Manuel Mujica Lainez’s historical novel, a strange biography of a 16th-century duke, leaves the reader wondering if human nature can ever change.
Palazzo Orsini (Bomarzo), 1910-20(Photo by Touring Club Italiano/Marka/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
“One must put himself in the period,” writes Pier Francesco Orsini, the 16th-century Italian duke and narrator of Bomarzo. “Remember that I belonged to a line in which, as in every illustrious clan of the time, crime had a certain familiarity from its repetition through time…. That’s what they were like, unscrupulous. So was I. And since we are speaking about it, so was the Renaissance.”
Throughout this 700-page novel by Manuel Mujica Lainez—the Argentine titan whose influence was exalted by the likes of Borges and Bolaño—we are repeatedly asked to keep this idea in mind: that our notion of a good or worthwhile life can only be conceived of in the terms we inherit. This was the era of Machiavelli. Liberal humanism—the notion that we as humans owe something to each other as members of a race beyond clan-based affiliations—hadn’t yet taken hold of the Western mind. The aristocratic caste “rejected present-day equalitarian calmness [and] individual rights,” Orsini tells us. “I was a man of my time and circumstances had made me worse than average.”
The reason our narrator even possesses the reflexivity to examine—or explain away—the specificity of this Renaissance ethic, ensconced as it is in a time and place, is that he speaks to us from a place of immortality, some 400 years after the events in this novel.
So yes, on the one hand, Bomarzo is a grand historical novel in the traditional sense: an assiduously researched mock-autobiography of a key Renaissance figure who—in Mujica Lainez’s telling—crossed paths with the likes of Michelangelo, Titian, Charles V, and Cervantes. If you’ve heard of Orsini, it’s likely in connection with his Sacro Bosco, or Park of Monsters, the garden of grotesque stone monuments he commissioned at his family castle in Bomarzo, north of Rome. Depicting episodes from his Forrest Gump–like life alongside flights of allegorical fantasy, this sui generis sculpture garden—so unlike anything else produced in the Renaissance—was meant as the duke’s grand parting gesture. Mujica Lainez’s visit to Bomarzo, where he learned of the real-life betrayals and back-stabbings that seemed to punctuate Orisini’s life, inspired him to write the novel.
But the 1962 epic also exemplifies the kind of modernist experimentation synonymous with the Latin American Boom and its expanded view of realism. By endowing his narrator with the literary device of eternal life (and a well-read knowledge of the figures that had come along in the centuries since the Renaissance, from Toulouse-Lautrec to Freud and Nabokov), Mujica Lainez allows Orsini to occupy both the proximity and the critical distance to reflect on the epistemological quirks of his historical moment. And something funny happens if you indulge the exercise and try to “put yourself in the period”: The similarities between Orsini’s time and our own suddenly start to feel as pronounced as the differences. Plus ça change.
Orsini’s immortality is augured on the day of his birth in a horoscope cast by Sandro Benedetto, physician and astrologer to his father, Niccolò Orsini. The prophecy is anything but auspicious. The positions of the planets on the day of his birth—Mars and Venus in particular—seem to indicate a life with no end. But “malevolent” Saturn’s trajectory portends a life of equally infinite and calamitous misfortune. Such an astrological chart also predicts for the infant a rare, exquisite sensitivity to aesthetic concerns. This may sound like a blessing, but born as he is into the martial Orsini clan—whose virile knights had watered the peninsula with their blood since time immemorial—it will prove just as much a curse.
As if it isn’t hard enough to be a dandy among men who know only war, Orsini is also born with a congenital defect: “a hump, a hunch, a protuberance, call it what you will.” The torrent of humiliations begins with a formative episode in which his brothers force him into a dress and women’s jewelry and drive a thick earring through one of his lobes. Limping bloody and hysterical through the castle halls, he encounters the patriarch Niccolò, a man of “tremendous rages” and “insatiable lust.” Shouting “son of Sodom” at the young Orsini, Niccolò opens a secret compartment in the wall of his study and locks him in a dungeon. There, he spends the night with a decomposing corpse until he is rescued by his grandmother, a rare sympathetic and protective figure in his life.
And so on, until early adolescence, when Orsini is sent to Florence to live with his extended family, the Medicis—a punishment that turns out to be his salvation. Mujica Lainez’s evocation of place, here as in the rest of Bomarzo, is as immersive as that of any novel I know; the mind reels at the seamless weaving of research and imagination (and, crucially, Gregory Rabassa’s translation rises to the occasion).
Orsini’s first day in Florence is a sensual circus: Women “bubbled” through the markets; “the dry sound of dice” can be heard outside the gambling parlors; a courtesan passes on a “bedeckled” mule with “a page carrying her parrot as if it were a falcon, and another a monkey perfumed with ambergris and orange blossoms.”
“One could feel the city throbbing and vibrating and trembling from door to door,” he continues. “And one could also feel the art, the permanent and vital presence of art.” At home in the courts of history’s most illustrious art patrons, “two essential elements fused in my individuality: a passion for art and a passion for caste.” Orsini is taken under the wing of his older cousin Ippolito, whose accolades include “breaking horses” and “perforating a cuirass with an arrow” while also translating the whole second book of the Aeneid into Italian. A custodian is appointed to Orisini, who takes on heroic proportions: the North African warrior Abul, who glistens “like a jewel, made of obsidian, jet, and rubies” atop his pet elephant Annone, a gift from Pope Leo X.
