of the day, missing legs and noses were swiftly replaced, though Christina stopped short of adding the fig leaves and draperies normally supplied for the palazzi of Counter-Reformation Rome. Her sculptures were seen as they had been intended to be, green and crimson wallhangings notwithstanding. They filled three whole rooms, and must have dominated many others, for the Riario was not vast, and there were some 160 of them, not counting vases and urns and even columns.6 The collection became as famous as her paintings, and is a surer sign of her own individual taste. None of the sculptures had come with her from Stockholm; they were not tributes or war loot, but had all been chosen by herself. Most were early Roman copies, but she did have several Greek originals, and her favourite of all, which stood opposite Bernini’s beautiful mirror, was a bronze head of a young Greek athlete, which Christina believed to represent Alexander the Great. Not for her the meek and suffering Salvator Mundi; heroic Alexander was the model for her life, the image of her own most cherished illusions.

 

‹ Prev