Archive for the ‘citric gallery’ tag
Closer (2006). On Dani Marti
Dani Marti, Monika, 2008
Closer
by Domenico Quaranta
Published in Dani Marti: Dark Bones, exhibition catalogue, Brescia (Italy), Citric Gallery, 7 October – 11 November 2006
Among the many stories of violence and horror that characterise the late European Renaissance, that of Beatrice Cenci is possibly one of the most tragic and obscure. Even though historically proven to be true, the story is imbued with symbolic meaning that few narrations can express. This story has also been of great inspiration to the fantasy of many romantic writers, from Stendhal to Percy Bysshe Shelley. Beatrice Cenci is the ultimate symbol of female sensibility that rebels against patriarchal authority, at first against her father, who rapes her, and afterwards against the Pope, who has her decapitated.
Beatrice was the daughter of Francesco Cenci, a violent and perverted nobleman, recognized as such by the authorities and his family who try to isolate him without any success. She thus organizes his murder together with her mother and brothers. This brief liberation is really only the beginning of a higher level of violence she has to go through and which she would not survive. Though knowing the true nature of the father, the Papacy could not endorse a patricide: the social consequences of such a defeat to authorities would be devastating.
Even due to this, the torture and torment for patricides take the most spectacular shape that the seventeen centuries of Christian civilisation had ever witnessed and was able to devise. Beatrice was subject to rope pulling, hanging by her hair, and finally decapitation, together with her mother, in front of Castel Sant’Angelo; while her brother Giacomo is tortured with hot iron tongs before being crushed under the blow of a club. Bernardo, her twelve-year-old brother is spared his life, but only after being incarcerated for life and forced to follow every stage of the torment of his family. All the Cenci family possessions were confiscated by the Papacy.
