The hurt(ful) body: Performing and beholding pain, 1600–1800 9781526113511

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The hurt(ful) body

The hurt(ful) body Performing and beholding pain, 1600–1800 Edited by TOMAS MACSOTAY, CORNELIS VAN DER HAVEN and KAREL VANHAESEBROUCK

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2017 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN  978 1784 99516 4  hardback First published 2017 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

List of figures page vii List of contributors xii Introduction 1 Tomas Macsotay, Cornelis van der Haven and Karel Vanhaesebrouck Part I: Performing bodies 23 1 Spectacle and martyrdom: bloody suffering, performed suffering and recited suffering in French tragedy (late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries) Christian Biet 2 The Massacre of the Innocents: infanticide and solace in the seventeenth-century Low Countries Stijn Bussels and Bram Van Oostveldt

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3 To travel to suffer: towards a reverse anthropology of the early modern colonial body Karel Vanhaesebrouck 74 Part II: Beholders 95 4 ‘I feel your pain’: some reflections on the (literary) perception of pain Jonathan Sawday 5 Masochism and the female gaze John Yamamoto-Wilson 6 Epicurean tastes: towards a French eighteenth-century criticism of the image of pain Tomas Macsotay

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vi Contents 7 Wounding realities and ‘painful excitements’: real sympathy, the imitation of suffering and the visual arts after Burke’s sublime Aris Sarafianos 8 Forced witnessing of pain and horror in the context of colonial and religious massacres: the case of the Irish Rebellion, 1641–53 Nicolás Kwiatkowski

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Part III: Institutions 221 9 Theatrical torture versus dramatic cruelty: subjection through representation or praxis Frans-Willem Korsten

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10 Palermo’s past public executions and their lingering memory 248 Maria Pia Di Bella 11 The economics of pain: pain in Dutch stock trade discourses and practices, 1600–1750 Inger Leemans

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Epilogue 300 Javier Moscoso Index 306

Figures

0.1 Richard Verstegan, Theatrum Crudelitatum Haereticorum nostri temporis (Antwerp: 1587), p. 41. page 2 0.2 Pieter Bruegel the elder, Massacre of the Innocents, 1565. Oil on panel, 109.2 × 158.1 cm. Windsor Castle, Royal Collection Trust. Image © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2016 RCIN 405787. 6 0.3 Lucas van Valckenborch (attributed), The Massacre of the Innocents, 1586. Oil on panel, 76.6 × 108.1 cm. Madrid, Thyssen-Boremisza inv. no. 414 (1956.10). 7 2.1 Peter Paul Rubens, Massacre of the Innocents, c. 1610. Oil on panel, 142 × 182 cm. Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario, The Thomson Collection © Art Gallery of Ontario. AGOID.106855. 59 2.2 Peter Paul Rubens, Massacre of the Innocents, c. 1638. Oil on panel, 199 × 302 cm. Munich, Alte Pinakothek, Inv. nr. 572. Image © Alte Pinakothek München/Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen. 61 2.3 Phillips Galle, after Frans Floris (I), Massacre of the Innocents, second half sixteenth century. Engraving published by Hieronymus Cock, 32.8 cm × 41.8 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 63 2.4 Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem, Massacre of the Innocents, 1590. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 64 2.5 Crispijn van den Queborn after Adriaen Pietersz. van de Venne, Massacre of the Innocents, 1637. Engraving, 10.0 cm × 13.5 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-OB-73.343. 66 4.1 Albrecht Dürer, Self-portrait, sick, c. 1509–11. Pen in brown ink, some passages in aquarelle, 11.8 × 10.8 cm.

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List of figures Kunsthalle Bremen, Inv.-No. 1851/50. Kunsthalle Bremen – Kupferschkabine – Der Kunstverein in Bremen. Photo: Karen Blindow. 98 Johannes Sadeler I after Bartholomeus Spranger, Phyllis riding Aristotle, sixteenth century. Engraving 27.2 × 21.6 cm. Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1953, Metropolitan Museum of Art 53.601.10(25) (www.metmuseum.org). 116 Pierre Subleyras, Charon Ferrying Souls, c. 1735–40. Oil on canvas, 135 × 83 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre. Photo: Wikimedia Commons. 139 Cornélis Bloemaert and Matham after Abraham Van Diepenbeeck, Vision of Hell, 1655. Engraving, 27 × 18 cm, in De Marolles, Temple des Muses, no. XXI. 141 Pierre Puget, Milon of Crotona, 1682. Marble, 270 × 140 × 80 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre. Photo by the author. 151 Cornelis Bloemaert and Matham after Abraham Van Diepenbeeck, Palais du sommeil, 1655. Engraving, 27 × 18 cm, in De Marolles, Temple des Muses, no. LVIII. 153 Peter Paul Rubens, Descent from the Cross, 1612–1614. Oil on panel, 421 × 311 cm (centre panel), 421 × 153 cm (wings). Antwerp, O.-L. Vrouwekathedraal. Photo by the author. 155 Gabriel-François Doyen, The Miracle of St Anthony’s Fire, 1767. Oil on canvas, 665 × 450 cm. Church of Saint-Roch, Paris. Photo by the author. 158 Jean Honoré Fragonard, The High Priest Coresus sacrificing himself to save Callirhoe, 1765. Oil on canvas, preliminary study. Madrid, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. Reproduced by courtesy of Mercedes Gonzalez Amenzúa, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. 160 Filippo Juvarra and Pierre Legros, Cappella Antamori, c. 1708–1710. Church of San Girolamo della Carità, Rome. Photo by the author. 164 Laocoon and his Sons, Vatican Museums, Vatican City. LivioAndronico and Notwist / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY SA 4.0. 180 Laocoon, illustration from Charles Bell, Essay on the Anatomy of Expression (London, 1806), p. 112. 182 Charles Bell, drawing no. 4, Soldier Suffering from Head Wound (and Shock?) 1815. Watercolour. The RAMC Muniment Collection, Wellcome Images, Wellcome Library CC BY SA 4.0. 185



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7.4 Charles Bell, drawing no. 14, Soldier with Right Arm Missing, 1815, Watercolour. The RAMC Muniment Collection, Wellcome Images, Wellcome Library CC BY SA 4.0. 186 7.5 Charles Bell, drawing no. 13, Soldier suffering from open chest wound, head and right arm bandaged. Watercolour. The RAMC Muniment Collection, Wellcome Images, Wellcome Library CC BY SA 4.0. 187 7.6 Charles Bell, Soldier suffering from a stomach wound to abdomen. Wounded at the battle of Waterloo. Watercolour. The RAMC Muniment Collection, Wellcome Images, Wellcome Library CC BY SA 4.0. 187 7.7 Charles Bell, Soldier with missing arm, lying on his side, grasping a rope, inscribed ‘XIII, Waterloo …’, 11 August 1815. Watercolour. The RAMC Muniment Collection, Wellcome Images, Wellcome Library CC BY SA 4.0. 188 8.1 James Cranford, The Tears of Ireland. Wherein is lively presented as in a map a list of the unheard of cruelties and perfidious treacheries of blood thirsty Jesuits and the Popish Faction (London: 1642), p. 41. © The British Library Board, G.5557. 206 8.2 Anonymous, Le Miroir de la Cruelle & horrible Tyrannie Espagnole perpétrée au Pays Bas par le Tyran Duc de Albe (Amsterdam, 1620), p. 51. 209 8.3 Richard Verstegan, Theatrum Crudelitatum Haereticorum nostri temporis (Antwerp: 1587), p. 53. © The British Library Board, G.20235. 211 9.1 Lieve Verschuier, The Keelhauling, according to Tradition, of the Ship’s Doctor of Admiral Jan van Nes [Het kielhalen, volgens overlevering, van de scheepschirurgijn van admiraal Jan van Nes], between 1660 and 1686. Oil painting. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 224 9.2 Rembrandt, ‘Abraham caresses Isaac’ (‘Jacob caresses Benjamin’), 1635–39. 116 mm × 89 mm, etch – print. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 233 10.1 Engraving from La pia opera delle anime dei corpi decollate. 27.5 × 25.5 cm. Collezione Cocchiara (p. 67, n. 185). Museo Etnografico Siciliano Giuseppe Pitrè, Palermo. Photo by the author from Giuseppe Cocchiara, Le immagini devote del popolo siciliano (Palermo, Sellerio Editore, 1982), p. 182. 255 10.2 Francesco Cichè, ‘Seconda promessa’, print no. 46, with a representation of the auto-de-fe celebrated in Palermo, 6 April 1724, from Antonino Mongitore,

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List of figures L’atto pubblico di fede (Palermo: Agostino e Antonino Epiro, 1724), with copper engravings from Francesco Cichè after Peolo Amato, Antonio Grano and Mario Cordua. 262 The cippo set up in Palermo on Corso dei Mille, corner Piazza Decollati [Ponte delle teste mozze (Bridge of the Severed Heads)]. Courtesy of Paolo Fabio Ceraulo (palermonascosta.blogspot.com). 264 The same cippo adorned with candles. Courtesy of Paolo Fabio Ceraulo (palermonascosta.blogspot.com). 265 Anonymous engraving, ‘Desperate traders in the exchange of Amsterdam / The Wind traders are paid with wind, if the last will still hang’ [‘Wanhopige handelaren in de beurs van Amsterdam / De Wind Koopers met Wind betaald, of de laaste zal blyven hangen’]. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-OB-83.504. 275 Anonymous engraving, ‘Apollo’s sentence over the bubbles’ [‘Vonnis van Apollo over de Bubbels’], 1720. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-OB-83.560. 276 Anonymous engraving, ‘Greed attempts to overtake Fortune’ [‘Hebzucht probeert Fortuna in the halen’], 1720. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-OB-83.576. 278 Bernard Picart, ‘Monument to posterity in remembrance of the incredible folly of the year 1720’ [‘Monument ter herinnering aan de dwaasheid van het jaar 1720’/’Monument consacré a la posterité en memoire de la folie incroyable de la XX. année du XVIII. Siecle’], 1720. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-OB-51.221. 279 Anonymous engraving, ‘Harlequin as a shareholder’ [‘Harlekijn Actionist / Arlequyn Actionist’], 1720. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, RP-P-1944-2134. 281 Anonymous engraving, ‘Allegory on the black bankruptcies as a result of the wind trade in the Amsterdam exchange’ / ‘In remembrance of the fickle wonder year 1763’ [‘Allegorie op de zware bankroeten door de windhandel aan de Amsterdamse beurs’ / ‘Ter Nagedagtenis van het Wisselvallig wonder Jaar 1763’. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-OB-84.582. 283 Anonymous engraving, ‘Rise and Fall of the Shareholders’ [‘Op- en Ondergang van de Actionisten’], 1720. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. RP-P-OB-83.511. 285 Anonymous engraving, ‘Mississipi, the land of gold famed for the wind trade’ [‘Het door de windnegotie



