of Incest and Female Relations in Harriet Hosmer's Beatrice Cenci

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Appropriate and popular sculptural subjects would have been
a captive Indian woman (in the vein of Erastus Dow Palmer,
The White Captive, 1858-59, Fig. 5), the ignoble and "savage"
native (Horatio Greenough, Rescue, 1837-53, Fig. 6), the
disappearing Native American race (Thomas Crawford, The
Indian: Dying Chief, 1856, Fig. 7), or a historical Indian figure
(Joseph Mozier, Pocahontas, 1877, Fig. 8). Hosmer, who had
previously treated heroic women in a mythological and clas-
sical context, would have had to depart from the content of
her oeuvre to produce such an Indian figure or white captive.
Instead, she selected a subject from Italian history that
would help to bring high culture to St. Louis, a city she
claimed to love because "it was there I first began my studies"
and because of the "many generous and indulgent friends
who . . . ministered to the growth of the Arts and Sciences." 21
Cenci's whiteness, manifest in the statue's white marble,
which nevertheless has some dark veins, is consistent with the
library's raison d'etre—westward expansion—for its color sig-
nifies Euro-American settlers in opposition to dark-skinned
Native Americans. Although the racial Other is absent, the
statue's very whiteness signifies this other absent presence. It
is thus ironic that her patron both supported and was a part
of the white patriarchy that Hosmer critiques through her
statue.
It may be that obtaining the commission for this statue
through her "second father," Wayman Crow, made her un-
easy, either because of Crow's reach into her life or her
natural father's abandonment of her. The choice of a subject
connected with incest and patricide, for a sculpture made
possible by a father figure, may be significant. Could this
statue be also an allegory about good fathers and bad fathers?
And one of possibly larger civic implications (that is, Crow as
a benign and responsible civic figure, a good father to his
surrogate daughter as well as to the city of St. Louis, versus
the evil father Cenci, a rogue and a tyrant, and the ultimate
bad father)?
Hosmer was a shrewd businesswoman who realized that her
subject would appeal to Americans who had been on the
grand tour, as well as to the literary and artistic expatriate
crowd in Rome and those who would see the statue at the
Royal Academy in London. These viewers most certainly
would have been familiar with the sixteenth-century Italian