If you have fish-eyes, you must be either
in love or half-witted.
VENETIAN PROVERB
To tell you the truth, I have always looked like a great sinner,’ said Casanova, gazing fondly at my latest portrait of him. He felt complicit in its birth, as indeed he was. We were standing in the studio. The new-born painting stood glistening in the variegated light.
‘Every speaking likeness has told truths of me. Even you, Cecilia, the first of my lovers to paint me, have painted my immortality as sinful.’
It was true. But when I look at that portrait now, it seems different. The sin has softened, somehow.
Even after you depose it from the easel, a portrait develops a life of its own. Casanova’s portrait was at the beginning of its life, in those days; a young, immature portrait, its Rose Madders and Flake Whites still relative strangers to each other, its Violet Lake as yet unacquainted with its faded future.
A portrait is shaped just like a window. The subject looks out at you, locked in the past, his nose pressed against the invisible glass. Locked inside the portrait is the story of the subject, and the story of the painter, and the story of their relationship. When a painter looks at a portrait she has made, years before, she re-enters that lost world. The process is rarely without a little pain. As the years pass, the pain becomes greater. The Vermilions, as I have told you, often turn black, the Zinc White desiccates and the Red Lakes hand their vibrancy back to your memory. You are left looking at nothing but loss. Believe me, these days it seems to me that the course of our lives is nothing but a gradual process of losing and of giving back.
So who was this man that I had painted? Was Casanova indeed a great sinner? Had he earned the patina of malefaction upon my canvas? Was it mixed in the sinews of my paint, or had it been applied like a varnish to him, now, at the end of his life?
Was he a beautiful man? That’s what you want to know now. You already know he was interesting. I shall not tell you yet. There are more important things for you to know just now.
Apart from mine, which no one sees now, you will not find many portraits of Casanova. He was too busy being Casanova to sit still and allow himself to be captured. He himself had strong views on the importance of physical beauty. Love was more to do with curiosity and instincts than with the pure cold aesthetics of beauty, in Casanova’s opinion.
‘Women,’ he used to say, ‘are like a book. You begin with the title page. If that is not interesting, then you will not desire to read further. In fact, interesting is better than beautiful. A beautiful title page may attract your attention, but if it’s not interesting, you will not continue with it.
‘People who read many good books are always curious to read new ones, and sometimes, just for the novelty of it, they want to read works of a wicked or lower timbre. And so men who have loved many women, usually beautiful ones, become curious to try ugly women, if they are new to him.’
I asked him, ‘But the object that always seems to be so new – is it really so in essence?’
‘Not at all, for it’s always the same story, with nothing new but its title page.’ He laughed at himself and the number of stories he had read.
‘So do you feel deceived?’
‘By myself? Perhaps. But do I complain? No. While enjoying the familiar story, I always kept my eyes fixed upon the title page, the charming new face with which I had fallen in love. How could I fail to be happy?’
Of himself, he always said, ‘It’s not beauty that I possess. It’s something better, but harder to define.’
Casanova’s several portraits tried to define it for him, but I do not think they entirely succeeded. I never did, completely, with my own. I take every opportunity to stare at the other portraits of him, these days, to extract what those other fortunate artists saw, painting Casanova in his glory days.
How did he look? Everyone wants to know now, though most do not dare to ask me aloud. I read their need on their own faces. I, greedier than anyone for the human face, understand what they want to ask me.
To help them, I would send them first to the life-size alleged portrait attributed to Anton Raphael Mengs. I believe it was painted around 1760. I myself have stood in front of that portrait and tried to find my Casanova inside those lovely strokes of Mengs’ brush. Casanova never mentioned the painting, but I am sure that he was involved in it somehow because his tender presence hovers around it still. Perhaps he did not like the portrait. He did not much like Mengs, who was a fair-weather friend and a cruel drunkard. Casanova perhaps remembered the man, and therefore could not like the picture.
But I do.