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befaamde goudland Mississippi, 1720 / Mississippi, of ‘t Wyd-befaamde Goud-land, door de Inbeelding der Wind-negotie’]. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-OB-83.580. 287 Anonymous engraving, ‘Battle between the Feasting Bubble Lords and the Coming Hardship’ [‘Strijd tussen de windhandel en de aanstaande armoede, 1720 / Stryd tuszen de Smullende Bubbel Heeren, en de Aanstaande Armoede’]. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-OB-83.534. 288 Anonymous engraving, ‘The stonecutter of 1720 / Many have the stone in their head / because people believe in wind’ [‘De keisnijder van 1720’ ”. ‘ “By veele zit de kei in’t hooft / om dat men in de wind gelooft’]. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-OB-83.513. 290 Anonymous engraving, ‘The greedy world, 1720 / Reflexion on the greedy world, from the outset rise and fall of the stock market’ [‘De geldzuchtige wereld, 1720 / Bespiegeling voor de geld zugtige wereld, in ‘t begin op- en ondergang van den actiehandel’]. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, RP-P-OB-83.465. 291 Anonymous engraving, ‘The world is a theatre, each plays his part and gets his due’ [‘De Waereld is een Speel Toneel, elk speeld zyn rol en krygt zyn deel’], 1720. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-OB-83.526. 293 Emblematic print on the South Sea Bubble by Thomas Cook, 1800, after a design by William Hogarth. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-OB-83.604. 294 Anonymous engraving, ‘Disastrous consequences of the stock trade, 1720. The spirit of the resurrected Heraclitus screams over the laughing stock of Democritus’ [‘Rampzalige gevolgen van de actiehandel, 1720. De geest van den verreesene Heerakliet schryjend over de Lagh-stof van Demokriet’]. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-1939-530. 296

List of contributors

Maria Pia Di Bella is a researcher in social anthropology and a member of the Institut de recherche interdisciplinaire sur les enjeux sociaux (Sciences sociales, Politique, Santé) at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Paris. She is also currently research affiliate at Harvard Divinity School. She has published monographs on popular religion and cultures of punishment and penitence, including La Pura verità. Discarichi di conscienza intesi dai Bianchi (1999), Dire ou taire en Sicile (2008) and Essai sur les supplices. L’état de victime (2011). She has edited, among others, Vols et sanctions en Méditerranée (1998) and, with James Elkins, Representations of Pain in Art and Visual Culture (2012). Since 2011 she works on street memorials in Berlin concerning the victims of genocide and the function of these memorials as ‘symbolic reparations’. Christian Biet is a professor in History and Theory of Theatre, as well as in French studies at the University of Paris Ouest-Nanterre La Défense and at the Institut Universitaire de France. He is also a regular visiting Professor at NYU and Florsheimer distinguished fellow, Cardozo Law School, Yeshiva University, NY. Recent book publications include Henry IV, la vie, la légende (2000), Qu’est-ce que le théâtre (with Christophe Triau, 2006) and Le théâtre français du XVIIe siècle (with Romain Jobez, 2009). He co-edited two volumes on early modern French theatre: Théâtre cruel et récits sanglants français (din XVIe–début XVIIe) (together with Pierre Frantz, 2006) and Tragédies et récits de martyres en France (2009). Stijn Bussels is lecturer in Art and Theatre History at Leiden University. His research focuses on northern Europe in the early modern period. From 2013 until 2018, he is the Principal Instigator of the ERC starting grant programme ‘Elevated Minds. The Sublime in the Public Arts in SeventeenthCentury Paris and Amsterdam’. He has written two monographs: The Antwerp Entry of Prince Philip in 1549: Rhetoric, Performance and Power



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(2012) and The Animated Image: Roman Theory on Naturalism, Vividness and Divine Power (2012). Frans-Willem Korsten holds the chair by special appointment Literature and Society at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, and is associate professor at the department of Film and Literary Studies, Leiden University. He is the author of Sovereignty as Inviolability: Vondel’s Theatrical Explorations in the Dutch Republic (2009) and co-editor of the standard reference work Joost van den Vondel (1587–1679): Dutch Playwright in the Golden Age (2012). He was Director of Education of LUCAS, the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society where he established the Center for Art, Literature and Law. He was responsible for the NWO internationalisation programme ‘Post-autonomia and Precarity – the Global Heritage’ (2010–14) and cooperates in the combined NWO-FWO project ‘Imagineering Techniques in the Early Modern Period’. He has published on baroque art and political theory, especially with regard to sovereignty, and on the role of art and literature at the limits of law. Nicolás Kwiatkowski studied History at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and earned his PhD at the same institution, with a thesis on the idea of history in Early Modern England. He has enjoyed research scholarships in Italy (Università degli Studi di Cagliari, 2014; where he also was guest professor in 2015), the United States (Fulbright Commission and Harvard University, 2009) and Germany (Freie Universität, Berlin, 2012; DAAD, 2015). His latest book is Tomiris. Reina de los masagetas, (2016). He currently teaches Problems of Cultural History at the University of San Martín (UNSAM), Buenos Aires, and works as Associate Researcher at the National Council for Scientific Research (CONICET), Argentina. Inger Leemans is Professor of Cultural History at VU University, Amsterdam, and director of the Graduate School of Humanities. She has written extensively about the history of Dutch literature, about early modern pornography and the (radical) Enlightenment. Her interest in cultural economics has resulted in research about censorship, journalism, literary criticism and the literary ‘bubble’ that accompanied the financial bubble of 1720. Her publications include a textbook on eighteenth-century Dutch literature Worm en Donder co-written with Gert-Jan Johannes (2013). Inger Leemans is one of the founders and directors of ACCESS, The Amsterdam Centre for CrossDisciplinary Emotion and Sensory Studies. Currently, she is working on Emotional Economies – a cultural history of stock trade from the perspective of the history of emotions. Together with Kornee van der Haven, Karel Vanhaesebrouck and Frans-Willem Korsten, she coordinates a project on the ‘imagineering’ of violence in the seventeenth-century Netherlands.

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List of contributors

Tomas Macsotay is an art and cultural historian specialising in the history of European sculpture in the eighteenth century. Between 2009 and 2014, he was a Henry Moore Foundation Post-doctoral Fellow at the University of Leeds, and held a post-doctoral Marie Curie grant from the Gerda Henkel Stiftung. His books include The Profession of Sculpture in the Paris Académie (2014), and the edited collection Rome, Travel and the Sculpture Capital (2016) and (as co-editor) Morceaux. Die bildhauerischen Aufnahmestücke europäischer Kunstakademien im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (2016). His work has appeared in a number of international refereed journals, including Intersections, Oxford Art Journal and Journal of Modern Craft. Macsotay currently holds a Ramón y Cajal tenure track position at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. Javier Moscoso is Research Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the Institute of History of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). His Pain: A Cultural History, was published in Spanish (2011) and in English (2012) and the French version won the 2015 Livres-à-nous prize in the category of History. Moscoso is now involved in the history of ambition. His next book, Broken Promises: The Historical Sources of Indignation, will be published in 2017. He was visiting professor at the University of Chicago for the second semester of 2016. Cornelis van der Haven is Assistant Professor at Ghent University in the field of early modern Dutch literature. He studied Comparative Literature at Utrecht University and wrote a dissertation about the institutional dynamics of early modern theatre repertoires in the context of urban culture. He has published widely on the history of Dutch and German theatre and literature in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with a strong focus on the role of literary texts in shaping cultural and social identities. Bram Van Oostveldt is Lecturer in Theatre History and Theory at Amsterdam University. He has worked extensively on the theatre in eighteenth-century France and the Austrian Netherlands, producing, among other publications, the monograph Tranen om het alledaagse: Diderot en het verlangen naar natuurlijkheid in het Brusselse theaterleven in de achttiende eeuw (2013). Currently he works as a senior researcher in French seventeenth-century theatre and theatricality in the ERC starting grant programme ‘Elevated Minds. The Sublime in the Public Arts in Seventeenth-Century Paris and Amsterdam’ at Leiden University. Aris Sarafianos is currently Assistant Professor in European Art History at the University of Ioannina, Greece. He has taught at the University of Manchester (2001–06) and he has held various research fellowships at the Huntington Library in San Marino, the Clark Library/Centre for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies, UCLA, the Paul Mellon Centre in London, the YCBA at Yale University and the Wellcome Centre for the History of Science,



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Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on the extensive interactions between the history of medicine and art history during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His work has appeared in a number of peer-reviewed publications, including the Journal of the History of Ideas, Representations, Art History, Art Bulletin, Comparative Critical Studies, as well as featuring in a series of theme-based edited volumes of essays dealing with the intersections of science, medicine, literature and the arts. Jonathan Sawday holds the Walter J. Ong Chair in the Humanities at Saint Louis University, English Department. His publications include: Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine (2007), co-edited with Neil Rhodes, and The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print (2000). His research is focused on the intersection between science, technology and literature, particularly (but not exclusively) in the early modern period. Currently he is working on the idea of blanks or voids in literature, art and culture. Karel Vanhaesebrouck is a professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, where he teaches courses in the MA programme ‘Arts du spectacle vivant’. Vanhaesebrouck also works as a theory lecturer at the Brussels-based film and theatre school RITCS, the Royal Institute of Theatre, Cinema and Sound of the Erasmus University College. His book publications include: Spectacle et justice. Regards croisés sur le système pénal en Belgique (with Christine Guillain and Yves Cartuyvels, 2005) and Theater. Een visuele geschiedenis (with Thomas Crombez, Jelle Koopmans, Frank Peeters and Luk Van den Dries, 2005). John R. Yamamoto-Wilson is interested in translation issues, particularly relating to Protestant editions of Catholic works during the early modern period, and his main research focus has been on the Protestant reception of Catholic literature in seventeenth-century England. His monograph, Pain, Pleasure and Perversity: Discourses of Suffering in Seventeenth-Century England (2013), springs from a study of differences between early modern Catholic and Protestant discourse on the subject of suffering. He spent a number of years in Spain before moving to Japan, where he lives with his wife and child and teaches in the Department of English Literature at Sophia University, Tokyo.

