Baron Kirkup: The Forgotten Mage of Florence

“Happy were the hours I spent in the society of Baron Kirkup…the manifestations he has witnessed are absolutely astounding.”

-from Around the World Around the World: Or, Travels in Polynesia, China, India, Arabia, Egypt, Syria, and Other Heathen Countries (1875)  by James Martin Peebles

Long before the the rise of Theosophy, which took the world by storm in the 1870s and 1880s, Spiritualism enjoyed a reputation as one of world’s fastest-growing and popular religious movements. In Florence its adherents were, as one contemporary wrote, “thoroughly organised, having a fine society.” Composed mainly of internationally minded artists and literary types, Florentine Spiritualists conducted psychic experiments in villas across the city, and occasionally ventured to “haunted” manors further afield. As reported in the Year-book of Spiritualism (1871), their séances were hush-hush affairs, mostly for “fear of public opinion”. Nevertheless, they involved the “highest personages of the land”.

Without a doubt, the most alluring of these Spiritualist venues was Casa Carovana: the atelier and home of Baron Kirkup. A former headquarters of the Knights Hospitaller, Kirkup’s residence was located directly above the Arno river on the southern end of the Ponte Vecchio.  By all accounts, it was a true mage’s lair, reminiscent–as the English writer Camilla Crosland noted–of a “medieval laboratory”. According to Kirkup’s acquaintance, James Martin Peebles, Casa Carovana also contained a “massive library of books treating of magic and the unsystematised philosophy of the mystics”.

Writing in his My Confidences (1896), another associate of Kirkup’s, Frederick Locker-Lampson, said that–among other bric-a-brac–the old palazzo was full of “grimy plaster busts and bas-reliefs after Donatello and Michael Angelo, and coarse majolica, tattered old books, pipes and newspapers, scattered about in what is called picturesque confusion”. Kirkup’s pets also amplified the dissonance of the space. “A beautiful shrill paroquet swings himself in a cage on the terra cotta stove,” wrote Charles Eliot Norton, another contemporary of Kirkup. “A big yellow cat, who has plainly been dining with his master, rubs himself purring against our legs.” When the guest tried to speak up, the chattering parrot drowned him out, making him “almost as deaf as the parrot’s master”.

As aesthetically jarring as it was, the décor was not the only reason for the mansion’s enduring popularity. Florence, then as now, was home to many well-preserved palaces, each with its own treasure trove of dusty antiques and heirlooms. What really drew people to the ramshackle landmark was the chance to have an audience with the mage himself.

The son of an English jeweller, Seymour Kirkup had come to Italy in 1820, five years after the completion of his studies at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. For the next four decades he worked as an illustrator and painter in Florence, all the while satisfying his lust for knowledge by amassing a museum-like collection of rare books. Kirkup also threw himself headlong into the study of Dante’s works. His zealous researches paid off in 1840, when he and two colleagues discovered the oldest known portrait of Dante in the Barghello. For his efforts, Kirkup was awarded an Italian knighthood in 1865. Subsequently, he styled himself as a “baron”.

It was only in the 1850s though, that Kirkup, after years of irreligiousness, adopted the mystic inclinations for which he would later be known. Until this point he had mostly been a dilettante, dabbling in magnetism out of pure curiosity as other gentlemen of the time were wont to do. This all changed at dusk on 27 July 1854, when Kirkup and his medium, Regina, received a spine-tingling dispatch. A bang “as loud as a gun” sounded off in the darkness and then an invisible presence, which later identified itself as Regina’s deceased father, spoke in a whisper.

From that point on Kirkup was a believer. In a journal entry he wrote: “As soon as it was over I took the candle and examined again minutely the room which I had bolted, and found everything secure. It was perfectly impossible for any one to have got in; it was beyond all human agency, beyond all trick or illusion.” Kirkup subsequently witnessed “hundreds” of manifestations, some of which he saw with his own eyes.

As the years went by, Kirkup the “ghost-seer”, already renowned for his art-hunting prowess, became something of a man about the town. His antiquated mannerisms, strange insights, and style of dress accordingly became sources of wonderment. The Irish writer and suffragist Frances Power Cobbe called him the closest thing to an “ancient wizard that might well be conceived”. Other contemporaries, such as Crosland, went so far as to say that the baron’s activities were “perilously near” black magic.

Kirkup was even rumoured to possess the secret of the philosopher’s stone. In his Rambling Recollections (1908), the Maltese-born English diplomat, Sir Henry Drummond Wolff claimed that Kirkup had “explained the process” to a poor man. The man had apparently “died rich”, and Kirkup was convinced that this wealth had come from his “knowledge of the secret”.

When Nathaniel Hawthorne came to see the baron in August 1858, he observed that the “white-headed old man” shuffled around his house in a blue frock coat while “thinking all the time of ghosts”. Yet the most evocative illustration of the mage of Florence would appear in the autobiography of the renowned archaeologist and statesman Austen Henry Layard. Layard described Kirkup as a truly Merlinesque figure with long white hair, a hooked nose, and restless eyes. He noted that whenever Kirkup strolled in his “battered felt hat to a neighbouring cafe” passersby would call him “stregone—the magician”.

Layard did not, however, share Kirkup’s views on Regina, who was rumoured to be Kirkup’s lover. Acknowledging that he had attended “two or three of her séances”, Layard concluded that it would “be difficult to imagine” a more “transparent case of imposture”. When Regina died, her daughter Imogene was raised by Kirkup as his own. The child assumed her mother’s mantle, reportedly becoming twice as clairvoyant as her predecessor. According to Hawthorne’s wife, Sophia, Kirkup would magnetise his daughter in order to speak with “dead emperors”.

In his What I Remember (1887), the writer Thomas Trollope, who had also witnessed Imogene’s mediumship, said that in his later life Kirkup lived solely according to her oracular dictates. In 1872, when Kirkup was in his 80s,  it was Imogene who convinced him to relocate to Livorno. Imogene was also said to have played a part in persuading her father to marry her friend, Paolina Carboni. Carboni was 65 years Kirkup’s junior, but like the other two women in Kirkup’s life, she laid claim to psychic powers. After Kirkup’s death in 1880, Carboni inherited his title and gave her husband’s Dante mask–one of his most prized possessions–to Professor Alessandro D’Ancona. Unlike her husband, who left behind copious bundles of notes and letters, Baroness Kirkup’s life was less documented. Consequently, not much else is known about her later pursuits.

Kirkup’s famous home was blown to smithereens by the Nazis in 1944, and in similar fashion, the memory of the old wizard of Ponte Vecchio has largely been erased from modern-day Florence. The storied spot that once hosted generations of Templars, Hospitallers, artists, poets, and spirits, is now packed with four-star restaurants and tourist-trap hotels offering astronomically priced meals and disturbingly immaculate suites. Kirkup’s ghosts, the all-too-inventive phantoms that so intrigued the day’s most famous literati, have left no trace. Like a city of legend, the haunted domain has been swallowed entirely by the ever-moving, never-relenting present. Thus, the full details of Kirkup’s occult life, and that of his Italian family in Livorno, have yet to be unearthed.