When her husband Luigi Borg de Balzan died, his widow Mary had a prominent notice published in the Florentine daily by which she “announces, inconsolable in her tears, the immense and irreparable loss of her beloved husband”. Possibly sincere, but a dose of discreet cynicism on the side rarely lets you down when reading into public obituaries.
Huge voids still mark the course of Borg de Balzan’s life. Where and how did he make his fortunes twice over?- Giovanni Bonello
Borg de Balzan’s wondrous collections of works of art and cultural artefacts, though dispersed well over a hundred years ago, still have a distinct echo today – sale catalogues and art scholars are quick to point out the provenance of a particular object if it comes from the memorable Borg de Balzan auction held by Sangiorgi in Rome in 1894, starting on April 2.
Even the very catalogue of that sale, elegantly printed with a striking, custom-designed cover, has now turned into a highly prized collectible. That auction, from a merely mercantile affair, morphed into a major cultural event.
Our compatriot had, over the years, acquired a discerning eye for quality – together with the fat funds without which a discerning eye on its own would not have got him very far. He generally went for the highest exemplars of traditional antique European, mostly northern, painting, drawing and sculpture. But he did not disdain, at the same time, the works of contemporary macchiaioli painters, Italy’s not insignificant challenge to the French Impressionists.
Borg de Balzan seems to have striven hard and successfully to keep the range of his hoarding interests as wide as possible. His important collections of Renaissance Majolicas and of North American ethnic showpieces, to mention just two other areas of specialisation, still attract admiration and study today.
The Florence press announced the death of Borg de Balzan, which occurred on Sunday, December 20, 1896. At least two Maltese papers reported the news, the Italian language evening daily Malta first, referred to him as “our compatriot the Commendatore Gran Croce... He was invested with many orders of chivalry, was extremely wealthy and had a passionate love for art, in such a way that his halls were crammed with paintings, sculptures and any kind of artistic products”. The Malta Standard specified that Borg de Balzan was “a Maltese who had settled in Italy and he was the recipient during a long career of many decorations of distinction”.
The Maltese art connoisseur’s Italian obituary adds that he died at 11.45 a.m. after a long and painful illness – aged 84. The cortege, it said, would leave his residence at No. 1, Piazza Savonarola, on Wednesday at 3 p.m. and the religious funeral service would be held in the historical church of the Madonna della Tosse, near the Porta San Gallo.
Fast-forward 15 years. The Borg de Balzan story takes an unexpected, rather amazing twist, as an American woman from San Francisco, Elizabeth Wheeler, on a study visit to Florence, befriended another American woman, a relative of an unnamed “famous general and President of the USA” then also present in the Tuscan city.
The latter young woman, in turn, enjoyed the close friendship of the widow of Luigi Borg de Balzan, who lived at No. 2, Piazza Savonarola. Here we get a closer glimpse of Borg de Balzan’s second wife, so far a blurred figure much in the background.
Miss Wheeler’s account contains some obvious inaccuracies, probably memory lapses due to the fact that she dictated her story 20 years after the events. The principal errors: Mrs Borg de Balzan’s maiden surname, which we know was MacIntyre Smith, Wheeler changed to Wilson. The author also says that the couple married soon after they met and that Luigi died suddenly, while other documents show that they married 40 years after they started living together and that he passed away after a long and painful illness.
Miss Wheeler adds that the widow lived at No. 2, Piazza Savonarola, while the documents show that, at least up to his death, the couple lived in No. 1 – of course, the widow could have moved to the nearby, smaller palazzo after her husband’s death. These minor inaccuracies notwithstanding, I believe it is well worth listening to Miss Wheeler’s (here very abridged) story:
“Madame Borg was born in New York and during her girlhood the family was removed to Mexico where her father, Mr Wilson, was sent on diplomatic service for the Government. At the quixotic court of Maximilian and Charlotte, Miss Wilson made her debut. Commendatore Borg de Balzan, a Frenchman (sic) high in Papal favour, was sent also to the rebellious court and there met the daughter of our diplomat. Many bonds drew the two together and the marriage took place during the year. The charming Miss Wilson was transplanted to foreign shores”.
Mrs Borg’s American brother, involved in the construction of the harbour of New York, eventually joined the Borg de Balzans’ household in Piazza Savonarola, and “within its seclusion gave out verses under the cabalistic pseudonym of Ellilu”.
Miss Wheeler here throws in the unexpected: “Borg de Balzan died suddenly, leaving Madame to a future whose loneliness and melancholy were not mitigated by time. The palace was desolated, haunted by wistful memories and when poverty finally forced her to shut off the rooms in which she and her husband had been wont to entertain interesting and royal guests, she crowded her treasures into the four rooms in which I found her.”
There, attended by her old man-servant Oreste and an equally decrepit maid, she shared her quarters with Ellilu, “now become strangely silent”. She rarely left home, but on Tuesdays kept up the habit of entertaining “friends, artistic and diplomatic celebrities, literary and picturesque spirits that found appropriate setting in the old salon” greeted by the gentle American hostess who feted them in perfect Italian, Russian, French (and presumably, English) “always an arresting figure”.
