Art collector
Until 1649, when Christina was twenty-three, the Swedish royal art collection was unimpressive, with good tapestries but for paintings, little more than "about a hundred works by minor German, Flemish, and Swedish painters". But in May 1649, the fabulous loot from the occupation of Prague Castle the previous year arrived, with the pick of the collection amassed by the obsessive collector Rudolph II, Holy Roman Emperor (1552–1612), one of the most important in Europe. Rudolf's bulk purchases had included the famous collection of Emperor Charles V's leading minister Cardinal Granvelle (1517–1586), which he had forced Granvelle's nephew and heir to sell to him. Granvelle had been the "greatest private collector of his time, the friend and patron of Titian and Leoni and many other artists".
Christina was entranced by her new possessions, and remained a keen collector for the rest of her life, and as a female art collector is only exceeded by Catherine the Great of Russia in the Early Modern period. Rudolf had collected old and contemporary works from both Italy and northern Europe, but it was the Italian paintings that excited Christina, and by her death, her collection contained relatively few northern works other than portraits.
Most of the Prague booty remained in Sweden after Christina's departure for exile: she only took about 70 to 80 paintings with her, including about 25 portraits of her friends and family, and some 50 paintings, mostly Italian, from the Prague loot, as well as statues, jewels, 72 tapestries, and various other works of art. She was concerned that the royal collections would be claimed by her successor, and prudently sent them ahead to Antwerp in a ship in August 1653, almost a year before she abdicated, an early sign of her intentions.
Christina greatly expanded her collection during her exile in Rome, for example adding the five small Raphael predella panels from the Colonna Altarpiece, including the Agony in the Garden now reunited with the main panel in New York, which were bought from a convent near Rome. She was apparently given Titian's Death of Actaeon by the greatest collector of the age, Archduke Leopold William of Austria, Viceroy in Brussels – she received many such gifts from Catholic royalty after her conversion, and gave some generous gifts herself, notably Albrecht Dürer's panels of Adam and Eve to Philip IV of Spain (now Prado), likewise seven marble statues of the Muses she acquired from Hadrian's villa in 1670. She also gave away two paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Dull Gret and The Cripples (now Louvre). In such ways, the balance of her collection shifted to Italian art.
The Riario Palace finally provided a suitable setting for her collection, and the Sala dei Quadri ("Paintings Room") had her finest works, with thirteen Titians and eleven Veroneses, five Raphaels and several Correggios. Titian's Venus Anadyomene was among them. Venus mourns Adonis by Veronese was from Prague, and is now back in Sweden (Nationalmuseum).
Christina liked to commission portraits of herself, friends, and also notable people she had not met, from 1647 sending David Beck, her Dutch court painter, to several countries to paint notabilities. She encouraged artists to study her collection, including the drawings, and exhibited some of her paintings, but apart from portraits she commissioned or bought few works by living painters, except for drawings. Sculptors did rather better, and Bernini was a friend, while others were commissioned to restore the large collection of classical sculpture which she had begun to assemble while still in Sweden.
On her death she left her collection to Cardinal Decio Azzolino, who himself died within a year, leaving the collection to his nephew, who sold it to Don Livio Odescalchi, commander of the Papal army, at which point it contained 275 paintings, 140 of them Italian. The year after Odescalchi's death in 1713, his heirs began protracted negotiations with the great French connoisseur and collector Pierre Crozat, acting as intermediary for Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, from 1715 the Regent of France. The sale was finally concluded and the 123 paintings included in the sale were delivered in 1721, forming the core of the Orleans Collection, the paintings from which were mostly sold in London after the French Revolution, with many of them being on display in the National Gallery. The French experts complained that Christina had cut down several paintings to fit her ceilings, and had over-restored some of the best works, especially the Correggios, implicating Carlo Maratti.
At first, removing her collections from Sweden was seen as a great loss to the country; but in 1697, Stockholm castle burned down with the loss of almost everything inside, so they would have been destroyed if they had remained there. Today very few major works from her collection still remain in the country. The sculpture collection was sold to the King of Spain and mostly remains in Spanish museums and palaces. Her large and important library was bought by Alexander VIII for the Vatican Library, while most of the paintings ended up in France, as the core of the Orleans Collection – many remain together in the National Gallery of Scotland. 1700 drawings from her collection (among them works by Michelangelo (25) and Raphael) were acquired in 1790 by Willem Anne Lestevenon for the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, the Netherlands.
