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Introduction In May of 2018 my husband Kurt and I were in Italy.
I had been invited to show a series of paintings at the Irtus Gallery
in Sutri, Lazio titled Saints&Martyrs&Bears. Although the
gallery owners Bebi Spina and Nora Kersh expected me to attend the
opening, I was not required to be in the gallery at other times.
Sutri is located less than an hour north of Rome and accessible
to much of central Italy so we, like all tourists, had made an long
list of places we might visit while we were there. Sutri is the
perfect little Italian hill town. You approach Sutri through a towering
arch in the encircling medieval wall. Narrow, flower lined streets
wind up the hill, sometimes dissolving into stone steps that lead
back down again. The hill top opens to the pedestrian square with
clock, fountain and three delightful outdoor cafes. There is a Museum
with Etruscan artifacts and, nearby, an amphitheater. Let me just
recommend pasta with truffles and a local wine. Our one excursion was to the unusual Renaissance
garden at Bomarzo, a woodland with a startling arrangement of gigantic
sculptures of monsters. It is located less than an hour from Sutri
and although we did get lost in Soriano (and who wouldn’t?)
we arrived just minutes after it opened. We hoped to avoid a mob
by arriving early. As it turned out we had the garden to ourselves.
An hour later a couple with a child in a stroller showed up, but
because the garden is laid out on a 7.4 acre hillside with a one
hundred foot elevation change, we never saw this little family again.
I was very interested in this garden because I had come across a
photograph of one of the sculptures years earlier and had used the
image in a painting and that image continued to haunt me. It seemed
such an odd theme for a Renaissance garden and I wanted to see it
all. When we left a couple of hours later, we had purchased the
book they were selling about the garden and had taken lots of photographs,
but were no wiser about why this 16th century gentleman, Pier Francesco
Orsini, had decided to fill his garden full of immence sculptures
of monsters.
In July 1553, Pier Francesco Orsini was taken prisoner at the battle of Hestin while fighting for Pope Paul III. His best friend, and grandson of the Pope, Orazio Farnese died beside him. Orsini remained in the military prison for the next three years before his family’s attempts to bribe his jailers was successful and he was released. Orsini, known to his family as Vicino, was 30 years old and trapped between his family’s tradition of military service to the Roman Church and his wish to retire to an intellectual life. I find no description of Namur prison beyond a modern photograph of a cell, but doubt he had any comfort beyond the food his family was able to bring to him and perhaps the escape of his imagination. Prison We do know that when he returned home to Bomarzo, he was a changed man. He was met by his wife Giulia Farnese Orsini and their four children. Within two years, Giulia was dead and Orsini, a widower. The Widower Since the fall of the Holy Roman Empire the peninsula we know as Italy was fractured and refractured into nation states and fiefdoms which suffered the repeated occupations of the Austrians, the Spanish and the French. When not occupied by these invaders, these states were controlled by feudal rulers and their private armies. Great families like the de’ Medici, the Borgia, the Farnese and the Orsini held onto wealth and power for centuries while working with the Church of Rome as Popes, Cardinals and soldiers. Returning home after his miserable military experience, Vicino Orsini did a remarkable thing. He denounced The Church’s anti-reformation campaign and took up the philosophy of Epicurus. Since the discovery of Lucretius’ poem On The Nature of Things and it’s publication in 1473, European intellectuals had been arguing the merits of the ‘scientific’ approach of the Greek philosophers versus the ‘faith’ construction of the Roman Church. Orsini’s denunciation was dangerous because the pressure of the Reformation had persuaded the Pope to reopen the Inquisition and now The Church was busily trying and punishing heretics. Orsini’s activities could not have gone unnoticed because his wife Giulia was related to Pope Paul III twice, through both lines of her family. Pope Paul III Orsini decided he would champion the philosophy of the Humanists by creating a garden where contemporary philosophers, scientist, artists and poets could meet to share ideas. In one inscription in the garden he tells us the garden would allow him to ‘vent his heart’. If Orsini had challenged the Church by writing and publishing his ideas, he would have found himself on trial like so many others. His garden was both subtle and effective. He turned his back on religion and dreamed of inspiring a revolution of understanding. His close friends, the poet Anibal Caro and Cardinal Christoforo Madruzzo were enthusiastic supporters. To design his garden he hired the choice of Popes and would-be Popes, designer Pirro Ligorio. Pirro Ligorio Instead of laying out a fashionable formal garden such as Tivoli or Caprarola with impressive waterfalls and a show of wealth, Orsini and Ligorio chose to design a garden they called Sacro Bosco in the wooded acres below the Palazzo Orsini. The valley was pockmarked with exposed volcanic rock known as peperino. It was not the fine marble of sophisticated taste, but a relatively soft, porous rock of uneven texture. It had the advantage of being carved easily, but the disadvantage of being crude. But crudeness is not necessarily a disadvantage when depicting frightening creatures. The sculptor Simone Mosca (Maschino) and his two sons
Francesco and Simone were called upon to carve the stone. It would
take them thirty years to create thirty works of art from these
exposed rocks, one over thirty feet feet high. Instead of the straight,
wide walk ways of Ligorio’s earlier design for Villa de Este,
he laid out narrow winding paths in response to the erratic location
of the stone outcroppings. Maintaining the forest’s thick understory
was critical to keep the sculptures hidden until the visitor happened
upon them. The choice of subjects for the sculptures has puzzled
scholars for at least four centuries and no satisfactory theory
has been widely accepted. Lines of contemporary poetry are inscribed
on many of the pieces. “Sol per sfogare il Core” The garden today is advertised as ‘Parco
dei Mostri’, a slight Disneyfication to attract school
children, but it is more serious than that. It illustrates the fascination
the 16th century had with monsters. Just look at the stories that
would have been part of a boy’s education and the romance of
what was to be found outside the known world. We’ve all seen
the medieval maps that claim at their margins “HERE BE DRAGONS”.
