If you’ve never heard of Paul Cinquevalli, join the club.
You would be hard-pressed to find a non-juggler who knows of him, and even among jugglers, you might expect to hear about Francis Brunn or Enrico Rastelli long before Cinquevalli enters the chat.
Yet the supremely talented Paul – born Emil Otto Paul Braun in 1859 in the Kingdom of Prussia – was once such a household name that even the family dog would have sung his praises (and envied his tricks).
Cleverer Than God, one of the latest tomes released by Modern Vaudeville Press, documents the fame and folklore of this influential artist.
Photos courtesy of Modern Vaudeville Press.
The book instantly fetches your attention with its striking violet text set against a white jacket; a textured blue hardback lies beneath.
Author Erik Åberg, a Stockholm-based performer and juggling historian who is pursuing his PhD at the department of Circus at Stockholm University of the Arts, strings together quotes from Cinquevalli with an array of historical press reports to briefly encapsulate the man’s upbringing and career.
Unlike articles providing a static biography of Cinquevalli, Cleverer Than God manages to capture the grand effect this juggler had on his audiences, whether they witnessed his feats in person or simply read about his legendary accomplishments.
As one of the book’s sources, an 1886 write-up from The Referee, notes, “If you want to have your hair stand up in astonishment, you must see the Signor throw an egg several times nearly up to the ceiling of the vast theatre, and then catch it on a plate without so much as bruising it, or even making a sound. Later on, he breaks the egg before you to show there is no deception.”
Other quotes detail Cinquevalli’s famous habit of doing a neck catch with a cannonball, which was either tossed high in the air or dropped from a raised platform.
“Tossing this globe of iron twenty feet into the air and catching it between the shoulders is a dangerous trick, for misplacing it a single inch either way means a dislocated shoulder, and a little higher up means a broken neck.” (The Kansas City Star, “THE ART OF THE JUGGLER.” October 6, 1901)
Left: Cinquevalli circa 1894, © 2022 LMF Press via Flickr. Top right: Cinquevalli’s monogram courtesy of Modern Vaudeville Press, Paul Cinquevalli’s letterhead, letter to Ellis [Stanyon]. 1901 January 15th. Mike Caveney Collection. Bottom right: Paul Cinquevalli © National Portrait Gallery, London. By London Photographic and Stereoscopic Company, published by Rotary Photographic Co Ltd. Bromide postcard print circa 1912. Bequeathed by Patrick O’Connor, 2010.
If you’ve ever spent the intermission of a circus show eavesdropping on your neighbors’ sensational reactions to the marvels they’ve just witnessed, Åberg’s collection of quotes from Cinquevalli, alongside quips from the juggling maestro’s enamored audiences, will set a familiar scene.
Bombastic and prophet-projecting as some of Cinquevalli’s stories sound, it’s believable that even the most aggrandized retellings — ever more sensational in successive interviews — must have been grounded in some spectacular reality.
A few of the book’s sources recount Cinquevalli’s lesser-known talents, including an affinity for learning languages, a prodigious memory, and the ability to sit at a piano and ‘play anything whistled by a person standing behind him.’
To read this book is to rue never having lived during Cinquevalli’s prime, and to ponder whether his talents, however popular in his lifetime, could have received an even more stratospheric reception in another era.
Then again, perhaps in modern times his remarkable abilities would be reduced to eye-catching tricks for social media likes, with audiences quickly scrolling onward to the next viral video.
‘That was nothing,’ Cinquevalli says in an 1886 interview with The Pall Mall Gazette, no doubt building hype for his next big feat. Alternatively, performers might sense that he’s commenting more broadly on the cruel impermanence of the lively arts.
Cinquevalli’s father once hoped his son would enter the priesthood. As such, this book raises the age-old question about which path leads one closer to god.
Staid virtue? Fervent spectacle? For Cinquevalli, all it took was one great heave of a cannonball coupled with the firm belief that his body would not crumble beneath the weight of its inevitable return.
Cleverer Than God
By Erik Åberg, Edited by Thom Wall
Published by Modern Vaudeville Press
116 pages
Hardcover
$25.00 plus shipping.
Available from Belmont Books, Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
