The Eternal Adolescents: Art, Destiny, and the Mystery of the Club of Thirty-Seven

An investigation by Italian art historian Flavio Caroli and the parallel destiny of Lord Byron

by Patrizia Poggi, Ravenna 5 December 2025

I caress the book’s cover, feeling the papery weight beneath my fingers. On the dust jacket, a title stands out in a bold, modern font, split in two like a destiny: TRENTASETTE THIRTY-SEVEN on a red background, and immediately below, almost merging into a single, hypnotic compound -word, ILMISTERO DELGENIO ADOLESCENTE.-THE MYSTERY OF THE ADOLESCENT GENIUS. At the top, the author’s name: Flavio Caroli, historian of modern and contemporary art.

It is a volume of austere elegance, a concentrate of paper and symbol. That number: thirty-seven so simple and anonymous in appearance, stares back at me. And then, it happens. Suddenly, like a short-circuit of destiny, the number on the cover lights up with a new, blinding light and finds its target in another name, another number: Lord Byron. Died at thirty-six.

The thought explodes in my mind with the force of an epiphany. This is no simple biographical coincidence. The poet’s lightning-fast life, his energy dissipated in a flash, his refusal to fade into the dull normality of adulthood, everything suddenly makes a terrible, fascinating sense. That figure ceases to be a mere datum and comes a symbol, a magical and fatal threshold beyond which certain elect spirits simply refuse to pass.

This personal shock of recognition, however, was not my first encounter with Caroli's captivating thesis. It vividly brought me back to a singular evening on September 18, 2000, at the Teatro Alighieri in Ravenna, where I had orchestrated a theatrical performance dedicated to these very "divine children". On stage, the acclaimed actress Patrizia Zappa Mulas gave voice to their tormented souls and fleeting lives, breathing raw, human emotion to their legends. Alongside her, Flavio Caroli himself was not merely a narrator but a visionary guide. With poetic and evocative language, he wove together their stories, transforming historical figures into timeless archetypes of beauty and tragedy.

The mystery takes the stage: A Ravenna night between history and performance

That night, the mystery was not a concept confined to pages; it became a living, breathing presence felt by the entire audience. Therefore Caroli's written work did not just present a theory to me; it resonated with the echo of his own voice from that stage, deepening a mystery I had already felt in its most powerful, performative form.

It is from this flash of recognition, sparked by the book and reinforced by memory, that I wish to take you on a journey. An investigation into the heart of art's most poignant mystery: why do the purest geniuses, the divine children, seem condemned to burn out at the peak of their splendour? Why did Byron, like so many other elect spirits, die just one step away from that fateful threshold of thirty-seven years?

This very question, so laden with pathos, guides Caroli's work and will be our compass. It transforms a historical account into a vivid and immediate experience. His use of the present tense is not a mere stylistic choice but a genius intuition, allowing us to experience art history not as a dusty relic but as a pulsating enigma that concerns us directly, immensely heightening the emotional impact and our connection to each artist.

Lord Byron by Thomas Phillips, c. 1813–1814.

Nottingham City museums, Newstead Abbey

They brush against perfection only to vanish in their own splendour. In Thirty-Seven - The Mystery of the Adolescent Genius, Flavio Caroli explores this timeless enigma: why are Raphael, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec,, and other souls so different united by the same tragic destiny?

The Author’s confession: the crisis at thirty-seven and the two models of genius

Our journey begins with the author's own personal confession. Caroli reveals that, precisely at thirty-seven, he himself felt a profound desire to die. He describes that age as the “extreme ridge of youth,” a moment of exhaustion when all potential seems depleted and the energy to refine and mature it vanishes. He intuited then that for the creative spirit, there are only two models: the divine children who die young, or the superhuman old masters like Titian or Michelangelo, who possess the strength to push beyond fulfilment to express the ineffable.

