Born in Velletri in as Carolina Carlesimo, Juana Romani ended her life in a room at the psychiatric clinic in Suresnes, near Paris. A figure with a tragic destiny, Juana Romani became the best-known Italian painter in late 19th-century Paris : her dream, similar to that of the Symbolists and Pre-Raphaelites, was that of an absolute art , translated into portraits of women embodying nostalgia and eroticism.
Her painting, heir to a pictorial tradition linked to the antiquity and marked by the influence of her masters from Jean-Jacques Henner to Ferdinand Roybet , stages strong and sensual female figures drawn from biblical history, theater, opera, history and art history. An artist with a fictional destiny, a talented painter whose career spans less than twenty years, Juana Romani embodies a singular path of a woman artist.
The exhibition, curated by Emmanuelle Trief-Touchard, Marion Lagrange and Gabriele Romani, features nearly a hundred works including paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, prints, period newspapers and clothes from French museums and private collections. Ferdinand Roybet, Portrait of Juana Romani ca. Voluntary and independent, the young Juana seduced the old Prix de Rome winners who found in her the grace and wild expressiveness of a youthful face and body that embodied a kind of quintessential Italian.
At the same time Victor Peter, a pupil of the master, produced an allantica medallion depicting a Juana Romani in the natural state of mind with an astonishing freshness that breaks with the hieratic appearance of the official portraits. The nymph motif also seemed to inspire painter Ferdinand Roybet, who chose her to embody a Diana pursuing the young Actaeon transformed into a stag. A figure in the Italian community in Paris, Juana Romani sinserted herself into the environment of Italian models within a network already linked to Parisian ateliers and academies.
Close to Jean-Jacques Henner and Carolus-Duran , the two most important masters of her career as a model and then painter, Juana Romani probably frequented latelier des dames. An assiduous reader, she trained as a self-taught artist, letting herself be influenced by encounters, travels, readings and the history of art, attracting the admiration of critics and the public. Exhibiting at the Salon beginning in , she established herself during the s as an independent and talented artist, recognized in France and then in Italy.
