A recent e-mail from Francesca Balzan enquired: “Have you ever come across Luigi Borg de Balzan? He died in Florence in 1896 and seems to have amassed a babaw art collection.”
Luigi tried to convince Via Condotti that the Borg of Malta were actually the same family as the Borgia of Spain- Giovanni Bonello
My first instinct was to reply: sorry, who is the guy? But then a flash short-circuited what’s left of my memory. The name rang a bell, a very, but very, remote tinkle.
Then the penny dropped, with a loud clang. In one of the drawers under my father’s writing desk, I somehow remembered, lay an odd, rather faded portrait of a bearded man in gala uniform, with more stars on his chest than you would expect in a planetarium, and enough medals round his neck to drive Michael Phelps to depression. The photo, taken in a Florence studio, had a name to it: Il Cav. Comm. Luigi Borg de Balzan. Thanks, Francesca – and definitely worth having a closer look at.
Selective searches turned up some highly tantalising morsels about this curious personage, though they still refused to disclose a number of others. An Italian source, writing about the acquisition by the connoisseur Antonio Borgogna of some important works of art which had previously belonged to Borg de Balzan, says that the objects came “from the Borg de Balzan Museum in Florence, made up of the collections put together by Borg de Balzan displayed in his villa in Piazza Savonarola, a meeting place and a point of reference for artists, poets, painters and musicians of the city, presumably in the years between 1870 and 1890”.
The author adds: “Born in Malta, but naturalised French, before abandoning a diplomatic vocation to settle in Florence, Borg de Balzan had progressed through a brilliant consular career that had resulted in extensive travels and in the collection of works of art from many parts of Europe, especially from the north”.
And this source concluded that “this varied gallery of paintings, glassware, ceramics and other collectible objects, close to the tastes of Borgogna, was, in fact, very rich in Flemish and Dutch paintings which the collector from Vercelli (Borgogna) bought in large numbers”.
This Italian bio note records some first essentials about Borg de Balzan: he was Maltese, took up a highly successful diplomatic career, collected art and artefacts compulsively, and positioned himself strategically to become central to the social and cultural life of Florence in the late Victorian era. Someone definitely to reckon with.
But there was more to him than just that, some of it quite mysterious, like his having lived in the US for some 30 years. The writer Genevieve Grahame Grant, visiting Florence in 1887, includes him in her memoirs:
“Last Tuesday evening the Commandeur Borg de Balzan gave his last ball until after Lent. Monsieur Borg is a Maltese by birth, and his niece and her daughter who are visiting with him this winter are from la belle Paris, but having himself lived 30 years in America and his house been presided over by his ward, a lady of unmistakably American type, the Americans claim the Commandeur for a compatriot, and I think he rather likes to be considered such, for in Europe, if you are not a king, a queen or a prince of the royal blood, the next best thing is to be an American”.
Grahame Grant, delightfully jingoistic in her ill-hidden American vanity, throws the right sort of compassion at the British, condemned to melancholy when denied easy access to the royal presence: “‘Just fancy’ say our English friends, ‘those nasty, vulgar shop-keeping Americans being presented to our Queen and going to the Prince of Wales’s ball, when even we, private gentle people, cannot be admitted’”.
This candid American woman did not attempt to play down the extent to which Borg de Balzan’s palazzo in Piazza Savonarola had overwhelmed her:
“The Commandeur Borg de Balzan’s house is a palace of curiosities. Paintings of every period and every master, drawings, etchings, engravings of priceless value, statuary, bas-reliefs, carved woods, mosaics, old china, porcelains, everything that a connoisseur loves and a master produced”. Not the only one to be bowled over by the splendid displays put together by the enigmatic Maltese collector.
Contemporary chronicles preserve references to the opulent dances hosted by Borg de Balzan (they must have cost him the earth – and this extravagance may, but only in part, explain why he later died in distressed financial circumstances).
Listen to this one: “The ballroom is 80 feet in length, with galleries at the ends and surrounded by colonnades. Here the lovers of art, while viewing the dancing and chaperoning their daughters, can at the same time admire rare pictures, Sevres, Majolica, Faience and Ginori ,without at all interfering with the festivities of the evening.
“All the fashion and beauty of Florence were assembled on the last Tuesday of the carnival. The costumes were magnificent. One dress of white satin, embroidered with white jet, worn by an American young lady, was very beautiful and effective. The diamonds and the emeralds of the Princess Carolath were marvellous and her dress of white satin covered with point d’aiguille was quite superb”. These fulsome tributes to Borg de Balzan’s star guest almost certainly targeted Elizabeth, the former society queen remembered as “one of the most brilliant beauties of the Court of Berlin”.
Princess Carolath had, scandalously and to the unbounded delight of gossips, ditched her husband and eloped to Italy with Prince Herbert von Bismarck, son of the Chancellor, only to find herself, in turn, ditched by him, more predictably than ceremoniously. Broken-hearted but not crestfallen, she settled in Italy, her waning beauty propped by her unwaning vanity and her extravagance grudgingly subsidised by her rich Hatzfeldt relatives.
Grand gala carnival dances promoted predominantly, though not exclusively, frivolity, the existential ennui that goes with it and, most of all, a compulsion to show off. To counteract the negative social message of flaunted mega-wealth, Borg de Balzan organised a lottery “for the benefit of the poor”. At the end of the ball the Maltese host distributed, or more probably sold, raffle tickets – “some of the prizes generously presented by the rich consist of parures of diamonds and emeralds and necklaces of pearls. The possibilities contained in their tickets gave the recipients pleasant hopes and the novel idea was hailed as a happy one.”
