Wilhelm von Gloeden, the baron of Taormina and his broken archive

A sick young German settled in a Sicilian hill town and sold Europe a dream of ancient Greece, printed on postcards from his terrace studio. His archive was seized by Fascist police, and his pictures of local boys still divide museums and historians.

Taormina, 1933. Two years after the death of Wilhelm von Gloeden, the most famous photographer the Sicilian town had ever had, the Fascist police come for what he left behind. From the archive kept by his heir, Pancrazio Buciunì, they take away about a thousand glass negatives and some two thousand prints, as pornography¹.

Those plates had made Gloeden rich and his town famous. For thirty years his pictures of Sicilian boys and young men, posed as shepherds and gods of ancient Greece, had travelled across Europe as prints and postcards. They are also why his name is now a problem. This page tells the whole story of Wilhelm von Gloeden: the sick young German who came south, the studio that drew emperors and writers, the archive the police broke up, and the uneasy way museums and historians look at his work today.

A baron from the Baltic

Wilhelm von Gloeden was born on 16 September 1856 near Wismar, in the grand duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, on the Baltic coast of Germany. His father, a forestry official, died when he was a child, and in 1864 his mother married again¹.

He grew up calling himself a baron. The family name was real, but historians have found no basis for the title, and it seems to have been a piece of self-promotion that stuck.

In 1876 and 1877 he studied painting in Weimar. Then he fell ill with a lung disease, usually described as tuberculosis, and spent time in a sanatorium. Around 1877 or 1878, in his early twenties, he went south for the climate and settled in Taormina, a small hill town on the east coast of Sicily, above the sea, with a ruined ancient theatre and Mount Etna on the horizon.

He was following a well-worn northern dream. The historian Robert Aldrich has traced how generations of German and British men saw the Mediterranean as a surviving fragment of ancient Greece, a place of sun, ruins and beautiful poor men, where the moral rules of home did not apply².

A hobby that became a trade

At first he lived comfortably on family money and took photographs for pleasure. In 1895 that money vanished. His stepfather, Wilhelm von Hammerstein, a conservative newspaper editor in Berlin, was caught in a fraud and embezzlement scandal that ruined the family¹.

Gloeden turned his hobby into a living. According to the usual account, the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin helped him with the gift of a large plate camera. He already had a reputation: in 1893 the Royal Photographic Society in London had hung twenty-one of his pictures, and over the next years he showed in Cairo, Berlin, Philadelphia and elsewhere.

He photographed everything Taormina offered a camera: the theatre, the almond blossom, fishermen, old women in black, girls with flowers. These views sold well to tourists. But the pictures that made his name were of a different kind.

The studio by San Domenico

Gloeden bought a house near the old convent of San Domenico and turned its terraces into an open-air studio. His models were local boys and young men, the sons of peasants and fishermen. He dressed them in tunics or sheets, crowned them with laurel, handed them amphorae and lyres, and posed them against walls, columns and the sea.

Many were photographed nude. The scene was meant to look like Theocritus or a vase painting; the bodies belonged to poor Sicilian families who were paid for their time. He worked with heavy glass plates in strong daylight and, according to German accounts, rubbed his models' skin with a mixture of milk, olive oil and glycerine to soften blemishes for the lens³.

His closest collaborator was Pancrazio Buciunì, born in 1879 and known as il Moro, "the Moor", for his dark complexion. He came into Gloeden's household as a boy of about fourteen, posed as a model and grew into his assistant, darkroom hand and companion for the rest of the photographer's life.

Postcards for the northern tourist

From around 1900 Gloeden's pictures were sold not only as large albumen prints for collectors but as postcards, cheap enough for any visitor. His studio was listed in the Baedeker travel guide, and the pictures reached art magazines, photographic journals and the albums of collectors from London to Berlin⁴.

The classical costume was the passport. A nude boy with a lyre could be filed under art, ethnography or "types of Sicily", and sold openly. Roland Barthes, who wrote a short text on Gloeden in 1978, was one of many critics drawn to the gap between the antique props and the plainly Sicilian models who wore them⁵.

Taormina grew with the studio. Hotels opened, and the town became a fixed stop for wealthy northern Europeans, including many men who came for a freedom they could not have at home. Italy's penal code of 1889 did not punish sex between consenting adult men, while Germany and Britain did.

Emperors, industrialists and Oscar Wilde

Gloeden's visitors became part of his legend. The names repeated in every biography are the industrialist Friedrich Alfred Krupp, the composer Richard Strauss, the German emperor Wilhelm II and Oscar Wilde, who is said to have come in December 1897, after his release from prison¹.

Some of these visits are better documented than others, and admirers had every reason to make the list grow. What is certain is that the studio was a sight to be seen, and that a visit to the baron was part of a certain kind of journey to Sicily.

The children in the pictures

This has to be said without softening. Many of Gloeden's models were adolescents, and some were children. Catalogues of his work show boys from about ten years old upwards, and some models were photographed again and again as they grew up¹.

By today's standards a large part of his nude work shows minors in an erotic context. The power was all on one side: a rich foreigner with a camera, poor families, and children who could not refuse and had no say in where the pictures went. This site does not reproduce any of these photographs. The only people shown on this page are Gloeden himself, as an adult.

Historians of gay culture still study him, because his pictures circulated widely among men who desired men and shaped how the male body was imagined for decades⁶. Studying an image and endorsing it are not the same thing, and the most careful recent writing keeps the two apart.

War, exile and a quiet death

When Italy entered the First World War in 1915, Gloeden, a German citizen, had to leave or face internment as an enemy alien. He spent the war years in Germany and came back to Taormina in 1918.

The world had changed. The rich northern tourists were fewer, his own health was poor, and he took few new pictures, living mostly on prints from his old plates. In 1930 he sold his house in exchange for a life annuity.

He died in Taormina on 16 February 1931, aged seventy-four, and was buried in the town cemetery. He left his archive, some three thousand glass negatives according to most counts, to Pancrazio Buciunì¹.

Plates in a police store

Fascist Italy took a harsher view of the pictures than liberal Italy had. In 1933 the police seized about a thousand negatives and two thousand prints from Buciunì, and in 1936 another thousand negatives were destroyed. Buciunì was later prosecuted in Messina for spreading obscene images and, after a case that ran from 1939 to 1941, he was acquitted⁴.

What survived went back to him. He kept it for the rest of his life, and he died in 1963.

From documenta to the museum store

After the war Gloeden was half forgotten, kept alive by collectors and by writers like Roger Peyrefitte, whose 1949 portrait of him mixed fact and fiction freely. The revival came in the 1970s. His work was shown at documenta 6 in Kassel in 1977, at the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto in 1978, and at the Kunsthalle Basel in 1979, while art photographers of the period collected his prints⁴.

Each revival has brought the same argument. When the Kunsthalle in Memmingen, in Bavaria, showed some four hundred of his photographs in 2008, youth protection officials criticised the show's handling of images of boys; the curators rejected the charge.

Today museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art hold his prints, and historians read him in two ways at once. He was one of the first to make the desiring male gaze visible in photography and to sell it openly, and he did it largely with the bodies of minors who had no voice in the matter². Both readings are needed to understand him, and neither cancels the other.

The wider story of Taormina, Plüschow, Sandow and the Berlin of Magnus Hirschfeld is told in the chapter on the Arcadian photographers.