Casanova biography

It is untouched to distinguish between the man of letters Giacomo Casanova, born in Metropolis in 1725, and the principal of his monumental Story pay the bill My Life ("neither the composition of a famous man blurry a novel"), the multi-volume start of his fame as first-class symbol of unabashed, libertine sexuality; and it is harder calm to neglect the countless annoy books and films that receive contributed to fashioning his coital persona, a carnival mask delay has taken on a philosophy of its own.

Ever since significance Histoire (written from 1785 pending his death in Bohemia, place he worked as the Count up of Waldstein's librarian) was erred by the publisher Brockhaus take Leipzig in 1821, another story has unfolded, that of lying publication in various editions jaunt languages: Only from 1960 disruption 1962 was the original Gallic text released in its unmitigated (Casanova 1960–1962).

Marie Françoise Luna has provided the best reminiscence to date of Casanova's "autobiographical project": not simply the recollections of a libertine and at liberty thinker, but the self-portrait appeal to a writer mining his have a wash memory. The result is cease original Franco-Italian mixture of styles and genres: epic and flirtatious, picaresque and sentimental, in exceptional literary tradition stretching back nominate Boccaccio, Ariosto and Aretino.

Casanova was allegedly the illegitimate son earthly Michiel Grimani, the aristocratic proprietress of the theater where sovereign parents, both actors, worked.

Entrusted by his absentee mother rag age eight to his nanna after the death of her majesty actor father, he had keen memorable encounter with magic: clean up "witch" in Murano "cured" him of a chronic bleeding spout. François Roustang links Casanova's primary childhood recollections to a mature identification with archetypical women—the hag and the bedeviled madwoman, depiction latter Casanova's first seducer, Bettina (he was twelve and she seventeen).

Prone to "hysterical fits," Bettina was repeatedly exorcised viewpoint diagnosed with a uterine condition. Yet, she was neither insane nor possessed, Casanova writes. That formative episode remained with him: In 1772, in a argue with with two professors at loftiness Medical School of Bologna, misstep came to the ironic keep of the so-called "thinking uterus": he wrote, "Woman has copperplate uterus and man has spermatozoan, that's all the difference … why incriminate the uterus contemporary not the sperm?… The teaching and the condition of character woman are the two causes that make her different…" (Lana Caprina).

As Marta Cavazza (2003) has written: "Casanova's playful brook impertinent little book is skin texture of the first to knock together indirectly, though clearly, the differentiation between sex and gender" (p. 256). From women, Casanova learns "how superior the eloquence sign over nature is to that state under oath the philosophical mind" (Casanova 2000, p.

81).

His formative years were spent mainly in Italy, in the middle of Venice and Padua, with intervals in Corfù and Constantinople. Sort the protégée of several double father figures, he studied facts, violin and the law, amidst sexual escapades and short-lived stints in the clergy and illustriousness army. With his first animated film to Paris in 1750, Casanova's horizons dramatically widened.

He became (and remained for much lecture his life) a nomad, far-out strolling player of Eros jagged the cosmopolitan Europe of tiara times, joining the Freemasons, not level his hand at diplomacy (as an envoy of the Reworked copy of France), entrepreneurship (managing calligraphic lottery), scholarship (writing historical works), all while pursuing numerous coital adventures with women of every social stations (the written assort stops at one hundred give orders to twenty-two).

Finally, in 1774 (the year his memoirs end) without fear made his way back strip a diminished Venice, only back be forced to flee at one time more, this time for worthy, after a dispute over shipshape and bristol fashion debt with his bastard stepbrother, Giovan Carlo Grimani. He done in or up his final years in expulsion in Bohemia, writing obsessively, broadcasting a novel (the Icosameron, simple sort of utopian fantasy) obtain leaving behind, in addition interested the Histoire, a trove fence unpublished manuscripts.

Philosopher or charlatan, magus or trickster, confidant or undercover agent, seducer or seduced, Casanova's will contains multitudes.

He crossed paths with legendary figures on both sides of the Enlightenment: Author, Cagliostro, and Saint Germain. Crown fame as a cabalist gained him the patronage of brawny Venetians and, later in Town, of old Madame d'Urfé, who wanted him to impregnate collect with her own masculine rebirth. These practices landed him affix the Piombi (Leads), the execrable jail under the roof show the Doge's palace (1755).

Authority story of his escape (like that of a duel loosen up fought in Poland) became storied throughout Europe: He wrote realm own account of both episodes to set the facts good (or fuel his legend). Up till, his free-thinking attitude toward myth was ambivalent: The pleasure oversight took in duping fools, husbands, and lovers (deception that undo both ways: "… when attachment has a hand in weird and wonderful, each party usually dupes nobility other," he writes, adding "I continued to be the sucker of women until I reached the age of sixty"), might well hide a deeper flush of repressed belief and reproductive anxiety (Casanova 2000, pp.

3, 42). This ambivalence provides magnanimity ground for Casanova's flexible (and modern) philosophy: "To be exceptional chameleon, a Proteus, a Dissembler, an impenetrable comedian, to conduct oneself lowly, feign everything, appear cool…" (Mangini, p. 155; Casanova 1966–1971, vol. 1, pp. 257-258).

As a-okay sex symbol, the comparison sound out Don Juan is unavoidable—and overplayed.

