queen Christina of Sweden

This essay examines Queen Christina of Sweden’s material response to accusations of barbarism by establishing that her collections of antique sculpture acted as artistic and intellectual foils to her detractors. The goal is to situate Christina’s development of a classicized persona within existing scholarship about the queen as a collector and patron, thereby illustrating its impact on her decision to build one of the largest collections of ancient Roman antiquities amassed by an early modern woman. This is accomplished by identifying key themes such as knowledge and rulership that formed the queen’s public persona and were projected to visitors through her display-spaces. To help understand why specific imagery related to these themes appears repeatedly in her suite of antiquities, allegorical emblems associated with Christina are contextualized as reflections of early modern intellectual movements that entwined Gothicism with Swedish history. Like her sculptural displays, these movements creatively inserted Scandinavia, and by extension Christina, into the Greco-Roman tradition.

Full text on google books: https://books.google.com/books?id=brMlEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA74&dq=theresa+kutasz+christensen&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwijlK2PjKGKAxWHrYkEHXw2ASEQ6AF6BAgJEAI#v=onepage&q=theresa%20kutasz%20christensen&f=false

One visual medium that is rather overlooked these days was particularly suited to the proclamation of great deeds and the insinuation of the always so fashionable flair of Antiquity, namely medallic art. This paper presents a selection of case studies exploring the use of ancient topoi illustrated on medals, and studying the purpose and significance of medals depicting early modern Swedish monarchs. Questions will be raised about how references to classical literature such as Ovid, Vergil or Horace are combined within the limits of a medal and in what way are the classical references reused and adapted to the new context. The aim of this paper is to provide a complement to the iconographic analysis by paying particular attention to the inscriptions and their connection to the images presented on medals. Subsequently, this will shed light on the innovative usage of classical literature on medals from early modern Sweden.

in Marca/Marche nr. 13  (2019) pp. 231-273
Un gran numero di cortigiani della regina Cristina di Svezia erano originari della Marca Fermana perché legati al Cardinale Decio Azzolino il Giovane. Galleria di personaggi e loro rete di patronato.

The article positions early modern collecting in relation to wider cultures
of knowledge production by using perspectives from the history of knowledge, memory studies, and recent studies of Kunstkammern. Some twenty-five years after the reawakened interest in early modern collections the author revisits the question if the museum in the Nordic countries was born in the mid-seventeenth century and asks if collections became museums and a museum culture was established with the appearance of, one, museography, theories and methods of classification and display, two, museology, a science or profession of museum organisation and management, and, three, designated, purpose-built architecture and furniture.
The first part brings into play exemplary scholarly and monarchical collectors that contributed to the development of museography and museology. The second part addresses seventeenth-century museography by introducing two acts of knowledge production and retention in the Kunstkammern – asking questions and selecting and ordering. Finally, the author discusses the findings in relation to arguments for placing the museum’s birth in the decades around 1800.

Private writing as a journey through history: Orazio Del Monte’s letters (1666-1668)
The paper considers private writing as a tool to tell a story from a privileged perspective, namely that of the first to live and act in a given context: specifically it aims to illustrate the work that the authors are making on the letters of Orazio del Monte, a dignitary at the court of Christina of Sweden, in light of contemporary research on the correspondence of other characters gravitating around the queen (Cesare Macchiati, Cardinal Decio Azzolino).
Therefore, the paper analyzes both the assumptions and the approach (historical, philological, literary and critical) that underlie the work of the critical edition of del Monte’s letters, part of a larger project, which aims to reconstruct Cristina’s court as faithfully as possible in its historical and social implications. Likewise, the private missive becomes a breeding ground for linguistic studies and for travel literature, fields that need to be taken into account when settling publishing criteria: the paper gives the reasons for the choices made by the authors in charge of the work on del Monte’s letters.

in Atti del V Congresso degli Italianisti scandinavi, Bergen 25-27 giugno 1998, K. Blücher (ed.), Universitetet i Bergen, (Norway, Bergen, 2000, pp. 115-123.
La strana conversione in Germania della nobile svedese Christina Drakenhielm nel 1665 e lo sconosciuto tentativo fatto dai familiari della ragazza che cercarono, in questa complessa vicenda, la mediazione della regina Cristina di Svezia, allora residente a Roma, e del cardinale Decio Azzolino suo amministratore.

Carte di viaggio. Studi di lingua e letteratura italiana, Pisa-Roma (Italy), nr. 6, pp.67-98.
Edizione commentata di 16 lettere inviate dal marchese Orazio Del Monte e dal protomedico Cesare Macchiati al cardinale Decio Azzolino junior durante il secondo viaggio (1666-1668) in Svezia della regina Cristina. Le lettere editate descrivono il viaggio da Amburgo in Svezia e ritorno della corte della regina (aprile-giugno 1667).

Com'e ben noto, Ia regina Cristina fondo due volte a Roma una propria accademia chiamandola Accademia Reale: Ia prima volta ne! gennaio del 1656, neanche un mese dopo del suo arrivo neJIa capitale 1, e Ia seconda, in maniera pili artkolata, nel 1674 2 • Non si trattava pero d'iniziative nate dal contatto deJIa sovrana con l'ambiente culturale rom~no, perche, e questa forse e meno conosciuto dal pubblico italiano, la Regina aveva cercato gi1i di istituire deJIe accademie in Svezia prima della sua abdicazione. Si trattava, per Ia cultura svedere, di tentativi antesignani che avrebbero preceduto di un secolo la fondazione deJIe grandi e tuttora rigogliose accademie di questo paese.