Introduction Tomas Macsotay, Cornelis van der Haven and Karel Vanhaesebrouck

In his infamous Theatrum Crudelitatum Haereticorum nostri temporis1 the Catholic priest Richard Verstegan takes his reader immediately to the heart of the matter: his book is an accumulation of gruesome and hyperviolent scenes of Protestant ‘heretics’ slowly and sadistically – that must have been, indeed, the underlying message – putting to death an endless series of Catholic martyrs. Bodies are grilled, opened up, dismembered, decapitated, eviscerated, hanged and even eaten. Think of any possible physical cruelty or any type of violence and it is represented – maybe ‘staged’ might be a more accurate verb – in Verstegan’s book. For example, in one of the pictures2 which Verstegan included in a series under the self-evident title ‘The horrible cruelties of the French Huguenots’ one can discern three topical scenes, each of them set apart by a clear scenographic division, which reminds us of the compartmentalisation of Flemish altarpieces. The image recounts how in Angoulême thirty Catholics were confined in the house of a bourgeois called Papin and were set to death through three different types of gruesome torture. On the front right three Huguenots try to cut a body in two, by moving it back and forth across a tightly bended rope (for sure, a crueller death than being cut in two by a sword). Through the two windows of the same indefinite space we see how, in the perspectival distance, five bodies are being burnt on a bale fire. On the left of the print, through an opened door, the remaining martyrs are being starved to death and are left no choice other than to eat one another, eventually dying from hunger. The picture is designed for our eyes to wander across the scenes, from one topical stage to the other, thus giving a temporal dimension to different activities taking place at the same time. For the reader’s convenience, Verstegan added letters to different scenes, which in their turn refer to explicative legends on the right page. A similar spatio-temporal organisation is to be found in nearly all of the images. In another, even gorier, composition Verstegan brings together events that

2 Introduction

0.1  Richard Verstegan, Theatrum Crudelitatum Haereticorum nostri temporis (Antwerp 1587), p. 41

supposedly took place in different cities (Figure 0.1).3 In the far right corner two Protestants roll up on a wooden stick the intestines of an opened-up corpse of a Catholic martyr. The scene clearly refers to the agony of Saint Erasmus of Formia (one century earlier Dirk Bouts had already evoked this gruesome scene for his altarpiece in Saint Peter’s Church in Leuven and it was later taken up again by Nicolas Poussin). In the middle of the picture, a priest is being buried alive, and at the far end, near the horizon, the slaughterers are cutting to pieces with their swords ‘the little children of the Catholics’.4 In the left corner the most spectacular scene is taking place: ‘In the city of Mans, they [the Huguenots] took a very old man, cut off his private parts, grilled them and then forced him to eat them. And to see how he digested his own private parts, they opened up his stomach, while he was still alive, and thus put him to death.’ The fire underneath the grill iron is still burning, the poor man is looking upward, his body opened up, calmly waiting for his death. Even though the depicted scenes are extremely violent and gory, no blood is to be seen, none of the martyrs seems to be crying out loudly from pain, let alone living their agony in an outspoken way. They seem to be calm, passive, even patient, as true martyrs, who know that with death comes

Introduction 3 salvation. However, the torturers seem to be excited and their grimaces either suggest that their cruelty is demanding a great effort or seem to evoke their true, perverse nature. Verstegan’s book has a clear aim – stigmatising the actual or supposed crimes of Protestant ‘heretics’ – and therefore uses a logic of accumulation, both in a linear, diachronic (one picture after the other throughout the book) and in a synchronic way, by using the principle of what one could call vertical montage or rotational exposition: the onlooker is invited to have his eyes hover over the picture where different events, which originally took place at different moments, are depicted in one single image. Verstegan’s Theatrum Crudelitatum is a very outspoken example of the issues at stake in this book: the violence (of any possible nature) inflicted on bodies and the representation of this very same violence, in theatres, in pictures and paintings but also in non-artistic modes of representation. Verstegan depicts Europe as a religious and moral wasteland, with man wandering around in this universe of atrocities and existential uncertainties, a universe both cruel and spectacular. Of course, Verstegan had straightforward propaganda aims with his book (i.e. showing the savagery of the other as a legitimisation for one’s own acts of violence). Indeed, the rhetorical principle of accumulation was, of course, driven by an outspoken didactic agenda, as Frank Lestringant explains in his introduction to the French edition: ‘The book aims at a rhetorical effect of accumulation […] far more striking than the incessant variation is its repetition, in its dry and inexorable monotony. The story has been reduced to its most simple expression. The places, the actors, the tortures follow one another without an interruption whatsoever, not throughout the book and not within the picture itself.’5 But, at the same time, Verstegan’s book also demonstrates how early modern popular imagination was permeated by violence and how the visual, literary or theatrical representation of violence not only functioned as a contemporary lieu de mémoire that allowed people to commemorate the atrocities they lived through or heard about, but also responded to an outspoken eagerness to actually see these violent acts represented. It is, of course, no coincidence that Verstegan, like many of his contemporaries, uses the baroque metaphor of the theatrum mundi as the general frame for his work, in which violence – real or fictional – is literally staged, thus willingly obscuring the distinction between real atrocities and their representations. The hurt(ful) body in three stages Verstegan’s Theatrum Crudelitatum Haereticorum nostri temporis thus takes us to the very heart of The Hurt(ful) Body as he (literally) gives centre-stage to representations of pain and suffering, while having a clear performative effect in mind, as he aimed at provoking a direct impact on the mind and body of the onlooker, without, however, losing sight of the spectacular potential of the depicted scenes. This book offers a cross-disciplinary approach to

4 Introduction pain and suffering in the early modern period, based on research in the fields of literary studies, art history, theatre studies, cultural history and the study of emotions. It has a sustained focus on visual sources, textual material and documents about actual events rather than well-known thinkers or ‘masterpieces’ of art history, and a preference for cases and historical contexts over systematic theory-building. The volume offers a twofold approach to the hurt body, defining ‘hurt’ both from the perspective of the victim and the beholder (as well as their combined creation of a gaze). It establishes a double perspective about the riddle of ‘cruel’ viewing by tracking the shifting cultural meanings of victims’ bodies, and juxtaposing them to the values of audiences, religious and popular institutional settings, and practices of punishment. It encompasses both the victim’s presence as an image or performed event of pain and the conundrum of the look – the transmitted ‘pain’ experienced by the watching audience. The structure of The Hurt(ful) Body reflects the double perspective on pain and suffering, as the first part of the book focuses mainly on performing bodies (on stage), whereas the second part discusses the pain of someone who watches the suffering of others, both in regard to theatre audiences and beholders of art, as well as to the onlooker in art: the theatre character or individual on canvas who is watching a(nother) hurt body. The third and final part analyses how this circulation of gazes and affects functions within a specific institutional context, paying particular interest to the performative context of public space. However, the reader will notice that a number of concepts and questions systematically pop up throughout these three different parts, as all of the chapters aim to understand, on the basis of concrete case studies and specific historical material, the complicated interferences between agents, onlookers, performative routines and specific contexts. The three parts function as ‘lenses’ enabling the reader to approach similar problems by taking a different perspective on the same historical reality, which will prove to be, just as any other reality – historical or not – being put on the historian’s dissection table, messy and complicated. As we will explain later in this introduction, the three parts do not constitute clear-cut, neatly defined packages, clearly different from one another. They provide different frameworks but often reiterate similar questions, in the hope of reaching out for a nuanced understanding of the complex question of the suffering body. Part I discusses the different forms and traditions of how suffering was staged, how that staging anticipated certain affects of the onlooker, but it also reflects on how the stage enabled audiences to get acquainted with distant suffering. It focuses on pain as ephemeral affect and what it means to be compassionately affected, particularly when hurt bodies enter contexts of performance. Part II deals with the question of how the availability (both physically and conceptually) of a beholder affects the pain of a victim. It not only discusses who watches, but also how the watching happens, and how it energises the sense of victimhood and the bonds between an onlooker and

Introduction 5 the object of pity, empathy, or exhilaration. Examining conventional images and poetic language that are deployed in order to reproduce the sensation of pain, it underlines the complicated ethos of victimhood. Part III discusses the institutional interpretative framing of violence and hurt bodies. The focus is on how the public spaces in which acts of violence were performed or represented (the theatre, the street, the stock exchange) determined the processes of staging and performing pain, but also of watching pain. With its focus on the institutions that governed these spaces and organised the staging of pain, this part of the book will elucidate on the intertwinement between the performance of pain, discussed in Part I, and the pain of the beholder, discussed in Part II. There is a strong focus in this last section on the element of punishment and how hurt bodies had to exemplify the political and moral power of the discussed institutions through their hurtful effect on the onlooker. Contrary to modern intuitions about public punishment, the final part shows how the spectacular form might have offered the possibility of shifting audience perspectives on ‘disserved’ affliction – perspectives barred from modern forms that altogether shun the visible. The Hurt(ful) Body seeks to bring into mutual dialogue several existing strands of the study of pain and embodied violence. It recurs to the study of text and metaphor in order to establish the perception of hurting bodies in the work of early modern authors in diverse fields. It embarks on the urban spaces reserved for the presentation of victims before audiences, covering gallows and performances, and imaginative representations of the patient and the punished in a constant to-and-fro. The book deals with the mediated, dynamic relationship between image and beholder, highlighting paintings, prints and written drama, its aim being to uncover conventions of representation and viewer-response that govern phenomena as diverse as torturous colonial encounters, stock-exchange excess and a revived aesthetics of the ‘terrible’. There is a growing body of work on the representation of violence and our book enthusiastically embraces this rapidly expanding field of study, but among those contributions available to an English readership, the interest in the violent or pain-inflicting event resides often in how such an event furnishes the pretext for a literary or painterly act of representation. The aim in this growing scholarship seems to be to expand our knowledge of how some author, engraver or painter went about doing a certain work of description, and how the violent nature of his or her subject might have impinged on this enterprise. But while authors in recent years have tended to bring fictional accounts and textual representations to the fore, these tend to lead to a history written in binary terms – a history that concerns itself with what is perceived to be a portrait of violence that has documentary reliability or, when subject-matter and genre considerations come to the fore, to owe to the ingrained topicality of represented violence. Although these questions remain relevant for examining what survives, for instance, of politicised

