This tomb of Princess Louise of Stolberg-Gedern (d1824) is situated in San Croce Florence it was designed and commisioned by her heir and companion François-Xavier Fabre, and sculpted by Charles Perçier. It is 4m x 2.45m and consists of two angels either side of a stele and a relife of the three virtues Faith, Hope, and Charity.

Louise Maximiliane Caroline Emmanuele of Stolberg-Gedern was born into a minor branch of the German high nobility in Mons, then part of the Austrian Netherlands. Her early life was shaped by the dynastic ambitions of European courts. At age 20 she was married off, largely for political reasons, to Charles Edward Stuart, the “Young Pretender” to the British throne, also known as “Bonnie Prince Charlie.” and who the Jocobites regarded as King Charles III of England. This union, solemnized in 1772, made her Countess of Albany, but it proved deeply unhappy.

By the mid-1770s, Charles’s alcoholism and erratic temper had made their life together intolerable. Louise fled their residence in Rome and took refuge in Florence under papal protection. There she met the celebrated Italian tragedian and poet Vittorio Alfieri, with whom she formed a lifelong partnership, intellectual, emotional, and artistic. Though never formally married, the two lived together openly in Florence and Rome, their relationship becoming one of the most discussed literary liaisons of the late 18th century. Alfieri affectionately referred to her as his “Socrate femmina” (female Socrates).

Louise was an accomplished hostess and patron of the arts. Her Florentine salon became a magnet for writers, artists, and political thinkers of the Enlightenment and early Risorgimento. She encouraged progressive discussion, fostered Italian literature, and preserved Alfieri’s literary legacy after his death in 1803.

She died in 1824, and her burial in Santa Croce completed the quiet symmetry of their story. Her tomb was commissioned by her heir and friend, the French painter François-Xavier Fabre, who had shared her later years in Florence and inherited her collection. Wishing to honor her with a monument of refined dignity, Fabre turned to Charles Percier, the great French architect and designer whose Neoclassical vision had defined the Empire style under Napoleon. Percier provided the architectural conception, a restrained, temple-like niche of luminous white marble, its composition governed by calm proportion and purity of line. The execution of the sculpture was entrusted to Florentine craftsmen, perhaps including Luigi Giovannozzi or Emilio Santarelli, who translated Percier’s design into marble under Fabre’s close supervision.

The result is a work of exquisite restraint: a white marble aedicule framing a relief of the Theological Virtues, Faith, Hope, and Charity, rendered with a gentle harmony of gesture and drapery. Above, the Countess’s coat of arms is encircled by a garland, while two mourning genii lean pensively at the base, their inverted torches symbols of life’s extinguished flame. Every element is governed by the clarity and composure characteristic of Percier’s late Neoclassicism, yet infused with the tenderness of Fabre’s personal remembrance.

Louise’s tomb thus speaks in a quiet but eloquent voice. In its balance of form and feeling, it mirrors the arc of her own existence—from youthful constraint to the poised independence of her Florentine years. The serenity of the marble seems to reconcile the contradictions of her life: royal exile and republican muse, patroness and exile, intellect and heart. In the company of poets, artists, and thinkers whose monuments fill Santa Croce, the Countess of Albany is remembered not as a tragic consort or a mere witness to greater lives, but as a woman of culture, reason, and enduring grace, a spirit at peace among the immortals.