Word: orsini
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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...
...given its world première last week at Washington's Lisner Auditorium, Bomarzo is based on a prizewinning novel by Buenos Aires Art Critic Manuel Mujica Lainez, who also wrote the libretto. In 15 taut, hallucinatory scenes that take place mostly in the mind of Pierfrancesco Orsini, Renaissance Duke of Bomarzo, it flashes back over the events of the Duke's "secret life, which like the hump on my back, encumbered my soul...