They could celebrate the peasantry without worrying about their plight. Bouguereau’s clientele collected his art because it didn’t ask too much of them. For example, in his painting “The Elder Sister,” he replicates Raphael’s composition in his “Small Cowper Madonna.” By referencing Renaissance works, Bouguereau suggests that the country folk of today are just as spiritually ennobled as holy personages were in the 16 th-century. He often made facile allusions to other artists. His figures are all unnaturally cheerful. Bouguereau produced charming scenes of rustic villagers. Instead, they collected the works of painters like William-Adolphe Bouguereau. Aschenbach’s contemporaries around the turn of the 20 thcentury scorned the avant-garde. The art the bourgeoisie produce is similarly degraded. Everyone in Aschenbach’s bourgeois milieu is a “doomed queen,” but it’s not queerness that forces them into degradation and sordidness. Their plumaged hats alone would provoke envy in any arbiter of camp. The people around him don the most extravagant fashions. He gives rambling, portentous monologues about the nature of time. He possesses pictures of his wife and children and kisses them when he goes out. Still, Aschenbach is already degraded before he meets Tadzio. To quote Andrew Holleran’s brilliant novel “Dancer from the Dance,” Aschenbach is a “doomed queen.” He “consider worthless because queer and…fall into degradation and sordidness!” Aschenbach’s homosexual desires lead to his undoing. Visconti’s film is a “straightforward story of homosexual love” that veers toward the “vulgar and simplistic.” Some feel that the film’s depiction of homosexuality is particularly unnuanced. In his review of the film, the distinguished Roger Ebert expresses the critical consensus. Yet, Visconti’s “Death in Venice” is not just a gay romance, but a meditation on the demise of bourgeois values.

Soon, he becomes fascinated with Tadzio, and he falls madly in love. The Polish youth speaks neither English nor German, but his beautiful features can be universally appreciated.

At his hotel, he spies an adolescent named Tadzio.

Visconti’s adaptation of Thomas Mann’s novella centers around the composer Gustav von Aschenbach, who arrives in the Italian metropolis after a disastrous concert. Because many retirees live there, some cynics have called Florida “God’s waiting room.” In his 1971 film, director Luchino Visconti proposes another candidate for the title-Venice.

Novel death in venice