‘Bizzarrie del boschetto del Signor Vicino’: the figurative language of the Sacro Bosco

In 1564, Pierfrancesco ‘Vicino’ Orsini wrote to the humanist Annibale Caro to request advice about the frescoes of a loggia of his palazzo in the town of Bomarzo. Orsini had already chosen the subject — a Gigantomachy, or Battle of Gods and Giants — but he needed Caro’s learned assistance to work out the details of the cycle. Orsini’s choice of subject indicates that he intended to create a relationship between the imagery of the loggia and the Sacro Bosco in the valley directly below, which he had begun to lay out more than ten years earlier in c. 1552. The figures of the wood were conceived and executed on a colossal scale; and the sculptural group of Orlando and the Woodsman derived from Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1532) explicitly depicts a battle between giants (Figure 1). In this sense, then, the theme of the frescoes that Orsini planned for his loggia was supposed to link the palazzo and what Caro, in his reply of 12 December 1564, called the ‘cose stravaganti e soprannaturali’ of the wood. In contrast to the detailed iconographic scheme that, as Clare Robertson has made clear, Caro devised with reference to ‘the mass of esoteric matter made easily available in the new mythographic handbooks,’ the Sacro Bosco lacks a clear narrative program. This absence of an obvious (or even recondite) interpretative key has inspired a wide range of readings, but no consensus about Orsini’s intentions or the cumulative meaning of the statuary and structures of the wood has been reached. The literature on the Sacro Bosco has become large, although it is widely dispersed and not easy to assimilate. Nevertheless, the main trajectories of interpretation can be summarized as follows. One early approach could be described as ‘cross-cultural’. Mario Praz was among the first to propose in 1953 that the carved war elephant supporting a castle refers to India. He speculated that knowledge of Indian sculptural practices could have reached Bomarzo through travelers’ tales. Horst Bredekamp (1985) developed this hypothesis further, arguing (unconvincingly) that a handful of the monuments of the Sacro Bosco, including the Fighting Giants, the Tortoise, and the Mask of Madness, are Pre-Columbian in inspiration. Another recurring premise has been that the Sacro Bosco deliberately alludes to the Etruscan history of the region. Beginning with Ezio Bacino in 1951, and now championed by Katherine Coty, this school of thought holds that the key to Orsini’s creation lies in local campanilismo and what has been called the ‘Etruscomania’ of the sixteenth century. The scholar Annius of Viterbo’s fabricated history of the Alto Lazio, in which he claimed that the civilization of the area was both more ancient and more noble than that of Rome, epitomizes this local emphasis. Orsini would surely have been aware of Annius’s widely-read Antiquities (1498), which was translated into Italian by his friend and family biographer Francesco Sansovino. The Sacro Bosco also contains a faux Etruscan tomb façade; and its sculptures are, like the necropolises that are still extant throughout the surrounding area, carved from the