Matilde Malenchini – painter

The tempestuous life of a talented Tuscan artist

Vincenzo Camuccini's portrait of
Malenchini, from about 1815

The painter Matilde Malenchini was born on this day in 1779 in Livorno in Tuscany. She was well-known for her paintings of church interiors but turned to portrait painting later in life to make money to help her survive after her long relationship with Belgian writer Louis de Potter ended.

Matilde was born into the Meoni family and married the painter and musician Vincenzo Francesco Malenchini at the age of 16. Although they soon separated, she kept his name for the rest of her life.

In 1807 she went to study at the Accademia di Belle Arte in Florence under the guidance of Pietro Benvenuti. To earn money and practise her art, she copied the works of old Italian and Dutch masters in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

After being given a four-year annual stipend by Elisa Bonaparte, the Grand Duchess of Tuscany, in 1811, Matilde went to Rome to study at the Pontificia Accademia romana delle belle arti di San Luca. There she met the French Governor of the Papal States, General Francois de Mollis, who was an art collector. He bought 18 of her paintings and helped her establish a studio in the convent of Trinità dei Monti. 

While painting church and convent interiors, she worked with students from the Academie Francaise who were living in the Villa Medici, as well as the up-and-coming Italian artists Antonio Canova and Vincenzo Camuccini. In 1815, Matilde was named a Professor of Merit at the Accademia di San Luca and in the same year Camuccini painted her portrait. The years she spent in Rome proved to be the most productive of her career.

Malenchini's own portrait of the writer
Louis de Potter, her long-time partner

She embarked on a long and intense relationship with Louis de Potter and between 1817 and 1819 they shared a home with the painter Francois-Joseph Navez. The couple attempted to obtain an annulment of Matilde’s previous marriage by appealing to the Roman Curia, but their requests coincided with some scandalous trials involving monks and nuns, which caused the Curia to be more cautious than usual with their decisions. At around the same time, Matilde’s former husband, who was supporting the request, was having problems with the police to further complicate the issue.

In 1820, Matilde had to leave Rome and she returned to Florence where she was named an honorary professor at the Accademia.

De Potter returned to Bruges in 1823 to be with his ailing father, but the following year, after his father’s death, he moved to Brussels and invited Matilde to join him. Their home in the Belgian capital became a meeting place for expatriate Italians and political refugees. With their friend Navez, they organised painting classes. Navez also became a prominent advocate for Belgian independence.

Matilde became restless and travelled for a while before returning to live in Florence. De Potter, who was frustrated at not being able to marry her, ended the relationship in 1826. He later married Sophie van Weydeveldt, 20 years his junior, with whom he had four children.

Although De Potter agreed to give Matilde an annual pension of 1200 francs, the money was spasmodic because of his political problems. He served 18 months in prison after writing a pamphlet denouncing King William I of Belgium and then went into exile in Germany. Matilde turned to portrait painting to make money to keep herself. There was no contact between her and De Potter until 1854, when he wrote her an affectionate letter following the death of his son, and afterwards they maintained contact with each other through letters.

The following year, by which time Matilde was 76, she was accused of pushing one of her maids out of a window after she caught her stealing. She was sentenced to three and a half years detention but the ruling was overturned. However, it was reinstated in 1857 and sadly, one of Matilde’s last paintings was of the interior of the prison in Florence. She died in 1858 in Fiesole in Tuscany at the age of 78.

Livorno, the Tuscan port city where Malenchini
was born, has a network of canals

Travel tip:

Livorno, Malenchini’s birthplace, is the second largest city in Tuscany, with a population of almost 160,000. It has a large commercial port and in many respects is the most modern city in the region, yet there are also many remnants of its history.  Designed by the architect Bernardo Buontalenti at the behest of the House of Medici at the end of the 16th century, Livorno was conceived as an "ideal city" of the Italian Renaissance. Notable are the huge Fortezza Vecchia - the Old Fortress - which was built to protect the port, the fortified walls around the city’s pentagonal plan and the dense network of canals, a kind of “Little Venice”, which were originally created to connect the merchants’ residences with their warehouses.  The city has produced many notable painters, including the 19th century landscape and battlefield painter Giovanni Fattori, and the celebrated modernist painter of portraits and nudes, Amedeo Modigliani.  It was also home to the opera composer, Pietro Mascagni.

