Among Canada’s numerous visual artists of Italian heritage, Sveva Caetani is probably the least known. Yet, her body of work is significant, defined by a visual and thematic complexity that defies categorization. Like many artists, Sveva Caetani’s life was marked by emotional and physical challenges which she expressed in her art. Her father, Leone Caetani, was descended of Italian nobility, and the family’s fortunes, at least during Sveva’s early life, were assured. The Caetani family immigration story, which brought Sveva and her family to Canada, is also not typical of the circumstances that caused hundreds of thousands of Italian nationals to emigrate before and after World War I. For Leone, the move to Vernon was an opportunity to “rusticate” in beautiful scenery, but the lack of money doomed them to stay.
Sveva Ersilia Giovanella Maria Fabiani Caetani di Sermoneta was born in Rome on August 6, 1917 and died in Vernon, British Columbia, on April 27, 1994, at the age of 77. These geographical settings were the poles of her existence and shaped her creative life. Her father Leone Caetani – Duke of Sermoneta and Prince of Caetani (the Caetani name goes back over 1000 years), her mother Ofelia Fabiani – a dancer and singer 27 years younger than Leone, and Sveva arrived in Vernon in August 1921, ostensibly to start a new life. Sveva was four years old. The couple was not married, which meant that Sveva was “illegitimate.” Leone was still married, unhappily so, to Vittoria Colonna (whose family also traced its lineage to the Middle Ages).
Leone moved his putative family to Canada in order to legitimize his daughter, since he could not obtain a divorce in Italy, and he did not want either Ofelia or Sveva to suffer from the stigma that such a union was tainted with at the time. In addition to being an Islamic scholar, Leone had also served as a Socialist member of the legislature. Opposed to Benito Mussolini, he feared retribution.
Sveva lived in Vernon for almost her entire life, except for trips to Europe with her parents in the 1920s. She was privately educated by governesses and tutors. In 1929-1930, she studied art at l’Académie Ranson in Paris for six months, and she was privately tutored by artist André Petroff in Monte Carlo. She attended Crofton House School in Vancouver between 1930 and 1932. The American stock market crash of 1929 wiped out most of Leone’s wealth, which ended the frequent trips to Europe. Sveva also withdrew from Crofton House School. Leone’s death of throat cancer in 1935 left a financial muddle. At the age of 18 Sveva took on the management of the family finances, but she was not good at it. She struggled with money to the end of her life. Her works did not sell and she gifted many paintings to friends.
“The Bell Tower,” 1980. Watercolour, 73 X 53 cm. Caetani Cultural Centre Collection. Sveva begins her journey on a train in the mountains, the destination, an iconic bell tower representing Italy. The stylized train appears to move through the heart of the mountains towards Italy and Sveva’s past. But she depicts the mountains of Baluchistan (today situated between Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan), conquered by the Arabs in the seventh century and converted to Islam – thus representing her father Leone metaphorically.
Afraid that her daughter might abandon her, the emotionally dependent Ofelia kept her a prisoner in their home, which they shared with Ofelia’s secretary, confidante and general housekeeper Miss Juul. Sveva was not allowed to paint. However, she was allowed to read anything she wanted, and she did. Her readings enriched her life and shaped her art. Ofelia died in 1960, which proved a liberation for Sveva. She returned to school and completed a teaching diploma with a major in art at the University of Victoria in 1972. She started to work as a teacher in Lumby; and she began to paint. Her medium was watercolour, developing a dry brush technique similar to that of Persian miniaturists. From 1978-1989 she worked on a major series which she titled Recapitulation, comprised of 56 paintings. She gifted the collection to the Alberta Art Foundation in 1987 to ensure that all the paintings remained together. In 2021, it was repatriated to the Caetani Cultural Centre, the historic family home that Sveva bequeathed to the City of Vernon upon her death. A small gallery exhibits about 15 paintings at a time due to their large size.
While many artists begin to create in early life, Sveva’s artistic production began relatively late. She did not begin the Recapitulation series until she was 60 and, then her production was prodigious. The book Caetani Recapitulation: A Journey – which is in effect an exhibit of her work curated by the artist herself – was published in 1995, one year after her death, by her protégée, the photographer and artist Heidi Thompson under her own imprint, Coldstream Books. To ensure that the viewer/reader had a basic understanding of the works, Sveva supplied textual and poetic explanations as well as end-notes and references. She was intentional in her sequencing of works to conform to a narrative that she wished to share. Dante’s Divina Commedia served as one “shaping” narrative – the narrator/hero’s journey into Hell, Purgatory and Heaven guided by a “spirit” guide – in the case of Dante, Virgil; in the case of Sveva, her father Leone.
