How do you create a potent art museum exhibition centered on someone who was not an artist? It’s not impossible, of course. There have been fascinating shows at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art illuminating the contributions of the influential art dealers Paul Durand-Ruel, Ambroise Vollard, and Alfred Stieglitz. These examinations of the history of taste assembled exemplary works by the artists these pioneering gallerists espoused, including many that were actually exhibited or personally owned by the dealers. But what if the proposed subject, unlike Durand-Ruel or Vollard or Stieglitz, had no obvious connection with the painters and sculptors of his day? What if he was known chiefly for writing a racy memoir recounting an extremely colorful, peripatetic life, a disarmingly frank account that made his name synonymous with “hedonist,” “libertine,” and “sexual adventurer”? What, that is to say, if the subject were Giacomo Casanova? Could a major museum exhibition focusing on the paradigmatic rake be created—not by the Museum of Sex?

The answer is a resounding “Yes.” Witness the delicious “Casanova: The Seduction of Europe,” a witty, multivalent celebration of the arts, culture, and social mores of high-end eighteenth-century Europe, as seen, experienced, and commented upon by the man himself.1It turns out that Casanova, despite his name’s current associations mainly with the erotic, is an excellent, all-purpose guide. He was not only, as we learn from his own account, an irresistible seducer, adventurer, gambler, con man, convict, escapee, spy, and