The remains of a Roman theatre on a hillside
near the town of Fiesole in Tuscany

Travel tip:

Fiesole, where Malenchini died, is a town of about 14,000 inhabitants occupying an elevated position about 8km (5 miles) northeast of Florence. Since the 14th century, it has been a popular place to live for wealthy Florentines and even to this day remains the richest municipality in the city. Once an important Etruscan settlement, it was also a Roman town of note, of which the remains of a theatre and baths are still visible.  Fiesole's Romanesque cathedral, built in the 11th century, is supposedly built over the site of the martyrdom of St. Romulus. In the middle ages, Fiesole was as powerful as Florence until it was conquered by the latter in 1125 after a series of wars.

Also on this day:

1596: The birth of violin maker Nicolò Amati

1911: The birth of composer Nino Rota

1917: The death in World War One of cycling champion Carlo Oriani

1937: The birth of actress Angela Luce

1947: The birth of politician Mario Borghezio

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Gabriele Corcos - celebrity cook

YouTube recipe blog led to TV fame in US

Gabriele Corcos and his wife, the actress Debi
Mazar, in a scene from their TV show

The TV cook and author Gabriele Corcos, whose show Extra Virgin on the Cooking Channel has given him celebrity status in the United States, was born on this day in 1972 in Fiesole, a town in the Tuscan hills just outside Florence.

He was invited to produce and host the show - the first original cookery programme to go out on the network when it launched in 2010 - after his YouTube channel, in which he prepared traditional Tuscan dishes, attracted a large following of devoted fans.

The Cooking Channel show was so successful it ran for five seasons, with 68 episodes, spawning a best-selling book of Tuscan recipes and a further show, Extra Virgin Americana, in which he starred with his wife, the actress Debi Mazar.

Corcos became a star of the kitchen without ever intending it to be his career.

His parents - his father was a surgeon, his mother a schoolteacher - wanted him to achieve his academic potential, while he was eager to find paid employment. He found a compromise by joining the army with the intention of qualifying as a medic, only to realise that the reward for graduating was to be posted to Kosovo, Somalia or Iraq.

Corcos, Mazar and one of their daughters
in action in their TV kitchen

Horrified at the prospect of active service, he abandoned his studies and decided instead to devote himself to his great love, music. Raising money by selling his treasured Ducati motorcycle, he decided to go to Brazil to learn to play the drums.

Everything changed again when, during a trip home, he met his future wife, who at the time was working with the pop megastar Madonna on make-up and dramatic presentation during a tour of Italy.   Within a short time, he had decided to travel back with Debi  to Los Angeles to start a new life in America. They married the following year, in 2002.

It was when he was forced to consider how he might make a living that he realised the thing he knew most about was cooking, having been brought up in the family farmhouse in the Tuscan hills, where the stove was always lit. His grandmother was preparing food almost constantly for the farmers and hunters and members of their families who would drop in most days.

Gabriele learned the basics of cooking when he was only six or seven years old and by the time he left home knew how to cook scores of Italian dishes. Noting how few Italian restaurants in the Los Angeles area served Italian food as he knew it, and struck upon the idea of demonstrating the recipes he had grown up with on his own YouTube channel, with his wife, Debi, as his companion in the kitchen.

Gabriele Corcos is active in helping food charities

Corcos boosted his knowledge while in Los Angeles by working in the kitchens of noted chefs such as Gino Angelini.

He never imagined his YouTube channel would be popular but soon the couple were receiving hundreds of emails congratulating them on their project and were encouraged to continue. The channel eventually ran for about five years.

Now based in Brooklyn, New York, Corcos has participated in both the Food Network New York City and Food Network South Beach Wine and Food Festivals since 2011 as a celebrity chef.

He has become involved too with food charities. While making an appearance on Food Network channel's Chopped in April 2013, he competed on behalf of the charity Feeding America and in 2013, Corcos and his family participated in the Live Below the Line Challenge, in which the family tried to feed themselves on $1.50 each per day, which is the equivalent of the poverty line in America.

In 2014, Corcos became a council member of the Food Bank For New York City and hosted a pop-up dinner series in 2014 where a large portion of the proceeds benefited the Food Bank.

Although married to an American and with two daughters born in the United States, Corcos still hankers after a return to Fiesole and the family farm, surrounded by vines and olive trees and hopes that the Food Network’s availability on Italian television may lead to opportunities to work in Italy.

Fiesole offers panoramic views across Florence

Travel tip:

Fiesole, a town of about 14,000 inhabitants situated in an elevated position about 8km (5 miles) northeast of Florence, has since the 14th century been a popular place to live for wealthy Florentines and even to this day remains the richest municipality in Florence.  Formerly an important Etruscan settlement, it was also a Roman town of note, of which the remains of a theatre and baths are still visible.  Fiesole's cathedral, built in the 11th century, is supposedly built over the site of the martyrdom of St. Romulus. In the middle ages, Fiesole was as powerful as Florence until it was conquered by the latter in 1125 after a series of wars.

