Review. Death, Torture and the Broken Body (TMR16.09)

Pictures of martyrs painted for the condemned to death in Bologna around 1350, 2022

The topic I will present for the 25th anniversary Studium Conference aims at reflecting on a special type of paintings which were used during the public staging of capital punishment in the late medieval and early modern world. Beyond the usual canons of Art History, I wish to understand how people perceived these objects, interpreted what they see and more importantly, how Art and Law were combined in a particularly compelling way. In those days, judicial practices were highly ritualized acts. From taking animals to court to brutal shaming practices, judicial officers would also perform trials by ordeal. These types of paintings are usually not well-known. The problems these artifacts pose are rarely addressed by Art Historians, because they mainly keep to the description of styles and schools and they rarely question visual dispositives through the approach of affective justice. In my examination of these panels, I wish to arouse a cross-disciplinary conversation on what might comprise an adequate understanding of these tools for “dying well”. These highly ritualistic practices (showing small images in the face of the condemned) would rely on the assumption that the poor foes would accept them because the terror of the spectacle they participated to also held out a promise: do not resist, repent your sins and you will be redeemed in heaven. The underlying assumption of my talk might be something like this: our sense of punishment, both individually and collectively, is made and remade through the visual, and therefore these ritualistic uses of images might appear as participatory (if we accept that through images of martyrdom, criminals could genuinely hope for their redemption), but they were also technologies of control: staged spectacles of justice being seen to be done, in a spectacularly brutal way.

Religion and the Arts, 2022

Open Arts Journal, 2018

Jusepe de Ribera painted the martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew more than any artist of the seventeenth century -more than a dozen works are documented, with six paintings still in existence. While these works have habitually been interpreted as images of extreme violence due to the gruesomeness of the subject, I argue here that they confront viewers with visual paradoxes by refusing to align or to make coherent the relationship between their subject and their technique. I argue that Ribera's Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew (1634, National Gallery of Art, Washington) and Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew (1644, Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, Barcelona) work the potentiality of canvas and oils as flesh or skin in divergent ways, thereby dislodging the possibility of interpreting narrative, temporality and violence in simple alignment or identity. In so doing, Ribera's paintings of flaying produce new relations between figures and surfaces that are capable of effecting new forms of violence.

Cultural History, vol. 8, 2019, no.1, pp. 43-69, 2019

As new histories of the public execution are published, cultural perceptions of crowds are again enjoying scholarly interest. This contribution evaluates the role to be played by visual culture in crowd culture, weaving an account that draws from a closer analysis of live visual relations to explain both crowd impulses and its afterimages. A visually structured history can be navigated in order to examine the murder on 20 August 1672 of Jan and Cornelis de Wit at the hands of a street crowd, a determining event in the Dutch ‘disaster year’ of 1672. Giving close examination to contemporary prints, a drawing and a play, the contribution makes two overarching observations: first, that a Christological reading of the execution site strongly informed all of the after-images of the murders. Moreover, sacredness worked as a schema for the mob's own part during the tragedy. Second, the crowd's behaviour followed a pattern of structured theatricality and merriment that is best understood in the context of historical disturbance culture. The Dutch crowds of 1672 offered a double bill of religious and secular visual logics, blurring the limits of a judicially ordered punishment and producing in the tacit testimonies examined here a marked affective response.

Renaissance Quarterly, 2019

Nethersole points out that in the latter part of the fifteenth century depictions of a scourged or crucified Christ show an increasing idealization of the human body, free of the physical evidence of torture. These heroicized images of the flagellated Christ depart from written sources describing the event, such as the fourteenth-century Meditations on the Life of Christ-and, one might add, from contemporary passion plays. How, he asks, do images of unmitigated or imminent corporal brutality become aestheticized into what we now too narrowly call art? Despite the idealizing of Christ's body, he claims that flagellation and martyrdom imagery, in general, served to "make yourself present," collapsing sequential time into the singular moment of the event that Mircea Eliade describes as sacral time-when the viewer is a full participant in the action depicted rather than pretending to be there. Rules of decorum seem to have dictated a measured physical reaction to the often-gory events depicted in martyrdom scenes, resulting in witnesses (our surrogates) being treated as framing elements that make long-ago events contemporary and help viewers to concentrate on the image or the miracle itself, rather than on the mise-en-scène. Nethersole sanitizes the blood and gore of assassinations and martyrdoms through references to historical and hagiographical texts, as if such verbal accounts really explain mob violence. I miss what I think was the wild menace of angry gangs running through narrow streets, endangering anyone in their way. Furthermore, in conjuring up viewers' responses to the images (a tricky proposition at best), Nethersole does not indicate that the reactions of viewers steeped in new humanist learning and those in the midst of the action might differ. Nethersole's book, in laying out a framework for thinking about how violence is depicted, invites us to be active participants-not simply viewers-in the represented narrative; that invitation should provoke animated responses not only to the art but also to the way we talk about it.

Drawing on several stunningly visual fifteenth-century burnings at the stake, I argue that medieval law made conscious use of mnemonic techniques not only to stage, pictorialize, and allegorize the death penalty but to "re-allegorize" the execution of criminals in such a way as to make images of justice unforgettable. Centuries before Michel Foucault ever spoke of the "spectacle of the scaffold," the Northern French city of Metz, for example, brought to the scaffold of an infanticidal mother a wooden doll which they placed in her charred arms along with "a painting of a child around her neck in order to signify the crime that she had committed." This unusual combination of a painting from the visual arts and a prop from the world of theater sheds new light on both the nature of any legal "exhibit" and on the symbolic systems of law itself. Just as one of the canonical functions of poetry is to “make new again” a tired old cliché or a metaphor, so too here do pictorialization, memory, theatricality, and staging reanimate and "re-allegorize" one of the great dead metaphors of the law: to "make an example of someone”—and do so in ways that lend new meaning to the term legal representation. Moreover, in a country like the U.S. where our own vernacular makes room for a term like "burned in effigy" and where the Bush administration emphasized what kind of spectacular dissemination of carnage the Iraqi people need to see in order to believe allegedly justifiable deaths (such as the deaths of the sons of Saddam Hussein), this process is not quite as medieval as one might suspect.

2020

Why does a society seek out images of violence? What can the consumption of violent imagery teach us about the history of violence and the ways in which it has been represented and understood? Assaf Pinkus considers these questions within the context of what he calls galleries of violence, the torment imagery that flourished in German-speaking regions during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Exploring these images and the visceral bodily responses that they produced in their viewers, Pinkus argues that the new visual discourse on violence was a watershed in premodern conceptualizations of selfhood. Images of martyrdom in late medieval Germany reveal a strikingly brutal parade of passion: severed heads, split skulls, mutilated organs, extracted fingernails and teeth, and myriad other torments. Stripped from their devotional context and presented simply as brutal acts, these portrayals assailed viewers’ bodies and minds so fiercely that they amounted to what Pinkus describes as “visual aggressions.” Addressing contemporary discourses on aggression and cruelty, the aesthetics of violence, and the eroticism of the tortured body, Pinkus ties these galleries of violence to larger cultural concerns about the ethics of violence and bodily integrity in the conceptualization of early modern personhood. Innovative and convincing, this book heralds a fundamental shift in the scholarly conversation about premodern violence, moving from a focus on the imitatio Christi and the liturgy of punishment to the notion of violence as a moral problem in an ethical system. Scholars of medieval and early modern art, history, and literature will welcome and engage with Pinkus’s research for years to come.