Courtesy of Marianna Zingone

This past summer, Marianna Zingone ’26 fell down a rabbit hole and landed on a new discovery. While interning at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA) as a curatorial assistant, Zingone was tasked with sifting through over 8,000 works of European art in the BCMA collection in search of art with a Spanish affiliation. However, the project was sidelined when Zingone came across an image of an eerily familiar woman.

“I came across this picture, and it was a profile portrait of a woman by some French photographer…. I recognized this woman because I’m a nerd, and I collect turn-of-the-century theater postcards,” Zingone said. “This woman was Cléo de Mérode, who was a French dancer.… I had, in my collecting travels, acquired a postcard off Etsy of her [in] this very distinct hairstyle. And I was like, ‘Oh, wait, I think I know who that profile portrait of an unidentified woman is.’”

Zingone emailed BCMA Curator Casey Braun later alerting her to the identification of the woman in the portrait.

“I was really delighted to be able to support [Zingone] in pursuing research that was really interesting to her, especially because it was the intersection of personal interests she had in terms of collecting postcards and images of actresses and dancers of the time,” Braun said. “[Zingone did] really, truly rigorous intellectual research.”

After stumbling upon the “Portrait of a Woman” photograph by Eugène Pirou, Zingone dived deeper into the life of Cléo de Mérode. Zingone found that Mérode lived in Paris from 1875 to 1966 and worked as a professional ballet dancer after beginning dance at the age of seven. Zingone explained the exploitative working environment that ballet dancers were subject to during the time period. Mérode was at the center of a controversy when a rumor circulated that she was having an affair with King Leopold of Belgium. Even though it turned out that he was having an affair with a different French dancer, Mérode still took the blame for the scandal.

“In the French National Ballet, where [Mérode] would dance, there was this very predatory culture of these young dancers [and] wealthy men…. The dancers were really celebrated in France, but it was also implicitly understood that they were not so much prostitutes but … courtesans,” Zingone said.

However, what excited Zingone most about her research was the story of Eugène Pirou, the photographer of Mérode’s portrait, signing away the rights of his name, causing a chain of legal disputes. This called into question whether Pirou took the picture of Mérode.

During the course of her investigation, Zingone contacted the French National Archives for more information. BCMA Co-Director Anne Goodyear noted how impressed she was by Zingone’s dedication to her research.

“I think what [Zingone] has done is thrilling, and part of what really excited me is the fact that [Zingone] was building on her own expertise. But also, within this environment, she was in a position to reach out to other professionals at other museums and to help us to better understand something that we had in our own collection,” Goodyear said.

Goodyear admires how Zingone is able to think unconventionally, which she believes is especially important in the visual arts.

“What is so special about what she did is that she is able to think broadly about how different disciplines come together, but at the same time, she has the capacity to really focus in on something extremely specific,” Goodyear said. “And so I think that that combination of having the big picture, but also the patience and intellectual capacity to really focus on something extremely minute is extraordinary.”

This summer’s work is an impressive part of Zingone’s art portfolio, though art history research is not the only area in which she excels. On campus, Zingone participates in Purity Pact, a sketch comedy group for female or non-binary students, and is involved with the club frisbee team. Off campus, Zingone has a passion for documenting places in her hometown, Chatham, N.J., through photography. Also, this past summer, Zingone read and evaluated film scripts as an intern for Josephson Entertainment.

“I do know I want [to do] something creative or art-related. I really love writing, and I really love researching, which is something that I think I really figured out working at the [BCMA] and working at Josephson this summer,” Zingone said. “As I’ve traveled through Bowdoin, [I have realized] that your major doesn’t really define you. I feel like I’m in a perpetual state of trying to find my way.”