Word: bomarzo
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...passion for detail with a novelist's fertile imagination, Mujica-Lainez set about constructing from the few known facts a sumptuous, fictional Doge's Palace of the mind. Like that famous seat of the Venetian Republic, whose ceiling, walls and floors constitute a convulsion of visual splendor, Bomarzo's pages glitter with descriptions of processions, land and naval battles, landscapes, a courtesan's sultry rec room and a cabalist's murky study...
Mujica-Lainez focuses this aesthetic and religious conflict in the mind and body of Bomarzo's Duke Orsini. He recreates him as a hunchback who tells the story of his life as an omniscient observer, not only aware of his own time but of events from the time of his death until the present. Mujica-Lainez's implication is clear: Orsini's true immortality resides not in the few historical facts and artifacts we know but in his re-creation as a fictional character...
...Bomarzo's Orsini combines Gothic deformity with a beautiful, refined face and a graceful pair of Tintoretto hands. Yet it is Orsini's genetic baggage, "the rucksack of my misfortune," that shapes his soul. In his childhood, the hump fostered his father's disdain and his brother's malice. When he was a youth, it caused impotence and self-disgust as Orsini had to view it multiplied in a harlot's mirrored chamber...
...procreation, high fashion and grand frescoes prove too ephemeral for Orsini. Only the stone of Bomarzo could preserve his suffering and redeem his miserable existence. "Love, art, war, friendship, hope, and despair-everything would burst out of those rocks in which my predecessors had seen nothing but the disorder of nature." It is an outcry that invites both admiration and pity, a strong but unstable mixture that Mujica-Lainez keeps bubbling with an alchemist's patient intensity...
Like alchemy, Bomarzo is based upon a richly human and dramatic scheme of symbolism and metaphor. It does not create any real gold, but fine fiction has always been essentially a ritual of appearance...