The Life and Times of Moses Jacob Ezekiel: American Sculptor, Arcadian
Knight tells the remarkable story of Moses Ezekiel and his rise to
international fame as an artist in late nineteenth-century Italy.
Sephardic Jew, homosexual, Confederate soldier, Southern apologist,
opponent of slavery, patriot, expatriate, mystic, Victorian, dandy,
good Samaritan, humanist, royalist, romantic, reactionary, republican,
monist, dualist, theosophist, freemason, champion of religious
freedom, proto-Zionist, and proverbial Court Jew, Moses Ezekiel was a
riddle of a man, a puzzle of seemingly irreconcilable parts. Knighted
by three European monarchs, courted by the rich and famous, Moses
Ezekiel lived the life of an aristocrat with rarely a penny to his
name. Making his home in the capacious ruins of the Baths of
Diocletian in Rome, he quickly distinguished himself as the consummate
artist and host, winning international fame for his work and
consorting with many of the lions and luminaries of the fin-de-siècle
world, including Giuseppe Garibaldi, Queen Margherita, Franz Liszt,
Richard Wagner, Sarah Bernhardt, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Eleonora Duse,
Annie Besant, Clara Schumann, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Alphonse
Daudet, Mark Twain, Émile Zola, Robert E. Lee, Augustus
Saint-Gaudens, and Isaac Mayer Wise. In a city besieged with
eccentrics, he, a Southern Jewish homosexual sculptor, was
outstanding, an enigma to those who knew him, a man at once stubbornly
original and deeply emblematic of his times. According to Stanley
Chyet in his introduction to Ezekiel’s memoirs, “The contemporary
European struggle between liberalism and reaction, between modernity
and feudalism, between the democratic and the hierarchical is rather
amply refracted in Ezekiel’s account of his life in Rome.” Indeed
so many of the contentious cultural, political, artistic, and
scientific struggles of the age converged in the figure of this adroit
and prepossessing Jew.
Les mer
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9781611476729
Publisert
2015
Utgiver
Vendor
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter