Princeton University has been following a programme of acquiring books illustrated by the Venetian nun and printmaker Isabella Picinni (1644-1734). Suor Isabella, who entered the Order of Poor Clares in 1666 at the age of 22, was the daughter of Giacomo Piccini, an excellent printmaker in his own right. Isabella was prolific, engraving after the designs of others and after her own inventions. The majority of her work was done for the devotional book industry and her prints are lively, imaginative, and always charming.
I wrote a doctoral thesis (2006) on the French printmaker Claudine Bouzonnet Stella (1636-1697), and although Claudine never entered religious orders there are parallels between the two women: both were devout, both devoted their lives to engraving on copper, and both specialised in religious imagery. Similarly to Princeton, I had the idea to collect works by Isabella, but rather than whole books, just the prints extracted from them. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries print collectors never had any qualms about breaking up books.
The first work is a portrait of the Franciscan monk, Giovanni Battista Fabri holding a quill in one hand and a Greek icon of the Virgin and Child in the other. The piece is signed Suor Isabella Piccini Scolpi, and was made as an illustration for Fabri’s theological work, La Conchiglia Celeste, published in Venice in 1690 by Giovanni Giacomo Hertz. It is worth noting that Isabella was a Poor Clare, that is, of the female order of Franciscans. Isabella’s etching is after a portrait of Fabri done by the Venetian painter Nicolo Cassana (1659-1713), a Venetian artist who like so many of his generation lived a peripatetic existence working in Germany and then in England where he died.
The frontispiece to Henricus Sommalius, Divi Aurelii Augustini Hippon. Episcopi, Meditationes Soliloquia et Manuale first published in Venice in 1691 by Nicolo Pezzana, shows Saint Augustine, wearing a mitre and holding a crosier, reading from a lectern assisted by a torch-bearing angel. Signed Suor Isabella P F, this etching is one of Isabella’s more cursory pieces.
This cannot be said of a very beautiful composition signed Suor Isabella F which shows the celestial crowning of the Virgin by God the father and son with a throng of saints watching on from the clouds below, many of them in wonderfully silhouetted and dramatically shaded poses, and with their heads and faces seen from a multitude of angles. This contrasts with the touching simplicty of God the father, Christ, and the bashful Virgin. It would seem likely that this illustration comes from an edition of the Offices of the Virgin Mary. Although in her signature Isabella does not precise whether the design is hers or not it looks very much like a work of her own invention.
See also :
https://graphicarts.princeton.edu/2021/08/11/engravings-by-suor-isabella-piccini-1644-1734/
https://graphicarts.princeton.edu/2020/09/03/sister-isabella-piccinis-first-known-work/
Jamie Mulherron 