A typical landscape in Tuscany's Chianti region

Travel tip:

The Tuscany countryside tends to be associated with Chianti country, the wine-growing area known and appreciated by visitors from across the world. It by no means occupies the whole of the region, although it is a large area.  The borders are not clearly defined but in general it extends over the provinces of Florence and Siena, covering all of the area in between, extending to the east toward the Valdarno and to the west to the Val d'Elsa. It is further defined as Chianti Fiorentino, which includes towns such as Barberino Val d’Elsa, Greve in Chianti, San Casciano in Val di Pesa and Tavarnelle in Val di Pesa, and Chianti Sienese, which includes Radda, Gaiole, Castellina and Castelnuovo Berardenga.

More reading:

How Gino D'Acampo rebuilt his life to become a star cook and TV presenter

The chef from Riccione and his American dream

Gennaro Contaldo's passion for Amalfi

Also on this day:

The Feast of Saint Giustina of Padua

1675: The birth of famed Venetian portrait painter Rosalba Carriera



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Blessed Fra Angelico – painter

Talented Friar became patron of Catholic artists

A detail from a Luca Signorelli fresco in Orvieto
cathedral, thought to represent Fra Angelico

The early Renaissance painter who became known as Fra Angelico died on this day in 1455 in Rome.

Fra Angelico is regarded as one of the greatest painters of the 15th century, whose works reflected his serene religious attitude.

He painted many altarpieces and frescoes for the Church and Priory of San Marco in Florence where he lived for about nine years.

In 1982, more than 500 years after his death, Fra Angelico was beatified by Pope John Paul II in recognition of the holiness of his life. In 1984, Pope John Paul II declared him ‘patron of Catholic artists’.

The artist was born Guido di Pietro at Rupecanina near Fiesole, just outside Florence, towards the end of the 14th century.

The earliest recorded document concerning him dates from 1417 when he joined a religious confraternity at the Carmine Church and it reveals that he was already a painter.

The first record of him as a Friar is dated 1423 and shows him to have been a member of the Dominican order.

The San Marco altarpiece in Florence is one of Fra
Angelico's most famous works

It is believed his first paintings were an altarpiece and a painted screen for the Carthusian Monastery in Florence, but these no longer exist.

Between 1418 and 1436 he lived at the convent of Fiesole where he painted frescoes and an altarpiece. A predella - platform - of the altarpiece is now in the National Gallery in London.

In 1439, while living at the convent of San Marco in Florence, he completed one of his most famous works, the San Marco altarpiece, which was unusual for its time as it showed the saints grouped in a natural way as if they were able to talk to each other. Paintings such as this became known as Sacred Conversations and were later executed by many other artists, including Bellini, Perugino and Raphael.

In 1445 Fra Angelico was summoned to Rome to paint the frescoes of the Chapel of the Holy Sacrament at St Peter’s. He moved to Orvieto in 1447 to paint works for the Cathedral and then went back to Rome to design frescoes for Pope Nicholas V, which were probably later painted by his assistants.

Fra Angelico returned to live in his old convent in Fiesole in 1449, but must have eventually gone back to Rome to do more work for the Vatican. He died in a Dominican Convent there in 1455 and was buried in the Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva.

Piazza Giotto is the central square of Vicchio

Travel tip:

Rupecanina, where Fra Angelico was born, is a hamlet of Vicchio, a town about 25 km (16 miles) north east of Florence. Many other Italian painters came from the area, including Giotto, who was believed to have been born in Colle di Vespignano, another hamlet of Vicchio, in about 1270.

The Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome

Travel tip:

Fra Angelico’s tomb, which was the work of Isaia da Pisa, is in the Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome because the artist died in the adjoining convent. He had painted a fresco in the cloister there, which has not survived.  The important Dominican Church is in Piazza Minerva, close to the Pantheon, and was built directly over an ancient temple. The church was consecrated in 1370 and the façade was designed by Carlo Maderno.

Also on this day:

1564: The death of Michelangelo

1967: The birth of footballer Roberto Baggio

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Guglielmo Libri – book thief

Nobleman stole more than 30,000 books and documents

Guglielmo Libri is thought to have stolen more
than 30,000 books, manuscripts and letters

The notorious 19^th century thief Guglielmo Libri, who stole tens of thousands of historic books, manuscripts and letters, many of which have never been found, was born on this day in 1803 in Florence.

A distinguished and decorated academic, Libri was an avid collector of historic documents whose passion for adding to his collections ultimately became an addiction he could not satisfy by legal means alone.

