Borg de Balzan: gambler, art collector, social climber

Although quite vague in details about Luigi Borg de Balzan’s previous career path, the Rome papers do contain some biographical information. A certificate issued by Giovanni Pietro Sola, Bishop of Nice, confirms that Borg de Balzan had acted as consul-general for the short-lived kingdom of Mexico and as vice-consul of the French Empire in New York.

Borg de Balzan plays the card that rarely fails to obtain results: cash. He found irresistable the Order’s charitable schemes- Giovanni Bonello

Luigi, born to “most honest Catholic parents” had, Sola attested, invariably professed the tenets of the faith (this included fasting on days of obligation), and led an exemplary, pious life during his stay in the US, as also confirmed by American bishops.

Then Borg de Balzan plays the one card that rarely fails to obtain results: the invincible eloquence of cash. In a long letter written in French to the regent of the Order, Balì Alessandro Borgia, he underlines his awareness of the noble nature of the knighthood, its philanthropic mission and activities, its Hospitaller dedication to the ill and the needy (over two long pages of that sticky sap).

He found irresistible, he insisted, his urge to contribute substantially to the charitable schemes of the Order, and added that, having retired from an active life in business and in the public service, he now often travels for leisure.

In fact, he would soon be off to the United States where he had spent 30 years of his life and where he would be meeting up with some rich and influential friends. If the Order were to agree to his request to be promoted to the higher ranks, he would do his utmost to rope them in and tap them for more substantial contributions. A trifle inadequate on the side of subtlety, methinks, but probably read in Rome not without some aristocratic interest.

In Florence, Borg de Balzan moved in the highest circles. Though obviously dazzled by minor royalty, the aristocracy and the plutocrats, to his credit it must be added that he also befriended bohemian, possibly penniless, artists.

Even his very choice of Piazza Savonarola, then a hotbed of the vibrant artistic agora of Florence, as his residence, bears witness to his active involvement in the cross-currents of Tuscan and Italian creativity. Borg de Balzan’s lavish Victorian palazzo in Piazza Savonarola today houses the Department of Italian Studies of the University of Florence.

His close set of acquaintances included some of the more enlightened and forward-looking reformers and scientists of the times, foremost among them Paolo Mantegazza (1831-1910), the leading Darwinian in Italy, a pioneer in sexology at a time when sex was a dirty word to be pointedly avoided in polite society, and an anthropologist who carried out fieldwork in primitive cultures, still decidedly valid today.

A hundred years after his death, Mantegazza retains his reputation as a powerful scientific observer and ethnographer. He still shines for his truly outstanding merits and discoveries, though somewhat less for a number of quite embarrassing doctrines he espoused and promoted, among others, that psycho-analysis and treatment can successfully reverse the orientation of homosexuals.

Or that cocaine could turn out to be the wonder drug for some psychiatric disorders – he had tried it personally and sang its praises with abandon, as if he feared restraint to be an indictable offence. Not many would today follow these teachings with wild enthusiasm, or would want to file them under science.

Together, Borg de Balzan and Mantegazza in 1892 embarked on a genuinely pioneering and revolutionary venture – the setting up of a museum of psychology in Florence, possibly the very first one of its kind in the world. The French press predicted that the inauguration of this rather bizarre museum was imminent.

“As the name implies, this museum includes collections of objects associated with the dominant passions of the human spirit, and each section bears a name appropriate to what is contained in the halls of Vanity, of Cruelty, of Religious Sentiment and of Lust.

Despite the strangeness of these labels, it appears that the new museum will offer a display of genuine historical value. Its creation is due to the initiative of Senator Mantegazza and Commandeur Borg de Balzan.”

Mantegazza also tried his hand at science fiction. One of his most prophetic novels, published in 1897, simply called The Year 3000, forecast how, according to his intuition, the world would be like in over a thousand years’ time. The terrestrial globe would then be serviced by four huge accumulators of cosmic energy (dynamos) one of which (possibly in deference to the memory of his dead Maltese friend Borg de Balzan) the scientist chose to situate in Malta, a country which, apparently, he had never visited.