Michelangelo, The Last Judgement (Detail), Sistine Chapel, Vatican Museums

He survived that crisis. His energy returned. And to his great wonder, he realised that the age of thirty-seven years was the bar on which almost all the “divine children” of art history had fallen. Thus began his exploration was born: does a vital law exist whereby, for these geniuses, the cycle of grace and the intoxication of potential closes at thirty-seven years? Having been “divine,” their energy flees due to an inability, or a refusal, to cross the threshold into adulthood. Becoming a Titian is, after all, an excessive toil.

The British Divine Children: a flame that knows no threshold

But what of the British divine children? Caroli’s list, though long, is not exhaustive. The British Isles have their own tragic heroes who resonate powerfully with this theme, even if they did not always reach the age threshold.

Thomas Chatterton (1752–1770): The romantic archetype of the young, doomed genius. A poet and forger of medieval poetry, he took his life with arsenic at the tender age of seventeen, desperate from poverty and lack of recognition, becoming a symbol of neglected genius for the Romantics.

John Keats (1795–1821): Though he died of tuberculosis at 25, Keats’s entire monumental body of work was produced in an extraordinary burst of creativity spanning just a few years. His own epitaph: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water”,  speaks to the fragility and tragic potential of a genius extinguished too soon.

Robert Burns (1759-1796): The "divine child" of Scotland burned through a lightning-fast life. His masterpieces, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786), elevated the Scots vernacular to a language of high poetry, transforming his work into the authentic and revolutionary voice of a people.

George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824): The archetypal "cursed" poet, whose life and work merged into a single, grand romantic drama. He died of a fever at thirty-six in Greece, fighting for independence, transforming his end into the perfect heroic and literary act.

Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898): The dazzling, decadent illustrator, a master of line and black ink , defined an era with his provocative work before succumbing to tuberculosis at twenty-five.

Although these British figures died before reaching thirty-seven, they embody the very essence of Caroli’s “adolescent genius”: a brilliant, intense flame that burns too fiercely to be sustained, leaving behind a perfect, immaculate potential that never had to face the excessive toil of becoming an old master.

Guided by his pen, let us meet these souls who stopped on this mysterious threshold.

Beyond the threshold: the final days of the Elect

Raphael (1483-1520): The Choice of Perfection

During Holy Week of 1520, Raphael, the prince of light, discovers “the dark side of Being.” Consumed by two fevers of the body, and for the elusive Lucrezia, he walks the Roman night under a “pale, sparkling orange" sky. He has an illumination: he must shatter “the mechanism of the two,” of doubt. He must choose between the chaos of the heart and the fever of the body, which “leads to death and Nothingness, that is, to Perfection.” And he chooses Perfection. On Good Friday, dying on his thirty-seventh birthday, the divine child of the Renaissance “delivers his soul to Perfection, in which he believed all his life”.

Raphael, The Stanza della Segnatura (Room of the Signature) Vatican Museums

Valentin de Boulogne (1594?-1632): Death by Anarchy

Valentin de Boulogne, Reunion dans un Cabaret, Musée de Louvre

He died perhaps at thirty-eight, perhaps not. For Caroli, the symbol matters: like a high jumper, Valentin cleared the bar of thirty-seven only to knock it down with the tip of his shoe. He left on a torrid August night in 1632, dead drunk, seeking coolness in a Roman fountain. The cold water “reconcentrated the heat”, and a  malignant fever extinguished him in days. The French painter who chose heroic solitude died for having despised “the other snobbery”.

Antoine Watteau (1684-1721): The Pyre of Desire

Antoine Watteau, Nymph and Satyr, 1715 ca., Musée de Louvre

In July 1721, Watteau was a “heap of wrinkles” consumed by consumption in Nogent-sur-Marne. He watches silently as his studies of nudes, incarnations of the “demon of desire” are cast to the flames. In that pyre, Watteau sees “the perfection of Nothingness.” But in the forty-eight hours of agony that follow, “deliciously” excited by fever, he takes his revenge. The painter of fêtes galantes had hidden his truest Eros not in the nudes, but in the statues in the parks, "sex bombs" painted white that the hypocritical world could accept. He died on July 18th, having saved in art all the women of his life.

