Orsola Maddalena Caccia,
Fruit and Flowers (c. 1630). Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, bequest of Errol M. Rudman.
Thanks to an unexpected bequest, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art now boasts the largest collection of works by the Mannerist painter and nun Orsola Maddalena Caccia (1596–1676) outside the artist’s native Italy.
Upon hedge-fund manager Errol M. Rudman’s death last year, he surprised the Met with a gift that included three works by Caccia, whose art is rarely represented in US museum collections or even outside of the convent in Moncalvo, Italy, where she lived and worked.