In Venice, a Young Boatman Steers a Course of His Own
When the artist Francesco Guardi returned home and published his first poem (in English, in 1653), he also began a new career as a man of the world. (Guardi, born in Venice in 1609, died at San Donato, near Florence, in 1682.) Today, his book contains a story of romance, seduction, and flight in the great watery city—a story of love, sex, and revolution.
Francesco Guardi’s book contains a tale of love, sex, and revolution in Venice and beyond.
Francesco Guardi (1609–1682)—author of the Venetian epic poem Il Risveglio (The Awakening, 1652)—was born in Venice, the third son of a banker. He was educated in his father’s countinghouse, and was a man of letters, although he was never a professional writer. Having taken up the practice of drawing, he also produced small, satirical, and erotic paintings of himself, and these may have inspired him. He was to remain a man of the world for the rest of his life.
In Venice, he entered an affair with Maddalena d’Arpino, daughter of the local nobleman, the Count of Arpino. She was beautiful, rich, and ambitious, an Italian of great ambition. Her father arranged a meeting with an English officer for her, and he—with the help of his lover, John Fielding, a prominent Venetian gentleman and poet—accompanied her to London. They remained together for several months, during which they had a son, a son who was to grow up to become the poet and philosopher Charles I. They also had a mistress, who bore a daughter, and who was to become, at the age of seven years, Francesco’s first and only wife.
Francesco Guardi was then apprenticed to his father, with whom he had become friendly, and who then introduced him to the Count of Arpino’s family, the Bardi. His father’s house became the center of an enormous network of family and acquaintances who welcomed him to their table. It was not long after this that Francesco began his first serious literary venture