Modern life abounds with men who aspire to be great lovers. We are constantly told much more than we could ever wish to know about the sexual adventures of Mick Jagger, Sven-Göran Eriksson and John “Two Shags” Prescott. Yet the ultimate dubious accolade bestowed on a rampant stud of any age is still “Casanova”, a term defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “a man notorious for seducing women”.
Two hundred years after his death, everyone has their own picture of Casanova – whether it’s David Tennant’s cockney chancer in last year’s BBC series, or Bob Hope’s bumbling fumbler in Casanova’s Big Night. But the real Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798) was very different from the lecher in knee breeches portrayed in the 24 films and TV dramas that have been made about his life. As well as being a serial seducer, Casanova was at various times a priest, soldier, lawyer, conman and spy. And the women to whom he made love, far from being mere passive conquests, were often as fascinating and complex as the great sexual adventurer himself.
The man who supposedly thought only with his penis was actually a distinguished intellectual and prolific writer whose passion for literature almost eclipsed his passion for women. During his lifetime he published more than 35 works of fiction, drama, history and literary criticism; he was an accomplished linguist who spoke fluent Latin, French and Italian as well as his native Venetian dialect: his repartee in all of those languages captivated both women and men.
Most intriguingly, far from being a ruthless sexual predator who coldly loved ’em and left ’em, Casanova was blessed with an instinctive understanding of the female psyche which is still startling in its modernity. If all this wasn’t enough, he also had a career as an entrepreneur and gambler. If he were alive today, he would probably be running a successful hedge fund.
Far from always choosing easy and submissive sexual partners, his lovers were often forceful and adventurous women. They included a female opera singer who disguised herself as a castrato, the infamous impresario of Soho’s first nightclub, at least two of his own illegitimate daughters, and a Venetian nun whose libertine attitudes put his own in the shade. Like most sexual buccaneers, he was unsparingly honest about himself. Towards the end of his life, isolated and poverty-stricken, he wrote an epic 12-volume autobiography, Histoire de Ma Vie, destined to be published posthumously, in which he created an unflinching portrait of his own adventures and misadventures, as well as of the amoral, licentious, class-ridden 18th century in general. In a work of self-analysis that Freud would have applauded, he confessed all – his hopes, his fears, his failures, his misdeeds and, most famously, his love affairs. He held nothing back, except the real names of some of his women. Unlike today’s kiss-and-tell merchants, he knew the value of being discreet.
The descriptions of his sexual conquests are honest and graphic but never crude. Seduction was an art to him, and his techniques put the drunken gropings of many of today’s seedy lotharios to shame. Few could withstand the full force of his magnetic personality when it was directed at them, and not many wanted to: unusually tall, swarthy and handsome, and with a head of glorious curls, Casanova could topple a virgin’s resistance with a single glance. But persistence was key to his success: “I knew,” he wrote, “that there was not a woman in the world who could resist the assiduous care and constant attentions of a man who wished to make her fall in love with him.” If a girl did resist, he found she was more likely to give in if he seduced her in the company of her best friend, because for each small liberty that one allowed him to take, the other would go a step further.
Generous to a fault, Casanova plied his lovers with money and expensive gifts, whether or not he could afford it. And his generosity did not stop at the bedroom door. He understood the intricacies of the female orgasm, believed that the slightest inhibition spoilt love-making, and claimed that a woman’s sexual pleasure made up four-fifths of his own. A “new man” two centuries before the term was coined, he treated women as his equals in bed and out of it, and they adored him for it. Whether she was a servant girl or a duchess, if he genuinely liked a woman he would do anything for her. For him, an essential prerequisite of desire was respect.
As capable of true friendship as he was of lifelong enmity, Casanova could hold his own in any company, male or female, including that of Voltaire, Catherine the Great, and Madame de Pompadour. Yet the insecure and frightened child he had once been was never far away.
“In the most brilliant gathering, if but a single member of it looks me up and down, I am undone,” he revealed. “I am overwhelmed with anger, and become stupid.” To understand why, one needs look only to the two most important influences on his life: his birthplace, Venice, the “beloved mother” of its citizens; and his real mother, Zanetta.
Eighteenth-century Venice, like today’s Ibiza, was the sex-tourism capital of Europe, a year-round party city invaded every autumn by tens of thousands of foreign tourists who were attracted by the city’s unusually long carnival season, its countless religious and civic festivals, and its atmosphere of “universal liberty”, as an English traveller, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, once described it. Rendered anonymous by their carnival masks and cloaks, Venetian women were legendary: beautiful, flirtatious and, above all, available. Only the working classes kept up any kind of moral standards.
Casanova’s working-class mother was born Zanetta Farussi, the daughter of a poor but respectable Venetian cobbler. When she eloped with Gaetano Casanova, an actor from a local theatre, she broke her parents’ hearts. For though the city’s seven theatres were owned by noblemen, actors were considered social outcasts, and actresses little better than whores. The prospect of his beautiful daughter joining their ranks horrified Zanetta’s father so much that he died supposedly of grief within a month of her wedding. Born into the despised milieu of the theatre on April 2, 1725, Giacomo Girolamo Casanova was the first child of this controversial marriage. Although he would later pass as a proud aristocrat in the capitals of Europe, the stigma of his humble beginnings never left him, and his relationship with his mother only exacerbated his feelings of inferiority.
From the start, she paid him little attention. When he was just 10 months old she left him with her own mother and followed her husband to London, where he had been engaged to work with an Italian commedia dell’arte troupe in the Haymarket. Here Zanetta fulfilled her parents’ worst fears by joining the profession herself and, it was rumoured, having an affair with George Augustus, Prince of Wales and the future George II, who was said to be the father of her second child, Francesco.
Zanetta developed into a talented actress who inspired Italy’s most famous playwright, Carlo Goldoni, to write a play about her. But her mothering skills were distinctly lacking. When she returned to Venice, she virtually ignored Giacomo, who in her absence had become a withdrawn, imbecilic and sickly infant prone to gushing nosebleeds. When, in 1733, 36-year-old Gaetano Casanova died of a brain tumour, he left his wife with five young children to support and a sixth on the way. On the night of his ninth birthday, Zanetta took Giacomo to Padua, dumped him at the home of a cruel harridan she had never met before – supposedly for the good of his health – and walked out of his life to pursue her acting career at home and, later, in St Petersburg and Dresden.
