Italian film diva Pina Menichelli was recognized as the female incarnation of the Art Nouveau style. She was “the most devilish and modern of all the divas,” Eva Vittadello wrote. “Her beauty was of an aggressive, perverse, disturbing type . . . (a) cruel, distorted expression that conveys, at one and the same time, unimaginable pleasures and atrocious sufferings.” Tigre Reale was a florid showcase for her in the story of a Russian countess who is involved in an affair with an Italian diplomat. The jealous husband who sent her previous lover, a revolutionary, to Siberia will attempt to deaden this affair as well, in an all-consuming fire. Angela Dalle Vacche saw the “alter-ego of a purifying fire (as) ground zero for women's emancipation to begin.”