Tarlton Law Library
Jamail Center for Legal Research

     We are taught that the history of Rome, like the social history of mankind, began with a fratricide. The people of Rome share with us all the inborn feeling that the destruction of one's own flesh and blood is the worst of crimes. It is in part the dread and fascination inspired by family murder that have won a curious immortality for the trial of Beatrice Cenci and her brothers in Rome in 1599 for the murder of their father, Francesco. The trial was a convulsive event and left behind it substantial contemporary commentaries in addition to the official trial records. The interest of the public was understandable. The case was not only a patricide but also an archetypal drama involving generational struggle, a social setting of wealth and nobility, the competing claims of religious authority and individual will, and an aura of violence and of sexual and moral corruption. Beginning with Shelley's great poetry-drama of 1819, a large number of literary and operatic settings have been made of the Cenci tragedy. A recent version is the opera by Alberto Ginastera, Beatrix Cenci, which had its American premieres at The Kennedy Center For the Performing Arts in September 1971 and at the New York City Opera in March 1973.
     The story of the Cencis turns on the tragic confrontation of the dissolute nobleman, Count Francesco Cenci, and his children. Francesco was bequeathed an ancient Roman lineage and a great fortune by his father, Cristoforo. Francesco's inheritance of the family name was one of those last-minute affairs, since Cristoforo married Francesco's mother only on his deathbed and had legitimated his twelve-year-old son shortly before. Francesco's succession to his father's fortune was even more tenuous, since Cristoforo, as an official of the papal treasury, had made himself rich through embezzlement of Church funds and passed on to his son, together with his wealth, the determination of the Church government to reclaim its rightful portion.
     Francesco's youth was stormy and was marked not only by amorous adventure with the women of Rome but also by signs of perversion and a strain of violence that found frequent release in street brawling and attacks on servants and tenants. He was often imprisoned, but fines and money damages won him freedom. Most of his sons grew up in his own image of violence, but he liked them no better for the resemblance. Ironically bearing a surname meaning "rags," Cenci kept his sons in a state of destitution until three of them obtained a papal decree ordering him to provide them with maintenance. Francesco was also caught in a maze of lawsuits with his creditors, who challenged the restrictions he had

placed on family properties, and with the Church, to which he twice made reparation for his father's thievery. He was always in litigation with members of his own family, his most sensational controversy being his unsuccessful (but prescient) claim that his son Giacomo was attempting to poison him.
     Two of his sons died violently, Rocco being killed in the aftermath of a street fight and Cristoforo being murdered in Trastevere in a love triangle that would have delighted the heart of Mascagni. Tradition has Francesco rejoicing in his sons' deaths, but his joys were numbered. Creditors were closing in on the stingy count and a dowry was required for the marriage of his daughter Antonina. Worst of all, he was convicted in 1594 of sodomy, and saved himself from the stake only by a payment of one-third of his estate to the Roman government.
     In 1597, Francesco, with his daughter Beatrice and his second wife, Lucrezia, moved from Rome to the Castle of Petrella, perched high on a crag in the Abbruzzi. The castle was situated in the Kingdom of Naples just beyond the borders of the Papal States; rumor was divided as to whether his purpose in moving was to devise new crimes beyond the reach of vigilant Roman authorities, or, more prosaically, to escape his creditors. In any event, he seemed intent on keeping Beatrice under his control in the castle indefinitely so as to prevent her marriage and the burden of another dowry. What began as residence passed into imprisonment, with Beatrice and her stepmother being confined in a room whose windows were walled up and replaced by air vents. He beat Lucrezia with a riding-spur when she upbraided him for an attempted sexual assault on her young son, and struck Beatrice with a bullwhip after he discovered a letter she had written to her brother Giacomo seeking his help in obtaining her release.
     From the violence and degradation to which he subjected his daughter and wife in the castle and from the largely financial grievances of his son Giacomo, a murder-conspiracy gradually took form. Beatrice's lawyer, the eminent Prospero Farinaccio, was later to argue unsuccessfully, on the basis of inconclusive and conflicting testimony of two maids, that the principal murder motive was an incestuous attack by Francesco upon Beatrice. The tradition and literature of the case seized on the incest claim as central to the tragedy. But nobody can read of the wretched treatment of the two women at La Petrella without finding Francesco's cruelty to be unnatural even in the absence of incest.
     The murder conspiracy may be described as a tragedy of errors. Beatrice appears to have been the main force behind the crime, but the murderer was Olimpio Calvetti, castellan of La Petrella, with whom Beatrice had been having a love affair. Giacomo gave his consent to the murder from Rome but lent little assistance, except a supply of poison 

