“Mad, bad and dangerous to know” was what Lady Caroline Lamb wrote about Byron upon their first meeting. Being an expert in this field, since she was crazy herself, she was looking for an alter ego. She found a poet: that was a bit less and at the same time much more. A few months later she was off her head: she would follow him, dress up as a man, threaten him with a knife and make scenes. She even wrote a novel with him, “the monster”, playing the leading role. To recover from this affair, Byron courted and seduced Lady Frances Webster, who could not have wished for anything better. When she, who was a puritan but overcome, declared her love for him, he put the matter off: “The best time is when there is nothing more you can ask for”. About women he had a clear head: in Don Juan he was to portray them as sexually predatory, pretending to be angels but no better than streetwalkers. The problem, he added, is that in England “Cant is so much stronger than Cunt”.

The most recent biography of Byron, which has just been released, "Life and Legend" (published by John Murray, 700 pages, 25 pounds) by Fiona Mac Carty, fully explores the diversified Byron world and metaphorically puts the ball back on the centre spot: if he spoke that way, then he must have been gay. Which does not rule out the possibility that he was mad, bad and dangerous.

And in fact “Mad, Bad and Dangerous. The Cult of Lord Byron” is the title given to the exhibition organised at the National Gallery Portrait for him, whom Simus Heaney, Nobel prize winner for Literature, simply describes as “the Master”, but with whom English people continue to have a love-and-hate relationship. Nobody has ever knocked them about so much and nobody has ever fascinated them so much. “I shall become the avowed enemy of British etiquette” was his promise. This promise was kept.
There are over one hundred articles on show, including paintings, busts, letters, photographs, manuscripts, first editions, clothes and memorabilia. The exhibition includes the carnival masks he wore, the Albanian costumes, the Greek uniforms, the helmets, the black skin, steel and bronze, as well as locks of hair… You will not find the pubic hair, inserted in a horn bracelet, from the “Fornarina”, “an Italian custom”, where Lady Lamb’s were blood-stained, having been cut off too close to the skin (“Will you please not place the scissors too close to the area that hair of yours grows from?”, she recommended, as she asked for the exchange). You will not find the skin dearly treasured by Teresa Guiccioli following a sunstroke due to too much sunbathing… But otherwise you will find the whole Byronism legend, including Edward Bulwer Lytton, Oscar Wilde, Colonel Laurence, Wyston Hugh Auden, Disraeli, Oswald Mosley, Harold Nicholson, Che Guevara, Robert Byron, Wilfred Thesiger and Bruce Chatwin, Rodolfo Valentino, Mick Jagger and David Bowie, and, on the whole, the writers, the poets, the travellers, the snobs, the aesthetes and artists, the right-wing and left-wing politicians, the real Latin lovers and the ambiguous ones, real sex and the third sex… For three months, conferences and shows continued to focus on the same subject: the radical hero, the movie hero, the fashionable dandy and the show business.

