Taking its title from a series of Pisan frescoes attributed to Buffalmacco, this is the first Italian novel to celebrate Nietzsche’s theory of the superman — represented here by D’Annunzio’s hero Giorgio Aurispa. Gripped by a deathwish, Aurispa finds his intellectual vocation to be a writer impeded by an earthly and physical desire, his excessive and entirely carnal love for Ippolita Sanzio. A fascination with death shrouds the entire story, whose thread is provided by the protagonist’s infirmity of will. This weakness prevents him from shaking off his creative block and freeing himself from the damnation of an insane passion for a woman who is sensually unbalanced.


Aurispa’s attempts to escape from Ippolita by returning to the past in his home town and the undefiled Abruzzi countryside are useless, as are his attempts to set up a new life with Ippolita as devotees of a superstitious and primitive Christianity preached by peasant cultists. Contact with nature and the genuine soul of the people fails to cure either Aurispa’s intellectual impotence or his sexual subjugation, but it exposes him to the sordid reality of a life of degradation which he finds unacceptable. Suicide remains the only type of heroism available to him, and he draws his lover in too — tragic gesture of the intellectual in the face of failure, the bitter conclusion being that the words and vision which would make creativity possible for him are snatched away by the rise of a vulgar, arrogant society, the domination of money and the carnal torment which has reduced him to sterility.


As the vision of a writer who wanted to produce ‘total art’, this fragment of Aurispa’s life is an exceptional document of an intellectual consciousness which, at the end of the nineteenth century, had to face the loss of its role in society. This was a society whose only ideal was economic and political aggrandisement — similar perhaps to our own fin de siècle of the 1980s and 90s.

‘When in the dawn of the great day, Giorgio Aurispa awoke out of an uneasy slumber, his first thought was: ‘She is coming to-day! In this day’s light I shall behold her, clasp her in my arms! It seems as if to-day she will be mine for the first time — I feel as if I could die of it!’ The vision he called up sent a sudden thrill through him from head to foot, like an electric shock, and the terrible physical phenomenon came upon him, against whose tyranny he knew himself to be utterly powerless. His whole being succumbed to the despotism of his senses, once again his inherited— — sensuality blazed up with irresistible fury in this fastidious and delicate-minded lover, who delighted to call his mistress sister, and yearned for spiritual communion with her. One by one he mentally reviewed her several beauties, and each outline, seen through the flame of his desire, assumed a radiance, a splendour that was chimerical, almost superhuman. He contemplated in spirit her every caress; every attitude was replete with fascination — in her all was light and perfume and rhythm.

And this adorable creature was his — his alone! But with that, on a sudden, like the smoke from a dull fire, the demon of jealousy rose in his mind. To shake it off he jumped out of bed. pp131-132