27 July – Who could envy the fate of an ‘ugly’ princess?

Princess Luisa of Naples and Sicily was born on 27 July 1773. Through her mother, Queen Maria Karolina of Naples and Sicily, she was a granddaughter of Empress Maria Theresa. Luisa’s life was marked by the widespread belief that she was ugly — a judgement curiously resistant to rational analysis. A well-known story tells of the celebrated French portraitist Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s reported reluctance to paint the young, supposedly unattractive princess.

However, the main source of this unflattering perception appears to have been Luisa’s own mother. Queen Maria Karolina arranged to marry two of her daughters to the sons of her brother, Emperor Leopold II. When sending portraits of the princesses to their prospective grooms, she deliberately ensured the two were misidentified — claiming that her less attractive daughter was not suitable for Francis, heir to the imperial throne, but “would do” for Ferdinand, Grand Duke of Tuscany. Once this scheme became known, it sparked endless jokes and gossip at courts across Europe.

In such an unfavourable position, the unfortunate princess had little choice but to play her expected role: modest, dutiful, charitable, mother of many children — and, tragically, dead by the age of 29. One can only hope that Ferdinand did not share the common opinion of his wife’s appearance. No objections to the match were ever known from his side. After Luisa’s death in 1802, he did not remarry for another twenty years — and only shortly before his own death.