The painters leave the delightful and innocent world for a rawer reality; in Spain, Goya happens to the Mengs and Tiepolo; in France, David does not paint delicate feminine nudes as his cousin Boucher was doing it, but a few hardened armed men. The new philosophy impregnates the literature; the persons of encyclopedic learning, the writers, like Beaumarchais in The weddings of Fígaro, Schiller in Don Carlos, on having questioned the relation between the monarchy and the divine right, finish with questioning the king and God.

In the Convitato I gave pietra of Gazzaniga and Bertati, and especially in Don Giovanni de Mozart with libretto of Lorenzo da Ponte, Don Juan leaves all his previous ridiculous aspects, which are gathered by his footman; it does not conquer already to be able to boast; he receives and appreciates a certain sensuality; it is the spirit of the sensual desire, the embodiment of the sensual demon. Don Juan does not depend already on the opinion about other (Tirso), he is a hero who denies the moral approval of his contemporaries, his social reward. In the work of Tirso, Don Juan feigns not to be afraid of the divine punishment before his servants, but then, only with the public, admits his fear. The sinner of the golden century is so a believer in further away at least; his challenging attitude was consisting of the sin.

Lorenzo da Ponte and Mozart support the divine punishment, but with an important tone: the licentious gentleman of the century of the Reason is never afraid of the statue of the Commander, whom it keeps on calling «a fatuous old man»; he is a blasphemer who defies consciously God. Only he feels a physical pain when the infernal fire burns him. Or, in words of Albert Camus, Don Juan and his team they know that the punishment will come. It is the law of the game. And it is a test of his generosity having accepted these rules. But, simultaneously, they know that they are right: an inevitable end is not the same as a punishment.

This ambivalent attitude before the death (and God) is typical of the century of Mozart and of proper Mozart; the fact of being a Freemason does not prevent him from writing to his father: "I give him now news that perhaps will know already: Voltaire, that vagrant who was not afraid of God, has died like a pig, this is the reward.» He writes also the year of the composition of Don Giovanni: "Since the death is the real goal of the life, [...] real and ideal friend of the man; his image does not have anything frightful for me, it is rather a calming consolation.»

In the full century of the Reason, of the Enlightenment, Don Juan, romantic hero, continues the laws of his own nature, pushing back the laws of the morality and the morality of the rationalism. Don Juan is also a son of his epoch, freethinker and free libertine of any belief.

The century of the Encyclopedia is that of the passion: passion for knowing, exploring, possessing, having a good time. There live together Haydn and Mozart, Voltaire and Kant, the Marquess of Sade and Casanova. It has the last one seventy years in 1787, when Mozart composes Don Giovanni. He lives to few miles of Prague, in the Doge's castle, through property of his last protector, the count of Waldstein. Casanova got excited about the theater, violinist in his adolescence, Freemason like Mozart, friend of Lorenzo da Ponte, takes part in the making of the libretto. A few notes with changes of the text, found recently in the library of the castle, give faith of it. He collaborates perhaps in the most scandalous scene of the work: Don Juan seduces, cheats once again Donna Elvira; he convinces it in his love. While Donna Elvira approaches, Don Juan y Leporello they exchange his layers. Donna Elvira rushes in the arms of the man who is thinking about being Don Juan, or, disguised Leporello. The aristocrat and the footman exchange love words before disappearing in the darkness. The right of kick that the aristocrats have on the peasants is an admitted custom. An aristocrat possessed by a footman and, for more inri, with the help of a member of the same class, is a provocation. It is also one of the favorite situations described by Sade in all his novels. Mozart, with the help of da Put and Casanova, it seems to take revenge - cruelly - for the kick that there gave to him the butler of the archbishop of Salzburg (the last emblematic affront that the aristocracy inflicts on the art before the Revolution, according to the beautiful phrase of Daniele Archibugi).

From Tirso to our days, Don Juan keeps on acting. On what is his seduction capacity based? In the power of the desire, in the force of the sensuality?