He stole on a large scale from the historic Laurentian Library in Florence but it was after he was appointed Chief Inspector of French Libraries in 1841 – he had been a French citizen since 1833 – that his nefarious activities reached their peak.

As the man responsible for cataloguing valuable books and precious manuscripts across the whole of France, Libri had privileged access to the official archives of many cities and was able to spend many hours in dusty vaults completely unhindered and unsupervised.

He was in a position to “borrow” such items as he required in the interests of research with no pressure to return them. Where the removal of a book or document was forbidden, he would smuggle them out under the huge cape that he insisted on wearing – on the grounds of supposedly poor health – even in the height of summer.

Although he began to arouse suspicion, it was not until 1848 that a warrant was issued in France for his arrest.  Tipped off, Libri had already fled to London, taking with him about 18 trunks containing more than 30,000 documents.

Some 72 letters written by Descartes were
thought to have been stolen by Libri

These included 72 letters written by the great French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes, as well as the Tours Pentateuch, a late sixth or early seventh-century illuminated Latin manuscript of the first five books of the Old Testament, which he stole from the Library of Tours.

With no extradition agreement existing between France and Britain at that time, Libri was thus able to evade justice, even though he was tried in absentia in 1850 and sentenced to 10 years’ jail.

Indeed, he lived a good life in London, mainly by selling books, often to members of the English nobility, or else at auction.

The Tours Pentateuch later became known as the Ashburnham Pentateuch after it was sold to the 4^th Earl of Ashburnham by Libri in 1847.  Two auction sales in 1861 are said to have netted him more than one million francs.

Born Count Guglielmo Libri Carucci dalla Sommaja, he was a precocious academic who began studying law at the University of Pisa at the age of 16 before switching to mathematics and being appointed professor of mathematical physics at the age of just 20.

He made many friends in Paris during a sabbatical visit in 1824 and when his involvement back in Italy with the secret revolutionary plotters known as the Carbonari led to the threat of arrest, it was to Paris that he escaped.

Libri's History of Mathematical Sciences
drew on stolen documents

He became a French citizen in 1833 and his academic stock continued to rise. He obtained a professorship at the Collège de France and in 1834 he was elected as assistant professor in the calculus of probabilities at the Sorbonne and elevated to the French Academy of Sciences.

Between 1838 and 1841, Libri wrote a four-volume tome entitled History of the Mathematical Sciences in Italy from the Renaissance of literature to the 17th Century, drawing from 1800 manuscripts and books by Galileo, Descartes, Leibniz and others which he claimed were in his personal collection. It was discovered later that many had been stolen from the Laurentian Library.

He cultivated contacts in high places to protect his reputation. His appointment as Chief Inspector of French Libraries, for example, came about through his friendship with the influential French Chief of Police, François Guizot.

Libri remained in England until 1868, when his declining health persuaded him to return to Italy.  He died the following year in Fiesole, just outside Florence, at the age of 66.

Although many of the huge number of items Libri stole have never been returned, having been forgotten about or left to gather dust in private libraries and storerooms, one of the missing Descartes letters, written in 1641 to Father Marin Marsenne, the priest and polymath who oversaw the publication of his Meditations on First Philosophy, turned up at Haverford College in Pennsylvania in 2010.

The Laurentian Library - the long building in the middle of
this picture - was fitted out to a design by Michelangelo

Travel tip:

The Laurentian Library – the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana – dates back to 1523, when the Medici pope Clement VII commissioned it to be built in a cloister of the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence, which is situated between the Duomo and Santa Maria Novella railway station. Home to some 11,000 manuscripts and 4,500 historic books, it was built to designs by Michelangelo in Mannerist style and is considered one of his greatest achievements, not only for elegance of its architectural features but for the innovative use for space to maximise the library’s capacity without detracting from its aesthetic beauty.

The remains of the Roman amphitheatre at Fiesole 

Travel tip:

Fiesole, a town of around 14,000 inhabitants, is situated about 8km (5 miles) northeast of Florence on a hill offering panoramic views. It was built on the site of an Etruscan city probably founded in the eighth or ninth century BC. In the middle ages it grew to be as powerful as Florence until it was conquered by the latter in 1125 after a series of wars. Among several notable sights is its 11^th century Romanesque Cathedral of St Romulus and many Roman remains, including those of an amphitheatre still used for open-air concerts during the summer.  Historically popular with wealthy Florentines as a place to build their villas, it still has the reputation of an upmarket residential area.

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Giovanni Michelucci - architect

Designer made mark with railway station and motorway church

Giovanni Michelucci 

The architect Giovanni Michelucci, whose major legacies include the Santa Maria Novella railway station in Florence, died on this day in 1990 in his studio just outside the Tuscan city at Fiesole.

