‘Don Giovanni makes furniture that God covets.’ So read an article in the local newspaper on the week before Don Giovanni’s death.
Whether this headline was prophetic or merely a temptation to fate we shall never know but there were certain mysteries surrounding the venerable old craftsman’s demise that have not and, I guess, never will be cleared up.
That said, locals have been too prompt to attribute his death to supernatural powers, that is for sure. Don Giovanni, let me tell you, did not lack for human enemies, and if God coveted his talents it does not bear thinking the sort of jealousy he sparked in others of his craft.
But I’m jumping ahead of myself. First let me describe to you in my poor Italian some of Don Giovanni’s creations and let us hope that together your imagination and my insufficient powers of description will come close to creating a simulcrum of those incomparable masterpieces.
The first that springs to my mind is a dining table which I once caught a glimpse of as he hurried me through his workshop to his back room to share a whiskey. My brief impression of the object was as that of a still-living thing. The legs of the table were tree trunks run about with vines and clinging plants whose tendrils wove in and out of each other in chaotic patterns too complicated for the eye to follow. Leaves as delicate as butterflies’ wings clung to the vines and petals beaded with little wooden drops of water seemed almost to give off a perfume, so lifelike and fresh they looked.
Don Giovanni could make wood sing. I have seen a lamp stand carved to resemble water shooting from a fountain which made you feel cool and refreshed just being in its presence; a wardrobe whose doors were shaped like gates and when you opened them a use of perspective so clever that it looked like a path leading away to a new world of woods and rivers and fairies. The man who bought that wardrobe, it is said, would spend whole days just sitting inside it. There was a chair crafted to look like a buttercup whose single leg, wrought to appear as the flower’s stem, looked so thin and fragile that people had to be assured of their safety before daring to sit in it; a writing table with such craftily designed drawers and panels that the owner, an absent minded poet, lost most of his work within its labyrinthine innards and had to constantly bring it back to have it opened and emptied.
Don Giovanni hadn’t always limited himself to furniture. He once, upon request, made a statue of a wood nymph from a single piece of chestnut. Although I never saw it myself, I have heard that the creature was so marvellously lifelike and beautiful that the owner fell in love with it in a very real way, and not only him but his brother as well who, one day, maddened with lust for this creature, tried to make off with it. Both brothers were permanently crippled in the ensuing duel and Don Giovanni vowed never to make human-like figures again.
But none of his masterpieces, it is said, compared to the object he was working on at the time of his death. It was commissioned by a mysterious and wealthy wandering humanist who settled for a while in Don Giovanni’s village and brought great changes for good in the short time he was there, renovating the town hall and building a new library to be filled with humanist literature. This man, who always wore a tall hat and was known only as ‘Il Viandante’ – ’The Wanderer’ commissioned an item of furniture for a vast but undislcosed sum of money that would be Don Giovanni’s most ambitious task yet.
It was to be a folding screen of nine panels as used in the boudoirs of rich ladies and was to depict, in its entirety, the Inferno of Dante with each panel portraying a separate circle of hell.
It is said that the commission became Don Giovanni’s obsession and all his spirit and talent was poured into it. After several months the first panel was completed and it was like looking into Limbo with Homer, Horace, Ovid and their colleagues gathered about the forgotten meadows. A few months later and the second panel was completed depicting Lust. It is said that after a few days of public display Don Giovanni had to hide it to stop the youths of the village openly trying to fornicate with the women portrayed on it, so well did he represent his subject.
So the work progressed with Gluttony, Avarice, Wrath, Heresy,Violence and Fraud following one after the other in separate panels and all the while closely observed by its wealthy patron. Friends who were lucky (or unlucky) enough to see and follow the progress of the work have told me how Don Giovanni’s art seemed to outdo itself with each successive panel so that you thought each one could not be surpassed until you saw the next, and that each panel became more lifelike, more grotesquely real, a brooding presence almost, rather than a solid object.
Finally came the ninth panel and the ninth circle – Betrayal, but sadly (or some say fortunately) this was never finished because it was then that Don Giovanni died. Doubtless it would have been the most lifelike and disturbing of them all but we will never know because Don Giovanni had only finished carving the portal to the ninth circle when his body was found lying dead in front of the panel. For some unknown reason his walking cane was lying next to the body along with Il Viandante’s tall, black hat.
Of course the worst kind of speculation surrounds Don Giovanni’s death. Il Viandante was never seen again, leading to obvious rumours of murder despite the fact that not a single mark of violence was found upon the body, and of course the supernatural must always play its part, the lowest gossip being that if you look into the bottom left corner of the ninth panel you will see – no larger than a thumbnail – the figures of Don Giovanni and Il Viandante frozen for ever into the timeless wood. Don Giovanni’s hands are raised as if to protest at his incarceration in hell but the hatless figure of Il Viandante is smiling beneath his newly-revealed horns.
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