I love the creamy forehead, the little plumes of hair above his fleshy ears. I love the soft brown eyes brimming in pink bulbs of flesh above and below. I love the large nose: it has a look of generosity. I love the mouth that it was possible to imagine already preternaturally smoothed by kisses. I love the plump hands, not too large, their fingers not too long, throwing doubt, according to the traditional proportional calculations, upon the truth of the eight inches of best English contraceptive skins he would record in his memoirs. (I am not being coy. Who has the time to take measurements during love? Anyway, everyone knows that a man expands to the measure of his love.)
In Mengs’ portrait, Casanova must be around thirty years old. He wears an Ultramarine velvet frock-coat, extravagantly buttoned in gold, and below it a waistcoat of Titanium White and Naples Yellow flowered brocade. Ecco — the discreet snowy cravat at his throat, and pleated spider-webs of lace at his wrists. Please welcome me as one of your own, his costume begs High Society I know how to dress. My minuet is the most exquisite you have seen. I have been embraced by popes and princes. But he has a vulnerable air, as if he knows that he will probably be rejected. And he has a slightly skinned look about him. This is true in more ways than one, as this creamy portrait has stripped him of his vivid African colour. It has faded him or whitewashed him, depending upon how your see the loss of colour.
He holds a book open in a somewhat supplicatory way. Please take me seriously, says this pose. I am the author of fictions and histories and pamphlets, articles and translations. I can talk knowledgeably of medicine, chemistry, alchemy, the cabbala, Descartes will praise my essay on the duplication of the cube. I have been a diplomat, undertaking missions for the French king. I set up the lottery that saved France! For my ingenuity and my philosophy I shall be known to the future. But below the book, a bare-breasted woman, worked in gold, leers up at the unreadable shadowy text.
You can’t help noticing her.
Casanova himself is almost feminine, and certainly passive, in his creamy softness. There’s the merest shadow of a beard around the pretty pink jawline, picked out in Carmine and cream. Just behind him, next to a swarthy, thrusting column, a putto, with a slight suggestion of genitalia and feathery wings (in cremisino and white), offers a carnation. Casanova’s own legs are comfortably splayed, but there is a soft sheaf of brocade strategically falling over the part of Casanova that has since become of greatest interest to the world.
I think that on the whole this is a good portrait of Casanova, even if it is not of Casanova. This pink man is no satyr. Sexual enthusiast, perhaps, but only on demand. There is a look of infinite kindness. There is no pleasure this man would willingly deny you. He is comfortable in his own skin and would like to share it with you. But only if you are disposed and preferably if you are urgent in your desire. He sits in a comfortable position to watch you undress, endlessly patient. He would prefer not to blow out the candle, for the darkness might deprive you of a compliment. All this I can read in Mengs’ portrait, because it is a good one.
There’s none of that invitation, in a slightly earlier portrait, by his brother, Francesco, done some time between 1750 and 1755. But I would send the curious to gaze upon it as I have done with Mengs’. For it, too, tells stories of Casanova. It is very different to the Mengs picture, which is full face, full colour; Francesco’s portrait of Casanova is a left profile,
sketched in various shades of pale terracotta and berettino grey.
It is a gentle face, the same face – again the large, guileless, slightly bulbous eyes – but now you see the pronounced hump of the nose, the generous nostril – again those smoothed lips, soft chin, and here also a sweet plumpness between the chin and the broad neck. The hair is again swept off the face in little puffs. A long ringletted ponytail, bound with a ribbon, rests lightly on his shoulder. His profile, in this sketch, resembles nothing more than a fish face – some benevolent, verdure-grazing fish, not a shark.
Francesco’s is definitely a sibling’s portrait. It is coldly and prettily executed, but with no breath in it, and certainly no fire. When I think of my sister Sofia (which is rarely) I would paint her like this: pale, the sibling of a central character rather than the protagonist of her own spettacolo.
So few portraits of Casanova remain. I cannot share with the curious those other visions of my lover, because I have not been able to look on them myself. In all my long journeys they have evaded me, though I tried to seek them out. But I run away with myself.