6 Introduction accounts of violence in 1790s France,6 the chapters assembled in this book signal the need to transcend a binary that opposes history to representation in any simple terms. This is not to say the terms are not valid – the danger is that they imply a false dissection of the object we wish to examine: the violent body. Real or mediated spectacles of pain? Giving precedence to the opaque, authorial concerns in representing may entail, for instance, using X-ray and infrared photography of Pieter Bruegel’s Massacre of the Innocents at Hampton Court (Figure 0.2) to gain a better understanding of a painter coming to grips with the mixed sense of censure and attraction emerging from what he manifestly hesitated to show us: the corpses of the murdered infants and the act of killing itself. In his discussion of the Bruegel painting and the telling restraints in representing the slaughter, Nigel Spivey has pointed to the measure in which the artist plays with this topical theme of Herod’s killings, well-established in painters’ repertoires and thereby easily categorised as ‘conventional’, by choosing a contemporary setting in a northern, snow-covered landscape. Imitating one of Bruegel’s versions of the massacre, in 1586 Lucas van Valckenborch painted a similar

0.2  Pieter Bruegel the elder, Massacre of the Innocents, 1565

Introduction 7 composition, which more clearly enlisted the Massacre to perform a documentary service (Figure 0.3). Herod’s troops are made to look even more contemporary, as Valckenborch outfitted them as Spanish halberdiers, thereby allowing the mercenaries of the Duke of Alba, the Spanish deputy who ravaged Protestant towns, to ‘perform’ the biblical tale for the viewer. Adopting Bruegel’s taste for the immediately recognisable, Valckenborch turned his own adaptation of the Massacre, to quote Spivey, into a veritable ‘bulletin of late sixteenth-century news’.7 Yet one should not overlook the fact that any political allusion made here remains encrypted in the form of allegory. Valckenborch is recording conflicts of his times without sacrificing the conventions of painting. This means that the beholder of the scene still needed, somehow, to connect the two levels. Through his painting, the biblical massacre becomes fused with a contemporary audience’s more fraught, or anguished, relationship to contemporary violent spurts. Many of the staged, written, painted and engraved images presented in this book consist of such layered representations. If they show us misery, punishment or torture, they also need to be treated as an artefact or text carrying a fictional subject matter. Within such conventions, nevertheless, they hold the residue of actual, possibly observed or witnessed motifs. In this, the paradigm is set by visual images of hell, which in the sixteenth and

0.3  Lucas van Valckenborch (attributed), The Massacre of the Innocents, 1586

8 Introduction seventeenth centuries were speckled with real forms of gallows equipment and told of real spectacles of criminal punishment. In Chapter 1, Christian Biet indeed proposes that the new, more enclosed spaces of theatrical representation emerging in the second half of the sixteenth century made this possibility of referencing modern violence within religious representation particularly compelling. Transcending the binary constitution of an object of representation as existing only on this side of a divide from the ‘raw’ historical event, it has not been our intention to give ontological priority to either the real or the mediated, and wherever possible to continue to address both intermittently. The chapters work together to produce an account of what historical conditions for the visual, what type of beholding consciousness, was constituted by an ability to countenance both the imminent scene of raw pain and the conventionalised imagery or topical pretext that circulated in texts, performances and material images. In order to achieve this reconstitution of a historical beholder, and before arriving at a general characterisation of this beholder as compassionate or cruel, a reconstruction and basic analysis of the space for performing and viewing pain has been necessary. This simple schema, however, sets aside the separation of the strictly historical and the strictly performed, and seeks to return the reader to the point where history and performance met: the image. Whatever anguish audiences might have felt about the plague sufferer, or whatever excitement they might have sought in the gallows, some of these same beholders had access to ‘safer’ places as well, as an increasingly distanced set of opportunities to see violence, those of representations, began to address violence in the manner of Valckenborch and Verstegan. These audiences – if any such monolithic entity can be said to have existed outside public spaces of culture – were at times to assume postures towards real victims in the gallows, but they also enjoyed the distractions of theatre, of the print and of literature. Habitually, they confronted modernising conditions of being present, of becoming subject to straining viewing circumstances that had an impact on how the cultural encounter with performance and imaging took shape. Whether in the theatre or when faced with religious violence, the witness becomes a fraught participant inside violent goings-on, or faces submission and humiliation inside such an event. Hence, this book perhaps restores a particular identity to early modern audiences, which emerge as men and women biographically positioned to inhabit spaces of punishment and of cultural relief, given to experiencing the two as contiguous in ways that are difficult to imagine in a modern, Western public sphere, so effectively cleansed of direct cruelty, yet teeming with omni-present media representations of violence. Disengaged from binary terms of convention and truth, this historical beholder may be thought of as existing within a web of relations. These relations are laid out through three rubrics, as we have explained: the early modern performing body, beholder or audience responses, and the operations of institutional power. The Hurt(ful) Body brings under

Introduction 9 discussion visual and performative representations of embodied pain, using an insistently dialectical approach that takes into account the perspective of the hurt body itself, the power and afflictions of its beholder and, finally, the routinising and redeeming of hurt within institutional contexts. The account that has resulted from the outlined desiderata will lead the reader through the fields of literary studies, art history, theatre studies, cultural history and the study of emotions, and as a result it does not represent a neat historical arc. However, all contributions are united by their concentration on two bodies: that of the beholder and that of the victim/performer. To unite these two, the chapters engage the spaces, ritual framings, and mediating agents that prepared, maintained, and were affected by the establishment of relations of performing the victim and viewing the affliction, and generally of responding to violence. The contributions revolve around the histories of the early modern stage and the visual arts, but literary representation, martial discipline, institutions of justice, episodes of financial stress and race-specific colonial discourses are called in to strengthen this account. Chronologically, the book spans the long period of secularisation and gradual advent of laws banning spectacular violence from the urban fabric: roughly speaking, it covers the time that elapses between the cited passage from Verstegan or Bruegel’s and Valckenborch’s Massacres and Edmund Burke’s famous construction of modern viewing in his theory of the sublime. Visual conditions of witnessing pain In early modern conceptions of the corporeal condition of pain, the growing role of medical thinking wrought important changes to the relationship between the hurt body and its observer. Medicine increasingly tended to obfuscate the visual condition of hurt as an object of experience, an object of knowledge and power, established by and for a watching Other, rather than simply by the sufferer (and his clinician) for himself or herself. Understanding this visual conundrum of being seen to suffer, or being seen to behold the victim, places us squarely in the notion of the gaze. Images of pain emerge in what Foucault described as the nexus of vision and power in the act of surveillance – the beholder’s authorising of who looks, whom is looked at, and to what effect – but gaze can also be taken in its Lacanian dimension.8 The important contribution of theories of the gaze are, however, not the only tools that prove their worth in accepting that pain and suffering demand a historical enquiry that takes into account the visual.9 Many books have taken as their theme the social forms and local histories of audiences engaging with live suffering men and women in hospitals,10 in ritual punishment or in religious life.11 Thus we know a lot about material and ephemeral images made and seen by audiences that needed them in order to stage and (re)imagine sacrifice, repentance and punishment. Aesthetic theory of

10 Introduction the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries made artists and audiences even more aware of the importance of ‘feeling with’ the suffering of others. Early modern scholars like Daniel Heinsius advocated the emotional effects of horror and fear on spectators while witnessing how a virtuous character had to suffer both physical and mental pain, an effect that was based on the Aristotelian principles of pity and compassion (commiseratio).12 The spectator’s suffering is maintained through the idea of substitution: his fear of being in the same situation as the hero and being subject to the same misfortune, pain and suffering that hero experiences on stage.13 Though this pain of watching is based on the idea of identification with the hero, this identification in the end is subordinated to the play’s moral message and the effect of catharsis, which should temper the spectator’s fierce emotions of pity and fear. The model of catharsis in Aristotelian poetics presupposes aesthetic distance on the part of the spectator, who should identify with the paradigmatic fate of the hero before relating that fate to the immediate interests of his own life.14 This would change gradually in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as soon as ‘sympathy’ became one of the key words in art and theatre aesthetics. The idea of sympathetic identification was strongly related to the ideal of an engaged audience that was expected to play an active role in processes of (dramatic) communication – inside and outside the theatre – while identifying with a ‘middling hero’, as in the drame bourgeois, whom the spectator can regard as someone of his own sort.15 Theatre and the visual arts were expected to play an important role in early concepts of a public sphere, based on feelings of solidarity and equality with the suffering Other, while criticising the earlier ‘detached’ forms of identification, based on pity, fear and admiration. Playwrights like Lessing developed a notion of tragedy that had to forge a community of sympathetic individuals, which can be seen as a step towards reconciling private individuality with public personality.16 These new literary genres thus enabled the public expression of the most individual feelings, which transformed these feelings into a public point of reference with regard to questions of sociability, which Moscoso defines ‘as a sentiment aimed at the suffering and pain of others’.17 So far, the theme of embodied violence and beheld pain has been examined in fragmentary mode, according to separate queries and disciplines. There are examples to be found of surveys on the theme of pain supported by contemporary theory, rather than by historical enquiry as such.18 Some innovative scholars with a particular interest in the historical visual arts, such as Barbara Stafford and James Elkins have patently placed the image at the heart of their work. They offer ground-breaking accounts that open the field to important theoretical work on vision, aesthetic tooling and embodiment, but this has also meant certain sacrifices in the treatment of the historical audience and its position in seeking to witness bodily calamity. If pain often entailed a witness, the social influence and social control of that witness has

Introduction 11 all too often slipped our attention. In such cases, the image overrides the cultural history of suffering and the planned, routinised spectacle of pain in public executions, anatomical prints and more ‘vehement’ theatre. By contrast, the fledgling scholarship of pain as an early modern phenomenon – whether the anatomy theatre examined by Jonathan Sawday, or the criminalised ‘sexual underworlds’ explored by G.S. Rousseau and Roy Porter – abets the circumspect examination of texts, handing fresh questions to art historians and anthropologists of the image generally.19 Similarly, the task of investigating historical audiences (the witnesses) has mostly gone to scholars of urban history. Following the lead of Michel Foucault, urban historians have done extensive work on mapping the world of the gallows and of the punitive torture and display of criminals.20 This is usually done without a determined ‘visual’ enquiry, and where images are used, they are made subordinate to the documentary historical evidence about agents and rituals. One will find a growing trend towards interlinking visual arts and theatre history, but up to now such work of interdisciplinary dialogue retains a focus on religious or in any case pre-secularist attitudes and material culture. Moreover, studies of this nature are usually not in the English language.21 If much is known about the development, during the Enlightenment, of a new link to the victim, of a willingness to protect his or her dignity, then much remains to be done to situate the continued existence, even resurgence, of visual violence in this period. As Aris Sarafianos points out in Chapter 7, sentimental audiences may have wanted to see less pain, but pain remained a part of the way they understood their aesthetic constitutions. From contagion to sympathy This returns us to the delicate problem of whether the spectacle of pain was subject to historical change. Certainly, urban historians have been long aware that legislation gradually removed the gallows from the cityscapes of Europe, and Foucault’s well-known thesis is that barracks, confinement, internment and colonial camps became the new sites of violence, generally without audiences and enacting coercion by a disciplining gaze. But what happened in that ‘safer’ auditorium of violence: the theatres, the publishing trade, paintings and prints? Javier Moscoso has perhaps offered one of the only accounts of a historicity of acts of regarding pain. His trajectory leads us from a culture of ‘contagion’ in the early modern period to one of ‘sympathy’ in the eighteenth century. The transition, which in Moscoso’s reconstruction does not neatly follow Foucault’s vision of biopolitical modernity, involved a complex reconfiguration of a relationship between the audience and the victim. Contagion depended on physical and temporal proximity to the painful event: it presupposed presence and coincidence of the atrocious action and the spectator. The form best equipped to meet these circumstances was tragedy, as in tragedy violent actions were made present again for an on-site re-experiencing.