Mantegazza’s vision still appears breathtakingly prophetic: he foresaw a European Union, world peace, the elimination of illness. And, besides these more or less romantic utopias, this Italian answer to Jules Verne foretold that science would one day come up with such unthinkables as aeroplanes, CT scans, computers and credit cards.

The Mantegazza archives preserve the correspondence exchanged between Borg de Balzan and the visionary scientist. Similarly secured is Borg de Balzan’s written conversation with James Fenimore Cooper, the renowned author of The Last of the Mohicans.

The Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale of Florence too has a good stash of letters written by Borg de Balzan to the leading Italian macchiaiolo, the painter Telemaco Signorini, and to Zanobi Bicchierai, a not insignificant literary figure of the time. I have not had access to these manuscripts. Besides Signorini (1835-1901), the Maltese connoisseur patronised other contemporary Italian painters, like Pietro Senno (1831-1905) and Giuseppe Guzzardi (1845-1914).

Judging by his photographic portrait (temporarily mislaid), Borg de Balzan collected honours, decorations and orders of chivalry as avidly as he did works of art and cultural testimonials – maybe his insular origins, or some society snubs he may have suffered in earlier life, go some way towards explaining his compulsion to prove his success and his pre-eminent genetic heritage to himself and to others (and, perhaps, his apparent reluctance ever to return to Malta).

His coat-of-arms, emblazoned at the top of his letterheads, confirms this: at least eight chivalric decorations and orders of merit hang from his noble escutcheon – again, not that of the mean Borgs of Malta but the rearing bull of the imperious Borgias of Spain and Rome.

Clearly he relished knighthoods, genuine, dubious and maybe even the downright phony – the latter have always exercised an irresistible allure for attention-seekers with low self-esteem who cannot resist the urge to throw money at their insecurities and to buy reassurance.

In 1869 the Sovereign Military Order of Malta had accepted him as Knight of Magistral Grace and later references describe him as Gran Croce – as high a title as a plebeian could aspire to in the Order of St John. Some art historians actually refer to the art collector as Count Borg de Balzan.

But his correspondence with the Order of Malta in Rome lists a few more of what insignia had made it to Borg de Balzan’s all-devouring chivalric hoard. Bishop Sola records that our own Wiġi Borg was – take a deep breath and wait for it – Knight Commander of the Order of St Gregory the Great, of the Order of St Maurice and St Lazarus (dynastic knighthood of the House of Savoy) and of the Order of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Guadalupe, knight of the Order of Jesus Christ, holder of the Legion d’Honneur and of the Order of St Charles (searches in the archives of the Legion d’Honneur in Paris have, however, excluded him as a recipient of that French distinction). His Florence obituary adds that at the time of his death he included in his honours the Gran Cordone della Corona d’Italia.

One is expected to gasp and say ‘wow!’, I suppose. Pity the Guinness Book of Records had not yet hit the shelves.

Borg de Balzan’s secret wills, which he himself wrote in longhand with extraordinary candour, go a long way to reveal some of his many secrets. Of the two I have copies, the longer one I initially found hard to decipher, but perseverance paid off. This will, dated August 14, 1894, thankfully repeats some of the contents of an earlier, revoked one. And what a story!

He asserts he had not received any inheritance from his father and mother, that he had no ascendants alive, no descendants, legitimate, illegitimate or adopted, and that all his estate was the fruit of his own initiative. He then admits that “over recent years he had lost almost the totality of his estate, being left only with a small annuity from the New York Life Insurance Company”. He was thus not in a position to fulfil the legacies he had instituted in his previous wills, and was constrained to revoke them and all his other testaments altogether.

As we shall see later, he had twice lost his fortune, swinging alternatively from destitution to opulence and back and forth again, first in the 1850s, and then at some time before his death, probably the same adverse financial circumstances which had compelled him to organise the grand auction sale of his art collections.

