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Beatrice Cenci: The tragedy of a young noblewoman

by Andira Vitale

“In this face of Cenci, there is more than I have ever seen in any other human face.”

– J.W. Goethe

“The face is smooth and beautiful, the gaze incredibly sweer and the eyes very large: they have the shocked air of a person caught by surprise when shedding hot tears.” 

– Stendhal

11 September, 1599. Piazza di Ponte Sant’Angelo, in the dark and gloomy Rome of Caravaggio. On a hot and humid morning, the execution of Beatrice Cenci, her brother James and their stepmother Lucrezia is underway. Giacomo’s head was smashed with a mallet before his corpse was quartered. Next were Lucrezia and Beatrice, both of whom were beheaded with a small axe. It ends in this manner, one of the most famous crimes in medieval history. This story will be told for centuries, transforming the young Beatrice into a heroine worthy of authors and artists such as Shelley, Stendhal, Dumas, Caravaggio, Guido Reni, and Moravia, to name a few.

The haunting story of Beatrice Cenci (1577-1599), the young Roman noblewoman who murdered her abusive father before being beheaded on a bridge in Rome, still fascinates today.

On September 9, 1598, screams were heard from a castle in La Petrella Village, close to Rome. What the people call a castle was the residence of Count Francesco Cenci outside the village, called “Rocca Cenci”, of which a few walls remain today. Plautilla Calvetti, the housekeeper of the Cenci castle and wife of its caretaker, was down in the village when she heard a loud commotion. When she rushed outside to see what was happening, a friend called her: “Plautilla, Plautilla, they are screaming in the castle.” She started to rush up to the steep dirt road towards the fortress; as she continued up the road, she met some men rushing down; “Signor Francesco died,” they told her: Count Francesco was dead. When she reached the castle, she called out but received no response. Plautilla asked her, “What happened, Signora?” The young girl was looking away, completely silent. While Beatrice stared blankly into the distance, her mother, Lucrezia, screamed inside the castle.

Count’s lifeless body was under the wooden balcony. Above the top story of the fortress, a wooden balcony had given way; the Count had fallen over forty feet to his death. It seemed to be an accident. After a quick ceremony in the church, Francesco is buried along with his troubled past. The case was closed and filed as an accident. Soon after, rumours that the man had been murdered made the authorities re-open the investigation for “fame”, meaning.

Evidence surfaces of the sheets and mattress of Francesco’s bed, which were abundantly soaked with blood. They make sure that the size of the hole in the balcony is so tiny that the voluminous body of a man would have barely passed; even if it were, the small size of the passage would have easily allowed the unfortunate to cling to the iron railing, which, however, was folded inward and not outward.

Marzio Floriani, called ‘Catalan, is arrested first, stripped and taken to the torture room by the inquisitors of the Papal States under the procedure known as the “territio”, which is intended to terrorise the accused with the threat of execution. The sight of the torture instruments ready to be used is enough to convince the poor man to tell everything word for word, of how the two women lived in a state of unjust imprisonment, the harassment suffered by the tyrannical Francesco, of the violence suffered, suggesting that Beatrice’s father had also sexually abused her. The inquisitors now have a confession, the best sort of evidence. The two women and the other accomplices are imprisoned in Castel Sant’Angelo.

As the investigation continued, it was revealed that three members of the family committed the murder. It turned out that the Count’s wife Lucrezia, his daughter Beatrice and his son Giacomo planned it. All eyes were on the family during the trial, especially the beautiful, innocent-looking Beatrice. From that moment on, Cenci’s story began to spread worldwide. British Poet Shelley wrote a play called The Cenci, and French novelist Stendhal wrote a play called Les Cenci. Who was this Beatrice Cenci?

