Exhibiting a consummate artist’s work

Sveva Caetani: From Old to New World and Back
by Adriana A. Davies

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Introduction

As Sveva Caetani lay dying on April 27, 1994 in the Vernon Jubilee Hospital at the age of 77, her body twisted in pain as a result of the inherited nerve disease (Marfans Disease, a disorder affecting the skeleton, eyes, heart, and blood vessels) that plagued her family, she reflected on her accomplishments. Her beloved Recapitulation Series of paintings was safely housed in the vaults of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts (formerly the Alberta Art Foundation) in Beaver House in Edmonton. Her friends Vanessa and Keith Alexander, who was a Member of the Alberta Legislature, used their political influence to get the gift of her work accepted by then Minister of Culture Mary LeMessurier. This was enormously satisfying since no British Columbia institution was interested in accepting them. In addition, in 1985, the Foundation saw to it that Sveva was listed in the Artists in Canada database maintained by the National Gallery. Also in motion was the gifting of her beloved home on Pleasant Valley Road to the municipality of Greater Vernon to create an artist-in-residence facility.

The text that Sveva had painstakingly-crafted in both prose and poetry (with scholarly footnotes and endnotes) that explained the motivation behind the Series, the sources of her visions (including Dante’s Divina Commedia), and even painters who had inspired her was ready to go to press. She trusted her protégé Heidi Thompson to do this. Heidi edited the volume and inserted all of the photographs that she had taken of the series as well as stunning portraits of Sveva. She even created her own press – Coldstream Books – to publish it. The beautiful art book titled Caetani Recapitulation: A Journey came out in 1995 and won the City of Vancouver Book Prize.

What remained undone was an exhibit presenting all of the works. Sveva wanted an exhibit in Canada, her home since the age of four, and in Italy, her place of birth and the ancestral homeland of the illustrious Caetani family who had resided there for about 1,100 years. While the AFA had created travelling exhibits that went to various locations in Alberta and BC, in 1991, the Italian Cultural Institute brought an exhibit to Vancouver (dedicated to her father) and, in 1993, another exhibit went to Toronto and Ottawa. They were mounted by the AFA and supported by the Italian consular service. These exhibits only displayed about two-thirds of the works. The completed series comprised 47 works, some of which were multiples for a total of 56 paintings; they required a large gallery space to be shown.

The 1991 exhibit attracted some national media attention including that of CBC radio broadcaster and media personality Vicki Gabereau. The interview focused on Sveva’s aristocratic past and also the 25-years of imprisonment in the family home as a result of her mother Ofelia Fabiani’s mental illness. Sveva hit the “big time” when she was interviewed by CBC’s Ann Pollock in 1994 just before her death. The long-running series was launched in 1965 as “The Best Ideas You’ll Hear Tonight” (later shortened to “IDEAS”), and has won numerous national and international awards. The Sveva presentation is described as a “sound feature” with some narration by prominent Canadian media personality Lister Sinclair and was broadcast on March 15, 1994. Her friend Anna Maria Zampieri Pan, editor of the newspaper L’Eco d’Italia in Vancouver, wrote a number of articles about Sveva and also saw to it that an article appeared in an Italian newspaper.

For the next over 30 years, her life has been of greater interest than her art with the “prisoner of Vernon” narrative prevailing. The fact that she was the “love child” of Leone Caetani, Duke of Sermoneta and Prince of Teano, and that he had gone to Canada to take out citizenship so that he could adopt her and give her his name was also part of the personal narrative. The fact that Sveva had ostensibly only found out about this after her mother’s death was also a part of the victim narrative. Leone’s Socialist beliefs and opposition to Mussolini was also part of the story of the family’s suffering.

The last exhibit, which included studies for the Recapitulation Series and some juvenilia, opened in the Art Gallery of Greater Vernon in 2003 and then travelled to the McPherson Library Gallery at the University of Victoria. This was inspired by the research done by Karen Avery, who began a Master’s thesis on the artist in 2000 (completed in 2005). The exhibit catalogue, edited by Catherine Harding of the University of Victoria (a specialist in art history), was titled Caetani di Sermoneta An Italian Family in Vernon, 1921-1994. The exhibit focused on studies for the Series and included some juvenilia.

