Even World-Famous Seducers Of Women Need To Keep An Eye On Their Public Images

You know, this blog post almost certainly isn’t going to be as interesting as that title suggests. Especially since the man in question is dead.

But yesterday, as I was moving a fabulous but rather disturbing picture of Hansel (as in “Hansel and Gretel”) interrogating two suspected witches (bless you for making that exist, James Jean), I realised that it had been hiding a volume of Casanova’s memoirs (volume four of an 1894 unabridged reprint in six volumes) that I’d forgotten I owned.

[I do own another set of Casanova’s memoirs, from Johns Hopkins University Press (also incomplete: I have only three of the six volumes). I have no intention, however, of posting a picture of their cover. It’s beautiful cover art, but it’s beautiful cover art focusing intently on a naked figure, and this isn’t that kind of blog, despite what the odd Google search suggests.]

No, it’s the cover of this solitary volume that makes me suspect that Giacomo Girolamo Casanova de Seingalt, had he not inconveniently died in 1798, might be having stern words with his publicist once this arrived on his doorstep:

I’ve slightly distracted myself, now, by wondering just how Casanova might fit into modern society. (He would have a publicist, wouldn’t he? And would probably be just another person famous for nothing more than being wealthy and leisured.) But leaving that aside for the time being, do you think he’d be pleased with this cover?

He doesn’t really look like a man whom—assuming, for the purposes of the argument, that you eye men speculatively—you’d be likely to eye speculatively, does he?

I think it’s the hideously magnified eye.

Well, once we ignore the fact that he appears to be largely two-dimensional, and whatever it is that’s going on with his lips there, and the fact that his cheekbones and chin look like they could cause some serious damage to the bed linen if he rolls over in his sleep—once you move past those issues, I think it’s the hideously magnified eye that’s the most disturbing factor.

I understand that enormous eyes are part of the reason why baby animals are appealing—and I’ve heard the argument (somewhere, many moons ago) that the appealing, exaggerated facial features of young mammals are helpful in triggering the protective instincts of the adult of the species.

But surely that doesn’t apply to Casanova, does it?

Maybe that’s the true secret of his success: perhaps eighteenth-century women were irresistibly attracted to men who looked like bush babies?

It’s one of the great mysteries of my bookshelves.