Sveva had encyclopedic knowledge of subjects that interested her. The catalogue of her personal collection included over 700 books (she had gifted another 150 to 180 to the University of Victoria). In the Caetani Cultural Centre, about 100 books are studies of individual artists. But there is also a significant number relating to individual periods in art history, world-wide in scope. The latest acquisitions date to the early 1990s just before her death.
“Triptych,” 1978. Watercolour, 72 x 46 cm. Caetani Cultural Centre Collection. The three figures representing Loss, Defeat and Disease are emblematic of generic and universal human suffering. However, this painting is also a personal statement representing the sorrows of her family and the disease of the bones that was inherited by many members of her paternal family, many of whom were over six-foot tall.
Her collections also included works on mysticism, psychoanalysis, the rise and fall of civilizations, as well as contemporary culture, as is evident in her notes to the Recapitulation series. There is also a number of books relating to technique and the teaching of art – to be expected in the collection of a woman who taught art. Others focus on watercolour, which was her medium of choice, including some on Mughal miniatures, which were watercolours on vellum or paper. She also had a book on Walt Disney cartoons; her interests in the visual arts were wide-ranging.
Her extensive readings included paths to enlightenment such as Jewish mysticism and the psycho-analytical Jungian path. She was also exposed through her readings to the “artificial paradises” of psychedelic drugs preached by Carlos Castaneda and Timothy Leary, which moved the exploration of enlightenment from the séances of earlier generations to a much more prosaic chemical base (though there is a certain irony in that an earlier branch of chemistry, alchemy, had inspired spiritual theories of the universe as early as the Middle Ages).
In artistic terms, her works span roughly one hundred years: from Symbolism to Surrealism and beyond; from Tolkien’s mythopoeic fantasy to Marvel comic representations of good and evil. To take these complex ideas and attempt to represent them in visual terms was ambitious.
The art world during Sveva’s lifetime, both academics and practitioners, was generally not sympathetic to her work. Writing for Woman’s Art Journal in Autumn 1997, Carolyn W. McHardy, Professor of Art History at Okanagan University College, Kelowna, gave Recapitulation A Journey a negative review, noting: “In her writings the trilingual Caetani seems worldly and sophisticated, drawing not only from canonical texts of the Western tradition (Dante, the Bible, Goethe, Poe, and Rilke), but also from mythology, Hinduism, and the literature of mysticism.” She continues:
Her paintings, however, are problematic. Many are technically assured and reveal Caetani’s familiarity with European movements of the early part of the century such as Futurism. Other images, however, with their excessive prettiness or their reliance on visual tropes that have lost their impact through overexposure, are less interesting; the transparent body with its forest of veins, the opaque, fragmented body as archaeological remnant, a distorted picture plane to signify imagined or psychic states.
The Spoiler: Aeshma, 1978. Watercolour, 71 by 54 cm. Caetani Cultural Centre Collection. The artist returns to the Old World Zoroastrian religion for a demon that represents wrath. Aeshma is represented as a cartoon-like figure made of stone blocks who lashes out at other residents of the Inferno, as the spirits of Leone and a shocked Sveva (with her hands covering her mouth) look on from the upper left quadrant of the painting. The cartoon figures in this and subsequent paintings show the influence of American comic books.
The Recapitulation Series
Sveva Caetani claimed that the idea for the series came to her suddenly and attributed the work to inspiration. The paintings got progressively larger as Sveva became sure of her themes; for example, “Makimono of the Ninth” is over four metres across.
In an interview with Barbara Hartley in 1983, Sveva stated, “Most people are used to images … the surrealism of Salvador Dali … limp watches … pianoforte with breasts, or something like that … and they laugh at it, they don’t really take the symbolism very seriously. My symbolism has always been serious, and therefore, people find it frightening. While conceiving a series of visual works, she notes in Caetani Recapitulation: A Journey:
I began by writing an outline or sequence of episodes for the paintings entitled Recapitulation, or the recounting of my experiences and perspectives on life. I chose for my model Dante Alighieri, the medieval poet and visionary who decided in mid-life to make the greatest of all recapitulations, and scour Creation itself in his master-work, The Divine Comedy. This was his mental and spiritual journey through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, ending at the foot of the throne of Him whose . . . love moves the sun and the other stars.
“From the Abyss,” 1979. Watercolour, 56 x 76 cm. Caetani Cultural Centre Collection. In this cartoon-like painting, cruelty is in the figure of a man metamorphosing and caught in a half-man/half-beast state. His appetite is consuming his humanity. His head is a stylized skull with empty eye sockets and a gigantic mouth. A “cobra-like” snake is linked to the shape Satan took in the Garden of Eden to tempt Eve. Both beasts prey on phantom figures of men. The phantasms of Sveva and her father look on in horror as they pass the cavern in which they are housed and the wall around them is blood red.
