Bachelor Queen

As a queen, Christina of Sweden was something of a flop. Her reign lasted only ten years; then she converted to Roman Catholicism, abdicated, moved to Rome, and became a national embarrassment. As a historical personage, she inspired more fiction than fact with her bizarre ways. Greta Garbo played her on the screen in 1934 as a vamp who went disguised as a man, washed her face with snow, and proclaimed that she expected to die "not an old maid but a bachelor."

Taking up the scepter in 1644, Christina soon became Europe's most curious baroque spinster queen. Her father, the militant Protestant Gustavus Adolphus, had ordered that she be brought up as a boy. In fact, the royal midwives had at first thought that she was one. She practiced shooting with a pistol, learned to speak Latin, French, German, Dutch, Italian and cope in Hebrew, Arabic and Greek.

Descartes at 5 a.m. "Learning was to Christina what needles and thread were to other women," wrote a contemporary. When Queen of Sweden, she personally invited scholars from all of Europe to visit her country. For her own edification she commanded the French logical philosopher Descartes to tutor her at 5 a.m. (he contracted flu in the chilly Scandinavian dawns and died). The great composer Alessandro Scarlatti even dedicated an opera to her in 1680.

Christina's other great passion was art. At her death, some 200 fine Italian masters were included in the inventory of her estate, and were eventually scattered across the globe in collections as far away as India. As a Council of Europe exhibition in Stockholm's National Museum currently shows, Christina amassed both the wondrous and the weird of her time (opposite page). Some of it has been destroyed or lost, but the reassembled wealth of her collection fills 36 rooms, a tribute to the woman hailed in her lifetime as the Athena of the North.

Vault in the Vatican. Her love of art helped sever her from the stern Lutheranism that her father preached by the sword. Contrary to the religious statutes of her country, Christina converted secretly to Roman Catholicism in 1654. She left Sweden ostensibly to visit a spa to the south, then set out across Germany disguised as a knight, and a year and a half later entered Rome regally. Legend has it that she wore embroidered gilt breeches to her first Communion.

In Rome, Christina's world was soon hemmed in with intrigue. With the help of France's Cardinal Mazarin she sought to occupy the throne of Naples. When her plans were betrayed by her Italian equerry, Giovanni Monaldeschi, she had him murdered while she coolly waited in the next room. The scandal forever ruined her chances to gain any throne, but it did not prevent her from being the reigning connoisseur of Rome.

Christina befriended the Italian sculptor Bernini, set up her own art center in 1674 called the Accademia degli Arcadi in imitation of classical antiquity, and stocked it with a museum of oils, many of which she had brought as baggage. Her Palazzo Riario near the Vatican became a "stopping place for every prominent and noble art lover of the age. While they proclaimed the era "il seicento de Cristina" she peeked and listened through a window concealed in the ceiling of her painting gallery. And when she died at the age of 61, Pope Innocent XI broke precedent by having her buried in a Vatican vault. As her death mask, disinterred last year, revealed, she remained cold, proud and regal to the end.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.