12 Introduction Sympathy, by contrast, is based upon an ‘unequal distribution of pain’ between the human being that suffers and the one who watches. The latter tries to identify with the protagonist as far as possible, whereas the person principally affected ‘internalizes the position of the spectator’.22 The selfconscious witness assumed the role of an arbiter, and wished for his judgement on the suffering of others to follow on from universal, objective and disinterested deliberations. The result, as Moscoso shows, was the collapse of the here-and-now of the order of contagion. Far-off events, such as natural catastrophes or the suffering of slaves and animals, moved to centre stage. The intermediary, still vital to the ‘politics of pity’ in contagion, was suppressed or veiled, to be replaced only by an ‘intermediate space’ of global communication.23 Verstegan’s description of atrocities revels in all the gore of a physical witness position: every wound, every cruelty committed against victims and their families, is elaborately presented before the eyes of the audience. Yet this does not hide the fact that Verstegan’s prints and descriptions translated these very particular circumstances to a medium that suggested, in one way or other, the existence of a public whose mind needed to be changed. The challenge of understanding images of pain in an era when cruelty could still be experienced publicly is that the wish to have representations of it already implied some form of suppression in ‘real’ spaces. It seems hard to argue that performance withered before the pressures of a more regimented, modern attempt to control the calamity. In his famous essay ‘Panopticism’, Michel Foucault demonstrated the growing power of the socio-political tendency to encamp and wall in violence, but he also made the point that early modern power structures were incapable of bringing under their control the performative setting. As the medical treatment of victims of leprosy and the plague – followed by a political encroachment of the ‘idle’: beggars, vagabonds, madmen and the disorderly – came to depend on ever more tightly structured technologies of separation, individuation and internment, a more anarchic energy of representation assuaged the need to have audiences and victims meet again. ‘Safe’ representation thereby came to play with the disappearing visibility of victims, as there developed a literary fiction of the festival: ‘suspended laws, lifted prohibitions, the frenzy of passing time, bodies mingling together without respect, individuals unmasked, abandoning their statutory identity and the figure under which they had been recognized, allowing a quite different truth to appear’.24 As part of the process by which the spectacle of pain became segregated from modern life, as Foucault shows via the example of N.H. Julius’s 1831 Leçon sur les prisons,25 how the public life of gore around temples, sacrificial altars, cruelty, intensity and sensuality came to be associated with ancient civilisations and how it was regarded as strictly opposed to the modern condition where communities became individuals, and public life was replaced by the disciplining force of the state.26 What makes the seventeenth and

Introduction 13 eighteenth centuries particularly intriguing from this point of view is that modernisation was an as yet imperfect and porous process. Urban cruelty in the gallows retained its place, and Enlightenment writers from Diderot to Burke continued to reference it. Theatre, literature and prints still communicated a sense of violence inside the fabric of religious, civic and political communities. At the same time, a growing self-awareness about the act of beholding, and a secularisation of institutions that oversaw cruelty, were also heavily in evidence. Here, the Verstegan prints and descriptions of atrocities may again provide support. These images, rich in markers of close ‘journalistic’, intense focus on cruel action, maintain the type of communion with the victim that Moscoso characterised as ‘contagion’. But this mechanism is contained by framing devices that suggest these acts have unfolded in a marginal sphere: either across the boundary dividing Catholic and Protestant regions, or in an imaginary site of hell, or an imaginary Orient. The recurring patterns of closed spheres and panoramic views suggest that the goings-on were happening, as it were, ‘out of order’. Distance is already implied in Verstegan’s attempts to create immediacy, and therefore the possibility of a ‘modern’ aesthetic enjoyment from afar can already be argued for. Judith Butler has recently discussed Levinas’s account of the position that often proves most difficult in the images, plays and literary passages discussed throughout this book: the direct encounter, face to face, between two subjects predicated by the logics of the execution site, or of the colonial venture, to become killer and victim. The position where one faces the Other both establishes the possibility of killing and creates its prohibition. ‘To be in relation with the other face to face is to be unable to kill’, wrote Emmanuel Levinas in his Ethics and Infinity.27 Being in relation, according to Butler, means to unravel the precariousness of our life: ‘To respond to the face, to understand its meaning, means to be awake to what is precarious in another life or, rather, the precariousness of life itself.’28 Some of what historians of the early modern era can aspire to know about the historical forms of such encounters comes from the performed figures of victims, and those who, in their various positions, watched them. The document of a violent event will almost invariably introduce a mediation, made possible by the webs connecting the institution that offers room to the scene, the beholder who witnesses it, and the body that performs. Part I: Performing bodies On the early modern stage emotions and corporality were tightly interwoven. Actors embody emotions: they use their bodies to represent (literally: to make present again) the feelings of others. This representation has in its turn a constantly changing impact on the observer of this very same body, and this impact constitutes the nub of the pleasure generated by the timebased art form par excellence that we call theatre. The same spectator then

14 Introduction describes his own emotions by making use of all kinds of physical metaphors. Emotions and their physical representation always function within a specific historical context. They are not, contrary to what one might think, ahistorical concepts. A body on a stage or on a canvas is always represented through specific, historical codes, just as this same body always has a concrete, emotional impact on its observer who in his turn will make use of historically informed bodily images. Hence, performance is necessarily a socio-symbolic practice: physical bodies symbolise specific emotions, and this process of symbolisation can function only within a specific historical context, i.e. the shared temporal space of the stage. This temporal space constitutes the core of this first part of the book, which focuses, through detailed analysis of specific case studies, on the different ways in which hurt bodies were staged and to what effect. The early modern theatre stage functioned as a privileged locus to represent and to question the fears and doubts of its time. Early modern theatre could thus be considered as a form of organised doubt in which the distinction between the theatricality of the staged pain and the pain suffered or witnessed in the real word is willingly blurred. At the same time, the staged violence functioned as a pretext for a social ritual, as the analysis of several martyr plays, in which the pain becomes salvation, shows. The three chapters in Part I investigate the different ways in which suffering or hurt bodies were staged, not only in theatre, but also in literature and visual art, taking as a basic starting point the position that the idea of performance is not the sole privilege of the stage as such. The chapters each focus on specific cases of ‘staged’ violence and the spectacular strategies deployed within that context (Part II focuses on the interaction with the – implied – spectator; Part III analyses the institutional framing of public violence). How do writers, actors and painters deal with the possibility or the impossibility of the spectacular representation of suffering? How do artists actually perform pain and through which theatrical means? And what kind of theatrical effect did they aim at? Christian Biet in Chapter 1 focuses on early modern French tragedy (late sixteenth and early seventeenth century) and how theatre at that time consistently chose to represent violence, often in a very explicit way, to commemorate the events spectators had recently experienced or to remind them of the potential violence they might face. Biet explains how religious tragedies of that time made use of often grandiose tableaux recounting the tales and stories of martyrdom and fostering a double aim: by means of spectacular techniques and striking effects artists tried to draw spectators into a lived and life-like experience, while at the same time never losing sight of its didactic impetus. Taking the grand performance of Doué-la-Fontaine (1607) as his starting point, Biet shows how the spatial organisation of medieval theatre facilitated this specific representational regime, thus adding an important correction to the historiographic misunderstanding that the

Introduction 15 representation of religious violence disappeared from the stage after the banning of the mysteries in 1548. Stijn Bussels and Bram Van Oostveldt focus on one of the most shocking events imaginable: infanticide. Even though it is hard to comprehend why children are murdered, early modern art and literature tried to get some understanding and thus to give some solace. For this, one episode from the Bible was often used, namely the massacre of the innocents in Bethlehem from the Gospel of Matthew. Bussels and Van Oostveldt concentrate on the popularity of this biblical passage in the visual arts in the early modern Netherlands and clarify how diverse the solace can be. They do so by focusing on the 1630s, when the Dutch Republic had consolidated herself as a crucial economic and cultural player and when the Spanish Netherlands were dominated by Counter-Reformatory discourses. Daniel Heinsius’s Latin tragedy Herodes infanticida (1632), an illustration from Jacob Cats’s Trou-ringh (1637), Rubens’s Massacre of the Innocents (1637) and Joost van de Vondel’s history play Gysbrecht van Aemstel (1638) will serve as guiding examples. Finally, Karel Vanhaesebrouck’s Chapter 3 investigates the representation of the enslaved body, where suffering and exoticism go hand in hand. Vanhaesebrouck focuses on the way the cultural encounter between Europe and the African continent as well as the Americas was represented on the early modern (French) stage, by taking the fascinating play Les Portugais infortunés (1608) by Nicolas Chrétien des Croix, which takes an encounter of a group of shipwrecked Portuguese with an indigenous African tribe, as his starting point. Early modern theatre, Vanhaese­brouck argues, functioned as a privileged locus to visualise a certain cross-cultural imagination that both frightened and fascinated the spectators of that era. Theatre thus played a crucial role in the invention of what could be called a ‘global culture’, giving centre-stage to the human body as a product of cultural imagination, while at the same time revealing the gaze with which these bodies were observed. Taking Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s idea of ‘reverse anthropology’ as a stepping stone, Vanhaesebrouck shows how Les Portugais infortunés can be read as a trace of a broader cultural imagination that questions the all too easy dichotomy between the self and the other, while at the same time showing that Europe, Africa and the Americas share a history and a culture of the body. Part II: Beholders In his work on the parade, Louis Marin illustrated the idea that we accrue knowledge about basic states, even where pain might be involved, through an act of mediation: an external beholder. Parades, as Marin pointed out, know no clear boundaries between their actors and their beholders. Their very movement through streets and squares results less in a linear unfolding of a theatrical action than in an unbounded, non-linear, constantly reiterated invitation to members of the audience to act out, by following, cheering,