Like sleeping beauty, the works lay dormant until 2021 when Dr. Sherry L. Price and artist aj jaeger, respectively, chair and vice chair of the Caetani Cultural Centre, decided to get the paintings back. A society had been established in 2008 by the municipality to run the cultural centre in her home and, in 2013, gallery professional Susan Brandoli was hired to run the Centre. Price and jaeger made a compelling case to the AFA and the paintings returned to Vernon in September 2021 to be stored in a secure and environmentally-controlled room in the Centre. This was a stipulation of the AFA, which also required electrical upgrades and an alarm system to make the house secure. A September 4, 2021 press release quoted Price as follows: “The Caetani Cultural Centre Society is very excited to have this iconic work back in Vernon where it belongs. The timing is perfect as we are finally ready to open the house to the public.” The COVID pandemic prevented this from happening but eventually several displays were created by the Centre for the small gallery in the grounds of the stately Craftsman-style home.

Towards a Rome Exhibit

In 2023, two individuals became interested in Sveva’s work and initiated events that would result in a rebirth in interest in the artist, and new scholarship and exhibits. One was Alessandro Giuli, President of MAXXI, the National Museum of Modern and 21^st Century Art in Rome; and the other was myself. In October 2023, I visited the Caetani Cultural Centre and saw her works again and was reminded of my meeting with her in January 1987 when the AFA exhibited 31 of her works at the Provincial Museum of Alberta from January to March to celebrate the acquisition of the collection.

Having been re-introduced to her work on my visit to the Caetani Centre in October 2023 and discovering that the Board and staff of the Centre did not know the “Edmonton story,” I began research in the Archives of the AFA and wrote an 80-page paper that I sent to aj jaeger, who was now the chair. The Board was very grateful for this new scholarship and invited me to present at the Centre in June 2024. I drew on my paper to produce an article that was published by The British Columbia Review titled “Sveva Caetani’s Recapitulation Series (see https://thebcreview.ca/2024/06/17/2201-caetani-davies/), which appeared on June 17, 2024. I also proceeded to write an entry on Sveva for the Canadian Women Artists History Initiative database compiled by Concordia University.

Giuli was fascinated by the ancient Roman past and the cult of the Magna Mater (the Great Mother Goddess). His book titled Venne la Magna Madre (The Great Mother Comes, 2012) is an expression of his fascination with the myths and legends of Italy’s Roman past. According to Laisha Rosnau, the Centre received a research request on June 12, 2023 relating to Sveva Caetani’s “art archive” from Giuli’s staff.  He also was intrigued by Sveva’s father Leone Caetani, who was said to have been the grand master of an esoteric society that performed various initiatory rites. One rite was performed at the beginning of the First World War to determine the outcome for Italy. It was said that Leone wrote under the pseudonym “Ottaviano.” Not only Giuli but also other prominent figures in Italy believed that Sveva’s work channelled her father’s esoteric beliefs and wished to see the works exhibited in Italy. This is not unusual for a country whose founding members were members of the Masonic Order.

No doubt, Giuli had read the two volumes written by retired civil servant and man-of-letters Pietro Vitelli: Sveva Caetani. Il viaggio nell’anima dell’ultima dei Caetani di Sermoneta (Sveva Caetani, The soul voyage of the last Caetani of Sermoneta, 2020) and Sveva Caetani di Sermoneta e Dante Alighieri (2023). Vitelli’s work was sponsored by the Roffredo Caetani Foundation in Rome. Vitelli sees the Recapitulation Series as a “pictorial journey” of Sveva’s life and further affirms that it is a “spiritual” journey like that of Dante. Vitelli visited Vernon to do research for his first volume and deposited some materials in the Vernon Archives as well as consulting with Susan Brandoli, then Executive Director of the Caetani Centre. Brandoli later visited the various Caetani properties and met with representatives of the Caetani Foundations before her retirement from the Centre in January 2023.

Thus, interest in Sveva’s life and works was building and the next phase began with Giuli’s interest and my own. His appointment as Minister of Culture put the exhibit on fast track and he appointed Chiara Ianeselli as curator in fall 2024.  Based on my own knowledge of the collections, I was pleased to serve as a resource for her with respect to the holdings in the Vernon Archives, Art Gallery and Caetani Centre. By January 2025, I had a solid draft of my book titled Sveva Caetani’s Recapitulation Series: From Medieval Mysticism to the Space Age, and shared it with her. In March 2025, Giuli sent Ianeselli to Vernon to see the paintings and determine what archival material should accompany them to Rome. I was pleased to meet her there (we both stayed in the historic home on Pleasant Valley Road) and I assisted her in her research. At my invitation, we were joined by Consul General Paolo Miraglia Del Giudice, who came from Vancouver on March 8 to see the works and to meet with Executive Director Laisha Rosnau to explore how the consulate could assist the Centre in mounting the exhibit. We also discussed development of a travelling exhibit to tour in Canada once the paintings returned from Rome.