that could not be administered to Francesco because of his suspicious nature. Lucrezia wavered, but when the murder hour arrived, it was she who unlocked the door to her husband's bedroom. Assisted by Marzio Catalano, a tinker and sometime guitar teacher, Olimpio killed Francesco with a hammer. The count's body was thrown from the castle after the murderers clumsily enlarged a hole in a balcony in order to make it appear that the floor had given way. Suspicions of murder were immediately aroused, and they were increased by the over-hasty burial of the count and the inept attempts of the conspirators to cover up evidence of the murder. On the orders of the Cenci family and their ally, Monsignore Mario Guerra (whom tradition later incorrectly identified as a suitor of Beatrice), Olimpio was assassinated to eliminate his testimony. However, Olimpio's accomplice Marzio, who had been wandering through neighboring villages giving guitar lessons with Count Cenci's cloak on his back as payment and proof of his crime, was captured and confessed his part in the murder. After initial arrogant denials leading to continued questioning and to torture, Giacomo, Lucrezia and Beatrice ultimately confessed. Giacomo and Lucrezia put the principal blame on Beatrice, and Beatrice accused her dead lover, Olimpio.
     Beatrice, Lucrezia, Giacomo, and a teen-aged brother, Bernardo (who at the most may have concurred passively in Giacomo's consent to the murder), were sentenced to death. The brief of their principal defense counsel, Farinaccio, survives. He argued that Beatrice's part in the murder was justified by her father's incestuous assault and by her fear of its repetition. (In a note that he appended to a final edition of his brief prepared years later, Farinaccio conceded that the claim of the act of incest had not been proved.) The lawyer contended that Lucrezia had withdrawn from the conspiracy, and Giacomo, he urged, should not be punished more severely than his sister for coming to her defense. Finally, he argued that Bernardo was entitled to clemency because of his minority and dim-wittedness. Bernardo was only seventeen at the time of the murder, but his mental incapacity was demonstrated by no better evidence that that he had difficulty with his Latin lessons.
     All the defendants were condemned to death. It is conjectured that Pope Clement VIII might have been inclined to mercy had not another murder of a noble parent, Costanza Santacroce, entirely without extenuating circumstances, occurred in Rome while he was considering the Cenci case. In any event, the Pope granted a reprieve only to young Bernardo, who was, however, condemned to witness the executions and thereafter to serve in prison galleys.
     The executions were cruel. Giacomo was clubbed to death and the two women were beheaded. Beatrice was only twenty-two when she died, but looked younger and is remembered as a beauty. Even at the 

execution, her unusual hold on the public sympathy and imagination was apparent. Young girls placed garlands on her head while it lay at the foot of the scaffold, and large mourning crowds followed as her body was taken to its resting place in the Church of San Pietro in Montorio. The legend of Beatrice had already begun.
     In the seventeenth century fanciful accounts of the case were published that purported to have been authored immediately after the executions but may have been written decades later. One such version inspired Shelley to write his drama, The Cenci, in 1819. A manuscript purporting to have been copied from the archive of the Cenci Palace was given to the poet during his travels in Italy. In a preface to his play, he recalled that when he arrived in Rome, he "found that the story of the Cenci was a subject not to be mentioned in Italian society without awakening a deep and breathless interest." Shelley was strongly drawn to the figure of Beatrice, "a most gentle and amiable being, a creature found to adorn and be admired, and thus violently thwarted from her nature by the necessity of circumstance and opinion." At the same time, his anticlerical emotions were aroused by what he saw as evidence of corruption at work in the Pope's judgment. "The old man [the count] had during his life repeatedly bought his pardon from the Pope for capital crimes of the most enormous and unspeakable kind" and the Pope as a consequence "probably felt that whoever killed the Count Cenci deprived his treasury of a certain and copious source of revenue." Shelley even asserted that the Papal government had attempted to suppress the facts relating to its handling of the Cenci case and that the circulation of the manuscript he had received had been "until very lately, a matter of some difficulty."
     Shelley intended his play for public performance and even dreamt of Edmund Kean in the role of the Count Francesco. But he recognized that "the story of the Cenci is indeed eminently fearful and monstrous: anything like a dry exhibition of it on the stage would be insupportable." It was necessary, therefore, to "increase the ideal, and diminish the actual horror of the events." As one concession to public taste, Shelley muted the incest theme; Mary Shelley thought the strongest allusion was a curse of Cenci that if Beatrice have a child, it may be

