Alas! It is 200 years since the death of Giovanni Battista Belzoni, who studied hydraulics, wanted to be a monk, became a barber, then a circus strongman, and was eventually employed to remove a huge bust of Ramesses II from Egypt and take it to the British Museum.
He was born in Padua in 1778, one of 14 children of a poor family (understandably if they had that many mouths to feed), and supposedly aimed to become a monk on having his heart broken — although his 1959 biographer Stanley Mayes wrote:
It is hard to believe that a young man of his energetic habit and restless temperament would seek consolation in the cloister. Much more likely is the explanation hinted at by Belzoni himself, that he was trying to make good the gaps in his education.
Certainly, this is how he liked to present himself:
…but the same book (The Great Belzoni) says he was “mild and gentle in his ways”, so perhaps he was more of a large, bumbling, sensitive Bernard Bresslaw type. I like to think so.
Anyway, by this time he was in Rome, but it was occupied in 1798 by the French, and he moved to the Netherlands and became a barber. In 1803, he was in England, and — what with being a handsome big feller of 6 foot 7, became a circus strongman.
He started appearing at Sadler’s Wells, where he appeared in Fee! Faw! Fum! or, Jack the Giant Killer. You may not be entirely surprised to hear that he played the giant, with famous Regency-era clown Joe Grimaldi as his dwarf.
But he also had a separate strongman act, in which he carried about a frame on which 11 or 12 people could sit (accounts vary). It’s described in Stanley Mayes’ book…
The harness he wore for this weighed one hundred and twenty-seven pounds. It consisted of an iron frame fitted with ledges on which ten or twelve members of the company could perch themselves till the whole looked like some huge human candelabrum. Then delicately, Agag-like, holding a flag in either hand, Belzoni would walk round the stage with three-quarters of a ton of humanity dependent from his broad shoulders. When he came down to face the footlights there were no tortured muscles visible, no agonizing look on his handsome face. The beauty of Belzoni’s performance lay in the ease with which he accomplished it.
…and illustrated in what 2011 book Belzoni: The Giant Archaeologists Love to Hate calls a “fanciful watercolour”:
George Cruikshank also drew him at Bartholomew Fair carrying… well, however many people there are in this picture
As a small digression, here’s the text of a handbill the owners of Sadler’s Wells produced to promote their show.
Anyway, apparently, he did his strongman act with his English wife. Sarah Belzoni was, according to one source, “of Amazonian proportions”, but Charles Dickens in 1851’s Household Words, called her “a pretty, delicate-looking, young woman”. A remarkable traveller and writer herself, she eventually outlived him by 45 years.
They appeared all over London, and the rest of the country, together, and Chambers’ Book of Days reproduces the text of another handbill for one of Belzoni’s own shows:
Presumably, this was some sort of conjuring trick. The grand cascade is believed to be some kind of shower of water and fire. Anyway, he left England in 1812, and toured the continent, then went to Egypt to offer the Pasha his services as a hydraulic engineer.
The Pasha wasn’t interested, but did give him leave to remain in the country, so Belzoni climbed the great pyramid at Giza, and went inside even though the ‘descending corridor’ is only four feet high. He also ran into British Consul, Sir Henry Salt.
They’d both heard of a mighty carved stone head half-buried in the desert, and Salt gave Belzoni the money to go and find it and claim it for Britain. He set off in June 1816, and near Thebes, there was, indeed, a ruined temple: Memnonium or the Tomb of Ozymandias.
Napoleon had, of course, been hanging around in Egypt not long before, and had also had designs on the big head — which is why you can still see a hole in it today.
Mayes says Ozymandias is “a Greek corruption of User-maat-Re, one of the other names of Ramses”, and an inscription read:
My name is Osymandias, king of kings; if any would know how great I am, and where I lie, let him surpass me in any of my works.
That will sound familiar to anyone who knows a bit of poetry, but it also inspired “City business man” Horace Smith to pen a lesser-known sonnet: On A Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered standing by itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription inscribed below.
Anyway, they rolled the head to the Nile, which took weeks, and then had to wait for a boat big enough. When that arrived, in November, the Nile had receded, so Belzoni spent two days building an 18-foot ramp. Finally, it got to Luxor.
Mind you, the delays gave Belzoni more time for exploring, so he did A Lot — and is also responsible, for example, for the Grade II listed Philae obelisk in the grounds of (Grade I listed National Trust property) Kingston Lacy.
In 1821, he rented the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly for a year and
Unfortunately, he was restless for further fame, and set out to find the source of the Niger… and died of dysentery in Benin 200 years ago today. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography:
(Not *that* Richard Burton.)
It seems appropriate, somehow, that his resting place is lost, when you consider what his work inspired:
…and you might want to conclude that if we sent everything in the British Museum back to its country of origin, we’d be left with the Sutton Hoo treasure and the Lewis chess set, but…
