Two Sculptures and a Poem

By Jos� Galindo

On May 21, 1972, a Hungarian geologist attacked Michelangelo’s Pietà, a marble sculpture of the Virgin Mary holding the dead body of her son. That morning, Lazlo Toth walked across St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican, entered the Basilica and, while screaming, “I am Jesus Christ,” smashed the sculpture with a hammer, causing severe damage to what is considered one of Buonarroti’s masterpieces. Chiselled when Michelangelo was only 23, in 1499, the Pietà depicts a youthful Maddonna, her head slightly inclined over the body of her son, who lies lifeless on her lap. Perhaps Toth deemed that Christ was battered enough, dead enough, so he hurled himself on the Virgin, breaking off her left arm and nose, and causing extensive damage to her face.

A court in Rome declared 33-year-old Toth a socially dangerous person and confined him to a mental hospital. On February 1975, he was released and deported from Italy as an undesirable alien.

After patient and careful work by a team of restoration artists, the sculpture recovered its original flawlessness. It is exhibited again in St. Peter’s Balisica, behind bullet-proof glass.

The following poem, of which I offer an English version, was written by Joaquín Antonio Peñalosa and published in Mexico City as part of the book Museo de Cera (1977).

A HUNGARIAN MUTILATED MICHELANGELO’S PIETÁ

I know that artists and many decent people

won’t agree with me

now that they’ve assembled to weep

and their tears have made the news

in France Press, in United Press.

The world awakened mutilated

because the marble Virgin is missing an arm

the nose, the veil, the tender eye

just like the monsters of war

when the physician comes to make the pronouncement

and to gather in a sheet the scattered petals

it pains the world that a flower has been plucked

as Christ’s dead body

longed for the subtle fingers that cradled him

and was afraid of falling yet another time

brittle in the stone of the genius

and in the workers’ flesh in which Mary sculpted him.

The hammer should be mourned, not the marble

this poor Hungarian Lazlo Toth

driven mad, with no country, no family

wandering like a cat through the streets of Rome

enraged and solitary and starving

crossing the Bridge of Chains in Budapest

headlights come on

a boat carries bunches of oranges

down the Danube

and a golden sunbeam threads through the Gothic needles

ay Hungary, small and luminous as a drop of blood

I ask forgiveness for you, Lazlo Toth

for you and the wary ones who refuse to forgive you

and you’re our son

in violent flesh we gave you birth

in anger and in rage

maniac Hungarian, who will restore you

who will glue on your hand

your eye, your sense, your life

what kind of love will bear your hope,

I demand a new Pietà for a mutilated man.

I love this poem for many reasons. The quick, almost cinematic changes of atmosphere—the public outrage in the media, the broken sculpture, the battlefield with scattered limbs/petals, the lunatic wandering about the streets of Rome, the sunset picture of Budapest.

The scene over the Danube is evocative of an oil painting. Obscure, gray brushstrokes on a canvas illuminated in three spots—the cars’ headlights, the oranges being transported dawn the river, the last rays of sunlight reflected in the Gothic towers. The chiaroscuro works visually as well as conceptually. Why is it that the splendor and harmony of Budapest has engendered the disruptive figure of a madman? The ordered geometry of the city as origin of a destructive creature. All of us, as a social body, responsible for generating or fostering the growth of anger and rage. By assaulting a cultural icon, the maddened outcast turns against a civilization that has forgotten him.

The key twist in the poem comes in metonymic form, “The hammer should be mourned, not the marble”. Prior to that verse, pain is focused on the injured sculpture—an attack on art, an attack on the Virgin as a religious figure, an attack on the suffering mother holding the dead body of her son. But after that verse the poem somehow restores the meaning of the sculpture itself. The Pietà is a symbol of infinite maternal sorrow and mercy. The dead Christ has taken upon himself the suffering of all mankind. There is a strange truth in Lazlo Toth’s crying, “Woman, I am Christ, I am the one who is suffering. Your son is dead. I am your son now. Have mercy on me”. There will be a skillful team of restoration artists taking care of the sculpture, but who’s there to restore the man? Hence the poet’s demand for another Pietà (not a sculpture, but all that is symbolized by that piece of stone) for a mutilated man—a man deprived of his senses, of a place in the world, of hope.

Peñalosa is a poet with a Franciscan flair. Many of his poems are minor tone hymns celebrating the tiny and humble creatures of God, the splendor of all things small. The beauty of this poem, though, lies in its grazing of a different enigma, and I will call on another statue to help me name it. This statue is known as “The Happy Prince” in a story by Oscar Wilde. The golden statue of the Prince had a friend, a swallow who, urged by the Prince/Statue himself, plucks out its eyes/jewels and gives them to people in distress. The swallow remains by the side of the Prince, now blind, despite the arrival of winter:

All the next day he sat on the Prince’s shoulder, and told him stories of what he had seen in strange lands. He told him of the red ibises, who stand in long rows on the banks of the Nile, and catch gold-fish in their beaks; of the Sphinx, who is as old as the world itself, and lives in the desert, and knows everything; of the merchants, who walk slowly by the side of their camels, and carry amber beads in their hands; of the King of the Mountains of the Moon, who is as black as ebony, and worships a large crystal; of the great green snake that sleeps in a palm-tree, and has twenty priests to feed it with honey-cakes; and of the pygmies who sail over a big lake on large flat leaves and are always at war with the butterflies.

“Dear little Swallow,” said the Prince, “you tell me of marvelous things, but more marvelous than anything is the suffering of men and of women. There is no Mystery so great as Misery”.

Hastily classified, objects of art may be said to be capable of escorting us in two kinds of trips: a voyage to far away places—either dreamlike places inhabited by ibises and Sphinxes and snakes (as described by O. Wilde), or places too small to be noticed (as fashioned in Peñalosa’s poems)—and a voyage into the abysses of the human heart. Michelangelo’s Pietá, Peñalosa’s poem, and Wilde’s short story belong to the second kind, although not exclusively. Let’s consider this classification a mere working hypothesis.