Somewhere in Portugal is the ring set with a miniature that Casanova had painted for the mysterious and adorable Pauline, whom he loved in London. The artist is supposed to be Jeremiah Meyer. Without seeing it, I could not tell you for certain.
I believe you can still see a miniature of him by Anton Graff in a private collection in Genoa. And another by Pierre Antoine Baudoin, with all the pleasures stripped from it. Then there is the engraving of Casanova, aged sixty-three, by Johann Berka. I have seen a reproduction. It makes me spit! He makes my Casanova look like an aged wild boar! Alessandro Longhi is supposed to have made two portraits, but I don’t believe in them. Where are they? Let them come forward, so I can tell you if they are real.
And my paintings of Casanova?
I am sorry, but you won’t see them.
Many things have happened to them, many things have been spilt on them, many fragments of colour are now chipped off their canvases on short journeys, and many contusions scar their surfaces from all the different kinds of damp that swelter out of Venice. Despite it all, they survive.
But you won’t see them. The secrets of our gondola will die with me. We Venetians are good at secrets. We are the repository for any number of unspeakable, and unspeakably delicious, acts. Mystery hangs on our lips and dances in our eyes. A Venetian can disappear around a corner like a cat, leaving no trace but a sense of loss and a disturbing perfume in the air. In the last remnants of the happy times of which I write, it was secrecy that gave us a relish for the loves and intrigues we were almost too worn out to perform. Secrecy spiced up our pleasures so that we could taste them on our jaded palates. In the dark corridors of our city, our feet whispered along the flagstones and we hid our mouths behind our masks. Yes, we Venetians knew the art of silence and of withholding information.
Casanova was different. In this way alone, he was no true son of Venice, and indeed it was in part his candour that cost him his constant exiles. He liked to talk about his own delicious, unspeakable past. He withheld nothing, good or bad. So I soon pieced together the details, webbing his real words and sweet memories over the crude structure of his legend. There were no souvenirs: too heavy for a life-long refugee, always on the road. There were only his memories, tangible in the moonlight. As he spoke of them, he seemed to become again what he once was.
One night, rocked by a melodious scirocco in the lagoon, we lay enfolded in the gondola, and he told me about his early years. He took me to his past. He was an artist of a raconteur. Even in our intimacy, the whispers soon became a fully wrought story.
A song of love for all good things he sang to me that night. He painted pictures of the past for me, and where he himself entered the scene his memories turned from sepia to full colour and the canvas became fragrant with the scents of sweat, flowers, tears and crab soups.
Casanova’s Chorus
I was conceived in the orchestra pit.
I have always performed.
They sent me to a boarding house.
I was starved there. I learnt to love food.
I was going to be an advocate, a clergyman.
But in the orchestra pit of my stomach, new notes were stirring.
I gave my first sermon at San Samuele.
There were love letters in the collection plate, afterwards.
I gave a second sermon at San Samuele.
Drunk, I performed ignominiously, but later I made a girl cry with delight.
I became the neolyte of a rich old man.
And what was his was mine, including his mistress.
I lived like a young god in the
palazzi of the Mocenigo, the Barbaro, the Dandolo …
But I had not the blood or the gold for a palazzo
of my own. I never would.
I started to be afraid of Time,
Of people being oblivious to me.
My pleasures were ritualised, I could concentrate better.
Then I’d make sure they would never forget me.
Chapter 5
Tuti quanti semo mati per quel buso che semo nati.
We all go mad for the hole from which we were born.
VENETIAN PROVERB
Venice belongs to those who love her, and everyone who loves her bears their private map of Venice inside them. While I painted Casanova, Casanova painted an indelible map of Venice for me. Even when he had gone, Casanova’s secret itineraries remained to me.
