Around 1637, the Baroque “superstar” artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini created his first, and only, non-commissioned sculpture: an intimate portrait of his lover, Costanza Piccolomini. Captured for eternity, the smooth contours of her face are chiselled with a tender sensitivity, there is a softness to Costanza’s flesh, a sensuality to her slightly parted lips, and her chemise falls invitingly undone. Yet, there appears to be a defiance too, as if Costanza is about to deliver a witty riposte or give Bernini a piece of her mind.
Hers is also a sculpture which changed the course of art history. Marble busts of living women were relatively rare in the early 17th century, and usually of noblewomen, following strict rules of modesty and decorum. By contrast, Costanza was relatively poor, the wife of one of Bernini’s assistants. Her portrait introduces an unprecedented level of raw expression, capturing Costanza’s vitality, and Bernini’s naked desire. As the historian Simon Schama once said, it is “the sexiest invitation in the history of European sculpture”.
At the time the portrait was sculpted, Costanza was around 23 and Bernini about 40, at the apex of his power, feted by princes and popes for his ability to conjure art full of theatre, emotional intensity, and dynamism. The couple’s affair was wild and intemperate. Years later, Bernini’s son described his father as having “lost his head to this woman”, when recounting the brutal dénouement of their relationship. For just months after lovingly carving Costanza’s face in marble, Bernini ordered it to be slashed with a knife by one of his servants.
I first heard Costanza’s story in a documentary about Rome. Two male presenters discussing Bernini’s undoubted genius made a passing remark about the disfigurement of his mistress, before returning to his virtuosity once more. She was not even named.
This anonymous woman haunted me. After researching and discovering Costanza’s story, I felt compelled to tell it. She was not just Bernini’s lover and muse, but a woman with agency, whose own narrative deserved to take precedence. I wanted to free Costanza from the male gaze which has clouded our view for the past 400 years.
Writing Costanza was also a way for me to examine the ways in which male coercion and violence are still used to control women today. Recent UK figures show that acid attacks and other offences involving corrosive substances rose by 75% in 2023, with girls and women increasingly targeted. It’s almost 14 years to the day since Time magazine featured Bibi Aisha, an 18-year-old Afghan woman whose nose and ears had been cut off by her husband as punishment for fleeing their abusive marriage. The world’s outrage was palpable, yet few realised this vicious act has deep, complex roots stretching back centuries, across cultures and continents.
In classical times, facial disfigurement was used as a political tool against opponents. Virgil writes of the adulterous Deiphobus losing his nose for forcing himself upon Helen of Troy. Byzantine Emperor Justinian II’s rule of terror came to an end when he was deposed and his nose cut off; a mutilated leader being unfit to rule.
In classical Greek art, the nose often represented character, reflecting a person’s moral and psychological makeup. Nasal mutilation was therefore not merely a physical injury, but a catastrophic blow to one’s identity. The repercussions were severe enough to drive early civilizations to seek ways to mask or repair such disfigurements through prosthetics or rudimentary reconstructive surgery.
By far the most common use of facial disfigurement, however, has been to punish women deemed to have transgressed societal sexual norms. In the Old Testament, God tells Egyptian sex worker Oholibah that her lovers will “cut off your nose and your ears”. While nose cutting was codified into English law in the 11th century during the reign of Cnut, recent archaeological evidence suggests facial mutilation had been used as a punishment far earlier.
A recent re-examination of a skull found in Oakridge, Hampshire, in the 1960s revealed that the victim – a girl aged between 15 and 18, who lived between AD 776 and 899 – had her nose and mouth cut off. She had possibly been scalped too. The nature and placement of the wounds – deliberate and highly formalised – suggest they were inflicted by a sharp, thin-bladed knife, possibly punishment for actions perceived as deviant, such as sexual misconduct.
A lack of similar documented cases makes it difficult to determine how widespread this practice was, but we know in 14th century Germany nose cutting was most commonly used in cases of adultery, and in Augsburg it was used as a threat against prostitutes for appearing in public at certain times.
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By Costanza’s time in the 1600s, the act of face slashing as a punishment for erring wives was widespread in Italy. Referred to as sfregio – meaning the act of cutting and the resulting scar – such punishment had particular resonance. In the Renaissance and Baroque periods, a woman’s beauty was revered as an indication of her honour and virtue. Beauty was also feared, often cited as the cause of inappropriate male behaviour.
While researching Costanza’s story, I read Jane Monckton Smith’s book In Control, which presents a groundbreaking thesis on intimate partner violence and control. Monckton Smith challenges the traditional perceptions of such violence as unpredictable and impulsive; the so-called “crime of passion”. Instead, she argues this behaviour often follows a predictable pattern, which, when understood, can spur intervention and prevention. In Control identifies an eight-stage progression, from a pre-relationship history of control, through early relationship dynamics, triggering events, escalation of control tactics, a crisis point, finally leading to violence.
Which brings us back to Costanza. Over the last 400 years, Bernini’s behaviour has often been explained or excused as succumbing to a “moment of madness”. My belief is that it was more invidious and inevitable than this. Chillingly, when writing Costanza, I saw that Costanza and Bernini’s relationship tracks so strongly against the eight-stage homicide timeline that I could use the trigger points partly to plot the novel.
I hope that in writing Costanza I have given voice to a complex unravelling of events, one which might just help us to understand, then guard against, a new generation of men controlling female bodies in these ways.
Costanza by Rachel Blackmore, published by Renegade Books, is out on 1 August