A hideous likeness of herself, that as
From a distorting mirror, she may see
Her image mixed with what she most abhors,
Smiling upon her from her nursing breast.
                      (act 4, scene 1, lines 146-49)

the knowledge of itself." The drama was not, in his view, the place for the enforcement of dogmas. Therefore, though Beatrice might have done better in life to win Count Francesco from his evil ways by peace and love, a theatre audience would yawn at his conversion; the real themes of the case -- revenge, retaliation, and atonement -- were also the fabric of effective drama.
     Holding these opinions on the function of drama, Shelley set out to focus his play on the clash of passionate human beings. Although his treatment of the case is consequently less ideological than some of the modern settings, images repeatedly used by the poet highlight themes of the inadequacy of human justice and the struggle of youth with old age and authority. These two themes are combined in Cardinal Camillo's quotation of the Pope's explanation of unwillingness to punish Francesco for an impious celebration of the death of two sons:

In the great war between the old and young
I, who have white hairs and a tottering body,
Will keep at least blameless neutrality.
(act 2, scene 2, lines 38-40)

his failure to obtain an acquittal: it was not that Beatrice had plotted revenge in cold blood, but that the incest charge had not been established. Wholly apart from this link in legal history, Browning acknowledged that The Ring and the Book owed an enormous literary debt to Shelley's The Cenci. In 1876, as a graceful token of gratitude, he addressed to Shelley's memory a short narrative poem, "Cenciaja," recounting the murder trial of Paolo Santacroce, the case that had influenced the refusal of Pope Clement VIII to grant clemency to Beatrice. According to Browning, the wrong Santacroce brother was executed for the crime.
     The Cenci case also fascinated French writers. Stendhal was a avid collector of manuscripts of old Italian crimes. In 1837 he published a close rendering of a variant of the account of the Cenci case that provided the basis for the Shelley play. His most important literary contribution was a preface in which he presented Francesco as a corrupt mutation of what he called the Don Giovanni model. In Stendhal's concept the Don Giovanni type begins by expressing opposition to what he regards as the irrational conventions of a hypocritical society. In his decadent stage, illustrated by Francesco, Don Giovanni derives his pleasure from criminal excesses banned by reasonable social restrictions.
     Two years after the Stendhal work, Alexandre Dumas the Elder contributed to a series of Celebrated Crimes an account of the Cenci case that draws on a source similar to Stendhal's and in some respects appears to plagiarize Stendhal's preface. However, Dumas shows none of Stendhal's reticence in dealing with the more lurid aspects of the case. Dumas' detailed account of the torture methods used even drew a complaint from Thackeray, who was himself a writer much concerned with crime and punishment.
     In Italy the Cenci theme was seized upon by nineteenth-century men of letters who were associated with patriotic activity and anticlericalism. The dramatist Giovanni Battista Niccolini, an ardent republican and opponent of Church authority, made an unsuccessful adaptation of the Shelley play in 1838. Much more popular was the 1851 novel, Beatrice Cenci, by Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi, a patriot of the Risorgimento and an enemy of the Papal Government of Rome. Guerrazzi's account distorts the facts of the case beyond recognition. In his novel Beatrice is free of any guilt. Her father is murdered by her suitor Guerra, who surprises the count in the act of assaulting her. Beatrice is idealized in the extreme; she is a militant saint who, while defending her brothers and her honor, continually exhorts her father to repentance. Guerrazzi presents Francesco as a conscious believer in a doctrine of evil, who holds that man is free to commit any outrages until checked by divine intervention.

