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In “Bomarzo,” the Renaissance Man is a Monster

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

“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........

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