Forma e Frammento (Form and Fragment) opened in Rome on October 3, 2025. “Team Sveva,” comprising Board members, staff and volunteers of the Caetani Centre (18-strong) and me were there. The exhibit curated by Ianeselli follows the narrative presented by Sveva in the book Caetani Recapitulation: A Journey, which includes nine sections modelled on Dante’s journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Ianeselli created a series of rooms that “house” the paintings based on the sections outlined by Sveva in the book within the large gallery located in an older building across from the Modernist main art museum (MAXXIextra).

Sveva, thus, controls the exhibit narrative and her words (text, audio, and video) are accessed through multimedia stations. In addition, mid-point in the exhibit, a computer plays on a loop a video interview done by Barbara Hartley at Sveva’s last exhibit in Vernon at the Topham Brown Art Gallery (later the Vernon Art Gallery) in 1988. Laisha observed at the opening: “Italy was central to Sveva’s family history and personal identity – reflected in her memories, writing, and artwork. Hosting her first international show in the country of her birth is a remarkable tribute to her legacy.” Ianeselli further noted: “Sveva transforms isolation into knowledge. In that forced solitude, study becomes her instrument for resistance and painting the highest form of freedom.” Culture Minister Giuli, because of ill health was not able to attend the opening but attended later. In the preface to the exhibit catalogue, he notes: “The story of Sveva Caetani, a multifaceted and fascinating figure, belongs to this rare category of biographies which illuminate the deepest folds of the human soul and cultural imagination. Hers is the journey of a woman who knew how to turn loneliness into art, sorrow into knowledge, memory into vision.”

I returned to Rome to take part in a conference on Sveva and the Caetanis at MAXXI on November 13 and presented a paper titled “Becoming Sveva Caetani:  A Recapitulation Journey.” Some content from this presentation appears in the article titled “Orsmby, Heriot, Caetani: Extraordinary Women of the Okanagan” that appeared in The British Columbia Review in the October 31, 2025 issue (see https://thebcreview.ca/2025/10/31/2716-davies-ormsby-heriot-caetani/).

While in Rome, I also was able to do some research in the family archives at Palazzo Caetani that confirmed material that I had found in the Vernon Archives about a traumatic incident that occurred while Leone, Ofelia, and Sveva were in Paris in spring 1930. Sveva ran away with her governess to escape from the battles between her parents (Ofelia was desperately afraid that her older lover would leave her for another woman). This led to a major confrontation when Leone’s wife Vittoria Colonna Caetani di Sermoneta, who he could not divorce because of Catholic orthodoxy, came to Paris after publishing a sensational biography titled Memorie (Things Past) in 1929. He refused to see her but the damage was done. Leone wrote to his mother that Ofelia’s feelings of inferiority led her to try to kill herself by poison on two occasions (she also threatened to poison them all) and observed that her influence on Sveva was terrible. Leone left Ofelia in Paris and returned to Vernon with Sveva. While he made up with Ofelia and she joined them in Vernon, Sveva was left with a profound sense of guilt that she had abandoned her mother. When her father died of throat cancer on Christmas Day 1935, she allowed her mother to keep her a prisoner in their home for 25 years as an act of atonement. What happened in Paris signalled an end of childhood innocence and generated a deep desire, in later life, to re-invent her past, “erasing” any discord and perpetuating the story of a “forever-happy” family.

Leone realized that the family dynamics had to change, and that Sveva needed to be away from him and Ofelia and their toxic relationship and arranged for her to attend Crofton House School in Vancouver. For the nearly two full years that she attended the school she became a “normal” school girl which stood her in good stead. She formed some friendships and her informal learning through governesses was tested and she was placed within the BC grading system.

Exhibiting Sveva in the Okanagan

The exhibit at MAXXI closed in January 2026 and the paintings and text panels were shipped to Vernon. The Caetani Centre Board was faced with a quandary – they wanted to share the Recapitulation Series with the people of Vernon and region but there was no gallery large enough. They came up with a solution – mount the exhibit in the new Coldstream Community Hall. The great hall would hold the paintings and explanatory matter including display cases with photographs, letters, magazines, studies of paintings as well as some of the artworks that Sveva produced when she studied at the Académie Ranson in Paris in 1929 and with artist André Petroff (Petrov) in Monte Carlo in 1920.

