Lens on Women and Politics

Two historical examples include Marie Sophie and Ghitta Carrell

By Nicoletta LEONARDI

 

 

 

 

Little attention has been given so far both to women photographers and the representation of women in photographs in Italy. More research needs to be done, for instance, on the relationship between women, photographs and politics. In the span of this article I will look at two significant examples pertaining to this vast and promising topic, in the hope that it will attract more scholarly and curatorial interest in the future.

During the late Risorgimento, photography was often used as an ideological tool and a mass instrument of propaganda both by the expanding Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia and its supporters and the anti-Piemontese forces (the Papal States, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the Austrians). This was not only the case with Garibaldi, whose heroic portraits widely circulated both in Italy and abroad, but also with photographs that depicted women.

In 1862 the Papal States were shaken by an unprecedented scandal: Marie Sophie of Baviera, ex-queen of Naples and sister of empress of Austria Sisi, appeared nude in some obscene photographs, intent in onanistic activities while surrounded by cardinals, monsignors, papal guards and even the Pope. The images were fake: they were photomontages produced for political reasons. Marie Sophie was in exile in Rome with her husband Francis II of Bourbon after the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was defeated in February 1861 by Victor Emanuel II’s troops. To avoid bloodshed in Naples, Francis and Marie Sophie, along with their army, retreated to the strong coastal fortress of Gaeta where the Piedmontese forces lay siege for four months. It was in this last stand of the Bourbons that Marie Sophie, who was just 19 years old, gained her reputation as the “warrior queen” and the “heroine of Gaeta” that stayed with her for the rest of her life. She tirelessly rallied her soldiers, she shared her food with them, she cared for their wounds, she dared attackers to come within range of the fortress cannon. She was worshipped unto idolatry by her men. Her passionate adherence to the cause of the Bourbons generated an almost cult-like admiration among the so called “legitimists”, who resisted the waves of revolution that shook Europe in the mid 1800s and led to the fall of absolutism and the rise of constitutional government in the continent. The cult of Marie Sophie among legitimists both resulted in and was generated by a wide production and circulation of photographic portraits of the ex-queen.

The obscene photographs depicting Marie Sophie were allegedly commissioned and circulated by pro-Piedmontese agitators operating in Rome. The city was itself menaced by the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia’s southern expansion that led to the unification of Italy in 1861 and to the annexation of the Papal States in 1870. Rome was the hotbed of legitimist soldiers and adventurers gathered around the ex-king and the ex-queen of Naples, who set up a government in exile that enjoyed diplomatic recognition by most European states for a few years as still the legitimate government of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The photographs were clearly meant at discrediting Marie Sophie’s international reputation as a young and brave heroine and a symbol of anti-revolutionary resistance.

In his Ricordi di Roma (1870), French poet and literary critic Louis Delatre, who was a society habitué, dedicated several pages to the ex-queen. A correspondent in Rome for the French press who criticized the Papal government to the point of being expelled from the city in 1863, Delaitre describes Marie Sophie as an extremely unconventional woman who was keen to inappropriate behavior. According to Delaitre, the deposed young queen did not realize that her situation demanded discretion, silence and withdrawal from public life. Quite on the contrary, she chose publicity and clamor, exposing herself to ridicule, attracting scorn. Adopting what was perceived as an inappropriately masculine (thus scandalous) behavior, she smoked, she often went hunting, she practiced fencing, every night she went out alone in her tilbury, riding her two frisky horses around the Pincio. She also loved gun shooting, a hobby she practiced in the garden of the Quirinale, where she lived, pointing her weapon against all sorts of objects and animals, including cats.

Delaitre also mentions the fact that Marie Sophie was very popular and that her photographic portraits were so much sought after that she was overwhelmed by photographers’ requests for obtaining permission to reproduce her likeness. And because on top being unsuitably extravagant and masculine she was also quite foppish, she would always agree. The result was a huge number of portraits in which she appeared in different guises: as an artilleryman, a sailor, an amazon, a nun, a zuoave, a bourgeois lady; with a gun, a crucifix, a horsewhip, a fan. That so many portraits of Marie Sophie were available on the market comes as no surprise. Besides being the celebrated heroine of Gaeta, she had great passion for photography, which she shared with her sister Sisi. The Empress collected photographs of beautiful women which she kept in an album. Among the more than one hundred photographs of female beauties owned by Sisi, there were lots of portraits of Marie Sophie.

During the Fascist dictatorship, a Jewish woman from Hungary living in Italy became the most sought after studio portraitist of the regime’s gerarchi, the Italian aristocracy, the highest ranks of the Roman Catholic Church, the entrepreneurs and industrialists from the northern regions, as well as prominent intellectuals who adhered to Fascism. Born in 1899, Ghitta Carrel moved to Italy in 1924 after attending a photography class for women in Bucarest, where she learned the ways of late pictorialism. During the 1930s, she continued working with a reminiscently pictorialist approach, strongly retouching her pictures in order to obtain the flattering effects of official portraits. An extremely successful professional photographer, Carrell gained national notoriety thanks to the portrait of a young balilla she shot in 1926, which was used for a Fascist propaganda poster displayed in public places all over the country. Shortly after, she became the photographer of the Italian royal family and portrayed Benito Mussolini. It soon became almost a social obligation for members of the regime’s social, cultural and political elites to have their portrait taken by her. In her studio close to Piazza del Popolo in Rome, Carrell photographed Edda and Galeazzo Ciano, Pope Pius XII, Alberto Savinio, Giovanni Papini, members of the houses of Gonzaga, Borghese, Visconti, Diaz, Colonna. Through her masterly retouch, she produced images that came close to the ideal beauty, nobleness and heroism that her sitters aspired to. Her photographs, carefully tailor made for Fascist ideology, are indeed an extraordinary document of the ideals, desires and ambitions of the regime. They also served as extremely efficient instruments of political persuasion and propaganda. It was due to her affiliations with the hegemonic class and particularly with Mussolini, that Carrell did not have to face racial persecution. When the racial laws were promulgated in Italy in 1938, she was indeed protected by the regime and continued working, though more privately and at a slower pace. After the Second World War, Carrell became the photographer of Italy’s new ruling political class, the Cristian Democrats, until she retired in Israel, where she died in 1972. Before leaving Italy, she donated all her negatives and part of her prints to the 3M Foundation in Milan, which is open to the public for consultation.