Aurelio Porfiri
In our Catholic faith, we are told that we must conform to the teaching of Our Lord and live in the image of his teaching. Moreover, in Genesis 1:26-28 it is said: And God said: “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and dominate over the fish of the sea and the birds of the sky, over the cattle, over all the wild beasts. and on all the reptiles that crawl on the earth.” God created man in his image; in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them: “Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth; subdue it and dominate over the fish of the sea and the birds of the sky and over every living being that crawls on the earth”. And who conforms to this, more than the saints and blessed, in whom the image of the Father shines.
Today we will talk about Blessed Osanna Andreasi (1449-1505), not one of the best-known figures in the Catholic world. Mantovana, who was from a noble family, refused to marry in order to enter the contemplative life. Despite this, she too was called to practical government responsibilities as regent of the Duchy of Mantua. Father Giovanni Lauriola OFM (santiebeati.it) gives us this description of our Osanna: “Osanna, although a favorite of great mystical phenomena, she is unable to describe the God whom she experiences during those sublime moments. Struck by the vision of God that she enjoys in her intimate soul, she would not want to return to her body again, in order not to part with so much beauty and goodness. Hence the deep desire for eternal union with God, left behind by these mystical raptures and flights”.
In the last years of her life, Osanna sees the state of the Church in a vision and she foreshadows the evils that dominate “poor Italy”. For this, she offers herself a victim of atonement and she unites herself with the most precious blood of Jesus, towards whose wounds she nourishes great devotion. She is rewarded by the Lord with many supernatural gifts, such as the piercing of the heart, the crowning with thorns and the stigmata, although without tearing the tissues, but clearly visible in the form of turgor. Her greatest reward, however, is that of taking part, through the passion of Christ, in the work of redemption. Passion, in fact, is not only always the center of her meditation, but also of her spiritual life, making her sublimate her innumerable physical and moral sufferings which become the substance of her spiritual and mystical life”. But why do we care about this humble nun?
We have to take a leap of about a century, when a father and two daughters go to Mantua, in the middle of the sixteenth century. Here they come into contact with the Gonzaga court, where the cult of the blessed Osanna was still alive. It happens that the two daughters were excellent painters, Sofonisba and Elena Anguissola. The blessed Osanna was then painted and later assigned first to Sofonisba Anguissola (1535-1625) and then to Elena Anguissola (1532-1584). The Anguissola family was very special, as the father was very afraid of the education of his children and in this case, we have a rare case of high-level painters who were also sisters.
We were talking about the portrait of Blessed Osanna. Antonio Iommelli (galleriaborghese.beniculturali.it) leaves us this description: “The painting, listed in 1611 among the assets belonging to Cardinal Girolamo Bernerio (Schütze 1999), was donated by him together with other paintings to Cardinal Scipione, becoming part of the rich collection of the Borghese house where it is reported for the first time in 1693 as “a picture on the table of about a palm, with a Nun holding Christ in one hand, and in the other a lily, from no. 267 black frame”.
Listed as a work of the Venetian school in the lists of faithful commissioners (1833) and by Giovanni Piancastelli (1891), this panel was assigned by Adolfo Venturi to the Sienese painter Raffaele Vanni, unlike Roberto Longhi who in 1928, thought of a Florentine painter of the first half of the seventeenth century. Based on a comparison with a painting in the Lord Yarborough Gallery in London, in 1955 Paola della Pergola published the painting as a work by Sofonisba Anguissola, recognizing in the figure portrayed the face of Elena, sister of the Cremonese painter, celebrated by sources as a talented artist. This opinion, accepted without reservation by Maria Kusche (1989), was questioned by Anastasia Gilardi who in 1994 cataloged the painting as a “circle of the Anguissola sisters”, interpreting the subject – without a few doubts – as a self-portrait of Elena; unlike Mina Gregori (1994), Valerio Guazzoni (1994) and Rosanna Sacchi (1994) who understood the picture as a portrait of a Dominican sister, painted in a convent by the painter.
To put a point to the question was Angela Ghirardi who, on the occasion of the exhibition on the Blessed Mantuan Osanna Andreasi, organized in Mantua in 2005, recognized the subject as a self-portrait of Elena, depicted here in the role of the Dominican tertiary as suggested by the lily, symbol of purity, and the heart pierced by the crucifix, a typical characteristic attribute of the saint that refers to the passion of Christ relived by the mystic in her own body in the form of stigmata”.
Therefore, Elena, who will later be a nun with the name of Sister Minerva, portrays herself in the role of the Blessed, as if to suggest to us that identification that we make with other models of the Christian life that lead us to perfection that our demanding faith requires of us. The Blessed (Elena) stares at us with a slight smile, serene, despite the fact that in one hand she holds her heart pierced by the crucifix, a sign of passion but also of rebirth, and in the other her lily, a sign of purity. We note how the two signs are presented at the same height by the painter, lowering one arm with respect to the other, a symbol of the interconnection between the two dimensions of purity and passion, purity is passion, but accepting the latter leads to purity.
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