For Martha María and Michael, Veneziani dentro la pelle.
They are two legendary figures: a novelist and a character from a novel; two names where the art of fiction and life in fiction intersect. Two men from the sixteenth century: one is a Spanish soldier born in Alcalá de Henares, and the other is an Italian duke from Rome. Eternity in painting has established its portraits, lights, and shadows when the two contemplate each other as if in a mirror: the soldier, portrayed in the studio of the painter Juan de Jáuregui in Madrid, and the duke, captured by the master Lorenzo Lotto in the shadows of the Emo Palace in Venice.
The soldier is a man whose age could be forty or fifty, or who knows how old Miguel was when he was painted, while the duke is both young and old at the same time, Pier Francesco in the eternity of the horoscope that sets his birth at the gates of the novel that will make him immortal. The sad and tired gaze of the soldier, his aquiline nose, his mustache and graying beard, which were once young as they are now, in front of Lorenzo Lotto’s easel, the features of the duke with his melancholic and astute gaze, leafing through a voluminous book, impeccably shaven and with a sharp nose…
Are Miguel and Pier Francesco’s noses similar? Are the noses of the soldier and the duke analogous? Juan de Jáuregui in his studio in Madrid, predicting a resemblance between the soldier and the duke posing for Lorenzo Lotto in Venice? They have certainly not smelled the same, but the noses of the soldier and the duke are discreetly distinctive in both: the former does not forget the sweat and onions of inns and taverns, the wanderings through inhospitable landscapes and captivity, while the latter recalls the mists and fragrances of gardens and shadows where ardor and daggers reign.
The noses in these paintings are elegant, born from the hands of the Madrid painter and the Venetian master: the former, the creator of an ingenious nobleman, and the latter, the protector of violent knights—and phlegmatically violent himself. The breath of life in Cervantes, and of death in Orsini. The mirror, or rather mirrors, of which there are two, one in Madrid and the other in Venice, sum up the fate of the soldier who writes and the duke who reads. The paintings by Jáuregui and Lotto are the description of Miguel dreaming that he is writing and Pier Francesco reading that he is dreaming.
Of Cervantes, we know his face: we do not know what his hands were like, only that one was disabled by a wound on a memorable day; and of Orsini, we know much more: his torso, his long, delicate fingers, accustomed to caressing pages and bodies. But the mirrors do not tell us that on one occasion—the great occasion—Miguel and Pier Francesco met: it is recounted in Bomarzo, Mujica Lainez’s enormous novel—“…a writing, an art of storytelling, which while reminiscent of the classics of the 19th century, introduces apocryphal luxuries of the 16th century, the century of the monstrous and angelic Orsini,” said Bolaño.
In the eleventh and final chapter of the more than six hundred pages of that great novel, Miguel, then page to Cardinal Julio Aquaviva—according to Mujica Lainez—saves Pier Francesco from a drunken brawl. They were in the Sicilian port of Messina, preparing for the Battle of Lepanto. While he recovers, Orsini gives Cervantes a copy of Orlando Furioso, and Cervantes reciprocates with “the book of an exalted author, a poet from Castile,” the work of Garcilaso de la Vega. The page had said his name, but the duke did not understand him in his feverish slumber.
Almost immediately, when he looks at the second page of the volume, the duke notices the soldier’s signature, “drawn in two lines, joined by the design of the initials”: then, from the timelessness of the narration of his prodigious life, Pier Francesco Orsini reads “a name he had never heard from anyone’s lips: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra.” Shortly thereafter, both will find themselves under fire, under attack and boarding, on October 7, 1571, in the Greek waters of Lepanto, the fierce clash between the Turkish and Christian armies, commanded by the Algerian Ali Pasha and the Spanish Infante Don Juan of Austria.
What came next has been of endless interest to historians and novelists—among the latter, it is essential to remember the great Venezuelan writer Arturo Uslar Pietri and his novel La visita en el tiempo (The Visit in Time)—: Christian arms prevailed over the Turks in that setting which, far away, foreshadowed future global wars of extermination, domination, and plunder. The outcome of Lepanto is clear: 208 Turkish galleys and 120 smaller ships were sunk or captured, and 50,000 sailors and 27,000 soldiers were killed or taken prisoner.
Miguel de Cervantes and Pier Francesco Orsini would never meet again, as Mujica Lainez recalls, but the paintings in which they have been immortalized, one in Madrid and the other in Venice, invite “new readings” when it comes to painting and the novel: the portraits painted by Juan de Jáuregui of the writer and Lorenzo Lotto of the gentleman whom the Argentine “discovered” in his immortal novel allow us to intertwine the stories of two fascinating figures, two gazes and two noses that are also a unique encounter between painting and fiction with the soldier and the duke.
Cover image: Portrait of a Gentleman (1527), by Lorenzo Lotto. Venice Academy Gallery.
Final image in the text: Miguel de Cervantes, by Juan de Jáuregui.
