Marija Ana Elizabeta Baroness Raigersfeld

Marija Ana Elizabeta was born on 11 November 1710 into the old aristocratic Carniolan family of the Barons Erberg. Her life was marked by her great love for Franc Henrik Raigersfeld. On 14 January 1725, when she was fourteen years and two months old, Raigersfeld wrote in his diary that he had seen a ‘beautiful girl’ and her ‘angelic face’ in the Provincial Theatre in Ljubljana. They were married a year later. Baroness Marija Ana Elizabeta Raigersfeld spent her life married to one of Carniola’s wealthiest and most successful businessmen, a theoretician of mercantilism and high state official. Empress Maria Theresa granted him a hereditary barony in 1747. Marija Ana Elizabeta bore twenty-two children and died on 14 November 1752, aged forty-two. Until his dead in 1760, the Baron remembered her by her portraits, which he kept, together with a large number of other family portraits, in his place in Mestni trg in Ljubljana, furnished in select and cosmopolitan taste in the spirit of its time. He thus wrote in his diary on 29 January 1756 that he had ‘six of my wife’s portraits in the house’. They included one by the Viennese court painter Martin van Meytens (1695(?)-1770) and some by Valentin Metzinger (1699-1759). Baron Raigersfeld first invited the painter Franc Linder (1736-1802) to reside with him in 1757. Linder made sixty miniature portraits of members of the Raigersfeld family during the time that he lived in the place. They included one of Marija Ana Elizabeta Baroness Raigersfeld, at thirty, with the inscription: M. A. E. Baro De Raigersfeld nata Baro ab Erberg n.a 11 9bris 1710 aet.s s.ae 30 an.m 1740, done from an original portrait by an unknown author.