Ada Harrison's biography of Kristina, part 23

Source:

Christina of Sweden, page 88, by Ada Harrison, 1929

https://books.google.com/books?id=xJvrtq4DCv0C&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=memoires+concernant+christine+1760&source=gbs_navlinks_s

The biography:

But the queen's greatest enthusiasm in art seems to have been for medals, a passion not difficult to understand when we remember that all the medals she collected bore the head of Christina. She never missed an opportunity for having a medal struck. She employed Carlo Fontana and other first-rate workers in bronze, and so left us not only a variety of likenesses of herself but some fine works of art. She had a fancy for putting a cryptic design and inscription on the reverse, after the fashion of the academies with their mottoes and devices, and for setting scholars to guess her meaning. On one occasion she had MAKELOS engraved about a phoenix on the reverse of her usual portrait. This apparently Greek inscription baffled everybody until Christina revealed that it was nothing more than the Swedish for 'matchless.' The queen professed to hate flattery in her likenesses, but like every other member of her sex she submitted to it. A medal of the year 1681 compares curiously with a drawing of the same date. The medal shows her curled and triumphant, with something of the look of a Flavian empress. The drawing shows a little[,] lop-sided, uncorseted old woman in particularly unheroic costume.

'In 1681', the Baron de Bildt wrote of Christina, 'she was in her fifty-fifth year. In the seventeenth century folk aged quicker than they do to-day, and Christina was far from being well-preserved. She was a little old woman with short hair turning grey, a big nose and a double chin, slightly bearded. A plain skirt, a big blouse with a wide waistband placed low to support a fulness that now exceeded her height, a man's cravat and flat shoes — this was her ordinary costume.'

Above: Kristina.