Casanova: The Seduction of Europe

FROM THE BOOK

Venice is one of the shiftiest cities in the world. Built on unstable marshland in a lagoon, it appears to ride the waves surrounding it, bobbing up and down as the ground beneath it moves. The effect is magically captured in the cityscapes of the great eighteenth-century painter Canaletto, where the scurrying people and swaying ships reinforce the city’s unsettled nature. Venice is also shifty by reputation, a place where men and women have traditionally enjoyed disguising their identities and engaging in activities of dubious morality. No figure in Venice’s history has contributed more to that reputation than its most famous native son, Giacomo Casanova, born in 1725. Any reader of his memoirs, History of My Life (Histoire de ma vie in the original French), can understand why. They recount in excruciating detail his many exploits as a serial womanizer, inveterate cheat, and committed hedonist. He was apparently resigned to his fate as the stereotypical reprobate and unscrupulous lover, admitting in the original preface, “I allow them to call me a pig.” If the comment bears more than a hint of frustration, it is because he had spent his life trying to forge a different identity for himself. When he set down his memoirs during the final years of his long life, in the remote Bohemian town of Dux (now Duchcov), where he died in 1798, he hoped his reader would focus on the more edifying sides of his existence: conversations with monarchs and popes, far-flung adventures in all corners of Europe, debates with the great thinkers of his age including Voltaire and Rousseau, feats of audacious cleverness such as the founding of the French national lottery, and ambitious literary achievements including a history of Poland, a philosophical novel entitled the Icosameron, and a translation of the Iliad.

This is the Casanova who inspired the idea of exploring the visual world of the eighteenth century through his encounters with it. To those who know Casanova only by reputation, it may not be an obvious approach to the subject. Our principal source for him, his memoir, is not very forthcoming on how he felt about art or even which artworks he saw. Yet it is possible, with careful reading, to uncover his attitudes toward art and reconstruct his experiences with art, both fine and decorative, and in turn to apply them to an understanding of the cultural world he moved through.

Casanova provides a singular lens for observing many of the highest achievements in European art of the eighteenth century. His History narrates a life that intersected with almost every element of contemporary society, from street performers to royalty. Moreover, it was a life that embodied many of the most freethinking tendencies of that society, which are also reflected in the period’s best paintings and sculptures. An effective example is The Bolt, by Casa-
nova’s almost exact contemporary, Jean-Honoré 
Fragonard. A scene of lust and sexual
 aggression, it encapsulates the world of the libertine, which makes it understandable that view
ers might associate the painting with one of the 
many escapades recounted in History of My Life. Although Casanova rarely acted violently toward women (at least in his telling), he was the consummate libertine in his willingness to abandon conventional morals in order to pursue the pleasures of sex.