The exhibit titled Recapitulation Reunited had only a limited run – from April 3 to 11 – since the works could not be exposed to sunlight for extended periods and the Hall had other bookings. Temporary walls were erected on which to hang the paintings in roughly the sequence that Sveva had spelled out in the book Caetani Recapitulation: A Journey. As past chair of the Caetani Centre and project lead in mounting the exhibition, aj jaeger observed: “It was a distinct honour to contribute to the visionary team that brought Recapitulation Reunited to the North Okanagan, British Columbia, marking the first presentation of the complete works on North American soil. The exhibition was met with an enthusiastic response, welcoming over 1,200 visitors. The gala celebrating Sveva’s life and accomplishments was both a resounding success and a dignified tribute—an elegant occasion marking her return to Vernon, BC.” A gala reception was held the evening of April 10 with Alberta Lai, Director of the Instituto Italiano di Cultura (Italian Cultural Institute) in Toronto, representing Italian Ambassador Alessandro Cattaneo. Consul General Paolo Miraglia Del Giudice could not be there for the gala but paid a visit to the exhibit in the previous week.

The Coldstream Hall resembles a contemporary, purpose-built exhibit facility. The openness of the space and also the higher lighting level (significantly higher than at MAXXI) makes the paintings come to life in a dynamic way that highlights their “modernity.” While they were out of sync with the mainstream art of the 1970s and 1980s including colour field painting, Op art, minimalism, etc., today, as a result of science fiction films such as Stanley Kubrick’s and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek television series, as well as fantasy literature such as Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Sveva’s works seem very current. The large number of school parties that visited the exhibit demonstrates their appeal to young people and closes the circle. Gale Woodhouse, the Caetani Centre Chair noted: “We were pleased to welcome a wide range of visitors throughout the exhibition, including students from several Secondary schools and other educational institutions. Their participation added an important educational dimension to the exhibition and underscored the value of providing meaningful cultural experiences for young people in our region.” It is noteworthy that, when Sveva began work on the paintings, she was teaching art at the high school in Lumby. She befriended her students, particularly the ones experiencing difficulties, and read what they read – Marvel comics in which the heroes and villains were drawn from mythological Greek and Roman fables. She also watched the lunar landings in 1969.

As a part of the Recapitulation Reunited exhibit, the Board of the Caetani Centre decided to show the trailer of Heidi Thompson’s immersive film titled Sveva Caetani Recapitulation – A Journey: From darkness she painted a path to light.” She describes it as a “docuanimation” film. Thompson, who produced and directed it, collaborated with Niko Bagratuni, a Russian doctoral candidate at St. Peterburg University, who served as animator. Bagratuni’s special effects allow the viewing of the entire painting but his layering of elements of different sections and planes of the work create the illusion of being able to enter into the work. The same technique is used in the biographical section using photographs and films (some taken by her father Leone who was fascinated by photography and made some excellent short home movies). Thompson selected text passages from the book and also turned some of Sveva’s poetry into songs, together with accompanying music and sound effects.

In order to continue to provide the community access to Sveva’s art, the Board of the Caetani Centre approved an exhibit for the Centre’s gallery. Adriana Davies and aj jaeger co-curated an exhibit titled “Sveva Caetani: Her Life and Art” that opened in late April.  Twelve paintings from the Recapitulation Series have been chosen that deal specifically with the family trauma and how Sveva came to terms with it through a Jungian journey into her subconscious that allowed her to process the pain. The paintings in this exhibition focus on the invented “personal mythology” of a forever-happy family that survived all of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

In processing her pain through art, Sveva followed in the footsteps of Leonora Carrington and Frida Kahlo, who are among the most prominent female artists of the twentieth century. Both used surrealism and fantasy to externalize and process their pain as does Sveva. The ending of Carrington’s love affair with fellow Surrealist Max Ernst resulted in a nervous breakdown and she received electro-convulsive therapy. Kahlo was injured in a bus accident that affected her throughout her life (she had to wear a body harness) and her troubled marriage with Diego Rivera also caused her enormous turmoil and grief.