For ever after, when I walked down the Calle della Commedia, I sniffed the crab soup that his mother, the actress Zanetta Farussi, demanded continually while she carried him in her belly. I heard the birth cries of Casanova and the screams of Zanetta, for whom the great Goldoni had once written a play. Amid the chaos, I heard the soothing voice of his putative father, Zanetta’s husband, the actor Gaetano. And I detected another, more refined male voice – this belonging to an equal candidate for the honour of Casanova’s paternity, the Venetian nobleman Michele Grimani. Or was it another rich patron, another lover of Zanetta’s? It hardly matters. Casanova was born a woman’s man, a mother’s boy. Sadly, his mother lacked any maternal instincts towards him.
Casanova, as I heard that night, learnt early that he would have to go hunting for caresses.
As a child Casanova was mute. Only his nose spoke – volumes of blood. How could a child contain so much blood? The laundry looked like a convent after a massacre every day. Nobody believed he would live long. No one invested much in the silent child. He was only a year old when Zanetta and Gaetano left for London, where Casanova’s little brother Francesco was born in 1727. Casanova they left at home, hardly thinking to find him there alive when they returned. But he was.
Casanova took me to this strange hushed childhood, so unlike the noisy luxury and discipline of my own. Casanova’s nose became his eyes and ears and mouth at those times. As he spoke, I felt myself shrinking. Gazing through his memory, I crouched two feet above the carpet, on which I could smell the dust rising and the little reeks of old spillages. Enormous toys surrounded me, stiff with dried saliva and milk. I heard the cries of Casanova’s baby brother and smelt the stench of his nappy from not far away. I saw the spines of the books flashing before my eyes, letters crammed into boxes, danced-to-death slippers kicked under shelves and forgotten. I smelt the sweat from inside them. I saw the knees of adults, passing to and fro. No one stopped to pick me up or caress my head. It was a strange, sensationless existence, as if living under water. This was how Casanova had seen the world until he was eight years old.
Then the picture changed. Now my eyes and nose were level with a large white apron. I saw marmellata and chicken blood printed on it, in the shapes of large strong fingers. I could smell the salt of armpits just a little higher than I was. Suddenly I was swept off my feet, and my nose was tucked into that armpit. I heard an elderly woman asking, in a rich Venetian accent, ‘Who will be the most loved little boy in the world?
’
When his nominal father Gaetano died, little Casanova went to live with his adored grandmother, Marzia Farussi, just a few doors away. From her, illiterate, passionate, maternal, the little Casanova received the fierce unconditional love that Zanetta was incapable of giving. And Nonna Marzia introduced him to the occult, which would ever after lure him into danger or into profit. We are practical, we Venetians, as you will see. Venetians first, and then Christians, as we say. We will borrow what we need to arrangiarsi, to get by, from whatever spiritual dimension offers succour, or opportunity.
At nine years old, blood still gushed from his nose and Casanova was still silent. So Nonna Marzia took him to a sorceress on the island of Murano. His earliest memory, which he loved to describe to me: the witch’s cat-haunted hovel and her tender hands on him, the incense of fragrant herbs smouldering under his nose, and hot potions fed gently to him. The witch had undressed him, put him inside a wooden chest, whispered incantations, rubbed him with sweet pomades, and lulled him to a deep sleep. The next night, at home with his grandmother, a vision of a beautiful woman came down the chimney to caress him. The witch’s spells appeared to cure the nose bleeds, except for moments of stress, when for the rest of his life his nostrils would express his fears in vivid torrents. Whatever really happened, Casanova learnt to talk and read in less than a month after that night at Murano.
Reluctantly, it seems, his mother started to realise that he was not an imbecile. Something had to be done with him. Zanetta took him by boat to Padua, where he was to study under a Doctor Antonio Gozzi. With little jabs and pushes, she marched him to a boarding house, and left him there with a small trunk and a deposit of six zecchini.
‘Only six …?’ I asked. He nodded.
The hirsute Slavonian landlady shrieked after Zanetta that she had not left enough money to feed and clean the boy. But his mother was gone. ‘And that is how she got rid of me,’ Casanova told me, sadly.