16 Introduction and joining the parade.29 Beholding a victim, one may infer, entails far more than the specific subject-matter, performative strategies and narrative ploys with which early modern writers, artists and thinkers turned the abstract, unapparent experience of hurt into things capable of being visualised and understood. It also entailed a positioning, a culturally determined attitude towards the victim. Who watches? How does the watching happen? How is language deployed in order to reproduce the sensation of pain, and to reinvest it with social, political and metaphysical ideas? How does the victim’s perception of being seen to suffer affect his or her awareness of inhabiting a position in space, or – to follow the spatial metaphor – a state in society? When does the knowledge of being watched lift suffering to a higher plane? Whether in its confessional, gendered, colonial or other forms of ‘positioning’, this section examines how suffering can indeed become a position, and reframe pain by the availability of a beholder, charging the witnessing with agency, and the viewing with complex forms of ‘mentality’. In the first contribution, Jonathan Sawday reaffirms the role that words that stand in for pain can have in consolidating the harrowing experience of watching King Lear. The conundrum of suffering as a position one can assume willingly, of course, calls to mind the legacy of the Imitatio Christi, in particular the theatricality of Easter, where the faithful allow themselves to ‘be humbled’, to be entrapped in the position of the suffering Christ. Attempts to assume the identity of victimhood and to ‘humiliate’ oneself as a sufferer can also become an element in the performance of gender relations. This is the point of departure for John R. Yamamoto-Wilson’s contribution, Chapter 5, which examines fictionalised accounts of dominant or ‘transgressive’ female characters that turn pain into an anxious vehicle of knowledge and power. Established by and for a watching Other, these particular pains, the ones that can be grasped through an act of witnessing or ‘facing’, point to ways in which bodily injury takes the shape of an enduring social condition lived and endured by the marginal and the disempowered. In this sense, the position of the beholder raises questions about the bond with the victim, and how audiences can oscillate between empathy and apathy.30 Tomas Macsotay’s Chapter 6 takes a closer look at what happens when pain becomes partially desacralised. Weaving a case through accounts of paintings by Rubens, Poussin, Doyen and Fragonard by Jean-Baptiste Dubos, Etienne-Maurice Falconet and Denis Diderot, this chapter argues that Christian identifications offered a model that could be easily turned on its head: depictions of Christ are savoured by the beholder as another spectacle at the execution site, a plague is relished as an exciting arousal of the eye by unexpected partial views and chiaroscuro, a suicidal scene is turned into an elaborate reflexion on socio-religious hierarchies of watching and showing horrific events. At every turn, the painting of pain is exposed for a ‘false simulacrum’, with the beholder allowed to imagine herself as standing clearly outside of

Introduction 17 the frame and the subject matter – to evolve a distanced awareness that one is looking at a transparent ‘lie’. Macsotay observes how the possibility of an ‘epicurean’ watching made ambiences and spaces, rather than hurt bodies, articulate a disillusioning of religious investments in pain. In Chapter 7, Aris Sarafianos charts the fresh territory laid out for the identities of beholder and victim at a time when the notion of sympathy was making itself felt through the novel formulations of a theory of the sublime. Sarafianos considers in detail Charles Bell’s Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression in Art as well as a corpus of watercolours from surgical operations on soldiers wounded on the fields of Waterloo, which are shown to reveal a new engagement with the victim, whose particular anguish derives less from spectacular presentation than from prolonged and detached exposure to the suffering of others. Nicolás Kwiatkowski, in the final chapter in Part II, Chapter 8, is preoccupied with the great difficulty of achieving detachment during the Irish Rebellion of 1641–53. As his account of forced viewing within the economy of war cruelties makes clear, the key to understanding images like Verstegan’s lies in a kind of trap in which victim and beholder tend to fall. If forced viewing reinforces values of compassion or general rejection of untamed violence, it also opens up venues for violent partisan retaliation. In contrast to the apparent arbitrariness of the cruelties of war, a more firmly regulated set of connections between beholder and victim tended to be welded in spaces and legal provisions that had the function of keeping the enactment of cruelty within specific institutional bounds: institutional pain therefore gave shelter to viewer and victim alike. Part III: Institutions The early modern perception of public violence was strongly connected to visual culture and theatrical ‘ways of seeing’. Battlefields and other places of mass violence were generally regarded as theatres, but the theatre metaphor was also applied to civic-urban spaces where violent acts had public visibility (violentiae theatrum), like the scaffold, mutinied villages and street riots.31 Public executions, as spectacular ‘ceremonies by which power was manifested’,32 were staged as theatrical events, with the victim sentenced to public execution, together with headsman and bailiff, as its actors, the scaffold as its theatre stage and curious people in the streets as its ‘audience’. The three chapters in Part III investigate three different institutions that controlled these stagings of pain: the Dutch military and punishments on ships in FransWillem Korsten’s Chapter 9; secular courts in Sicily and the performance of executions in Maria Pia Di Bella’s Chapter 10; and the Amsterdam Bourse and the hurt bodies of the stock trade in Inger Leemans’s Chapter 11. Political, social, religious and military institutions did more than just initiate and control public performances of violence; they also constituted the interpretive tribunal, which determined how audiences should ‘see’ the pain

18 Introduction and suffering of others. The internalisation of this interpretative framing strengthened the illusion of self-control and could be seen in relation to Foucault’s concept of governmentality, which refers to a state of government that bears on its population instead of its territory and on processes of individualisation and ‘subjectification’.33 The contributions to this part of the book focus on the institutions and how they imposed certain ways of seeing pain on people who were directly involved in these institutions. The approach, however, is not ‘institutional-centric’, which means that the chapters also move outside the institution, its functions and its objects. Leemans’s chapter about the Amsterdam Bourse, for instance, not only deals with the behavioural blueprints as provided by the Amsterdam Bourse for stock brokers to deal with the pain of financial loss but also discusses how the Bourse, and the body of the merchant in particular, as a locus of pain provided models of ‘economising’ pain and emotions in the early modern society as a whole. Also in regard to the military juridical institutions of the Dutch Republic, the questions discussed in Korsten’s Chapter 9 go beyond the institutional impact of maritime torture and punishment as such and focus on how society as a whole was organised through theatrical practices of punishment. The re-staging of public punishments in paintings for instance, with their clear distinction between audience and actors, confronts us with how early modern societies were theatrically organised. One of the paintings discussed by Korsten shows in a theatrical way a public execution and as such repeats it, in order to produce what Korsten calls an ‘un-representable, dramatic moment’ that confronts the audience with political choices and a logic of torture and cruelty. If the staging of ‘hurt’ signalled some punitive consequence of wrong moral decisions and criminal acts, also self-correction became important. Di Bella’s Chapter 10 on public executions in Sicily shows how the publicly shown representations of pain performed by the Inquisition had to introject in the people’s minds to become part of their institutionalised mindset. Contemporary descriptions of so-called ‘Acts of Faith’ stress the impact on the crowd and the way the crowd tries over and over again to convince impenitent heretics. In economic thinking, the ‘pain of loss’ and even physical pain could indicate gullible or imprudent behaviour that was easy to correct. As we see in Leemans’s chapter, in pamphlets and in plays that were published in the years of big economic crisis, the hurt body of the merchant often had to represent the pain of economic loss. The injured body thus functions as an allegoric representation of ‘economic pain’, making physical what would otherwise remain abstract, invisible or unsayable, like the pain of loss. Doing so, these images of the injured bodies of traders made audiences aware of consequences that wrong economic behaviour could have on a higher level: economy could hurt ‘the nation’ and citizens had to defend that nation against such diseases by way of corrective interventions that should help them to cure the nation’s body.

Introduction 19 The questions raised in Part III are related to this institutional interpretative framing of violence and hurt bodies. It examines the extent to which this framing served authoritative processes of discipline and obedience, but, on the other hand, allowed for diversity in perspectives and opinions towards staged public violence. It deals with the power of institutions to force audiences to distinguish between just and unjust human suffering: when does this or that behaviour rightly deserve ‘pain’ (and in which gradations) and when not? What kind of visual and theatrical performances did institutions apply to force or stimulate audiences to feel connected to staged hurt bodies? Was pain a ‘redemptive’ intervention on the victim and should the victim’s body ‘learn’ from pain in the same way as in Burke’s theory of real sympathy, expecting audiences to feel ‘delighted’ seeing others suffer, or should it improve audiences morally after watching the (justified) hurt of others, like in the early modern interpretations of the Aristotelean concept of catharsis? How were performances of hurt bodies expected to reaffirm institutional power in the minds and hearts of audiences and to what extent did institutions know how to use this performative potential of the hurt(ful) body? Notes 1 Richard Verstegan, Theatrum Crudelitatum Haereticorum nostri temporis (Antwerp: Adrien Hubert, 1588). We made use of the excellent French edition presented and annotated by Frank Lestringant: Richard Verstegan, Le théâtre des cruautés, ed. Frank Lestringant (Paris: Editions Chandeigne, 1995). 2 Verstegan, Théâtre des cruautés, p. 91. 3 Ibid., p. 105. 4 Ibid., p. 104. 5 Ibid., p. 37. 6 See for example the recent Thomas Wynn (ed.), Representation of Violence in France (1760–1820) (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2013). 7 Nigel Spivey, Enduring Creation. Art, Pain and Fortitude (London: Thames and Hudson, 2001), pp. 143–5. 8 The literature on the gaze is vast. On the term’s usage in Lacan see the instructive essay by Kaja Silverman, ‘Fassbinder and Lacan. A Reconsideration of Gaze, Look, and Image’, Camera Obscura, 7 (January 1989), 54–85; on combining both psychoanalytic gaze and Foucault’s ‘surveillance’ see Griselda Pollock, ‘Feminism/Foucault – Surveillance/Sexuality’, in N. Bryson, M.A. Holly and K. Moxey (eds), Visual Culture. Images and Interpretations (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994), pp. 273–301. 9 For the image-conscious studies of pain, see James Elkins, Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); James Elkins and Maria Pia Di Bella (eds), Representations of Pain in Art and Visual Culture (New York: Routledge, 2013); Simon Richter, Laocoon’s Body and the Aesthetics of Pain: Winckelmann, Lessing, Herder, Moritz, Goethe (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992); Barbara Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging

