Word: casanovas
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Robert Burns followed his regimen so strenuously that at his death in 1796, he was known not only as Caledonia's bard but as the Scottish Casanova. Popular legend made him a victim of wine, women and song. Less censorious, and more in accord with modern views, Byron saw Burns forever riding the pendulum of a split personality: "Sentiment, sensuality, soaring and groveling, dirt and deity." Some of the best evidence for and against Burns the man-his robust, personable letters-has been sifted for the first time in two decades by a Brooklyn College English professor, DeLancey Ferguson...
...Italian giant (6 ft. 6½ in., 280 Ibs.) who was promoted all the way up to the world's heavyweight championship in the 1930s, had turned his acting talents to the movies after a moneymaking postwar wrestling career, is currently performing (but not starring) in Casanova's Big Night and Prince Valiant. To make things complete, he and his Italian wife have just picked up their U.S. citizenship papers in Los Angeles...
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...
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...