Antonia of Württemberg

Antonia of Württemberg (24 March 1613 – 1 October 1679) was a princess of the Duchy of Württemberg, as well as a literary figure, patroness, and Christian Kabbalist.

Life

Born in Stuttgart in 1613, Princess Antonia was the third of nine children from the marriage of Duke Johann Frederick of Württemberg and Barbara Sophie of Brandenburg, the daughter of the Elector Joachim Frederick of Brandenburg. Highly educated and generous, she was the sister of Duke Eberhard III of Württemberg, who more than his father played an important role in the Thirty Years War.

During the course of the war many churches in Württemberg were looted and became stripped of their ornaments, especially following the battle of Nördlingen in 1634. Antonia made it her mission to establish foundations to repair and restore the churches. Her charity, piety, gift for languages and all-encompassing scholarship were widely praised, and she became celebrated as "Princess Antonia the learned", and "the Minerva of Württemberg". Wherever possible she dedicated herself to the arts and sciences, together with her two sisters the princesses Anna Johanna and Sibylle. Central panel of the opened Kabbalistic Lehrtafel of Princess Antonia. The soul stands at the threshold of the garden of paradise, depicted in a dense web of esoteric symbolic imagery. She became a close associate of the evangelical Protestant theologian and mystical symbolist Johann Valentin Andreae, and later was on friendly terms with the founder of the Pietism movement, Philip Jacob Spener. In addition to painting, her interests were above all in the realm of philosophy and languages, with a special preference for Hebrew, and the study of the Jewish Kabbalah.

Esenwein, dean of Urach and later professor at Tübingen, wrote in July 1649 to Johannes Buxtorf at Basel that Antonia, "having been well grounded in the Hebrew language and in reading the Hebrew Bible, desires to learn also the art of reading without vowels," and three years later he wrote to Buxtorf that she had made such progress that she had "with her own hand put vowels to the greatest part of a Hebrew Bible".

The painting is in the form of a triptych. The two outside panels depict the procession of the soul as the mystical bride of Christ. These open to reveal in two flanking panels a daytime scene of the finding of Moses in the Nile, and a night-time scene of the flight of the Holy Family to Egypt; and in the centre an immensely detailed systema totius mundi - a depiction of a philosophical system of the whole world.

The central panel finds a woman holding in her right hand a flaming heart (charity), with in her left an anchor (faith) and a cross (hope), standing at the threshold of a garden enclosed by a hedge of roses. In the middle of the garden is Jesus, and around him a circle of the fathers of the twelve tribes of Israel.

Beyond them hovers a female figure, in front of a richly decorated temple with an onion dome. Arranged in the composition on and around the temple are nine female figures representing the sephirot, according to their places in the traditional tree of life of the Kabbalah. The tenth of the sephirot, Malchut (kingdom), is represented by the figure of Christ himself. Everywhere in the execution there is more and more intricate detail, symbol upon symbol, meaning upon meaning.

Ancestry