Runaway Queen

The Silver Throne employed for centuries of Swedish coronations was first inaugurated in 1650 by Christina of Sweden; René Descartes died in Stockholm just a few months earlier. Until the eve of that date, so fateful for them both, the queen and the philosopher had carried on a busy exchange of correspondence: that same epistolary dialogue engendered the final version of Descartes’s last treatise, Les passions de l’âme, dated 1649. Shortly thereafter, it would appear, the Swedish climate finally proved fatal to the French philosopher. Christina herself decided to abandon the strictures of both throne and Scandinavia four years later, embarking on a sort of proleptic Grand Tour, traveling (triumphantly) across Europe and then settling on the banks of the Tiber, there to enjoy a climate far milder than that found along the Norrström. In Rome she consolidated and expanded her collection of art and also founded what we might today call a cultural circle – destined, after her death, to become a cenacle, or fellowship, of rationalist classicists (almost Cartesian in spirit), which promptly found a home in what had been her residence in exile, Palazzo Riario, a building still known as the Accademia dell’Arcadia.