Beatrice's Spell: the enduring legend of Beatrice Cenci
Belinda Jack Chatto & Windus, 196pp, £19.99
ISBN 0701171308
She is turning back to look over her shoulder out of the darkness. She wears a white turban, her chestnut curls escaping; she has a high forehead, dark sad eyes and slightly parted cherry-red lips - Vermeer's earring girl 65 years before her time. But if every picture tells a story, then the painting reproduced on the front of Belinda Jack's book tells an unusually gruesome one. It is allegedly a portrait of Beatrice Cenci, the beautiful 16-year-old daughter of a Roman nobleman who, having suffered sexual and physical abuse at the hands of her father, organised his murder, for which crime she was arrested, tortured and finally beheaded in public along with her stepmother in 1599. Her elder brother had his flesh torn to pieces with red-hot tongs and was then beaten to death, as her younger brother was forced to watch. It is one of those stories that both repels and fascinates; there is something almost pornographic in its sadism and unrelieved suffering.
Beatrice's Spell is about the artistic legacy of Cenci, and how a host of artists, not surprisingly many of them Romantics, have explored and refashioned her story in their own image. Each chapter describes a different incarnation: Shelley, Melville, Hawthorne, right up to the actor and playwright Antonin Artaud, with a number of lesser disciples in between. Shelley, the quintessence of Romanticism, works well here: his fascination with violence, incest and madness combined with the more unconscious desire for patricide to produce his play The Cenci.
Others are less convincing. We have to learn so much about Melville and Hawthorne before we get to their Cenci moments that the substance of the legend gets lost in what feels like unnecessary biography. By the time you reach the work of the 19th-century American sculptress Harriet Hosmer, the real Beatrice has become a feeble sigh of neoclassicism, any hint of reality lost in marble flesh under diaphanous robes. If I hadn't been reviewing the book I probably would have stopped reading it at this point. Which would have been a shame, because the last chapter on Artaud and the Theatre of Cruelty is much more interesting and makes the most forceful case for Jack's underlying thesis: that the art these figures created out of the Cenci legend failed, and led many of them into decline. In other words, she argues, artistically they suffer the same fate as Beatrice: they are not listened to.
It's a lovely piece of sophistry. Unfortunately, there is a crueller, more simple theory lurking beneath: the art failed because the works they produced out of Beatrice were largely melodramatic. While Jack argues that only cynics could explain the enduring fascination of the story as sensationalism, this is precisely the trap into which many of them fell. Although they may well have read elements of their artistic selves into her rebellion and martyrdom, it was the queasy psychosexual drama of the story, its incest and its cruelty, that most interested them. The reality of Beatrice herself - who lived in an age when women were considered vessels of weakness and lust, biologically and theologically inferior, and when the act of patricide was a crime as much against the state as against any man - gets lost somewhere.
But the manipulation of the narrative is nothing compared to the self-delusion that goes on when they look at her image. That girl without a pearl earring was read by generations of men, for the most part (Browning, Shelley, Stendhal, Dumas), as the embodiment of the story of Beatrice. To quote Dickens at his sentimental best:
Through the transcendent sweetness and beauty of her face, there is a something shining out, that haunts me . . . there is an expression in the eyes - although they are very tender and gentle - as if the wildness of a momentary terror, or distraction, had been struggled with and overcome, that instant; and nothing but a celestial hope, and a beautiful sorrow, and a desolate earthly helplessness remained.
The final trick of history is that the painting is not of Beatrice at all. Stripped of centuries of artistic longing, it is now known as a copy of a Guido Reni portrait of a prophetess. So many chose it to be Beatrice because it showed them what they wanted to see: a woman ennobled by her suffering. The one emotion that the viewer could not possibly find in this painting is rage. One can't help thinking that while Beatrice may have had a slew of male artistic protectors over the centuries, most of them were more afraid of female anger than of female suffering. No wonder it took so long for women like Beatrice to get a fair trial.
Sarah Dunant's latest novel, The Birth of Venus, is published in paperback by Virago this month
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