Art: Portrait of a Lover

To hear him tell it in his Memoirs, Giovanni Giacomo Casanova of Venice was the greatest lover of all time. But the world has only a sketchy idea of what the great lover looked like. Only two known portraits have come down to posterity, both profiles, one painted by his brother Francesco when Casanova was a young man, and the other by an unknown artist showing him in old age. Last week in Rome the experts were sure that they had finally got a good look at Casanova; an amateur art-restorer named Armando Preziosi had turned up a new portrait, this time a full-face picture.

Art Lover Preziosi came on his find by accident. Browsing about a Milan antique shop last fall, he was struck by a haunting portrait of a man, painted in fine detail and rich colors. The picture showed an 18th century dandy, seated in a chair, with a plump cupid hovering in the background. Preziosi had no idea who the man was, and was unable to meet the asking price. But he was so taken by the picture that he finally offered in exchange for it a clock, two Chinese vases and a painting of the Spanish-American War. The discovery came when he started cleaning his dusty acquisition. Between the frame and canvas, he found a small slip of paper with the words in French: “Jean Jacques Casanova, 1767.”

Italy’s foremost Casanova expert, retired Journalist Gino Damerini, was immediately called in. He said the costume was typical of the dandified Casanova; other experts testified that it was surely Casanova, with the same heavy eyelids, arrogant nose and sensual lips. The painter, according to the experts: Raphael Mengs, an 18th century Bohemian master.

Casanova himself had long since testified to a more than passing acquaintance with the artist. Both men were in Madrid in 1767, and Casanova’s Memoirs record how he embroiled Mengs in his adventures. One day a beautiful woman invited Casanova to her bedroom, where he was staggered by the sight of her former lover dead on the bed, a dagger in his throat. Undaunted, Casanova threw the body into a stream behind the house, soon after heard that the police were after him. Casanova fled to the house of Mengs, where he hid out until the police finally caught up with him and bundled him off to jail.

Later, after the Venetian ambassador wangled his release, Casanova went back to Mengs and more adventures. But the long-suffering Mengs soon had enough and asked the great libertine to leave. Says Casanova bitterly in his Memoirs: “To the painter I wrote that I felt that I had deserved the shameful insult he had given me by my great mistake in acceding to his request to honor him by staying at his house … As a matter of fact, he had only asked me to stay with him to gratify his own vanity.”