Sveva initially withdrew into the world of literature and, when her mother allowed, into the world of artistic creation but change would come when she went to university at the age of 53, and began her formal art studies. She conceptualized the Recapitulation Series in 1975 (a Dante anniversary year celebrated internationally) and began painting in 1978 completing the 47 works in 1989. 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.

Based on her extensive readings, Sveva included other paths to enlightenment including mysticism (Christian/Jewish/Muslim) and the psycho-analytical Jungian path. She also encapsulates in her work the movement, beginning in the 1960s, represented in what became cult books, plays, television series and movies to explore new realities, and in the words of the Star Trek television series:

Space: The final frontier

These are the voyages of the Starship, Enterprise

Its five-year mission

To explore strange new worlds

To seek out new life and new civilizations

To boldly go where no man has gone before

Her symbolism is that derived from Dante and religious mystics throughout time and in different cultures. In the Recapitulation series, she has taken ideas, images, and symbols and created a “world view” as startling as that created by Dante 700 years ago. In his exploration of the human mind and sexuality, Totem and Taboo, Sigmund Freud writes about the artist as follows:

In only a single field of our civilization has the omnipotence of thoughts been retained, and that is in the field of art. Only in art does it still happen that a man who is consumed by desires performs something resembling the accomplishment of those desires and that what he does in play produces emotional effects—thanks to artistic illusion—just as though it were something real. People speak with justice of the ‘magic of art’ and compare artists to magicians. But the comparison is perhaps more significant than it claims to be. There can be no doubt that art did not begin as art for art’s sake.

Assessing Her Work

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 who she found particularly inspiring.

The artist’s colourful self-portraits were a vehicle for reflecting not only her personal pain but also served as a commentary on the human condition. Sveva’s mystic journey was inspired by personal pain and reflected a troubled world. She used world myths and religious imagery at a time when they were both out of favour as a means of recounting her journey of selfhood. She also created her own visual language that included fantastic elements. I can only hope that my book titled Sveva Caetani’s Recapitulation Series: From Medieval Mysticism to the Space Age (Guernica Editions, 2026) will help to promote understanding of the scope of her achievement.

I firmly believe that she belongs not only in the canon of Canadian artists (particularly in the under-represented area of women artists) but also world art.

Sveva was a consummate artist and her imagery and ideas are very contemporary and the stuff of a range of material currently found in galleries and on the World Wide Web. Her art was outside of the Modernist traditions current during the period in which she created her masterwork; however, the art world at the beginning of the 21^st century is much more diverse and ranges from representational works to abstraction and multimedia, and is therefore more receptive to her creations. She was not an “academic” painter of her time and that, in my opinion, is to her credit. Her work is “ripe” for re-discovery and for the development of new audiences.

In conclusion, I believe that the exhibit at MAXXI, the Coldstream exhibit, Thompson’s immersive art film, and my book, which includes critical analysis of the works, will provide a huge impetus to building Sveva’s reputation in the years ahead. As Sveva’s reputation continues to build through travelling exhibits, Vernon will become a destination reinforcing the need for core funding for the Caetani Centre to enable it to continue to exhibit and interpret her works and serve as a centre for artist residencies and community programming.

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Adriana A. Davies, Order of Canada and Cavaliere d’Italia recipient, was born in Italy, grew up in Canada and has BA and MA degrees from the University of Alberta, and a doctorate from the University of London, England. She has worked as a writer, editor, curator, fine and decorative arts specialist, and cultural executive director.  She was science editor of The Canadian Encyclopedia and also created the Alberta Online Encyclopedia, comprising 84 multimedia websites (33 with Indigenous content). She was involved in the Canadian Museums Association and Assembly of First Nations Task Force on Museums and First Peoples; implemented three Alberta Museums Association symposia on the same subject the last being, “Re-inventing the Museum on Native Terms”; and created three internships to engage Indigenous young people in content creation for the Alberta Online Encyclopedia.  Publications include The Dictionary of British Portraiture (two volumes); From Realism to Abstraction: The Art of J. B. Taylor; The Rise and Fall of Emilio Picariello; The Frontier of Patriotism: Alberta and the First World War (co-editor and contributor); From Sojourners to Citizens: Alberta’s Italian History; poetry anthology Changing My Skin: Dark Elegies and Other Poems; and memoir My Theatre of Memory: A Life in Words. [Editor’s Note: Adriana Davies recently contributed an essay on the subject of Sveva Caetani centered around an exhibition of her work at The Caetani Centre in Vernon as well as wrote about Extraordinary Women of the Okanagan.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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