Lust and Violence

The Borgia dynasty, by Jodorowsky and Manara

The Borgias by Alejandro Jodorowsky and illustrated by Milo Manara, translated by Katie LaBarbara

This is a remarkable book. The compilation of all four volumes of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s and Milo Manara’s epic of lust and murder: and I would say that, in cases of both author and illustrator, readers find a perfect match for the subject. Jodorowsky for his strange esoterica, his vision of strange, alien societies so different from ours, where the moral calculus is not the same. He can solve for Thanatos. And Manara, of course, as many who know his work will say, to supply the part of Eros — famous as he is for his erotic artworks, works adorning magazine covers, comic books, playing cards, and much more.

There are few other artists of his generation in such communication with lust.

What is the tale they are telling here? Jodorowsky writes in his preface that the Italy of the high and late middle ages was a deeply, profoundly sick society. A little like ours. The Black Death had given everyone a sense that life was not only short and arbitrary, but also that there was no point in living morally. If existence is a morally blank void, and the hereafter close and uninterested in how a man or woman lives, why not live for today and not for tomorrow? Why not, if one would, indulge in every pleasure money can buy? Why not use violence to solve every quarrel? Why not seek earthly dominion over this small anthill of a planet? Why not?

In the first chapter, Blood for the Pope, the old pontiff, haunted by terrible visions and suffering greatly from stomach cancer, desperately attempts to keep death at by with two cures: the milk of a series of new mothers, and infusions of blood from young boys, who often (quite naturally, for this is a gothic work) die in the process. All the while, Rodrigo Borgia, a cardinal, schemes to secure his own ascent to the papacy after the inevitable decease of his holiness.

Borgia tells his family that the family is all that matters; that they are surrounded and assailed on all sides. And that if they want to extend their rule over the known world, they will have to stick together. Stick together and never let the clan fracture.

Jodorowsky clearly believes, or accepts as necessary for his story, every scandalous tale he ever heard or read about the Borgia family. Be it in their personal lives, or in what they were claimed to have done to their rivals, or in what they were claimed to have designs on doing, if their plans were rightly carried out.

And it’s also clear, from Jodorowsky’s preface and from what he includes in his story, that he is trying here to make medieval Italy into an alien world: a place of great squalor and misery but also luxury nigh unimaginable. The Borgia addiction to art, here, is in great evidence.

There are some dissenters. We have the deranged, obsessive Girolamo Savonarola preaching his sermons of repentance and revelation. He sees visions, visions of great tides of blood drowning the lands, of celestial cavalry (the horsemen of the end times, perhaps). And in preaching, he whips the Florentine crowds into hysterics. Savonarola has them burn their jewels, destroy their pictures. In a neat trick, Jodorowsky and Manara conjecture a lost Botacelli, invent it almost from whole cloth, just so may be fed into the rapacious flames.

All the while, Borgia is scheming. He is buying of papal electors, one by one. Some want money; others status; one, a very old man, wants only to enjoy the company of woman once again. And some of them, of course, have to be threatened and tormented by those threats.

When Borgia ascends to the papal throne as Alexander VI, he attempts to put his plan into action. He will send his children to marry or make alliances where they go: together, they might dissuade a French invasion of Italy, keep the Italian states who would ally against Rome apart, and bring those states who might be Rome’s ally together.

Chapter two is called Power and Incest, and (having heard the stories about the Borgias already) you can imagine what that might mean. And of course, the ascent to power means access to grandeur and luxury almost beyond imagining, and opportunities to gratify lust and greed likewise, although not beyond Manara’s skill to imagine and to put on paper.

Say what you like about Manara (and people certainly have), but no one illustrates depravity quite like him. He knows that even amid the chaos of near mythic debauchery, it’s important your characters still look good. A courtesan may be vomiting a stomachful of wine, but she must look enticing, even so.

Critics say that Manara’s women (for which he is most famed) all look the same. Perfect skin. They’re all statuesque, with mostly the same proportions. The same bodies. Even women of different races have the same physiques. They have faces like screen sirens of the last fifty years. Aside from changes in hair colour, some have said, Manara’s women all have the same face. It’s a lascivious face, a type of face that does not exist in real life. Or at least, I can’t claim to have seen one personally.

I share some of these quibbles. It wouldn’t hurt Manara to feature women of different heights and different builds. It might even achieve his objectives more effectively. But we can go too far. Manara was hired because he matched the sensibilities of this work, which contrasts terrible brutality and vile degradation with extreme, pornographic luxury and shameless eroticism. There is no better distillation of what the Borgias are said to have wrought, what they have come to represent.