Ostentation, flashiness, waste, shallowness, those were God-given rights one fought for relentlessly – but then Borg de Balzan also threw in a lottery for the relief of the destitute. Whatever socially-inspired pruritus the mindlessly privileged suffered from had somehow to be salved, and Commendatore Luigi knew how to go about paying his penny as conscience money to the deliberately unprivileged. A substantial file about Borg de Balzan stored in the Rome headquarters of the Order of Malta in Via Condotti provides us with many of the basic details regarding our man, together with a searing insight into his ambitions and compulsions to climb as briskly as he possibly could the steep society ladder.
Luigi was born in Valletta on November 30, 1812 (shortly before Malta formally became a British colony) and was baptised the following day in the parish church of Porto Salvo (St Dominic’s). His father, Giuseppe Borg, had married Maria Pollacco on November 28, 1810. No one, as far as I could discover, mentions anything about the boy’s education, his early years or when and why he left Malta, possibly never to return.
These papers also explain why he added the ‘de Balzan’ appendage to his real surname: to distinguish himself from the hordes of Wiġi Borg plebs who then crawled all over the island. In truth, the very last Balzan in his family had been a Margherita Balzan who had married Bartolomeo Borg a year before the Great Siege of 1565.
Rather far-fetched, it would seem at first sight, but then the logic of Luigi’s choice appears compelling: Margherita née Balzan had two sons, one the totally forgettable Giulio Borg (the direct ancestor of our Luigi), but the other was Don Filippo Borg, founder, vicar-general and benefactor of the Birkirkara canonicate – about the only mildly illustrious ancestor Luigi Borg de Balzan managed to haul up in the course of his unrelenting trawl for lustre through rather lacklustre family trees.
Our compatriot’s will reveals that in 1886 he had formally petitioned Umberto I, King of Italy, to become an Italian citizen and the monarch had graciously acceded to this request, on condition he would take the prescribed oath of loyalty to acquire Italian nationality. The following year he had also proceeded to change his name formally from Borg to Borg de Balzan, and this faux patrician addition had been duly recorded in the public registry of Florence.
The obese Roman file came about after the Order of Malta had conferred on Luigi the honour of Knight of Magistral Grace in 1869, a rather low rank in the chivalric pecking order (no pun). What, only Magistral Grace? Luigi went all out, manning the heaviest artillery, to force the Order to reconsider and award him a promotion.
On January 14, 1870, he formally entreated the regent in Rome to be appointed Knight of Devotion. As a fallback, should the Sacred Council of the Order consider insufficient his qualifications for that higher grade, he begged to be at least authorized, by special dispensation, to wear all the same the uniform and the insignia he was not entitled to (these pertained exclusively to the more elite class of Knights of Devotion). Rare, almost endearing, cheek.
Had Borg de Balzan cultivated his studies of history as diligently as he did his social climbing strategies, he might have avoided shooting himself in the foot- Giovanni Bonello
The petitioner buttressed his claim by filing a truly impressive mass of documents, to demonstrate how prominent a role his ancestors had always played in the civic affairs of Malta and how close to the Order they had been when the Knights of St John ruled the island. In support he presented 52 family trees (no less) and a number of certificates and attestations, all authenticated by Notary Vincenzo Napolitano Souchet and verified by the consulate of the Holy See in Malta, in the person of Franco Lauron.
Putting to practical use his more creative wishful thinking, Luigi tried to convince Via Condotti that the Borg of Malta were actually the same family as the Borgia of Spain and of Rome. Overlooking Pope Borgia’s barely overlookable track record of infamy, Luigi rather fancied that horrid Pontiff as his illustrious grand-uncle, and the Pope’s pretty, if mischievous, daughter as Auntie Lucrezia. In all this Luigi was being anything but ingenious – his petition had to be handled and decided on by H.E. the Balì Fra Alessandro Borgia, then the regent Grand Master of the Order, and a real Borgia of impeccable lineage for a change. Like the true hard-nosed aristocrat that he was, the regent must have cringed dealing with Luigi’s impudent attempts to throw the faultlessly plebeian Borgs of Malta in the same genetic cauldron as his ancestors, the haughty, if debauched, Borgias of Rome.
Some snippets from Borg de Balzan’s long petition are worth recording. His father Giuseppe, he claims, had been personally tutored by the Abbé Breuvard, chaplain of Grand Master de Rohan, and had been the only one, among all Maltese children, allowed by Comm. Striker (Stritier?), the director of the Grand Master’s boy pages, to mix with those noble cadet knights. And even, in days of great festivities, to enter the paggeria, the house of the pages, out of bounds to all other commoners.
Again, quite disingenuous of Borg de Balzan to remind the Order who his father’s teacher had been – if he believed that by mentioning Breuvard he was scoring points, the results he obtained were certainly the opposite.
The Abbé Breuvard had taken a leading role to ensure the expulsion of the Knights from Malta; he had been one of the main conspirators responsible for the Order’s loss of the island when he and his fellow Jacobins betrayed the fortress to Bonaparte. Had Borg de Balzan cultivated his studies of history as diligently as he did his social climbing strategies, he might have avoided shooting himself in the foot.
Even more admirable, according to Luigi, was the fact that when, on one occasion, some French knights set about producing the play Athalie, the 1691 masterpiece of Jean Racine, relevant to the circumstances of the time (the French Revolution?), they had selected the boy Giuseppe, his father, to play the part of Joas, “a choice as unusual as it was honourable”.
Voltaire, in a reckless mood for hyperbole, considered Athalie “the greatest triumph of the human mind”.
(To be continued)