The Prince Who Painted Hell

Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, wrote chromatic progressions in 1611 so strange that no European composer would write anything like them again until Wagner, 248 years later. He invented the harmonic future from a castle in Avellino, alone.

On the night of 16 October 1590, he murdered his first wife and her lover. The court ruled it no crime. He went home and began the long work of repenting.

The repenting was thorough. He wrote to Cardinal Borromeo begging for fragments of his recently canonized uncle, certain the bone-chips would cure his depression and his sin. (Ignored.) He kept ten young men in the household whose only job was to beat him three times a day. Per a 1635 account, a specialist was retained to beat him while he defecated, on the theory that this addressed constipation, melancholy, and demons in a single sitting. What the others made of this is not recorded.

In 1609 he commissioned an altarpiece for his own church. It shows him kneeling in prayer beside his saintly uncle, eyes lifted toward heaven.

Directly beneath his folded hands, in the flames of purgatory, his wife is burning.

He hung it where he prayed.