Free Casanova's Women by Judith Summers Page A

had ‘great qualities [that] made me think of you every time he honoured me with a visit,’ she wrote flatteringly to Giacomo a few months after his grandmother’s death. ‘I told him, a year ago, that I had a son who was headed for the priesthood, whom I hadn’t the means to keep. He replied that my son would become his if I could get the queen to appoint him to a bishopric in his own country.’ 16 What Bernardo wanted was the bishopric of the town of Martirano, near Naples, where the Polish monarch’s daughter was married to the king. ‘Trusting in GOD,’ Zanetta’s letter continued melodramatically, ‘I threw myself at Her Majesty’s feet, and I found favour. She wrote to her daughter, and she had him elected by Our Lord the Pope to the bishopric of Martirano. True to his word, he will take you with him the middle of next year… He will set you on the road to the highest dignities of the Church. Imagine my comfort when I see you in twenty or thirty years from now a bishop at the least.’ 17
    This behind-the-scenes manoeuvring was as near as Zanetta ever got to expressing love for Giacomo, whom she did not see again until 1752 when he was twenty-seven years old and came to visit her in Dresden with his brother Francesco. By then Zanetta had lost her looks, a tragedy for an actress used to playing romantic roles. ‘She is around forty years old,’ a German critic wrote of her in 1750. ‘Her body is stout, tall, her face looks aged in spite of the theatrical perspective. She would have portrayed a villainous woman, a real demon of a woman, more accurately than a lover. She takes the role of Rosaura; for a young romantic lead her voice is too husky.’ 18 Aware that she was no longer in her prime, Zanettahad already tried her hand at writing for the theatre: on 6 November 1748 her
Le Contese di Mestre e Malghera per il Trono
, an operatic parody, had been staged at Warsaw.
    In 1756, due to the start of what would become known as the Seven Years War, the Italian Theatre in Dresden closed and Zanetta was temporarily pensioned off with an income of 400 thalers. When the city came under fire, she fled to the safety of Prague with many of her compatriots. Short of money (she did not always receive her pension during the war), she appealed to Giacomo for financial aid. Always generous by nature, he sent her what he could spare. Zanetta may not have been much of a mother to him, but, as he told an acquaintance at the time, ‘I do not forget my duty as a good son.’ 19
    Whilst most of her colleagues made their ways back to Italy at the close of hostilities, Zanetta returned to Dresden, the city she now thought of as home. Unexpectedly, it was at this later stage in her life that she at last began to enjoy something of a domestic life. Around 1751, her nineteen-year-old daughter Maria had joined her in Dresden. Breaking the promise she had made to her dying husband, Zanetta had allowed the girl to join her on the stage, and in February 1752 the two Casanova women acted together in
Zoroastre
, a French play written by Cahusac and translated into Italian by Giacomo, presumably at Zanetta’s instigation (it was his first theatrical work). Maria later married musician Peter August, the court harpsichordist in Dresden, and gave birth to a daughter, Marianne.
    Then, in the autumn of 1764, Zanetta’s third son Giovanni, who had been living with her intermittently since her arrival in Saxony, returned to Dresden from Rome, where he had been studying painting for five years under the artist Anton Raphael Mengs. He brought with him a Roman wife, Teresa Roland. Giovanni was appointed director of Dresden’s Academy of Fine Art that year, and the couple’s first son, Carolus Xaverius, was born in Dresden in 1765.
    When Giacomo visited Dresden for a second time in 1766,Zanetta’s family was more complete than it had been since she had first left Venice.