Artist, singer, member of Rome’s Accademia di San Luca and the Royal Academy in London, Kauffmann excelled at history painting, but her wealth and fame came from portraiture. In 1782, she and her second husband, Antonio Zucchi, settled permanently in Rome, where they became close friends with Giuseppe Spina. He was in his early forties and recently ordained when he sat to Kauffmann in January 1798. The elegant monsignor was a confidant of Pius VI and, in the service of the church, would become a skilled diplomat.
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Title:Monsignor Giuseppe Spina (1756–1828)
Artist:Angelica Kauffmann (Swiss, Chur 1741–1807 Rome)
Date:1798
Medium:Oil on canvas
Dimensions:37 5/8 × 31 1/2 in. (95.5 × 80 cm)
Classification:Paintings
Credit Line:Gift of Carlo Orsi, 2016
Accession Number:2016.392
The Swiss-born Angelica Kauffmann belonged to Rome’s Accademia di San Luca from an early age and had been a founder member in 1768 of the Royal Academy in London. While her preference was for history painting, her considerable fortune and her fame came from portraiture. With her second husband, Antonio Zucchi, she settled permanently in Rome in 1782. Angelica was known as a singer and a linguist, as well as for her skills as an artist, and she had a wide acquaintance, and took sittings not only from Italians but also from visitors of many different European nationalities to the Italian capital. The Zucchis met Monsignor Spina no later than 1788, as he is mentioned in a letter she addressed on August 13 to the poet and writer Johann Wolfgang Goethe. Spina, ordained in 1796, was just embarking on a career as a diplomat in the service of the church. He wears the purple robes trimmed with red of a bishop or monsignor and a magnificent lace surplice. His brown eyes and dark eyebrows are set off by a high forehead, a receding hairline, and tightly curled and powdered hair. He holds a letter of several pages which begins with the word "Caro."
Giuseppe Maria Spina was born into a noble family in Sarzana and educated at the University of Pisa. An aide to Pius VI, in 1796 he was ordained to the priesthood in Rome. The pope had condemned the civil constitution of the French clergy as well as the French Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1791. When—on February 10, 1798—Napoleon’s armies marched on Rome, entered unopposed, and declared the Roman Republic, Pius VI was taken prisoner and removed from the Vatican. He was escorted from one north Italian city to another and eventually was settled in Valence, where he died in the summer of 1799. Spina followed the pope and accompanied him into exile. Doubtless in recognition of his services, he was elected titular archbishop of Corinth in summer 1798. The next pope, Pius VII, sent Spina and Cardinal Ercole Consalvi to Paris to negotiate the Concordat of 1801 with the First Consul. In the following year Pius VII elevated Spina to Cardinal and appointed him archbishop of Genoa. Toward the end of his career he served as cardinal-archbishop of Palestrina and also prefect of the apostolic signatura. He died in Rome in 1828.
private collection (in 1998); Carlo Orsi, Milan (until 2016)
New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "European Paintings: Recent Acquisitions 2015–16," December 12, 2016–March 26, 2017, no catalogue.
Bettina Baumgärtel inAngelika Kauffmann. Ed. Bettina Baumgärtel. Exh. cat., Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf. Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany, 1998, p. 38, as in a private collection, with an old attribution to Kauffmann on the reverse.
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