The italicized phrase comes at the end of the “Paradiso” section of the Divina Commedia, when the pilgrim Dante encounters God and is allowed a vision of the Universe in its unity. Sveva differentiates herself from Dante, noting that his world was that of the late 13th century in a culture that was “dominantly Latin,” “Christian” and “controlled by the papacy.” Though she does not state this, the society in which she lived, in contrast, was, largely secular with a myriad of belief systems that individuals could pick and choose from to create their own world view. This is, in fact, what she did.
“Barak for the Skies,” 1982. Watercolour, 73 x 53 cm. Caetani Cultural Centre Collection. The viewer is given emotional relief from the darkness and brutality depicted in the previous paintings. While the sky is dark, lines of white light create an image of Mohammed’s horse, Barak (from the Semitic root B-R-K meaning “blessed” or “burāq) ). The fabled horse carried Mohammed to Paradise, but Sveva chooses only to represent the horse and not the rider. Sveva pictures herself as grown-up, contemplating the immense heavens with her father.
The framework of the Recapitulation series is an imaginative journey into the underworld, not only that of Dante’s masterwork, La Divina Commedia, but also other journeys into dark worlds represented in fantasy fiction (such as Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings) and into the subconscious in the Jungian process of individuation. The Divine Comedy was part of Sveva’s “imaginative” inheritance from the Caetani family. The family owned a 14th or early 15th century edition of the work annotated by Italian humanist philosopher Marsilio Ficino (her uncle Gelasio Caetani produced an edition in 1930). From his hospital bed in 1935, her father had sent her a telegram telling her to read Dante.
In the Recapitulation series, Sveva’s beloved father takes on the role of guide. Sveva recounts parallel journeys – that of her father, who she presents as a Christ-like figure betrayed by his peers, and her own solitary journey.
What is Sveva’s achievement? In visual terms, she has left a compelling body of work that is both challenging and uplifting. In psychological terms, she goes through a “dark night of the soul” and achieves what was, for her, a state of enlightenment. She uses all of her knowledge of commentators on the human condition throughout the ages as signs and guide posts throughout her journey. She also draws on her extensive knowledge of the visual arts and, on occasion, paints an homage to someone that she found particularly inspiring. Recapitulation is thus a masterwork in both visual art and the written word.
Sveva’s mastery of the watercolour medium is complete and the scale of some of the works challenges the limitations of the medium. The Recapitulation series demonstrates the evolution of Sveva’s artistic style that is both representational and symbolic. She was extremely knowledgeable about art history and created her own style and drew, on occasion, on the techniques of other artists, some of whom she named and others can be inferred. She belongs not only in the canon of Canadian artists (particularly in the under-represented area of women artists) but also world art.
“The Razor’s Path,” 1984. Watercolour, 86 x 91 cm. Caetani Cultural Centre Collection. It is as if the “phantom Sveva” has slipped into her “real” body, and it is a frail one. She has diabetes and arthritis, and falls have meant confinement to a wheelchair. Thus, she chooses to represent herself from the knees down. She borrows from “the razor’s edge” found in the Katha Upanishad, a Hindu sacred work that outlines ways in which to achieve ultimate reality and spiritual maturity. Western religious tradition also gives us Ockham’s razor, derived from the fourteenth century Franciscan theologian and philosopher William of Ockham, who emphasized simplicity, using the metaphor of the razor to “shave away” uncertainties. In the painting, the razor’s edge is a tightrope over hell. The journey’s end for Sveva is thus not an easy path and she faces it alone.
Sveva was a consummate artist who used her own life and experience to throw light on the human condition. Her imagery and ideas are very contemporary and are in a range of material currently found in galleries and on the Internet. Her art was outside of the Modernist traditions current during the period in which she created her masterwork but, the art world at the beginning of the 20th century is much more diverse and ranges from representational works to abstraction and multimedia. She was not an “academic” painter and that is to her credit. Her work is “ripe” for re-discovery and for the development of new audiences.
Excerpt from a paper presented at the Biennial Conference of the Association of Italian-Canadian Writers in Toronto on September 28, 2024.
Adriana A. Davies has worked as a writer, editor, curator, fine and decorative arts specialist, and cultural executive director. She holds a PhD in Literature and was science editor of The Canadian Encyclopedia. She is a recipient of the Order of Canada. Her memoir, My Theatre of Memory: A Life in Words, was published by Guernica in 2023.
For further reading:
Adriana A. Davies, “Sveva Caetani’s Recapitulation Series: From Medieval Mysticism to the Space Age,” BC Review.
Vitelli, Pietro. Sveva Catetani: Il Viaggio nell’anima dell’ultima dei Caetani di Sermoneta. Fondazione Roffredo Caetani Onlus, Latina, 2020. (394 pp, in Italian)
“126-year-old North Okanagan mansion opens to public for the first time,” CBC News online.
“A century before Meghan and Harry, this Italian noble family sought refuge in B.C. — and stayed,” CBC Radio online.
