Operatic Lives

Writing under the pen name Alberto Savinio, Andrea de Chirico (brother of painter Giorgio) penned fourteen short portraits of such luminaries as the painter Arnold Böcklin, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, Verdi, Stradivarius, Nostradamus, Paracelsus, Jules Verne, the bullfighter Bienvenido, Isadora Duncan, and Carlo Collodi, the creator of Pinocchio. In these biographies, Savinio's complex tone is at times warm and cordial -and, at other times, ironic to the point of malignancy.