Miss Wheeler for the first time ever speaks publicly of the poverty that had overtaken (twice over, but Wheeler could not know that) the Borg de Balzans – an aspect of their life no other source I know of hints at. That obviously explains why the gifted amateur and manic collector had, so uncharacteristically, sold his beloved museum pieces not long before his death. What compulsive art lover would contemplate parting with his treasures if not impelled by dire necessity?
Huge voids still mark the course of Borg de Balzan’s life. Vague references to a brilliant diplomatic career as a favourite of the Pope, French citizenship, 30 years in the USA, his presence at the tragic Mexican court of Emperor Maximilian, the deliberate or unconscious rejection of Malta (Borg de Balzan appears successively as French, American and Italian, but though born in Malta from indigenous parents, hardly ever as Maltese), his so-called fabulous wealth and its disappearance: where and how did Borg de Balzan make his fortunes twice over? The American author had no answers.
All the same, Elizabeth Wheeler has a fascinating story to tell, which may contain clues that help to fathom at least some of these enigmas. It forms the core of the memoir she published (dictated to Mary Goodrich) in 1930. Discarding the literary niceties, of which there are perhaps too many, the narrative runs thus:
When, in the autumn of 1911 she visited the Borg de Balzan widow in her gloomy palazzo in Savonarola Square where “undisguised dreariness” reigned, the first thing that struck the girl from California was the mournful main hall: “the very walls were weighted, paintings and hangings from ceilings to floor left no uncovered portion; the doors served as backgrounds for objects of value and interest in the household, and, on the floor, in close juxtaposition stood furniture that was meant to receive more objects”.
Luigi’s cherished decorations, medals and knighthoods not the originals, but plaster enlargements, were strewn all over in “conspicuous position”, repeating loudly: please take note and be impressed. To the neat, rational American, the general effect was one of clutter and disorder, even if tempered by “extreme cleanliness and care”. The furnishings included “masterpieces of the Great Renaissance, paintings from the hands of masters, carving of great craftsmen of Europe”. And all this bounty even after the massive auction sale of 1894 which had disposed of the bulk of Borg de Balzan’s important pieces.
The widow Borg de Balzan entered the hall, preceded by two tiny black and tan dogs. “She was a tall and erect woman, wearing a costume of black velvet whose severe bodice arrested the eye for a moment ... Her smile brought unusual charm to the long face which was crowned by a fuzzy white transformation suggestive of the coiffeur of the late Queen Alexandra ... She was old – time and fashion had swept by her position, leaving no mark upon the surface of her intent” (whatever that means).
The conversation between the women, all-American, turned to Miss Wheeler’s native California. Oh, the widow remarked, “my husband had visited California in 1848”. What? 1848? the guest remarked, that was a most eventful year for California – gold had then been discovered, and the legendary Gold Rush had begun.
So Borg de Balzan had actually been present when the prospecting craze had taken hold of America. Miss Wheeler pressed the point, asked many questions.
It is nothing short of staggering to find an enigmatic Maltese art lover actually being in California at the time when history changed- Giovanni Bonello
Her husband, Mrs Borg explained, had been a visitor to Sutter’s Fort, a guest of Captain John Augustus Sutter, an adventurer of Swiss origin, today indelibly associated with the Gold Rush – in fact, that saga’s very icon. She added she never tired of hearing her husband’s enthusiastic account of the discovery of gold at Coloma by the mythical wheelwright James Marshall, recalled, to this day, by memory, literature and monuments, as the one who had heralded California’s gold fortune – and the one who, ironically, never benefited from his discovery. Marshall too, like Sutter, had been Borg de Balzan’s good friend.
“Suddenly Madame Borg rose and hurried to a satinwood cabinet. From it she took a box which bore a yellowed label and, as she passed it to me she said, ‘Here child, is something from your California. Even in Florence is a bit of your loved home’. Eagerly I took the box and read the legend: ‘From the gold discovered in January, 1848, by James Marshall. Given by him to me at Sutter’s Fort, California. (Signed) Borg de Balzan’. Inside lay five small pieces of gold! I was speechless with amazement.”
The discovery of gold in California counts among the epochal events in US history. It is nothing short of staggering to find an enigmatic Maltese art lover actually being there at the time when history changed and that he was, moreover, a friend of both the man who first found gold and of the owner of the mill in whose waters it was discovered. Was part of the perplexing first fortune of Borg de Balzan somehow related to the California Gold Rush? The answer is still a mystery. May it remain forever so.
(Concluded)
Acknowledgements
My warmest thanks go especially to Manuela Belardini for her researches in the Florence archives on my behalf, but also to Prof. David Attard, Francesca Balzan, John Edward Critien and the staff of the Magistral Palace Archive (Rome), Nicholas de Piro, Raymond Mangion and James Wehn of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.