Some Notes on the ‘Painted Life’ of Mary Ward

Extract

MARY WARD, foundress of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (I.B.V.M.) and so indirectly of the Loreto nuns, was born in 1585 and died in 1645. In addition to some autobiographical writings in English and Italian, there are a significant number of Mary Ward's letters preserved. Early lives were written by Winefrid Wigmore in English (there is a seventeenth century manuscript of this in Loreto college, Manchester), by Pageti in Italian in 1662, by Bissel in Latin in 1667 or ‘68 and in German by Lohner in 1689. The Pageti and Lohner Mss. are in the Institute's archives at Nymphembourg, but in addition to these documentary sources the Institute possesses at Augsburg a remarkable collection of fifty large canvases called ‘The Painted Life’. As a series of paintings on the life of a single individual from this period these would seem to be almost unique. There is a short cycle by Rubens on Marie de’ Medici, and some baroque series on the lives on the saints in Roman churches. But there does not seem to be anything comparable to this ‘Painted Life’ from the seventeenth century. Some account of it will therefore be of interest both to the historian and the art critic and, since certain incidents in Mary Ward's life are alluded to in connection with the paintings, a brief outline-biography is provided by way of introduction.