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-siecle 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,
Emile 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.
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