“Olga Raggio was born in Rome on Feb. 5, 1926, to a Russian mother and an Italian father. She earned a diploma from the Vatican library school in 1947 and a Ph.D. from the University of Rome in 1949.”
“… Raggio, an internationally known scholar and curator who in almost 60 years with the Metropolitan Museum of Art organized some of its best-known exhibitions, scoured the world for treasure and coaxed rarely seen artworks from places as far flung as the Vatican and as close at hand as a New Jersey abbey, died on Jan. 24 in the Bronx. She was 82 and lived in Manhattan.”
Quoted here on the date of Raggio’s death:
“Death is not earnest in the same way the eternal is. To the earnestness of death belongs precisely that capacity for awakening, that resonance of a profound mockery which, detached from the thought of the eternal, is an empty and often brash jest, but together with the thought of the eternal is just what it should be, utterly different from the insipid solemness which least of all captures and holds a thought with tension like that of death.”
— Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, Harper Torchbooks, 1964, p. 324
Related material:
February 2, 3, and 4 as well as
February 5 (Raggio’s birthday).