Beatrice, noble daughter of Rome

Beatrice was born on February 6, 1577, in Rome in the Palazzo in front of Hotel Monte Cenci. Her family was one of the wealthiest Roman families of the period. Beatrice is a Roman noblewoman, the third of the twelve children of Francesco Cenci and Ersilia Santacroce. Her mother died when she was seven years old, and the girl was entrusted to the care of the Franciscan nuns of the Santa Croce monastery in Monterotondo. The young woman returned to her family at the age of 15. In the meantime, her father had remarried to a Roman widow, Lucrezia Pietroni, a marriage that would soon make the woman regret her unfortunate choice. As Beatrice grew up, her beauty, grace, and elegance contrasted with her family life’s rough character.

Cruel father

The murder victim, Count Cenci, was a figure well-known to the Romans. Stendhal described him as an evil Don Juan in his story Les Cenci. But Don Juon was a person who deceived women by talking loudly. However, Papal records described Francesco Cenci as wild, aggressive, and money-hungry. His father, Cristiforo, had amassed a great fortune by managing the papal treasury. Francesco was born as an illegitimate child, and by marrying his mother while his father was ill, he could leave his wealth and title to him.

Francesco wandered around Rome like a spoiled and rude heir, teasing his servants, beating everyone he met on the street, and attacking his tenants. He was frequently imprisoned and released with fines. He was convicted of molesting a child, but he escaped this punishment by giving one-third of his wealth.

Count Cenci was a violent and depraved individual who abused his first wife and sons multiple times. In his first marriage at fourteen, he fathered twelve children, of whom only seven reached adulthood. After the death of his first wife, Ersilia Santacroce, he remarried Lucrezia Petroni, a wealthy widow and mother of three children. Since he was a father who maltreated his children, the Pope issued an order to protect his children. One of his sons, Rocco, died in a street fight. Cristoforo was killed because he was involved in a love triangle. He had not paid his daughter Antonina’s dowry.

The count was jailed and often fined for sexual crimes committed against others, but due to his noble status, he was freed early. Several times, he was accused of abuse and sodomy, even against his servants, but these accusations, one after the other, had been silenced for non-existent evidence.

His assets had been severely affected by the payment of numerous sentences, so he began to have problems with the papal tax authorities. He found it convenient to get out of Rome, taking up residence in a crumbling castle in the small countryside town of Petrella Salto in the Abruzzi mountains east of the city. The building was part of the kingdom of Naples and, therefore, was outside the jurisdiction of the Vatican, an excellent place to take refuge in case of danger. Inside the castle, he imprisoned his daughter Beatrice and his wife Lucrezia. In contrast, his other daughter, Antonina, managed to escape from that violent father, thanks to the intercession of the Pope. The young woman had sent letters to the pontiff begging for suitable accommodation, either in a convent or through marriage. The pontiff will then arrange the marriage between the young woman and a nobleman, ordering Francesco Cenci to prepare a substantial dowry for her. Antonina’s marriage will deal a severe blow to the finances of the count, who is now left in dire straits, and a hypothetical second marriage that of the young Beatrice, who is also of marriageable age would have given Cenci the final blow. Thus, the ideal solution is to lock her up in the castle with her stepmother, Lucrezia, away from everything and everyone.

That forced imprisonment increased the resentment of the young Beatrice and her stepmother Lucrezia, who was also a victim of Cenci. The young Beatrice then tries several times to send requests for help to her family and older brothers. But the count intercepts one of the letters, who then savagely beat Beatrice for daring to challenge him.

In 1597, Francesco, ill with scabies and gout, retired to Petrella, taking his younger sons Bernardo and Paolo. Beatrice’s life became a nightmare. She was regularly beaten and sexually abused by her father. Lucrezia suffered the same fate. The two women, now tired, began to think about eliminating Francesco.

During the trial, all of the family’s secrets were revealed. Prospero Farinaccio, the defendants’ lawyer, brought many witnesses to the court, showing that Palazzo Cenci and Rocca Cenci were hell for the family.

