Giacomo Girolamo Casanova In Selva, by Oleksandr Roytburd, whose work is on view this month in the exhibition Painting in Excess: Kyiv’s Art Revival, 1985–1993, at the Coral Gables Museum, in Miami © The Estate of Oleksandr Roytburd
Discussed in this essay:
Adventurer: The Life and Times of Giacomo Casanova, by Leo Damrosch. Yale University Press. 432 pages. $35.
In Adepts in Self-Portraiture, a 1928 study of the autobiographies of Casanova, Stendhal, and Tolstoy, Stefan Zweig wrote about a shady eighteenth-century class of figures known as adventurers:
They hear of a court, and in a trice they flock thither, the adventurers, in hundreds of masks and disguises. No one can tell you whence they come. . . . They bear pompous names, false as the jewels they flaunt on their shoe-buckles. They speak all languages; claim to be…
