French Poster Showing Captain Costentenus "L'Homme Tatoué", 1890s
Color lithograph on paper; linen-backed
24 x 18 inches
Levy's credit and address recto.
Djordgi Konstantinus (1833 – ?), better known as Captain George Costentenus, The Tattooed Greek Prince, The Greek Albanian and The Living Canvas Back was a late-19th century circus performer of...
Djordgi Konstantinus (1833 – ?), better known as Captain George Costentenus, The Tattooed Greek Prince, The Greek Albanian and The Living Canvas Back was a late-19th century circus performer of Greek ancestry, born in Albania in the Ottoman Empire. By all accounts (especially his own) he lived an outsized life of great adventure. Costentenus toured with P.T. Barnum in the 1870s. He purported to be a pirate, and that his extensive tattoos were the result of being held prisoner for three months in Asia while on a mining excursion. He claimed his captors inked his body from head to toe as a form of punishment. He performed with the Folies Bergere in the late 1880s, but by 1894 disappeared from all public records.