Along the halls, 40 portraits, including oil paintings, miniatures and engravings, which were dedicated to him during the 36 years he lived, relate an unrepeatable existence, an incredible fame and an irresistible charm. Supervised by Fiona Mac Carty, whose biography could be viewed in a sense as a peculiar catalogue, this exhibition relates the Byron legend in its multi-faceted aspects. What is not portrayed by this show is the excellent poet who revolutionised the poetry of his times, the extraordinary modernity and freshness of his lines that were able to blend styles, switch from tragic to comic, be proud and sweet, sarcastic and moving, sink into the past and suddenly re-emerge in the present day, with an overwhelming rhythm that ended by shaping a language which would have otherwise proved inaccessible. “Our harsh northern whistling, grunting, guttural, /which we’re oblig’d to hiss, and spit, and sputter all”. Nobody is perfect.
Let alone a biographer and an exhibition. Suffering without showing, it was a categorical imperative for Byron ever since his earliest years; he was a fat child, with a club-foot that crippled him, he had an idolater but absent father, who later poisoned himself, and a mother he had to stand, who was on the other hand present, ostentatiously pious and boring. The cruelty of childhood, which cannot conceive differences and therefore doesn’t respect them, helped him build a shield in which his body had to be reshaped and handicaps have to be overcome, cost what it may, come what may. Malformations heighten a type of sensitivity which accepts no rules, coercions, prohibitions or other impediments in addition to those which have already been forced on the person upon being born. His early lively intelligence, as well as his curious and watchful eye, completed his personality: nothing and nobody would ever again cause him to be marginalised.
When he left for his first journey, at the age of twenty-one, he already knew what was waiting for him “The whole world lies before me and I am leaving England unregretful”. In presenting a number of Byronian models, exegetes, admirers and imitators, the exhibition helps us understand the unique example that Byron represented. Indeed, each of them contains a part, but almost always lacks the essence, that is his being against his own times, his being able to proudly look after himself and be self-sufficient.
Oscar Wilde ended up by being crushed by the society he had challenged but which he would never have wanted to be excluded from; Losley and Guevara placed their talent at the service of an ideology, whereas Byron identified with an ideal; in writers such as Chatwin and Robert Byron, the action and dissipation element is missing, whereas movie and music stars are robbed of true freedom by the star system itself. At the age of twenty-six, Byron was already famous, at 28 he was already an exile and at 36 he was already dead. Oddly enough, d’Annunzio, the only one who could have been compared to him, was totally absent; typical English provincialism. As a matter of fact, the Italian artist had despisingly brushed aside any comparison, when Emil Ludwig had attempted to put the matter forward to him: “He might have swum well, but he mounted his horse ridiculously. And dying from fever at Missolungi isn’t really a heroic deed”. Surviving in the Vittoriale isn’t either. In Fiona Mac Carty’s biography, the reason for the exile is traced back to the incest rumours (involving his step-sister Annabelle) and those of sodomy which had started growing against the poet upon the breakup of his marriage, which had only lasted one year and had ended with his weeping wife charging him with mental cruelty.
This is a plausible reconstruction, but it does not explain every aspect. Incest was a minor crime, some sort of aristocratic vice that was fashionable in England in those days; for Byron, homosexuality was a public school practice, subsequently wisely released abroad, which was however difficult to prove in the absence of direct witnesses and of specific evidence. Both charges were grounded; however much more tangible and contingent was his disastrous financial situation which, only a few hours after his departure, caused a process-server to visit his house and even confiscate the tame squirrel from his bedroom. In a rather tortuous but elegant manner Byron set out the terms of the matter in a letter: “You can’t have forgotten the circumstances which caused me to leave England, nor the rumours about me. If they were true, then I am not fit for England; if they were wrong, then England is not fit for me”. And all things considered, this is the crucial aspect: Byron’s inadaptability: to society, to morals, to hypocrisy, and to the vices and virtues of his homeland. The idea that somebody or something may try and reshape his soul and instincts, as that boot which had been forced on him as a child to try and straighten his foot, although without success.
The idea of a society made of judges, spies, confessors… “The secret enemy whose sleepless eye/Stands sentinel, accuser, judge and spy/…Watch every fault that daring genius owes/…Distort the Truth, accumulate the Lie/and pile the pyramid of calumny”. He was never to return home again, and, in the ten years that he had yet to live, he gave free play to his love for women, palaces and politics. “In a society which prohibited affairs with young men, Byron’s salvation was represented by the number of female lovers”, annotated Fiona Mac Carty to explain the apparent contradiction of a homosexual smothered by women. Maybe, but the range of women involved was extremely diversified: it included intellectuals, illiterates, virtuous and wild women, noblewomen and lower-class, brunettes, redheads and blondes, young, mature and even aged. “All sluts”, are the words that end the list. Some of them, as in the case of the Fornarina, were special. To Byron, who had addressed her as “whore”, she replied: “Your whore, my lord”. When they were making love, if a church bell rung, she would bless herself and then resume… To Marianna Segati, who claimed birthright about the poet, she replied “You are not his wife, and I am not his wife. You are his woman and I am his woman. Your husband is a cuckold and so is mine. Otherwise, what right do you have to blame me if he prefers my belongings rather than yours? It’s no fault of mine”. The haberdasher’s shop run by Marianna Segati’s husband was called “Il Corno” (“The Horn”). She renamed “Il Corno inglese” (the slang Italian word for “cuckold” is “cornuto”, literally “horned”) “The best thing about the Fornarina”, was Byron’s comment, “is that she can neither read nor write. So she can’t haunt me with letters”.
Venice was the perfect setting to stage his life performance. At the age of ten, Byron had been granted the baron title following a number of deaths that had paved for him the way to nobility and, together with his mother, he had gone to Newstead Abbey, near Nottingham, to take possession of the family dwelling.

The Gothic ruins of Newstead are still imposing today, and include a 13th century priory with dining hall, cloister and large church window. In Byron’s days there still were neglected remains of French-styled gardens, two miniature forts and an artificial lake with its small fleet of boats… It was some sort of enchanted realm, where England sunk into the past, where children could dream of the noblest deeds and of the most heroic achievements.
For young Lord Byron it was the source of sudden inspiration, and, when a number of years later he was forced to sell it, it became source of pain made worse by a sense of guilt. Palazzo Mocenigo was to take its place, together with Venice, “the greenest island I could imagine”, the setting of his new maturity. Decline, silence, amorality, parties, swims and rides. A traveller wrote that, throughout the town, there were only eight horses, at the Lido, and these belonged to Byron. A lithograph by J. Dash, “Lord Byron at Palazzo Mocenigo” conveys the gloomy stateliness of immense spaces, centuries of history, delusions of grandeur and solitude in writing.
With “His grey hair and the crow’s-feet profuse in their indelible marks, his teeth still there as a matter of courtesy”, at 36 years of age Byron seemed doomed to become a caricature of his young self, a full-time “cavalier servant”, hand in glove with Teresa Guiccioli, and with ten horses, eight dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a falcon, five parrots, two guinea pigs and a stork to emphasise the freaks of a life, which in Venice, Ravenna, Pisa and Genoa, forced him to play a certain role, that of the myth he had contributed to create and which now smothered him.

Greece freed him from all this; the idea of action set him free from the risk of merely witnessing his own decline. In his political role, Byron was much wiser of the many nationalist artists full of passion but lacking organisation skills and with no critical intelligence. He knew that the Greeks did not really amount to much, being quarrelsome and dishonest, and he knew that the Turks should not be undervalued. He was a resolute and capable person, as well as a good judge: he did not play and did not give himself airs. He was let down by malaria and epilepsy, by wrong treatments and by a body that was by now too weak.

Byron’s death, as portrayed in the painting by Joseph-Denis von Odevaere, one of David’s students, recalls that of Marat painted by the master and heralds the work which, one hundred years later, was to convey the image of Byron lying on a rickety stretcher in the laundry of Vallegrande Hospital in Bolivia, the latest Byron icon of the 20th century. (trasl by Interpres)

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