THE COMPLETE HAUNTINGS by Vernon Lee

Author:Vernon Lee [Lee, Vernon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FICTION / Ghost
ISBN: 9781553103226
Publisher: Christopher Roden/Ash-Tree Press
Published: 2013-08-07T22:00:00+00:00

II

Cold Shivers under the Arcades of Bologna

But when we were a couple of romantic hobbledehoys, my friend John and I, spellbound (by our own childish, self-complacent spells) in front of Farinelli’s picture, and ignorant that gramophones were about to be invented, what would we not have given if some supernatural mechanism had allowed us to catch the faintest vibrations of that voice!

And herein is the connection between the Magnasco Society’s Catalogue and the story called ‘Winthrop’s Adventure’.

Not that the picture we stood before (in 1872, I think) was the one now belonging to Lady Templemore and reproduced in that (1927) number of Country Life. Indeed, I have expatiated on the latter because, as I told you, the sight of that engraving was what made me take down the long-unopened volume of Metastasio’s letters, in search of Signora Teresa Castelli, shaking out with the dust of its pages, that siren and her innocence ‘at least for the duration of the play’, and sundry other ghosts, some belonging to my own adolescence, as well as those painted by Amigoni. Moreover, because the Magnasco catalogue afforded a royal road, just what is wanted for a royal favourite, leading to that curious (note the adjective curious!) figure from whose history and legend ‘Winthrop’s Adventure’ originally arose, and sundry metamorphoses thereof. To wit: this famous singer Farinelli (Carlo Broschi nicknamed Farinelli, or rather Farinello, born 1705, died 1782) who, after dispelling with his songs the melancholia of one dotty King of Spain, Philip V, became as indispensable to the somewhat feeble-minded Ferdinand VI, and was all powerful with both for some twenty years in the capacity of virtuoso di camera, and with virtue no less rare and consummate than virtuosity. Whence the myth (consecrated by the Magnasco catalogue) of his having become prime minister or as Voltaire (if I remember correctly) expressed it, of ‘Farinelli a gouverné les Espagnes.’

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