How the mighty are fallen

by Andrew Whittaker
April 14th, 2010

After a richly creative life – a life driven by some visceral passion for the written word, or by the clamour to render life on canvas – you would, by rights, expect a heroic, romantic death at the end of it. A death that brings enough anguish to cement posterity’s respect but one that doesn’t involve too much actual discomfort, because after all you’re an artist, a little bit delicate and, truth be told, quite unexcited about the prospect of genuine physical pain.

Percy Bysshe Shelley got it just about right. The most politicised of the great British Romantic poets shuffled off in appropriate style aged just 29, drowned when his schooner, Don Juan, sank in a storm off the Italian coast in 1822 (the painting above, by Louis Edouard Fournier (1889), shows Shelley’s funeral) . Italian architect Giuseppe Mengoni was on a high platform making the final checks to his 1877 masterpiece, the neoclassical Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, when he slipped and fell, dying from his injuries shortly after. Tragic, but undeniably apposite.

However, for every creative light snuffed by heroic tragedy, there are plenty that simply flutter and fade to a death either normal or strange. Here are five who, given the majesty of their lives, perhaps deserved better:

Emile Zola. The giant of late 19th century French literature died from carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a blocked chimney.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The latest theory for Mozart is that his death, aged 35, was triggered by a sore throat; the streptococcal infection led to a fatal swelling of the kidneys.

Cyrano de Bergerac. The real one, not the big nosed fella in Rostand’s 19th century play, was the author of Baroque fantasy novels and satire, before a lump of wood fell on his head.

Antoni Gaudi. When the Catalan architect was hit by a Barcelonan tram in 1926, no-one rushed to his aid; bystanders thought he was a vagrant.

Caravaggio. The Italian painter behind the gusty, emotional masterpieces of the Baroque era, who killed a man over a game of tennis and went on the run, was eventually caught out by typhus.