The Essay: Death in Trieste

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The Essay: Death in Trieste: 2. The Trial

2. The Trial

Death in Trieste

BBC Radio 3 - The Essay, Death in Trieste, 2. The Trial

Seán Williams on the Italian real crime drama that became a myth of art, sex and death.

Seán Williams unpacks the mysteries and realities of a murder in Trieste in the 1760s which still informs ideas and mythologies about aesthetics, a certain sort of sex and death.

Murder! In hotel room ten, with a rope and a knife. By a fellow guest. If this were Cluedo, we’d have given the game away. But it’s true crime, turned cultural history. And travelogue: Seán Williams follows in the footsteps of the most famous art historian of all time. The German Johann Winckelmann – killed in Italy, in June 1768.

In a series that takes us to Trieste, Venice, and Rome, Seán uncovers skeletons in the closet. One crime becomes a way of conceiving a certain sort of life, death, art. Winckelmann’s end has written the script for a classic gay tragedy that has been adapted over the centuries. It’s a dramatic story told by Goethe, Oscar Wilde, and Thomas Mann, to name but a few.

But what are the facts of this fiction? Ranging from supposedly tolerant and intellectual Enlightenment Europe to the nonchalant nineties, and to Italy today – where the government are ramping up anti-LGBT rhetoric – Seán asks what it means that a historic murder has become cultural myth. To us. To him. Because it was also Winckelmann the historian who taught us a haunting truth. We always read art of the past personally, in the present.

Part 2: Sean explores the detail and the speed of the trial reported across Europe.

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Seán Williams unpacks the mysteries and realities of a murder in Trieste in the 1760s that still informs ideas and mythologies about aesthetics, a certain sort of sex and death.

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