In this artwork, how is the Mutual pardon discussed?
Denis Morrier mentions yet another interpretive tradition. In August every year, the town of Gesualdo re-enacts an event that marked the city: the mutual pardon of Prince Carlo and his son Emmanuele. In the narratives of the early seventeenth century chroniclers, this ceremony is tied to the reconciliation, as well as to the very close deaths, of the two princes in 1613. Don Ferrante della Mara, chronicler of the great Neapolitan families, evokes this ultimate drama of Gesualdo's life in his Rovine di case Napoletane del suo tempo (1632):
“It is in this state that Gesualdo died miserably, not without having known, for his fourth misfortune, the death of his only son, Don Emmanuele, who hated his father and ardently desired his death. The worst was that this son disappeared without having left a child for the survival [of their house], as he had only two daughters by Donna Maria Polissena of Furstenberg, Princess of Bohemia.”This Mutual Pardon of Gesualdo is exactly contemporary to the completion of the Perdono di Gesualdo. In fact, Eleonora d’Este described the reunion of the father and his son in a letter date March 2, 1609, addressed to her brother Cesare: “My son Lord Don Emmanuele is here at our place (in Gesualdo), and he is seen with great joy and pleasure by his father, since the differences that opposed them are calmed, for the greatest pleasure of all, and in particular for myself who loves him so.”
Gesualdo Eleonora d’Este left