The Portrait Of Beatrice Di Cenci, In The Palazzo Berberini, Is A
Picture Almost Impossible To Be Forgotten.
Through the
transcendent sweetness and beauty of the face, there is a something
shining out, that haunts me.
I see it now, as I see this paper, or
my pen. The head is loosely draped in white; the light hair
falling down below the linen folds. She has turned suddenly
towards you; and 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. Some stories say
that Guido painted it, the night before her execution; some other
stories, that he painted it from memory, after having seen her, on
her way to the scaffold. I am willing to believe that, as you see
her on his canvas, so she turned towards him, in the crowd, from
the first sight of the axe, and stamped upon his mind a look which
he has stamped on mine as though I had stood beside him in the
concourse. The guilty palace of the Cenci: blighting a whole
quarter of the town, as it stands withering away by grains: had
that face, to my fancy, in its dismal porch, and at its black,
blind windows, and flitting up and down its dreary stairs, and
growing out of the darkness of the ghostly galleries.
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