“One of the Most Celebrated Pictures in Rome”: Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Tourists and the Portrait of Beatrice Cenci
Lancaster, Amelia Katherine
Lancaster, Amelia Katherine
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Abstract
A portrait long-attributed to Guido Reni and presumed to depict Beatrice Cenci soon before her execution on September 11, 1599, became a sensation among nineteenth-century tourists in Rome, especially those from Anglo-American countries. The painting inspired works by some of the most well-known writers of the time, and the image of Beatrice appears on dozens of prints and souvenir objects in museum collections today. Although the nineteenthcentury obsession with this artwork is fundamentally a touristic phenomenon, modern scholarship has not treated it as such. If approached as a tourist attraction, what can the portrait’s place in nineteenth-century Rome’s touristic code reveal about foreign visitors’ encounter with the idea and the reality of the city? This thesis considers tourist responses to the alleged portrait of Beatrice Cenci from a postcolonial perspective and applies the semiotic theories of modern tourism developed by Dean MacCannell, Jonathan Culler, John Frow, and John Urry to investigate how Anglo-American tourists engaged with the object and the image. The analysis focuses on how tourists engaged with print copies, the portrait in the context of the gallery, and the thriving souvenir market. Material from guidebooks, travelogues, letters, diaries, and magazine articles written by and for the Anglo-American tourist audience suggest that this group treated the portrait of Beatrice Cenci as one of the major signs for the Other that was Rome, while they simultaneously interpreted her image as a partial reflection of the Anglo-American Self by contrasting it with types for the authentic cultural Other represented by two portraits in the same gallery: La Fornarina by Raphael and a portrait by Scipione Pulzone believed to depict Beatrice Cenci’s stepmother.
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Master of Arts in Art History -- John Cabot University, Spring 2025.
Date
2025
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Keywords
Beatrice Cenci, 1577-1599, Pictures
Citation
Lancaster, Amelia Katherine. "“One of the Most Celebrated Pictures in Rome”: Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Tourists and the Portrait of Beatrice Cenci". Master's Thesis, John Cabot University, Rome, Italy. 2025.