     Beginning with the latter half of the nineteenth century, research in official archives has stripped away many of the Cenci legends and has given us a more humanized portrait of Beatrice. In 1877 Antonio Bertolotti published for the first time the text of a second codicil to Beatrice's will in which she made provision for a little boy, whom Bertolotti assumed to be a child born of her liaison with the murderer Olimpio. Bertolotti also believed that the alleged incest, to which Beatrice had never testified, was an invention of Farinaccio, whom Bertolotti denigrated as a man whose own loose morals had inspired the defense. Although Corrado Ricci, in his definitive study of the case in 1923, concurs in Bertolotti's conclusions with respect to the birth of Beatrice's child and the insubstantiality of the incest claim, he rejects Bertolotti's ridiculous attempt to rehabilitate Francesco as a man of religious conviction and leaves us a well-balanced view of Beatrice as a victim not free of fault but entitled to clemency, if not acquittal. Unfortunately, we must also credit to Ricci the definitive disproof of the charming tradition that Guido Reni's portrait of a sweet turbaned girl which until recent times hung in the Barberini Gallery is a death-cell painting of Beatrice. (This painting has been worshipped as an icon of Beatrice by throngs of literary tourists, including Shelley and Hawthorne, who devotes to the Reni work an entire chapter of The Marble Faun.) Ricci's version of the historical facts of the case provides the basis for many of the modern literary reconstructions that have followed, including the colorful novel of Frederic Prokosch, A Tale for Midnight (1955).
     In the modern era, Antonin Artaud and Alberto Moravia have written dramas on the Cenci case that in quite different ways remove the conflict between Francesco and Beatrice from the plane of morality. Artaud's The Cenci (1935) was written and performed, with the author in the role of Francesco, as an approach towards realization of Artaud's concept of the Theatre of Cruelty. In Artaud's drama, sound, light, and gesture supplement the word in rousing the audience's responses. Artaud follows the narrative plan of Shelley's play, but there the similarity of the two works ends. Elements of myth, storm, and dream propel Artaud's drama, and the characters are forces of nature more than rational beings. Francesco is presented as personifying the myth of the "father destroyer." Beatrice is not the embodiment of purity, but a force that is compelled to react to her father's violence. As her death approaches, Beatrice's principal fear is that she has come to resemble her father.
     In Moravia's Beatrice Cenci (published in Italy in 1958), the ultimate kinship of the personalities of Francesco and Beatrice is also suggested. As in much of Moravia's work, all the characters are locked in their own 

worlds of isolation and egoism. Olimpio kills to maintain power over Beatrice, and Marzio kills for money. Francesco's crimes are explained by his weak sense of his own reality except when stimulated by excess. Beatrice explains her revenge not by an incestuous attack but by a childhood "loss of innocence" caused by witnessing an amorous passage of her father. However, Francesco charges that the root of her antagonism and of her failure to leave the castle of La Petrella is a trait she has inherited from him, an "incapacity for living."
     The Cenci tragedy, with its mingling of pity and terror, seems as well suited to the opera stage as to the criminal courts. The history of its operatic treatments confirms the strong international appeal of the case and of its heroine. Appropriately, it was an Italian composer, Giuseppe Rota (1836-1903), who made the earliest operatic setting of which record survives. Rota's three-act tragedy, Beatrice Cenci, was first performed in 1863 in Rome. Subsequent operatic settings of the Cenci case have been composed and performed far from the home of the historical case. In 1927, Beatrice Cenci, an opera of the Polish composer Ludomir Rozycki had its premiere in Warsaw. This opera proved to be one of Rozycki's most popular works, and was revived in Poznan in 1936. The libretto, written by the composer and his wife, was based on a drama by Julius Slowacki, one of the most important Polish Romantics. Slowacki began his play in French in 1832 while he was in Paris and completed it in Polish in 1839 after his return to Paris. Considered as diverging from the Shelley treatment and antedating Stendhal in its original conception, Slowacki's work has been described as "pathetic, violent, full of a romantic splendor of style."
     A third version of the opera, Beatrice Cenci, by Berthold Goldschmidt, a German-born composer and conductor residing in England, was awarded a Festival of Britain prize in 1951. In 1953 the BBC broad-cast excerpts from the opera conducted by the composer with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. The libretto for the opera, which followed the Shelley text verbatim to the extent possible, was prepared by the composer in collaboration with drama critic Martin Esslin. Certain poems of Shelley, such as "Unfathomable Sea," were also included in the libretto.
     Albert Ginastera's Beatrix Cenci reflects, as did its predecessor, Bomarzo, the composer's predilection for the violent history of the Italian Renaissance. The libretto, which was written in Spanish by William Shand, an Englishman residing in Argentina, and the poet Alberto Girri, is based on the Shelley play. As in Shelley's drama, the Ginastera work preserves the incestuous rape as the crucial act of violence begetting the tragedy. However, both the libretto and the concept of the production appear to bring the Ginastera opera closer to the spirit 

