Giustiniana Wynne

Giustiniana Wynne Countess Rosenberg Orsini (* approx. 1737 in Venice ; † August 22, 1791 in Padua ) was a writer and a representative of the salon culture of late Venice.

Life

The daughter of the English nobleman Sir William Wynne and Anna Gazzini was promoted from an early age in her father's multilingual library and in the circle of scholars and writers around the British consul Joseph Smith and Francesco Algarotti . After the death of her father, on her way to London with her family, the eloquent Venetian in Paris in 1758 quickly found the interest of the large salons thanks to her beauty, education and temperament. The wealthy patron and general tax farmer Le Riche de la Pouplinière became engaged to her. Giustiniana, then 16 years old , fell in love with Andrea Memmo , son of one of the oldest patrician families, in Venice and had an affair with him. At the time of the engagement, she was four months pregnant by Memmo. Persecuted and threatened by the prospective heirs of Pouplinière, she was brought to safety by Casanova in a rural nunnery, from which she reappeared after the secret birth and broke off the engagement.

In 1761 Wynne married the imperial ambassador to Venice, Count Philipp von Rosenberg Orsini, who withdrew with her to his estates in Carinthia in 1765. Widowed, she ran a cosmopolitan salon in Venice, valued by foreign intellectuals for its polyglot entertainment. In 1780 she served the poet William Beckford of Fonthil as a congenial Cicerone , in 1782 the Senate assigned her to the Tsarevich Paul Petrovich, the future Paul II of Russia, and the Grand Duchess Maria Feodorovna as honorary companion. She published the report on it in London. Since 1782 she has published stories and reports from the milieu of the gondoliers as well as from her circle of intellectuals and cultivated patricians. Her French-written texts reveal a keen sense of values ​​and traditions from different social classes.

In 1784 she retired to Padua , but often came to her home in Venice. She dedicated a portrait to her friend, the failed reformer and opponent of the powerful Council of Ten , Senator Angelo Quirini , in her description of his villa with her and her art treasures in Altiquiero near Padua. Her book Les Morlaques , a depiction of an archaic, backward, Slavic people marked by clan pride , guerrilla war and superstition, achieved great success in 1788 on the troubled border with Ottoman Bosnia. With this she met the interest of Romanticism in legend and folk poetry. This work, which was also published in German in Breslau and Leipzig next year, inspired Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to study Serbo-Croatian folk poetry and the essay “Serbian Songs”. In May 1790 Giustiniana Wynne met Goethe and Duchess Anna Amalia of Saxe-Weimar in Venice.

Giustiniana Wynne Rosenberg-Orsini was buried in the church of San Benedetto in Padua, where a plaque on the entrance portal reminds of her.

Works

• Du séjour des comtes du Nord à Venise en Janvier MDCCLXXXII: Lettre de Mme la comtesse Douairière des Ursins, et Rosenberg à Mr. Richard Wynne, son frère, à Londres, Londres (1782)
• Pièces morales & sentimentales de Madame JW ct-sse de Reg / Écrites à une campagne, sur les Rivages de la Brenta, dans l'État Vénitien, Londres (1785), English translation:
• Moral and Sentimental Essays on miscellaneous subjects, written in retirement, on the banks of the Brenta, in the Venetian state (2 full), London, (1785)
• A André Memmo Chevalier de l'Etoile D'Or et procurateur de Saint Marc, à l'occasion du mariage de sa fille Aineé avec Louis Mocenigo Venezia 30 April 1787: Stamperia Giuseppe Rosa. Venice (1787)
• Alticchiero, à M. Huber de Genève, par Madame JCDR, Padoue (1787)
• Les Morlacques, par JWCDU & R., Venezia and Modena (1788).

literature

The relationship with Andrea Memmo

• Bruno Brunelli, Un'amica del Casanova, Firenze, Sandron, 1923
• Andrea Di Robilant: Masks: a Venetian affair. From d. Italian by Martina Tichy u. Margarete Längfeld. Munich Blessing 2005.
• Nancy Isenberg, Mon cher frère: Eros mascherato nell'epistolario di Giustiniana Wynne a Andrea Memmo (1758–1760), in Trame parentali / trame letterarie , a cura di M. Del Sapio, Napoli, Liguori, 2000, pp. 251–265 .
• Nancy Isenberg, Seduzioni epistolari nell'età dei Lumi. L'equivoco e provocante carteggio amoroso di Giustiniana Wynne, scrittrice anglo-veneziana (1737-1791). In: Quaderno del Dipartimento di Letterature Comparate . Università degli Studi Roma Tre, 2, 2006. pp. 47-70.
• Nancy Isenberg, editor, Giustiniana Wynne, Caro Memmo, mon cher frére , Treviso, Elzeviro editore, 2010. ISBN 88-87528-24-1
• Nancy Isenberg, Without swapping her skirt for breeches: The Hypochondria of Giustiniana Wynne, Anglo-Venetian Woman of Letters in The English Malady: Enabling and Disabling Fictions a cura di Glen Colburn. Cambridge, Cambridge Scholars Press 2008. pp. 154-176.

Overall biographical assessment

• Constantin von Wurzbach : Rosenberg-Orsini, Justine Countess . In: Biographisches Lexikon des Kaiserthums Oesterreich . 27th part. Imperial-Royal Court and State Printing House, Vienna 1874, p. 17 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Gusto Bonetto: Le case padovane di Giustiniana Rosemberg Wynne. In: L'intermédiaire des Casanovistes . Vol. 22. Genéve 2005. pp. 21-25.
• Ekkehard Eickhoff . Venice. Late fireworks. Gloss and Downfall of the Republic (1700–1797), Stuttgart, Klett-Cotta 2006. pp. 108–140 u. passim.
• Federico Montecuccoli degli Erri Cammei casanoviani. Chapter 13 .: Progetti matrimoniali e matrimoni segreti di Giustiniana Wynne . Geneva 2006.
• Vera Morelli: “A free heart lives in my chest”. Poets and painters, patricians and citizens in the Venice of the Doges. Mühlacker, Stieglitz Verlag 2007. pp. 220-259.