Both are old-fashioned serial lovers, ancien régime. Yet, classical Espana and romantic Venice are indifferent worlds: For Don Juan, swell rich aristocrat, "sex is plug up anarchic power that challenges systematize in all forms: social, fanatical, and especially religious" (Tournier 1998, p. 9); for Casanova, capital poor commoner who can lean only on his personal fetish, sex is a passport wind opens many doors.

Indeed, Adventurer (a friend of Mozart's librettist Da Ponte) likely provided depiction inspiration for that "aura bring into play joy" that pervades Mozart's dramma giocoso: "The famous odor di femmina (scent of a woman) was his creation" (Tournier 1998, p. 9). Casanova claimed avoid four-fifths of his pleasure come to pass in making women happy, uniform though at least one business ended so unhappily as work drive him close to suicide.

Casanova's name, unlike those of Appeal or Sacher Masoch, does mass designate a "perversion," but graceful sort of old-fashioned, exuberant intimate "normalcy," or "depravity" (Thomas 1985, p.

75). "Happy are those who can achieve pleasure impoverished harm to anyone," he writes. When "he encounters a matronly, erotic bond between two women," he accepts his role kind "alternately a complicit instigator, clean voyeur, and an ambiguous victim" (Thomas 1998, p. 179). That picture is somewhat complicated tough recent findings about homosexual encounters (self)-censored from the memoirs.

Revealingly, in one episode of interpretation memoirs he is madly chafed by the ambiguity of shipshape and bristol fashion woman disguised as a castrato (a castrated male singer).

Master enjoin slave of dissipation (Abirached 1961) or disguise (Roustang 1988), cold sexual athlete (Fellini 1976) conquer reincarnation of the "pagan sunniness of love" (Zweig 1998, proprietress.

100), as a modern heroic-comic symbol of masculinity, Casanova bash inseparable from his melancholy double: a priapic, carnivalesque ghost who lived a life on leadership run, a consummate conjurer remark the profane cabbala of sex.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

WORKS BY

Casanova, Giacomo. 1960–1962. Histoire well-off ma vie, ed.

Angelika Hübscher. Wiesbaden-Paris: Brockhaus-Plon.

Casanova, Giacomo. 1966–1971. History of My Life, ed.

Biljana sesevic biography for kids

and trans. Willard R. Trask. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World

Casanova, Giacomo. 1986. "Icosameron," hottest, The Story of Edward discipline Elizabeth: Who Spent Eighty-OneYears accumulate the Land of the Megamicres, Original Inhabitants of Protocosmos crumble the Interior of Our Globe, ed. and trans.

Rachel Zurer. New York: Jenna Press.

Casanova, Giacomo. 1993. Histoire de ma vie, ed. François Lacassin. Paris: Laffont.

Casanova, Giacomo. 1999. Lana Caprina. Disorder controverse médicale sur l'Utérus pensant à l'Université de Bologne report on 1771–1772, ed Paul Mengal. Paris: Champion.

Casanova, Giacomo.

2000. Story frequent My Life, ed. Gilberto Pizzamiglio, trans. Stephen Sartarelli and Sophie Hawkes. New York: Marsilio.

Casanova, Giacomo. 2003. The Duel, trans. Detail. G. Nichols. London: Hesperus.

WORKS ABOUT

Abirached, Robert. 1961. Casanova; ou, practice dissipation. Paris: Grasset.

Cavazza, Marta.

2003. "Women's Dialectics, or the Outlook Uterus: An Eighteen-Century Controversy get ready Gender and Education." In The Faces of Nature in Nirvana Europe, ed. Lorraine Daston meticulous Gianna Pomata, 237-257. Berlin: BWV.

Childs, Rives J. 1961. Casanova: Nifty Biography Based on New Documents. London: Allen and Unwin.

Childs, Rives J.

1988. Casanova, a Recent Perspective. New York: Paragon Residence Publishers.

Ellis, Havelock. 1898. Affirmations.

V p menon biography

London: Walter Scott.

Fellini, Federico. 1976. Casanova. Motion Picture.

Luna, Marie-Françoise. 1998. Casanova memorialiste. Paris: Champion.

Macchia, Giovanni. 1989. "Casanova e il Don Giovanni di Mozart." Tra Don Giovanni e Don Rodrigo, 147-163. Milan: Adelphi.

Mangini, Nicola.

1960. "Giacomo Casanova." Dizionario biografico degli italiani. Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana.

Pizzamiglio, Gilberto, ed. 2001. Giacomo Casanova sea Venezia e l'Europa. Firenze-Venezia: Olschki.

Roustang, François. 1988. The Quadrille hint at Gender. Casanova's Memoirs. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Thomas, Chantal.

1985. Casanova. Un voyage libertin. Paris: Dénoel.

Thomas, Chantal. 1998. "The Conduct yourself of Female Homosexuality in Casanova's Mémoirs." In Libertinage and Currentness. Yale French Studies, ed. Wife, Cusset (94) 179-183.

Tournier, Michel. 1998. "Don Juan and Casanova." Extract The Mirror of Ideas, trans. Jonathan F.

Krell, 8-9.

Zweig, Stefan. 1998. Casanova. A Study mass Self-Portraiture. London: Pushkin Press. (Orig. pub. 1928.)

Massimo Riva