A curse — or a blessing in disguise

The death of Francesco Cenci has the ring of a contemporary crime. A wealthy, well-connected man is killed when he steps onto a balcony which inexplicably gives way beneath him. Within days of his burial, local gossip suggests that it was no accident — the hole in the balcony is too small for anyone to slip through. Investigators discover blood-stained bed-clothes, and when the body is exhumed the skull is found to have been caved in by blows from an axe. Under questioning, Francesco’s servants reveal that he was killed on the orders of his wife and daughter aided by two sons.

The Cenci murder took place in Italy in 1598, but what gave it a resonance that seems modern in every age since were the motives of the murderers. Francesco was a bisexual sadist: he forced his wife into multiple couplings with male and female prostitutes, sodomised his stableboys, imprisoned his daughter, Beatrice, whipped her in sight of witnesses with a bull’s-pizzle sjambok and, allegedly, raped her. His killers, prompted and driven on by Beatrice, were themselves victims, goaded to extreme violence by the untrammelled cruelty of an abusive husband and father.

The final act, their dreadful torture and execution at the instigation of Pope Clement VIII, created a perfect tragedy which only required an image for the imagination to work on. Two centuries after the murder, the necessary icon was provided by Guido Reni’s painting of a lovely, startled girl, unconvincingly identified as Beatrice.

This is the starting-point of Belinda Jack’s ambitious essay. In it she sets out to show that among the many artists who have taken the Cenci murder as their subject, five in particular — Percy Bysshe Shelley, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, an American sculptor, Harriet Hosmer, and the French dramatist Antonin Artaud — became so obsessed with the sadistic, sexual undercurrents of the Cenci case that they were destroyed by it: ‘The work they produced under “Beatrice’s Spell” was almost invariably their last, their farewell to art, and often to life.