ART FAGS OF VENICE
BUTT lands in Venice! As our buddies Ben Miller and Huw Lemmey of ‘Bad Gays’ fame note, “with its atmosphere of rarefied aesthetic splendor, its culture of art and partying, and its maze of cruisey dimly-lit alleyways, Venice has long been a site of pilgrimage and obsession for the discerning artistic homosexual. Today, the Biennale continues to bring visitors to ‘La Serenissima’ – not least the contemporary queer, drawn by a heady, sometimes toxic mix of passion, desire and exposure offered when the world’s artistic elite come together. But, they follow in the footsteps of some of history’s most fascinating – and sometimes malevolent – art fags.”
Pietro Aretino
Declaring himself a “sodomite since birth”, Aretino was a satirist whose pen was so poisonous he was once employed simultaneously by Francis I of France and Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, to slander each other. Surviving assassination by an angry bishop, he lived in a palazzo off the Grand Canal, which he opened up to young women needing refuge. Popular tradition has it that he died laughing at a particularly funny dirty joke told about his sister.
Peggy Guggenheim
When her dad went down with the Titanic, Peggy inherited far less than her cousins: equivalent to a measly $45 million today. She moved to Paris in the 1920s and dated Djuna Barnes (who was busy writing her lesbian cult classic ‘Nightwood’). After opening and closing a Manhattan gallery and marrying and divorcing surrealist Max Ernst, she established her collection in the Palazzo Vernier de Leoni on the Grand Canal. She slept with a cast of thousands: once, when the queer conductor Thomas Schippers asked how many husbands she’d had, she replied, ‘Mine, or other people’s?’
Frederick Rolfe
Decriminalization of homosexuality under the Zanardelli Penal Code of 1889 made Italy an attractive place of exile for British queers escaping persecution at home. None was more eccentric than the writer, photographer and Catholic convert Frederick Rolfe, aka “Baron Corvo”, whose many relationships with young gondoliers were the basis for his fictional depictions of idealized youths.
Lord Byron
In George Gordon Byron’s 36 years, he lived a compelling enough life to make an adjective, “byronesque”, out of his last name: one which evokes the stormy and romantic mood of his poems but also his orgiastic, scandal-filled life. After being sent to Cambridge and falling madly in love with a classmate, John Edelston, he racked up debts, became a poet and went on a Grand Tour of the Mediterranean. He spent much of his life abroad, including in Venice, where once, two mistresses fought so bitterly in his palazzo that he chose to sleep outside in a gondola. After leaving a trail of children, devastated lovers, and brilliant poetry in his wake, he died in the fight for Greece’s independence.
Thomas Mann
Perhaps no-one played a larger role in associating Venice with depravity than Thomas Mann, whose 1912 novella ‘Death in Venice’ depicts a homosexual pedophilic aesthete whose desire for a young boy, Tadzio, an avatar for beauty itself, leads to the narrator’s death during a cholera outbreak. The character, Aschenbach, echoes Mann’s own struggles with his pedophilia, and had a tragic coda: Björn Andrésen, who played Tadzio in Visconti’s film adaptation, struggled his whole life with the consequences of his early hypersexualization by the director.
Marchesa Luisa Casati
Peggy Guggenheim wasn’t the first wealthy, queer eccentric to inhabit the Palazzo Vernier de Leoni. Decades before, Luisa Casati, born in 1881 to a family of wealthy Milanese textile manufacturers, had married well but maintained separate residences from her husband. In her villa, she threw wild parties, sometimes wearing live snakes as jewelry. She patronized, befriended and dated an impressive line up of artists and writers including Romaine Brooks, Jean Cocteau and the Ballets Russes. She also became a muse for the fascist-friendly Futurists, but after spending all her money, she died in poverty in a one-room flat in London.
Rolandina Ronchaia
A trans woman who engaged in prostitution, Ronchaia was seized by the Doge’s legendary “Lords of the Night”, magistrates who used torture to try to tackle vice in the mediaeval city. Found guilty, she was condemned to death by burning. Sodomy and trans identities became such a “problem” for the authorities that in the 15th century that they established the Collegium sodomitarum inquisition to root out the queers, burning hundreds in Piazzetta San Marco. The cross-dressing, masked “Gnaghe” were allowed to commit sodomy during Carnival, and male prostitutes were once so popular the city allowed female ones to publicly bare their breasts, just so they could compete. Taxes levied on prostitution helped fund the excavation of the Arsenale, where the Biennale is held today.
Romaine Brooks
A wealthy American born in Rome, Brooks’s fortunes fell early in life when her parents divorced and she was raised from a distance by her mentally unstable mother. In 1902, Brooks’s mother finally died and she came into a considerable fortune. She moved to Paris and then to Venice, where she was a lover and supporter of the fascist poet Gabriele D’Annunzio – her own politics have come under scrutiny. In a three-way partnership with the saloniste Natalie Barney and the French aristocrat Lily de Gramont, Brooks maintained an art studio which Truman Capote once called, ‘The all-time ultimate gallery of all the famous dykes from 1880 to 1935 or thereabouts.’
Giacomo Casanova
A seducer of women so legendary his name has become a synonym for a fuckboi. Casanova almost certainly enjoyed trysts with men as well. Hardly surprising: Venice’s famous 18th century masked balls provided ample opportunities for experimentation with every form of discrete sexual coupling and gender expression. Fun fact, Casanova was an early advocate of safer sex, favoring an early version of the condom.