20 Introduction the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991); and Hans T. Sternudd and Angela Tumini (eds), How Does it Feel? Making Sense of Pain (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2011). 10 See for instance John Henderson, The Renaissance Hospital. Healing the Body and Healing the Soul (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2006). 11 See for a recent example, with extensive bibliography, John R. Decker (ed.), Death, Torture and the Broken Body in European Art 1300–1650 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). 12 See Chapter 9 in Daniel Heinsius, De constitutione tragœdiæ. La constitution de la tragédie, ed. A. Duprat (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2001), pp. 192–205. 13 A. Duprat, ‘Introduction’, in Heinsius, De constitutione tragœdiæ, p. 61. 14 Hans Robert Jauss, ‘Levels of Identification of Hero and Audience’, New Literary History, 5:2 (1974) 283–317: 286. 15 Ibid., 307 ff. 16 Benjamin W. Redekop, Enlightenment and Community. Lessing, Abbt, Herder, and the Quest for a German Public (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), p. 82. 17 Javier Moscoso, Pain. A Cultural History (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 66. 18 For instance, Asbjørn Grønstad and Henrik Gustafsson (eds), Ethics and Images of Pain (New York: Routledge, 2012). 19 Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned (New York: Routledge, 1995); and G.S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (eds), Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1987). See also Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen, Pain and Compassion in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2012); and John Yamamoto-Wilson, Pain, Pleasure and Perversity. Discourses of Suffering in Seventeenth-Century England (New York: Routledge, 2013). 20 For instance, Lionello Puppi, Torment in Art: Pain, Violence and Martyrdom (New York: Rizzoli, 1990); Maria Pia di Bella, Essai sur les supplices. L’état de victime (Paris: Hermann, 2011). 21 Christian Biet, Théâtre de la cruauté et récits sanglants en France (XVIe–XVIIe siècle) (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2006); Karsten Zelle and Peter Gendolla (eds), Schönheit und Schrecken. Entsetzen, Gewalt und Tod in alten und neuen Medien (Heidelberg: Carl Winter 1990); Klaus Herding and Bernhard Stumpfhaus (eds), Pathos, Affekt, Gefühl (New York : Walter de Gruyter, 2004); Charlotte BouteilleMeister and Kjerstin Aukrust, Corps sanglants, souffrants et macabres (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2010); Fabien Cavaillé, Alexandre Hardy et le rêve perdu de la Renaissance. Spectacles violents, émotions et concorde civile au début du XVIIe siècle (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2013). 22 Moscoso, Pain. A Cultural History, p. 65. 23 Ibid., pp. 72–3. 24 Michel Foucault, ‘Panopticism’, in Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), pp. 195–218: p. 197. 25 N.H. Julius, Leçons sur les prisons présentées en forme de cours au public de Berlin, en l’année 1827 (Paris: F.G. Levrault, 1831).

Introduction 21 26 Foucault, ‘Panopticism’, p. 216. 27 Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard A. Chen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), pp. 86–7. 28 Judith Butler, Precarious Life (London and New York: Verso, 2005), p. 34. 29 Louis Marin, ‘Establishing a Signification for Social Space: Demonstration, Cortege, Parade, Procession’, in Marin, On Representation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 38–53. 30 Sharon Sliwinski, ‘A Painful Labour. Photography and Responsibility’, in Elkins and Pia di Bella, Representations, pp. 64–74. 31 Marian Füssel, ‘Der Krieg als Inszenierung und Wissensschauplatz im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert’, in F. Schock, O. Bauer and A. Koller (eds), Ordnung und Repräsentation von Wissen. Dimensionen der Theatrum-Metapher in der Frühen Neuzeit (Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2008), pp. 205–30. 32 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin Books, 1979), p. 47. 33 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978, ed. M. Senellart (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 184–5.

Part I

Performing bodies

1

Spectacle and martyrdom: bloody suffering, performed suffering and recited suffering in French tragedy (late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries)1 Christian Biet

During the period from the mid-sixteenth until the mid-seventeenth century when Europe experienced the ultra-violent events of the religious wars, theatre, literature and the other arts represented, staged and analysed this very same violence, sometimes for reasons of political or religious propaganda, and in other cases to stimulate reflection or even straightforward doubt on everything fixed and stable. Present-day research has convincingly documented the different ways in which English theatre developed themes of vengeance and bloody violence. Other researchers have analysed why and how early modern painting seems to have been obsessed by scenes of violence. However, there has not been similar attention paid to how and why excessive violence haunted French theatre stages at the same moment.2 We have recently re-discovered an important body of about 150 texts in French, representing directly, or by making use of antique and historical references, a hyper-violent world.3 Sometimes these texts were based on political, personal or historical narratives (the so-called ‘histoires’, often drawing on antique or medieval sources but sometimes also on the very recent past), while others found inspiration in travel literature. But all of these French tragedies represent on stage the violence that the spectators actually just lived or that they feared. An important subset of these texts are religious tragedies staging horrible tableaux aimed at attracting the attention of the spectator with a living image of a martyr while at the same time trying to convince this spectator of the beauty and the necessity of the sacrifice by these heroes of faith. These martyr tragedies and the way in which they were represented are at the heart of this chapter.4 This chapter will analyse how these religious tragedies represented suffering through the actors’ performances and by use of striking effects, but also through the texts themselves written and published at that time, the basic hypothesis being that this very same suffering is one of the major aspects of these historical texts as they aim to affect, through every means possible, the passions on stage and in the spectators.

26

Spectacle and martyrdom

This perspective will oblige us to reconsider European theatre history itself, by re-integrating its French part. The chapter will thus analyse the different dramaturgical, scenographic, visual and literary means used to deploy these violent themes, in order to be able to understand through which processes of aesthetic production theatrical effects are deployed and what impact these effects had on spectators. And it will also show that French tragedy, from the 1580s to the 1630s was therefore diverse, contradictory, and of astonishing cruelty, highlighting classical legends and emphasising freedom of the imagination. Marked by opposition between those in favour of dramaturgical and theatrical invention and those who supported the poetic need for simplicity, theatrical practice was clearly ‘heterogeneous’. Therefore, rather than being a moment of some kind of radical change (rupture) in the history of theatre, the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries seem to be a period of continuity marked by the tension between a humanistic kind of tragedy, as represented by Jodelle and, most of all, by Garnier, and a tragedy of action and violence. These two types were not opposed but complementary. The sixteenth century was not a moment of silence or a black hole in the history of theatre; in fact, the end of the sixteenth century and the turn of the seventeenth were, together, a particularly rich period in this history: a period of experimentation brought on by the supposed abandonment of the depiction of Christ in the Mysteries and a constant experimentation with the genre itself, as theatre, a fact and feature of the city, seemed to be revived as a meeting place for its citizens. Moreover, violence, already featured in the stagecraft and discourse of Garnier, seemed renewed and amplified in the tragedies at the turn of the century. We must therefore do away with the idea, long known to be erroneous, that the banning of the mysteries in 1548 led to an almost brutal transition to the modern theatre. Moreover, it bears pointing out that French tragedy has not always been produced by humanistic theatre or based on a supposed respect for Aristotle’s Poetics (which, moreover, became known very late in France, and via Italian theorists), but rather in response to a series of aesthetic and ideological experiments, to a set of phenomena and to a series of formal experimentations, and to numerous political and religious factors, which, themselves, provide subject matter for the tragedies, in particular those based on stories from the Old Testament or tales of martyrdom. Finally, it is time we gave up the idea that an awkward, bloody and ‘irregular’ form of tragedy preceded the adoption of the beautiful, grand and discreet tragedy of the Classical period. The process of violence and its reasons If the representation of horrors was generally prevalent around this time, in painting as much as in writing, theatre was where things became interesting, insofar as questions were constantly posed as to whether theatre could



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tolerate the bloody effect and whether the mechanism of this ‘living art’ could be mobilised to represent suffering bodies in excess; this thought process generally gave way to a stagecraft based on a spiral of vengeance or on an increase of violence, step by step. This kind of theatre focuses, therefore, on a sort of serialisation of portrayable varieties of violence and on a sort of casuistical approach to the subject, aesthetically, morally and ideologically speaking, one which solicited the full intellect of the spectators who gathered to watch. From that moment, based on the dramatic construction of a logical chain of violence and on retaliation and reinforcement at each stage of the process of violent events, reflection could take place. At the same time, the questioning was of an aesthetic nature since one can wonder about the ways of representing the violence characteristic of this chain and the different levels of intensity that it allows: hyperrepresentation of bloody tragedy and/ or legends, or even movement set to music, the use of machines or wall tapestry that show or mask horror. Even so, this kind of theatre fosters reflection of a philosophical, moral, political nature that focuses on the possibilities of stopping the infernal cycle of retribution and humiliation: can one stop the spiral, must it be stopped, how does one stop it, for what reason, etc.? Further, this sort of drama aimed to have an impact on the theatregoers and begged the question, ‘Why show crises, violence and wars in the theatre?’ inciting one to respond through action, doubt and debate. Tension between representations of blood, of excess and of evil – inspired by Seneca, certainly, but also by medieval spectacles, driven by a will to show, on stage, the state of things in the present, a memory of wars and of modern exactions in a not too distant past – and the moral perspective from which these representations are viewed; the performance of actions and vivid, violent images, and the channelling of these poignant images, of their impact and the emotions they provoke; extreme suspicion of the modes of expression that set off human passions; the need to captivate and command the attention of the theatregoers can all be found in European art and theatre in the period directly following the Italian productions. They were also a feature of the Elizabethan theatre, largely influenced by Seneca via Giraldi Cinzio and by the political themes of Italian authors. They are also present in the theatre of the Spanish Golden Age, which adopts the ideas championed by the Italians, particularly their conception of happy-ending tragedies, while at the same time adapting them. They are also to be found in French tragedy at the end of the sixteenth century and beginning of the seventeenth, which, like the English drama of that time, resorted most often to a representation of horrors that Cinzio and Seneca presented in the form of discourse – even if these horrors were sometimes actually staged by the actors. Even during the renaissance of theatre in the years following the wars of religion, when in France it was again possible to assemble without fear of harm, new forms of hyper-representation appear, shocking theatregoers, capturing their attention and inciting them to various kinds of debate and

