Prison of love, 14921979

LUIS Racionero combines elements of the detective novel with those of the historical novel as he explores and exploits the Mediterranean mystique in La carcel del amor. He recreates the ambiance of late fifteenth-century Rome, ruled by the Borgia family whose flamboyant members figure as his principal characters. The shimmering beauty of the Mediterranean clime with its golden sunlight and gentle breezes wafting from sea and mountains over fertile plains evokes the earthly paradise depicted by Botticelli, and Racionero's characters like Botticelli's graceful gods and goddesses are visually commensurate to their setting. The physical beauty of landscape and inhabitants conceals a moral turpitude so profound that Racionero's characters could all find slots awaiting them on the nine levels of Dante's subterranean Inferno; the only difficulty would be to ascertain which is their worst sin and which, therefore, is the lowest rung they should occupy. All display lust, greed, treachery, and few are the crimes that do not appear on their ledgers. They hesitate only momentarily to commit incest, fratricide, matricide, and patricide, but their principal vice is forgery. The one redeeming quality of these characters is their aspiration for artistic perfection: they recognize, appreciate and support the best work produced by the foremost artists of the time, notably Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo; they also collect and protect Roman antiquities. Racionero suggests that precisely this combination of the pure and the impure produces great art, just like the most fertile soil contains a good measure of manure from which its plants draw nutrients as necessary to their survival as sunshine and rain. Racionero's La carcel del amor (1) echoes Diego de San Pedro's Carcel de amor both in theme and in structure, despite the wide divergence of subject matter and style between the two authors. Racionero (2) chronicles the incestuous pairings of the Borgia family, notching up the licentious family history through the creation of the eye-witness narrator Pietrogorio, twin brother to Cesar Borgia. After Cesar's exile from Rome, and his subsequent death in battle as capitan general for the King of Navarre, Pietrogorio replaces his famous brother as lover to their sister Lucrecia in her palace in Ferrara. Blending historical and fictional characters and episodes with Post Modern freedom, Racionero paints a reasonably accurate picture of the Machiavellian power struggles between the Italian city-states, the Papal Court, France, and Spain. Not only does Machiavelli himself figure as one of Lucretia's lovers, but also Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci cater to the Borgias' avid collecting of Renaissance art and Greco-Roman antiquities.