Considered by many to be the 'father' of modern Italian architecture, he was only two days away from his 100th birthday.  He was still working and is said to have been inspecting progress on his latest project when he slipped and fell, later suffering a cardiac arrest.

Michelucci, who was born in Pistoia on January 2, 1891, is also remembered for the brilliantly unconventional church of San Giovanni Battista, with its tent-like curved roof, which forms part of a rest area on the Autostrada del Sole as it passes Florence.

The Santa Maria Novella station project for which he first won acclaim came after a collective of young architects known as the Tuscan Group, co-ordinated by Michelucci, beat more than 100 other entries in a national competition in the early 1930s to built a new station behind the church of the same name.

The linear design was loathed by conservatives but loved by modernists, although it could not be said to conform to the style identifiable as Fascist architecture in Italy at the time, which had echoes of classical Roman design, albeit without ornate decoration.

It met with the approval of Fascist leader Mussolini, nonetheless, who approved the design, and it came to be regarded subsequently as a masterpiece of rationalist architecture. The stone of its exterior blended with the historic colours of Florence, yet a spacious entrance hall and gallery with a thermolux and steel roof made it functional and modern.

Santa Maria Novella railway station in Florence

The station was built between 1932 and 1935, almost 30 years before Michelucci's second landmark work, which he undertook at the age of 73 after the highways authority commissioned him to design a church that would both honour the memory of those who died in the construction of the motorway and provide a 'parish for tourists', where travellers could break their journeys to worship.

The church, in concrete and stone, is built around a traditional 'cross' floor plan with tent-like vertical elements, rising to a height of 27.5 metres (90 feet), giving it a modern feel. The roof is of copper, oxidised to a blue-green colour on the outside and burnished blond on the inside, with marble, glass and bronze used for other interior features.

Michelucci came from a family which owned a craft iron workshop, which gave him his introduction to design. He graduated from the Higher Institute of Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts of Florence before teaching at the Institute of Architecture of Florence, where he could later become Dean.

During his military service in the First World War, he built his first architectural work, a chapel for soldiers on the eastern front in Casale Ladra, near Caporetto in what is now Slovenia.

In the early 1920s, Michelucci taught in Rome, the city where he married the painter Eloisa Pacini. He returned to Florence in 1928.

Michelucci's 'motorway' church of San Giovanni Battista

Other important works in Tuscany include a 1936 town plan for Pistoia, the classicist-style Palazzo del Governo in Arezzo the same year and the Borsa Merci in Pistoia (1950).

In Florence, he designed an urban plan for the Sorgane neighbourhood of Florence in 1955) and the Cassa di Risparmio of Florence in 1957.  The Inn of the Red Crawfish at the Pinocchio Park in Collodi (1963) is his, as is the skyscraper in Piazza Matteotti in Livorno (1966).

His biggest disappointments were the rejection of his plans for reconstruction of the Ponte Vecchio area after the Second World War II and for restoring the buildings around Piazza Santa Croce after the 1966 flood.

However, Michelucci did become involved with the reconstruction work necessitated by the Vajont Dam disaster in the mountains above Venice in 1963, in particular the village of Longarone, where he designed a memorial church.

Always an architect who wanted his buildings to benefit the people who used them, in his later years he concentrated almost entirely on what might be deemed social projects, designing churches, schools, hospitals, and prisons. He also devoted time and energy to setting up the Michelucci Foundation to support research into urban planning and modern architecture and to promote his own values and ideals.

Travel tip:

Florence's railway station was opened on February 3, 1848, to serve the railway lines to Pistoia and Pisa. It was initially called Maria Antonia in honour of Princess Maria Antonia of the Two Sicilies but was renamed after the church of Santa Maria Novella after the unification of Italy.  Nowadays, the station is used by 59 million people every year and is one of the busiest in Italy, with high speed lines to Rome and Bologna.

The 11th century cathedral of Fiesole

Travel tip:

Fiesole, situated in an elevated position about 8km (5 miles) north-east of Florence, has since the 14th century been a popular place to live for wealthy Florentines and even to this day remains the richest municipality in Florence.  Formerly an important Etruscan settlement, it was also a Roman town of note, of which the remains of a theatre and baths are still visible.  Fiesole's cathedral, built in the 11th century, is supposedly built over the site of the martyrdom of St. Romulus.

More reading:

Ulisse Stacchini's architectural legacy to Milan

Pier Luigi Nervi - from football stadiums to churches

How Marcello Piacentini's designs symbolised Fascist ideals

Also on this day:

New Year's Eve - the Festa di San Silvestro


(Picture credits: Motorway church by Luca Aless)

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