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890): The Collapse of Truth

Vincent van Gogh, Wheatfield with Crows, 1890, collection Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

In an ideal letter to his brother Theo, Vincent recounts three feverish months in Auvers. In a “manic phase,” he painted over eighty canvases, feeling like “a glowing oak trunk.”, believing he had defeated depression forever. But on the morning of July 27, 1890, he raised his eyes to the mirror: “I saw it. It was still there. The monkey, the depression. The energy was gone.” He felt like “a worm shrivelled up in space.” He took the pistol, feeling his body was no longer his own. “It was inevitable to abolish that sack of shit with little destiny that I was.” His final, lucid truth was to recognise himself, still and forever, a depressed man.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901): The Curse of the Bones

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Seule, 1896, Don Fondation Florence J. Gould, 1984 © RMN-Grand Palais

(Musée d’Orsay) / Thierry Le Mage

On September 5, 1901, in his final delirium, Henri’s mind returned to lifelong obsession: perfect lines and bones. He relives the childhood trauma of first recognising himself in a mirror as a “monster”. His life, he understands, has been “the intolerable sweetness of the curse”: being devoted to everything he could not reach. Flesh had granted him his only joys, but now he knows it will rot. What remains, “cursed, lasting forever,” will be his bones, that “deformed little skeleton.” His last words are an insult to his father, but his final prayer is an invocation to make the traces “of the scandal and the shame" disappear.

The Farewell to Perfection

After encountering these final hours, the circle closes the most desperate and aware voice: that of the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930).

It is he, in a text written just before taking his own life at thirty-six, who provides us the most lucid and tragic conclusion to Caroli's mystery. Mayakovsky begins with the magical threshold: “Soon I should have turned thirty-seven, which I never turn.” Having read of the great painters who died at that age and feels “there must be a magic.” His energy, his vital balance, is broken. He felt the hole, the strength slipping away, and now it’s gone.

His analysis becomes universal. He traverses the deaths of Rimbaud: “Just nemesis! Right there (in a leg) he had to be hit!”, Byron: “Vitalism, in fact, is tiring. Living is work. And work tires”, and Mozart, guilty of having unspooled “madly the thread” of his adolescent energy, exhausting it too soon.

Vladimir Majakovskij, Russian poet, playwright and painter (1893-1930)

But it is on himself that Mayakovsky concentrates his desperate lucidity. He defines himself as a “vitalist", whose energy was exploited and squandered by politics, the “field where the cunning and the many, that is, exploit the intelligent and the seducers.” He understands he is not like Rossini, the “cunning vitalist” who at thirty-seven stopped composing for the theatre, saving his own life. “I am not Rossini”, he writes. “They have squandered me. I have squandered myself".

The last, heart-wrenching conflict is between the abstract, the Revolution, politics and the concrete love. After a final, exhausting nocturnal duel with his beloved, he understands there is nothing left to do. His conclusion is the perfect synthesis of death of potentiality. "I wasted energy, and none remains”.

The choice is inevitable. Active, rational, desperate. Like an actor concluding his performance, he shoots himself in the heart. His last written words are an epigram on his own life:

"AS THEY SAY, / THE INCIDENT IS CLOSED. / Let’s not speak of it anymore.”

In Mayakovsky, the “divine child” becomes fully aware. He does not die from madness or by chance. He dies because, having exhausted his pure, adolescent energy, he refuses the prospect of an adult existence of compromises and mediocrity. His is an extreme choice of coherence, an epitaph for all divine children: the tragic, shining awareness that for some elect, the only way to preserve the purity of their potential is to never betray it, even at the cost of their life.

Vladimir Majakovskij, advertisement poster for spices, private collection. Copyright: photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images

Vladimir Mayakovsky, 1930. The incident is closed.