The intrepid explorers who sailed away from European shores must
have been the popular heroes of their day. We who were left behind
waited for the discovery of untold riches, the secret of eternal
youth or just a truly thrilling yarn. The cartographers of the 16th
century rejoiced in being able to show us exactly what those dragons
looked like because the explorers who returned described for us
what they saw. Boys like Pier Francisco Orsini, born in 1523, and his brother, Maerbal, would have been educated at home by tutors. Because they were orphaned as young children, the guardian named in their father’s will was their half-brother by the father’s first marriage, Girolamo. A year after assuming the responsibility, Girolamo died and the guardianship of the two minors went to Abbot Farfa. I haven’t discovered where the brothers lived during Farf’a’s rule, but I’m sure they would have been instructed in Greek and Latin. They were expected to learn Latin in order to read Pliny The Elder’s Natural Science . Those thirty-seven encyclopedic volumes included astronomy, geography, zoology, botany, material medica, mining and minerals. An excerpt from the zoology section titled “Animals Bad Breath” reads as follows; “Lion’s breath contains a virulent poison and bear’s breath is unwholesome. No wild animal will touch things which have come in contact with bear’s breath, and things which bears have breathed upon putrefy more quickly. As for the other species, Nature has willed that only in man is the breath made bad in several different ways, namely by tainted food, decaying teeth, and most of all by old age.” But, before we dismiss Pliny, let me offer another quote. In the astronomy section, Pliny tells us, “Man occupies a small fraction of the Earth, itself a mere dot in the universe.…and this is the substance of our glory. Here we fill positions of power and here we covet wealth and put mankind into turmoil repeatedly and fight wars. To sum up the madness of nations, this is the land in which we drive out our neighbor and dig up his land and add his turf to our own. May we rejoice in possessing an infinitesimal part of the Earth.” The Devil in the Green Coat In addition, the boys would have read the Greek classics in Greek. They would have also been instructed in the all-important ‘acts of war’. In 1539, Orsini moved to Venice to study under Gabriele Giolito. There he was exposed to many of the scholars and artists of the day. Jean Drouet, Lorenzo Lotto and poet Anibale Caro became life-long friends. Venice was a multi-cultural city and the music capital of Europe. Orsini would have attended the opera and seen the art works of Veronese, Palladio, Titian and Tintoretto. There he met and fell in love with a young woman named Adrianna Roza. After a ‘mysterious disturbance’ I have yet to uncover, he carried his lover off to Viterbo. There his name appears in the cast of a play called Cangiaria, a comedy attributed to Sacco da Viterbo. Shortly after his theater debut, he was tracked down by the family retainer and told that the lawsuit over his inheritance had been settled. His older brother Maerbal and he were each awarded half of their father’s estate. At the age of nineteen, Vicino Orsini got the estates of Bomarzo, Collepiccolo, Castelvecchio, Montenero and Mompeo. He left Viterbo for Bomarzo, apparently without the company of Miss Roza. The weight of family history and his inheritance saw him take on the mantel of adulthood. He was soon married to Giulia Farnese and commissioned a Condottiero in the service of the Church. His marriage to Giulia was, by far, the best of the two moves. It appears they were happily married for thirteen years until her death. While away frequently from home he relied on her to manage their many properties, their growing family and the construction of a new church for their community. When Orsini heard about Epicurus’ philosophy or read Lucretius’ The Nature of Things we don’t know, but when he returned from prison he was strongly in the fold. We can’t be positive he saw the art works of Bosch or Bruegel or became good friends with his neighbor Ulyssi Androvanni. We don’t know if he read the accounts of the great explorers who were unveiling unknown worlds, but it’s easy to understand that after facing death and experiencing the terror of imprisonment, he was longing for his family and the life of the mind. The Nature of Things After Kurt and I returned home I read the book we had bought in the garden and wanted to know more about the Parco dei Mostri and Pier Francesco Orsini. Two books I had read before our trip, Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age and Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve made me realize that Orsini sat right in the middle of this intellectual upheaval. The challenge to religious dogma made by the Mannerist and the Humanist placed ‘doubt’ as their first important tenet. To find meaning, the philosopher needed to doubt above all. Keeping Doubt Alive We know many of the contemporaries who joined Orsini in developing his garden. The most influential may have been Anibal Caro and Cardinal Madruzzo. Jean Drouet is mentioned often. Orsini’s choice of imagery can be traced to Roman history, Greek and Egyptian mythologies and the epic poetry of Dante, Colonna and Ariosto. Caro & Ariosto Bears stand guard as symbols