The Marble Faun: Or, The Romance of Monte Beni (1860) , (Volume I and II), was the last of the four major romances by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Marble Faun is Hawthorne's most unusual romance.
Murder and romance, innocence and experience dominate this sinister novel set in mid-19th-century Rome. Three young American artists and their friend, an Italian count, find their lives irrevocably linked when one of them commits a violent crime of passion. Hawthorne's final novel is "must read" for its symbolic narrative of the Fall of Man.
The four main characters are Miriam, a beautiful painter who is compared to Eve, Beatrice Cenci, Lady Macbeth, Judith, and Cleopatra, and is being pursued by a mysterious, threatening model; Hilda, an innocent copyist who is compared to the Virgin Mary; Kenyon, a sculptor, who represents rationalist humanism; and Donatello, the Count of Monti Beni, who is compared to Adam, resembles the Faun of Praxiteles, and is probably only half human
