Word: orsini
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...goddess with each pubic hair clearly delineated, and a 20-ft. satanic head whose mouth opens into a large chamber. These overwhelming creations are 50 miles north of Rome. It is known only that they were carved between 1555 and 1585 at the command of Duke Pier Francesco Orsini...
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...
Like Philoctetes' stinking wound-a classical symbol of the relationship between art and abnormality-Orsini's back is the burden of his genius. It compels him to refine everything into art, including cruelty and murder. He even lays a beautifully cunning trap to secure an heir by mating his brother with his wife. Ironically, this perverted, successful stratagem restores his own potency. A brood of his own follows-including another hunchback...
...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...