of the Orsini family. Dragons and Sirens call up the fear of the unknown and architectural fragments and tilting buildings hint that the monsters are over-powering civilization. Cardinal Madruzzo As I continued to read additional material about the garden, it became obvious that so many creative people, long after Orsini himself was gone, found the subject fascinating. Philosophers, playwrights, poets and painters from Montaigne to Dali were inspired by Bomarzo. Jean Cocteau was led to make the film La Belle et la Bete. In 1988, Spanish painter Marcial Gomez showed a series of wonderful paintings about the time and the death of Giulia Orsini. Both fiction and nonfiction books have been written about Orsini. Even today, when we feel so much better informed than the explorers who reported strange peoples and beasts during the Age of Exploration, we remain intrigued with monsters like Big Foot or the Lock Ness Monster or Martians or all those characters in the Men in Black films. Montaigne Defends the Church & Dali
Prison The prevalence of siege warfare in the 16th century meant that massacres of war prisoners as well as civilians was predictable. The common soldier, if lucky, could be offered the chance to switch sides with the promise of being fed. An officer had a ransom on his head according to his ranking. It seems unlikely the Church ever payed bribes, so the officer’s family would have been his only hope. The fact that no food or water would be offered meant the family needed to hire an agent to keep their man alive while the negotiation continued. Orsini waited three years for his family to succeed. The Widower This painting finds Pier Francisco Orsini in his garden with his two daughters Faustine and Ottavia and his sons Carlo and Marzio. The sweet gesture between the father and son was borrowed from Veronese’ s portrait of Iseppo da Porta and his son Adriano. Orsini’s wife, Giulia, has died and daughter Faustine has been given a small dog to comfort her. Pope Paul III This man was a major figure in Orsini’s story. He was largely responsible for the Italian Religious Wars and the revival of the Inquisition. Orsini fought on his behalf in several campaigns, though we read that he was not a celebrated officer like his father. No stories of his heroism have surfaced and he was, after all, captured. Pope Paul III, so tangled in family relationships, may have viewed this Orsini as a pain in the his side. Pirro Ligorio Garden designer and interior designer, far more accomplished than his youthful beauty would suggest. Aldrovandi and His Art Androvanni saw himself as a naturalists, a chronicler of the new and startling life being discovered by the explorers. The Devil in the Green Coat This image is based on a Grimm fairytale of the same title. Will she or won’t she find some virtue in him? The Nature of Things Lucretius wrote his poem as a student of Epicurus. His text went missing, later discovered in a monastery library by document sleuth Poggio. The poem was published and widely distributed in 1473. It caused an intellectual sensation and lit a fire between religion and science. I was skeptical that a poem written in the First Century B.C.E. could bring down the curtain on the Dark Ages. But then I read the poem… Just a few of the revelations Lucretius explains are: Everything in the Universe is made up of atoms. Space is infinite. Color cannot exist without light. Gravity doesn’t distinguish falling objects by weight. And on the subject of the origins of the universe he writes, “In that long-ago
Cardinal Madruzzo Christoforo Madruzzo must have been remarkably brilliant or a very well connected young man. With-in two years of being ordained, he was elevated to the rank of Cardinal. He served in the Vatican’s diplomatic corps, settling disputes during the Italian Religious Wars. He eventually fell from grace and retired to his home in Soriano where he collected monster bones. He read widely and enjoyed a diverse group of friends. He had been labeled a Pluralist by the Church and dismissed. Even though the liberal minded Society of Jesus was established about this time, it would appear the Pope had no use for a Cardinal who could entertain more than one philosophy at a time. Orsini build his leaning tower in his friend’s honor. It is a tiny replica in pink stucco of Madruzzo’s home, just three kilometers south of the garden. Montaigne Defends the Church Michele de Montaigne seems to have survived the four centuries since his death with his reputation firmly intact. He was an essayist on every subject and set the style for his followers much like Beau Brummel determined how men would tie their neck cloths for a generation. He wrote, “I cannot really convince myself that Epicurus, Plato and Pythagoras genuinely wanted us to accept their Atoms theory.” Dali In the early 1950’s Salvador Dali made a horror film in Orsini’s garden and named his cat Bomarzo. By then time the garden had been neglected for years. With Dali’s encouragement, the Bettinis who then owned the property began a major renovation. The stream that had once meandered thru the garden had been redirected, perhaps to water sheep, and the garden was now dry. A few of the smaller pieces had to be moved and time had eroded the surface of the art, but what is now open to the public is remarkable and well worth the visit. |