But Osini’s respite is brief, as is his short-lived state of innocence. By the time he returns to Bomarzo, following the invasion that drove the Medicis out of Florence, the duke has already begun to enjoy his aristocratic immunity, sending his page to die over a dalliance with his cousin, the girl he loves.
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Now initiated into the world of gold-collar crime, Orsini has his first moral reckoning. It’s one of many passages in Bomarzo where he squirms in front of the reader. It’s not that he’s a bad guy at heart, he explains, but he was at the mercy of a totalizing worldview whose only consideration was the will to power.
“My grandmother had shaped me within those inherited ideas—erroneous, blameful, vain, call them what you will,” he tells us. “And if the reader censures her for that he should be careful and weigh the pros and cons on delicate scales, because everything that concerns me is intricate and multiple.” He continues:
The drownings, neck-breakings, strangulations, fatal intoxications, stabbings, and other bits of butchery alternated in the genealogical recollections that my grandmother had given me since childhood with splendid military feats, with triumphs of artistic patronage, and with the glories of saintliness. I grew up in an atmosphere in which crime was something as natural as a warlike deed or a profitable marriage.
Not to mention the devil worship, necromancy, alchemy, curses, and enchanted dolls they wield against each other in the course of all this palace intrigue. As in the more rustic reaches of today’s Catholic realm, witchcraft here is ubiquitous and often bundled in uneasily with science and medicine. And in describing it, Mujica Lainez’s prose bears period-perfect verisimilitude. Take, for instance, one conversation overheard at an inn, where two men are arguing about the celebrity physician Paracelsus—who actually shows up 300 pages later to cure Orsini’s syphilis:
“He’s an ignoramus. An herb gatherer who goes through the Alps with his father talking to shepherds and looking for fennel, thyme, opium poppies, mint, and Saint John’s plant.”
“Are you talking about his cures? The fat of a viper, the horn of a unicorn, the dust of a mummy, children’s hairs boiled by a redhead, toads, a handful of manure, moss growing on a skull…”
“What does he use the children’s hair for?”
“Chilblains.”
“I’ll have to try it.”
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“Imbecile!”
Magic has an obvious appeal to a character like Orsini, who is driven to depravity as both an object of ridicule and a despot who can do whatever he wants. He plucks a boy named Silvio from a nearby village after hearing rumors of his magical acumen. The boy becomes the increasingly paranoid duke’s only adviser, and a plaything in his orgiastic milieu of amoral libertines who bugger anything that moves—in Orsini’s case: men, women, boys, girls, his brother-in-law, terrified villagers, vassals, slaves, and so on. When he falls ill one evening, Silvio crawls under the covers with him for the first time, their “naked swords within reach.”
Orsini becomes obsessed with immortality, as men with too much power do. He’s unsure whether to believe his horoscope and willing to do anything to make it so, maintaining “good relations with both God and the Devil,” hedging his bets on the ultimate savior of humanity. He tests the hypothesis by taking the men of Bomarzo to war twice, first against Charles V in Metz and then against the Turks at the naval Battle of Lepanto. As if he wasn’t unlikable enough, he spends most of these skirmishes cowering away from the action, in extravagant armor of “damascene gold,” with a “splendid relief” of “satyrs, centaurs, and undines.” The only blow he strikes is to the corpse of an already dead janissary.
By the time Orsini inherits the family seat—following his father’s glorious death at war and the dispatching of his older brothers—Bomarzo is populated by only a few remaining sycophants. Orsini has had everyone else killed or banished, and he oscillates wildly between guilt-ridden anguish and total indifference. (Amid pages and pages of breathless Proustian sense memories, he spends 29 words on the time he poisoned his last living brother to death.)
Only a great wonder of art will immortalize his mark, he decides—and what medium lasts longer than stone? The work on his Park of Monsters begins with the help of a Sicilian master painter and an army of artisans from the surrounding villages. They set about carving the property’s natural boulders into a Boschian menagerie depicting events and characters in Orsini’s grand personal mythology.
His first love, his cousin Adriana, is immortalized as a sphinx; his murdered brothers, two titans locked in a swordfight; his father’s cruelty takes the form of a giant skeleton, the same one with whom he spent that night in a dungeon. They are joined by a Cerberus, a harpy, and a bear taken from the Orisini clan’s coat of arms.
One realizes that the previous 600 pages, which set up the significance of each symbol, are a prelude to what is essentially the longest artist’s statement in history. And what a pathetically self-involved, navel-gazing work of art it is—a thuddingly literal monument to nothing but the artist’s own hubris. But it’s equally a reflection on what the craven pursuit of power does to a person.
The history of humanity is one of cruelty and impunity, to be sure. But there are times when the Orisinis of this world run amok, and we seem to be entering one now. Look no further than a figure like Bryan Johnson, the tech CEO promoting all manner of life-extension charlatanry, from plasma transfusions to psilocybin treatments, most of which amount to pure magical thinking. Or someone like Elon Musk, in many ways the exemplary man of our times, whose behavior is not only normalized by our cruel atmosphere but is driven, like Orsini’s, by the kind of ill will that comes from having been bullied.
Renaissance men had one thing in common, Orisini reminds us: “All believed that from the mere fact of existing and enjoying a hereditary or acquired position they could do as they pleased according to their overwhelming convenience.” And the more he insists on how uniquely inhumane they were in 16th-century Italy, the more you start to realize how much it sounds just like life today. Again, listen: He’s a man of his time and a victim in his own right, someone whose suffering made him susceptible to the worst values of his era. Can you really blame him? I say yes, we can. And by the time you finish Bomarzo, you’ll probably think so, too.
Max Pearlwrites about art and politics across the Americas.