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.
