Cenci

Cenci, BEATRICE, 'the beautiful parricide,' was the daughter of Francesco Cenci, a Roman nobleman of colossal wealth. According to Muratori (Annales, lib. x.), Francesco was twice married, Beatrice being the youngest of twelve children by the first wife. After his second marriage, he treated the children of his first wife in a revolting manner, and was even accused of hiring bandits to murder two of his sons on their return from Spain. The beauty of Beatrice inspired him with the horrible and incestuous desire to possess her person; with mingled lust and hate he persecuted her from day to day, until circumstances enabled him to consummate his brutality. The unfortunate girl besought the help of her relatives, and of Pope Clement VII. (Aldobrandini), but did not receive it; whereupon, in company with her step-mother and her brother, Giacomo, she planned the murder of her unnatural parent, into whose brain two hired assassins drove a large nail (9th September 1598). The crime was discovered, and both she and Giacomo were put to the torture; Giacomo confessed, but Beatrice persisted in the declaration that she was innocent. All, however, were condemned and beheaded (10th September 1599). Such is Muratori's narrative. Others allege that Beatrice was the innocent victim of an infernal plot. The results, however, of Bertolotti's investigations (Francesco Cenci e la sua Famiglia, 1877), based on original documents and contemporary notices, go far to deprive the story of the Cenci tragedy of the romantic elements on which Shelley's powerful tragedy mainly turns. Francesco, it would appear, was profligate, but no monster: Beatrice at the time she murdered her father was not sixteen, but twenty-one years of age, was far from beautiful, and was probably the mother of an illegitimate son. And Bertolotti further shows that the sweet and mournful countenance which forms one of the treasures of the Barberini Palace in Rome cannot possibly be a portrait of Beatrice by Guido, who never painted in Rome till some nine years after Beatrice's death. See an article in the Edinburgh Review for January 1879.