Regarding this artwork, how does the Analysis's Allegories or "Black Legends" incorporate the Adultery and double murder?
Adultery and double murder According to Denis Morrier, “traditionally, the figures of the man and the woman have been interpreted as the tormented souls of Maria d’Avalos and the Duke of Andria,” assassinated in 1590.
A great deal of ink has been spilled over this event, as much in Neapolitan and Roman chronicles of the sixteenth century as in sonnets, quatrains and other occasional poems; Tasso composed three sonnets and one madrigal about this double homicide and “was soon followed by a number of poets. The theme thus became a topos among others, providing beaux-esprits with ample subject matter to poeticise.” In France, Pierre de Bourdeille, Lord of Brantôme, took up the narrative in his Lives of Noble Women (first discourse: “On the ladies who make love and cuckold their husband”).According to Catherine Deutsch, “even if the viceroy sought to suppress the affaire, either of his own accord or through the Gesualdos’s insistence, this double crime left a profound and durable mark on the consciousness of Naples, Italy, and the rest of Europe.” Denis Morrier sees the “Gesualdo affaire” as the crime of the century, a crime that definitively established the composer's reputation through “the extraordinary publicity” that accompanied it.Though not pursued by justice, “he paid in a certain measure for his acts, as he was ostracized from Neapolitan aristocracy” and “this forced retirement affected other members of Gesualdo’s family, notably his father, Fabrizio, who died December 2, 1591, far from Naples, in his castle in Calitri.” Consequently, at the end of a year of exile, Carlo Gesualdo became the head of his family at twenty-five years of age, and one of the richest landowners in all of Southern Italy.In the popular imagination, a black legend soon surrounded the composer. “Crime and divine punishment, fault and expiation: barely twenty years after the death of the prince, all the ingredients were already in place for the mythic edification of the character of Gesualdo,” who become “the bloody murderer of the nineteenth century historiographies, the monster tortured by his conscience and by the ghost of his wife.”
Pierre de Bourdeille, Lord of Brantôme Tasso Italy Gesualdo left Carlo Gesualdo madrigal