Louisa Grace Bartolini
1818–1865 · British
The story
Louisa Grace Bartolini is remembered first as a poet, and she reached the Uffizi by a side door. Born in Bristol in 1818 into an Irish Catholic family, she was raised on languages, and after her family settled in Tuscany she began writing verse in Italian so fluent that admirers called her the Irishwoman who wrote poetry in Tuscan.
From Pistoia, the small city west of Florence where she lived, she translated English and American poets into Italian and kept a salon that drew leading writers of a newly unifying Italy, among them the young Giosuè Carducci, later a Nobel laureate.
She painted as well, and it is a self-portrait of 1862 that earned her a place in the gallery's famous collection of artists' own faces. She had married a Pistoiese engineer, Francesco Bartolini, in 1860, and she died in Pistoia in 1865, at the age of 47.