of Artaud than to the nineteenth-century precursors. Projections of slides and movies, dream sequences, and dramatic lighting effects are used and, fulfilling Artaud's requirement that each character have his own "particular cry," the climactic end of the first act is dominated by the barking of the count's mastiffs and Beatrice's prolonged scream of anguish.
     The Ginastera opera, like the Artaud and Moravia plays, is informed by the vision that this old Renaissance tragedy can speak to us still of the violence of our own era, a violence that can overcome the comfort of the family and the promise of youth. Thus the chorus in the opening scene calls Count Cenci "a forerunner of our own times." This understanding of the continuing relevance of the case must also be conceded to the earlier masters of the Cenci story. In fact, one of the Cencis' judges in act 5, scene 1 of Shelley's tragedy makes a comment on the murder evidence that may serve to explain why the awful facts of the case have universal meaning. The judge says of the testimony: "This sounds as bad as truth."

     A detailed historical account of the Cenci case is provided by Corrado Ricci, Beatrice Cenci (New York: Liveright, 1933)(Morris Bishop & Henry Longan Stuart trans.). See also, Antonio Bertolotti, Francesco Cenci e la sua Famiglia (Florence: Gazzetta d'Italia, 1877). The principal literary versions of the Cenci case discussed in the essay are: Antonin Artaud, The Cenci: A Play (New York: Grove Press, 1970)(Simon Watson Taylor trans.); Robert Browning, "Cenciaja," in The Poems and Plays of Robert Browning 1008-12 (New York: Modern Library, 1934); Alexandre Dumas, "The Cenci," in Celebrated Crimes 3-47 (Philadelphia: G. Barrie & Sons, 1895)(vol. 5)(I.G. Burnham trans.); Francesco Guerrazzi, Beatrice Cenci ([New York]: The National Alumni, 1907)(Luigi Monti trans.); Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun (Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Co., 1891)(vol. 1, ch. 7); Walter Savage Landor, "Five Scenes," in Stephen Wheeler (ed.), The Poetical Works of Walter Savage Landor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937)(vol. 2, at 6-29); Alberto Moravia, Beatrice Cenci (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966) (Angus Davidson trans.); Frederic Prokosch, A Tale for Midnight (New York: Little, Brown, 1956); William Shand & Alberto Girri, Beatrix Cenci (New York: Boosey and Hawkes, 1971)(libretto for opera in two acts and fourteen scenes by Alberto Ginastera); Percy Bysshe Shelley, "The Cenci," in John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley: Complete Poetical Works 298-366 (New York: Modern Library, 1932); Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle), The Cenci, in The Shorter Novels of Stendhal 165-203 (New York: Liveright Publishing Corp., 1946)(C.K. Scott-Moncrieff trans.); William Makepeace Thackeray, "Celebrated Crimes," in Robert S. Garnett (ed.), The New Sketch Book: Being Essays Now First Collected from "The Foreign Quarterly Review," 86-87 (London: Alston Rivers, 1906).
     For the description of the style of Slowacki's Beatrix Cenci, see Stefan Treugott, Julius Slowacki, Romantic Poet 88 (Warsaw, 1959).

* This article was previously published in Opera News, March 17, 1973, pp. 10-13 and in A Gallery of Sinister Perspectives 11-20.