Queen Maria Casimira's stay in Rome on display at the Capitoline Museums
Palazzetto Zuccari, where Maria Casimira stayed (Getty photo)
The exhibition
From pilgrimages to Roman basilicas to the washing of pilgrims' feet. Francesca Ceci and Jerzy Miziolek dedicate an exhibition to the 15 years spent in the capital by the wife of Jan Sobieski, the Catholic King of Poland
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“And you know, and you know, that the scum of the world, the unworthy Turks, are thirsty for beautiful Vienna… If Vienna falls, alas, and soon after Italy will go, Rome will be sacked”. If Meo Patacca also spoke about the matter in the popular poem of the same name, it was a sign that fear was at its peak throughout Rome, the world capital of the West. If the Mohammedan troops managed to bite into the “golden apple”, as the Crescent Moon called Vienna, they would immediately tear the rest of the Christian nations into quarters. But Providence sent Jan Sobieski, the Catholic king of Poland, who on 12 September 1683 routed the Ottoman forces of Kara Mustafa Pasha with his hussar cavalry, causing a general sigh of relief . “I thought Vienna was lost without a miracle,” confessed the fiery Queen Christina of Sweden who, having converted from Lutheranism, had abdicated the throne and moved to Rome in 1655. But we will return to her.
The Viennese victory over the Mohammedans in 1683, once the danger had passed, became a second Lepanto and, as for that one, Pius V had established the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary (7 October), so for this one Innocent XI introduced the feast of the Holy Name of Mary (12 September) into the calendar. And gratitude to the “Sarmatian Achilles”, “new Constantine” (Constantinus dedit, Joannes servavit) also extended to his wife Maria Casimira , affectionately called Marysienka, when, after her husband’s death (1696), to escape the bitter disputes over succession, she came to Rome with her court for the Jubilee of 1700 and remained there for 15 years, residing mostly in Palazzetto Zuccari, today the seat of the Hertziana Library. The interesting exhibition at the Capitoline Museums “A Polish Queen in the Capitol”, curated by Francesca Ceci and Jerzy Miziolek, is dedicated to this prolonged royal stay and to the documentary and artistic traces of it that have reached us.
Maria Casimira had asked that the same ceremony and pomp reserved for Queen Christina of Sweden decades earlier be adopted for her – without wanting to upset the readers: between two queens without a throne, even if one had just died, the comparisons were predictable and inevitable – but this did not happen and for two reasons: the Swede, an aristocrat converted from Protestantism, constituted a shining banner of revenge for the Catholic Church to wave in the face of the reformed European nobility and her throne, unlike the Polish one, was dynastic and not elective, therefore of superior rank; moreover, it was she who had chosen to abdicate, while Maria Casimira, now a widow, had been left out of the power games. For the latter, the Roman welcome was ultimately nothing more than a gesture of dutiful homage to the former first lady of the hero of Vienna; and in any case she too was received with honor, she had after all been the wife of the Defensor fidei .
As for her stay, unlike the fiery, irascible and worldly Christina, the Polish queen shunned ostentation and loved to practice acts of piety and charity: there are many accounts of her pilgrimages on foot to the Roman basilicas and of her washing the feet of pilgrims during Holy Week.
She was also very interested in art, so much so that she had a stage space built in her home called “the little Queen's Theatre” where operas were performed and concerts were held. She greatly admired Frascati, where she went to spend a few days at the invitation of Don Livio Odescalchi (“You will be enchanted by Frascati” – she wrote to her son, Prince Giacomo – “The Villa dei Pamphili, which is called Belvedere, is astonishing because everything that art and nature can combine is all there”), after having had to refuse the invitation to Albano in the Villa of Cardinal Ottoboni, because the ladies and gentlemen invited there had expressed embarrassment at the presence of the VIP widow. The latter was actually “courting” her to gain her support in the Conclave that opened after the death of Pope Innocent XII, during the Jubilee; many cardinals still held the heroic Sobieski in high esteem, and these were precious votes . She did not back down and a drawing on display portrays her at a table surrounded by eight cardinals, in Grottaferrata, in a sort of pre-conclave congregation: those who complain about the lack of power of women in the Church should think about it.
The echo of the name Sobieski has continued over the centuries: in the Vatican Museums stands out an enormous painting by Jan Matejko, donated for the bicentenary of the victory to Leo XIII and dominating the room dedicated to the leader king, the "willing" one who saved Europe. "Thus it happened to the Turk and well it served him, the punishment that the eagle gave him", final comment by Meo Patacca .
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