The truth of the Agave: to blossom in order to fulfil, to die in order not to betray

And so, the circle closes by returning to its most powerful and primordial image. Like the agave, which for years silently accumulates sap in a perpetual, feverish wait, these elect spirits live in constant tension toward their one, fatal moment of glory. But it is crucial to grasp its deepest meaning: the agave does not flower to die; it blooms because it must, and in that extreme gesture fulfils its destiny, which includes death.

Flavio Caroli, with poetic intuition, writes:

“You have entered the truth of the agave, marvellous metaphor of the adolescent genius […] then one day, it no longer throws out and raises at the centre of its tuft one stem, just one, several meters high, rich with flowers clustered in bunches—an extraordinary vision of beauty, of intoxicating solitude—of ascesis. And it is in that instant, while its flowers turn gold, that it dies, around forty years of age. Nature, too, you see, has its divine child.”

The agave and the flower

This is the ultimate truth that unites the Raphaels, the Van Goghs, the Mayakovskys, and the many others: they were not merely unlucky geniuses cut down by chance. They were, like the agave, ascents. Their entire existence, feverish, concentrated, unrepeatable, was one single, magnificent, thrust toward that “stem” of eternal works. And at the very moment their flowers turned golden, aware or not, they chose not to survive that perfection. They chose not to age, not to become dull, not to betray the dazzling purity of their vision. Nature has its divine child, and art has its own.

And thus, that number on the cover -thirty-seven- ceases to be a mere mystery. It becomes a law of the heart, a biological truth of inspiration.

Patrizia Poggi

Ravenna

Flavio Caroli is a preeminent Italian art historian, critic, and public intellectual whose work  has profoundly shaped the discourse on modern and contemporary art. He is celebrated  for uniquely blending rigorous scholarship with profound psychological insight and  compelling narrative. A former professor at Milan's Polytechnic University, his teachings  have influenced generations.  

His pioneering research focuses on the themes of physiognomy, expressionism, and the  dialogue between artistic form and the inner self from the Renaissance to today. As a  curator and author of a vast body of essential works, Caroli is known for constructing  groundbreaking thematic journeys and writing with a literary flourish that elevates scholarly  analysis. His studies range from European Expressionism to the history of the portrait, all  characterized by philosophical reflection and lyrical clarity.  

His latest 2025 publication, "Come in uno specchio. Il diario segreto di Sofonisba Anguissola", perfectly embodies his distinctive method. The book is a diary, discovered at  the artist's burial place in San Giorgio dei Genovesi, Palermo, on the 400th anniversary of  her death. Caroli delivers his deep admiration for the painter from Cremona, narrating  Sofonisba's life in the first person as if in a novel. It is a captivating account of the thoughts  on art, family, the Spanish court, adventures, travels, and loves of a nonconformist woman and painter navigating the 16th and 17th centuries. This work exemplifies a masterful blend of intimate reconstruction and rigorous scholarship.  

Caroli's enduring legacy lies in his broader ability to reveal the human drama and philosophical depth of art, making it resonate with both specialists and the wider public.

Flavio Caroli, c. Festivaleletteratura

Patrizia Poggi is ACT Advisor, a native of Ravenna and has 30 years in the forefront to enhance the Italian heritage, art and culture sector, she is an art consultant and gallerist, formerly resident manager of the Relais Villa Roncuzzi, member of the Association of Social Promotion “Taste Italy Aps”, Ambassador of Knowledge and Flavors of Italy for Italy&Friends in Florence.

For further blogs on the cultural significance of Ravenna – please read Patrizia’s last ACT pieces. https://www.artculturetourism.co.uk/post/ravenna-oscar-wilde-s-byzantine-refuge-mosaics-speak-and-poets-listen

https://www.artculturetourism.co.uk/post/bridges-of-culture

This article is published by Marysia Zipser, Founder of Art Culture Tourism & ACT Ambassador,

Beeston, Nottingham, UK.  https://www.artculturetourism.co.uk/  https://www.artculturetourism.co.uk/blog  E: artculturetourism@gmail.com 

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