Mr Phoebus e la sua isola in Lothair di Benjamin Disraeli

In Disraeli’s Lothair (1870), towards the end of the novel, and as part of his Bildung, the eponymous aristocratic protagonist undertakes a Mediterranean voyage, which includes landing on a beautiful fictional Greek island owned by a fashionable Hellenising painter aptly named Mr Phoebus. This essay highlights the biographical, political and cultural contexts mobilized by Lothair’s voyage and Mr Phoebus’s island, especially investigating the Mr Phoebus-Frederic Leighton connection, and finally underscoring Disraeli’s complex take on nineteenth-century Hellenism and neopaganism, as – on the one hand – a politically engagé artistic trend, connected with republicanism and the revolutionary spirit pervading Europe at mid-century, and – on the other hand – as a crucial component of the much tamer “aesthetic movement” that would soon be associated with Pater and the late Victorian literary and artistic avant-garde