The lawyer was implying that the Count raped his daughter Beatrice. According to the maid named Calidonia, one day, Beatrice ran away from her father’s room crying and saying, “I don’t want to be burned.” However, Beatrice refused to speak even under torture and only said that her stepmother, Lucrezia, had warned her, saying, “You will see, she will dishonour you too.”

The cruelty that Count Cenci inflicted on his household was diverse. For example, there was also a kind of scabies disease. Only Beatrice scratched it with a damp cloth because the other women hated it. The count was always walking around the house in a shirt, constantly whipping with the whip in his hand, humiliating and beating his wife and children. They were subjected to all kinds of psychological and physiological torture in the castle where the count imprisoned them…

Beatrice and Lucrezia have hatched a plot to kill Count Cenci, engaging the help of Beatrice’s elder brother Giacomo, Bernardo, the count’s son from his second marriage, and two servants, one of whom was secretly seduced by Beatrice. The idea was born to stun him with drugged wine, finish him off with a club and discard the body below to simulate an accident.

                                 Beatrice Cenci in prigione. Quadro di Achille Leonardi.

While Count Cenci was under the influence of a sleeping pill prepared by his second wife, Lucrezia, two men entered his room. But nothing went their way: the opium was not enough to put Francesco to sleep, and the murder lasted a considerable time; not only was he bludgeoned to death, but they stuck a nail in his eye to finish it off. While one of the men was holding him, the other hit him on the head with a hammer with a pointed iron. Then they dressed the body, threw it off the balcony, and fled the castle, leaving the bloody sheets behind. One was Olimpio Calvetti, the butler of La Rocca castle, and the other was the assassin guitar teacher Marzio Catalano.

Giacomo Cenci, BBeatrice’sbrother, was subjected to prolonged torture of the rope. He confesses, however, attributing all the blame to the deceased Olimpio. A few days later, the younger brother Bernardo confesses. Lucrezia attributed the blame to Beatrice and Olimpio.

One of the hitmen, Olimpio, was killed by a bounty hunter in the mountains. The other, Marzio Catalano, died during torture in the dungeon. But these two were just hitmen. And no one paid any attention to them during the trial.

The plot was discovered, and the four members of the Cenci family were arrested, found guilty, and sentenced to death. Knowing the reasons behind the murder, Romans protested against the decision. However, Pope Clement VIII showed no mercy and ordered the public executions to go ahead.

The 12-year-old Bernardo was spared but was forced to watch the execution of his relatives before returning to prison and being condemned to a life as a galley enslaved person. The Cenci properties were confiscated and ended up in the hands of the family.

Beatrice, a Roman maiden of noble birth of barely twenty years, the violence, even sexual suffering, and legal disputes; as time went on, she became a symbol of youthful rebellion against the oppressive methods of her parents, a symbol of enchanting beauty, of punished innocence, and of the oppressed woman trying at all costs to win her independence.

        Beatrice Cenci. Scultura di marmo di Harriet G. Hosmer. 1857                  

The chronicles then say that among the crowd who witnessed the execution, a young painter from Lombardy had arrived in the city a few years ago. His name was Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio. Whether the artist’s presence is an anecdote or not, that execution must have left a profound impression on Caravaggio, an impression later transferred onto an extraordinary canvas painted in that period, Judith beheading Holofernes, of violent and dramatic realism. Although it seems impossible that Guido Reni could have witnessed his execution, it is almost certain that another artist, the great Baroque painter Caravaggio, was also present. It was claimed that he had an excellent view of the beheading in the Tiber River and witnessed both his dignity in the face of death and the atrocity of the act. 

                                                 Caravaggio, Giuditta e Oloferne, 1599

                                                Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Roma

 

The Via Monserrato plaque in the Regola district commemorates Beatrice Cenci, the young Roman noblewoman.

The plaque is placed where the Corte Savella prison once stood, where Beatrice was locked up, and was placed by the Municipality of Rome in 1999.

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