In the first testament he reproduces parts of his previous will dated July 10, 1886. His (once) remarkable wealth, he says, had been the result “of my initiative, of my hard work and of my fortunate speculations on the Stock Exchange and of real estate deals in the USA”.

Then something catastrophic happened around 1855 when he was living in New York – apart from the great expenses he incurred in the purchase of works of art, he lost virtually everything he had previously accumulated as a result of a compulsive gambling habit to which he had succumbed and been addicted to for two years.

His friend Edwin Smith had come to the rescue, giving him support and refuge. The bankrupt gambler sold his furniture to pay his more pressing creditors, and let go of his “large and very expensive apartment on two floors”. Smith also took charge of Borg de Balzan’s highly valuable antique paintings, hanging them in his home as if they were his own, and thus saving them from the clutches of those he owed big monies to. He had gone to live in cheap rooms, but Smith had allowed him a free run of his residence for him to continue enjoying his collection of old masters without restraint.

He twice lost his fortune, swinging from destitution to opulence and back and forth again, first in the 1850s, and then at some time before his death- Giovanni Bonello

These wills also throw light on some unexplained aspects of Borg de Balzan’s private life. He had been married to Paolina Felicita Castelnace, but in the Smith household had come to know and fallen in love with his host’s extremely young (‘giovanissima’) daughter – and dumped his wife in favour of the dew-fresh American filly,

Mary MacIntyre Smith (actually it is not quite clear who had dumped whom – it may have been the other way round, with his wife having had enough of the penniless casino-junkie who cradle-snatched underage girls).

The two lovebirds turned into a fixed couple, passing themselves off as husband and wife – though this did not take everybody in – in later years in Florence, where they were living together, some referred to Mary as Borg de Balzan’s wife, but others, more diplomatically and in homage to Victorian prudery, as his “young American ward”. They certainly took in Bishop Sola, who certified Borg de Balzan, ‘living in sin’ though he publicly was, as a paragon of Christian virtue, born to Maltese parents of unbearable piety. Nor did it stop him, Lolita notwithstanding, being “high in Papal favour”.

Borg de Balzan did feel a nagging need to justify his separation from his wife – and the lust of the male mid-life crisis had nothing to do with it, he seems to kid himself. No, he records, the adolescent Mary had saved his life. When at her father’s home, she had made him swear solemnly never to touch a playing card again and this had brought about in him “a radical change of life”.

He had started his uphill climb again, financial and social, and owed his resurrection to the Smith father and daughter – he was careful to credit them, above anyone else, with his present high “moral and material” state. This high moral state included, among other treats, the adulterous frolics of a middle-aged hubby with a seriously underage girl.

The Maltese art collector could not marry his young mistress, as his Italian wife persisted irritatingly in staying alive. News reached him of her passing away in Paris on August 8, 1894, and he instantly took steps to organise his wedding with his long-time partner, throwing both a civil and a religious ceremony in for good measure. This happened the following September 27. When he drew up his will six days after the death of his wife, he left everything to Mary, though they were still unmarried. To make doubly sure, he signed a supplementary will just after the wedding, confirming Mary, now his wife, as his universal heir.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art houses a lovely portrait, drawn in pencil in 1847 by Theodore Chasseriau, probably the pupil Ingres admired most. The back of this drawing is inscribed ‘Madame Burg de Balsan, femme de l’ambassadeur’. It shows a refined, dazzling beauty and witnesses the fair, aristocratic looks of the sitter.

This exquisite drawing has been described as “a miracle of concision and emotional understatement”. Chasseriau drew the likeness of Madame Borg de Balzan at least three times over, and the other sketches are now to be found at the Louvre. Do these drawings show Paolina Felicita, or Mary MacIntyre Smith?

The features of the sitter look Anglo-Saxon, rather than Italian, but the date, 1847, would indicate Borg de Balzan’s legitimate spouse. How she got herself portrayed by the trendy Chasseriau remains unknown – but the artist did run around in the more rarefied circles of society. Chasseriau rates among those overly talented but unfortunate painters: “a moon eclipsed by stars”.

(To be concluded)