28

Spectacle and martyrdom

judgements as they gather around the stage-scaffolds, the sites of these horror spectacles. Indeed, in Paris or in Normandy, particularly in Rouen, and in all of northern France, authors, theatregoers and actors cultivated this bloody style of enacting the suffering of the martyrs and thus attempting to persuade and instruct a mixed audience through recourse to violent effects, showing the vilest kinds of offences and fomenting debate around them. By doing so, they fine-tuned certain formulae for the stage, which clearly appealed to the viewing public. Grand performance at Doué-la-Fontaine (1607) This chapter will focus on the early seventeenth century, knowing that the development just described is a slow and steady one. Particular attention will be paid to the dramatic effects that the religious tragedies seek to produce.5 What may seem most noteworthy during this period is the fact that the emotions elicited by the tragedies of the first part of the seventeenth century and, in particular, the biblical and martyr tragedies are meant to appear in response to the depiction of strong, remarkable actions. As such, the shock and consternation of the audience members and of the readers are also decisive elements in the emotional process, both in terms of production and of reception. ‘We are bored with books that teach, give us some that move us’, wrote Agrippa d’Aubigné in his ‘Avis aux lecteurs’ of the Tragiques, and Pierre de Nancel in the Tragédies sacrées (1607)6 defines tragedy as an effective event thanks to the concentration of epic material made intelligible to the senses by means of the body and of colours7. Pierre de Nancel (1570–1641), a native of Tours and a legal practitioner in this region8, was in fact the author of Le théâtre sacré dedicated to Henri IV and containing three plays based on biblical stories (Dina ou le ravissement, Josué ou le sac de Jéricho, Débora ou la délivrance) of which we know where and when they were staged: in the amphitheatre of Doué-la-Fontaine, with many special effects, with an audience probably seated on the steps surrounding the performance area (at least 270°).9 At Doué-la-Fontaine, in 1607 – in this amphitheatre constructed, according to the brochure distributed today by the town, in the fifteenth century to host the staging of plays – great depictions of battles were appreciated as much as long, rhetorically structured soliloquys. The aim was clearly to touch spectators as directly as possible, by means of very specific techniques but also through the representation of actions and characters and, finally, by means of the text itself that takes as its inspiration famous biblical episodes. Indeed not only the stage but also the text itself aimed at opening up the spectator’s imagination through emotions provoked by reading the very same text. The ability to write serial plays on biblical themes with a clear persuasive aim, while at the same time entertaining the public, was considered a genuine skill. Recent research has shown that these plays were



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composed with full understanding of the location where they were to be performed.10 Indeed, in his ‘Récit pour l’entrée des jeux’ inserted at the beginning of his book of tragedies (1607), Nancel declares: Nous représenterons toute la catastrophe, Ores que les auteurs de la meilleure étoffe Semblent le réprouver, comme ne jugeant pas Qu’on doive ensanglanter l’échafaud de trépas. Mais c’est la loi du lieu, du temps même où nous sommes, Nous défrayons et l’œil et l’oreille des hommes.11 We must show the full catastrophe, Though authors of more genteel stuff Seem to reprove it, saying that the boards Should not be bloodied with death. But ’tis the law of the place and the times in which we live; Thus shall we entertain the eyes and ears of men.

Similarly, staging directions, such as ‘here the battle begins’12 and a number of other indications within the text itself, suggest that the staging mechanism represented two camps opposed to one another or rather one camp outside the city and a city surrounded with ramparts made from light elements that the actors and extras could dismantle and overturn during the sacking scenes (these same elements could then be reinstalled for the following performance). In her aforementioned thesis Corine Meyniel provides further details: The site of the Doué amphitheatre is […] circular. The circle, which is closed, has a diameter of about thirty meters and the performance space has only one entrance. The terraces and the acting space are separated by crenellated ramparts. At the back of the acting space there are four little towers; these are practical, as they can be used in performance as defensive walls, particularly in scenes of siege; for soldiers to climb over; for climbing over ladders etc. A tunnel was dug in the basement, containing side paths and several entries and exits, which can serve as wings to the stage. The specificities of the place must have been known to Nancel when he started to write, since in all three rooms, one witnesses a fighting scene which, according to the ‘récit pour l’entrée des jeux’, must have been performed with care.13

As such, it is entirely reasonable to suppose that, in Dina ou le ravissement, Dinah, in act II, actually gets into Sichem’s chariot, which was also able to exit the amphitheatre before the intermission (between acts II and III): the space seems to have been large enough for that and the text confirms the presence of this kind of effect. Moreover, after Dinah comes back on stage, at the beginning of act III, to complain about being raped, the biblical plot begins to develop in act V up to the point where the town is attacked by Dinah’s brothers, Levi and Simeon. This specific moment is introduced by the following stage direction: ‘Pause; sacking of the town’.14 The dramatic scene can then take over the amphitheatre and give rise to more or less

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spectacular effects, depending on the technical and financial means that the city (which commissioned the show) had at its disposal. The description of the pillaging as depicted by Algedon allows us to imagine the major features of the staging apparatus: O piété cruelle ! Ô la sainteté feinte ! O sacré sacrilège ! Ô la feintise sainte ! Allez-vous donc méchants, à vos Dieux immolant, Le sang chaud des humains de leur gorge coulant? Quel ravage ont-ils fait? Quel furieux carnage? Quel hachis détestable? Au sang la ville nage, Tout est jonché de morts, de tronçons tapissé, Pavé de membres froids, de frayeurs hérissé.15 Oh cruel piety ! Oh feigned righteousness ! Oh holy sacrilege! Oh pious falsehood! Will you then evil men sacrifice to your God The warm blood of humans flowing from their throats? What ill deeds have they done? What furious carnage made? What detestable massacre? The city swims in blood, The ground with dead is strewn, with bodies carpeted, Paved with cold corpses, with horrors bristling

In Josué ou le sac de Jéricho, act IV forms the highlight of the show since, as the title of the play indicates, the attack on Jericho is depicted on a circular stage: after a few brief exchanges between Joshua and the high priest, the battle takes place. The text itself suggests a certain organisation: ‘pause; they blow the trumpet, go around seven times, the walls fall, they pillage the city’.16 But as early as acts II and III one can already get a better understanding of the way in which the acting space is used: indeed, the topological and axiological opposition of the two enemy camps functions as the basic spatial principle. The same goes for Débora, whose two first acts involve the opposition of two camps and two places: the unjust and cruel camp of the king of Canaan Iabin and of his lieutenant general Sisara, on the one hand, and the camp led by Deborah, a pious heroine submitted to the will of God. The principle of alternating between one camp and the other evokes the representation of military conflicts or the siege of cities as found in medieval mysteries. It also helps in getting a better understanding of the spatial organisation of the text, as it functioned, as we have shown for Dina and Josué, as a crucial principle of imagination and representation. Conceiving of the world in terms of opposition by imagining two camps, both in the mind and on the stage, triggered and activated the spectator’s intellect, setting in motion his or her critical thinking in such a way that, perhaps, an attempt at resolution may ensue. And this is exactly the principle at work in Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual exercises. We will develop this point and this essential reference at the end of this article, but at this stage we can already suggest that the religious tragedy shows on stage the eternal combat between faith



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and evil, by making use of striking effects and images. The images and scenes affecting the mind and the senses are visible and are, at the same time, implemented in the spectator’s imagination through the dramatic spatial organisation of a battle between the armies of God and of Evil (just as in the spiritual exercise of the two standards).17 The goal of this specific process is to produce ‘motions’ for the spirit and the soul, to shock and chill both and subsequently to stimulate meditation and reflection. But here again, the real highlight of the play is the battle: in act IV of Débora, after a new axiological, rhetorical and spatial opposition has been staged, Deborah, portrayed as a strong woman, harangues her army in the name of God while, following her, Sisara addresses his men without referring to the Creator. These impassioned speeches are then followed by a simple stage direction: ‘Here the battle starts’.18 Quite interestingly, the battle, which was clearly to be staged lavishly and which comes just after elaborate and rhetorically and juridically complicated soliloquies, is not the end point of Nancel’s plays, and at the end of act IV and/or in act V, the dramatisation of political and religious acts resumes after the main spectacle. After the dénouement, after the celebration of the glory of the victors and after the words of regret from the vanquished, the dramaturgy follows the text of the Bible and sets a new action: the epic and religious flow and the continuation of events, then, bring the episode to a triumphant conclusion. Act V of Débora thus adds the gruesome demise of Sisera to the overall tragedy. Overcome with regret for the fate of his camp, Sisera meets Iahel – a new biblical heroine appearing in this tragedy, who pretends to offer him hospitality only to surprise him and kill him. The text is not explicit and there are no stage directions, but the sequence of the scenes suggests that the murder was dramatised on stage. Supposedly the episode showing Iahel hammering a long nail into Sisera’s skull was hidden by the tent, which would of course not stifle the cries. After this sacred murder, Iahel comes out of her tent, proclaims her exploit and joins Deborah for an act of collective thanksgiving, while during the last scene of the play, King Iabin learns of his defeat and stabs himself to death. We thus have, in the same last act, three places being represented (the tent of Iahel close to Deborah’s camp and the king’s palace), a bloody action probably dramatised on stage (entirely or a minima), a series of long, passionate speeches, two exemplary women, one crowded scene, and finally, as often happens, the suicide of the tyrant. Triumphant Jews and strong women can therefore come together in a grand, spectacular outpouring, which could close the play on a pleasant note, except for the fact that alongside this triumph, the punishment of the villain also had to be depicted. These three examples are not isolated cases. At least since Des Masures’s David combattant (1566), scenes of battle episodes were roughly alluded to on stage, then later fully performed in this type of biblical tragedy that made use of the compartmentalised stage design of the Mysteries. In David combattant, the battle eventually turns into a duel (the duel of David and Goliath

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actually represented on the stage), but all the elements of a possible collective battle are nonetheless present: group movements, division of the space into two camps, miming of struggle and murder on stage. And as we have seen in Nancel’s plays, the confrontations depicted are meant to move the audience: they evoke the protective grace of God towards the righteous and reveal how he turns his back on the wicked, whose ostensible presence adds to the pleasure of the spectators. These examples show clearly that one did not see on the stage only the declamation of legends and stories. Indeed, these tragedies – the ones dealing with secular subject matter as well as the ‘holy’, ‘biblical’ or ‘martyr’ tragedies – are not only and maybe not in the first place discursive tragedies, but veritable shows or displays of theatrical violence and conflict From the Bible to the holy martyrs Having made these observations, we can now have a closer look at what we know of the evolution of the mysteries into tragedy by focusing our attention on the question of stage performance and on the performative strategies deployed to depict blood, torture, murders and other cruelties. As a second step we will analyse how the striking effects are instrumentalised in the attempt at conviction and how they cannot be disconnected from the didactic and militant discourses as they appear in the warnings and in the texts themselves. Once we have described the different ways in which violence and suffering were represented (through stage technique, acting but also the text itself), we will be able to get a better grasp on the function of this staged suffering and on the actual emotional impact that both author and practitioners aimed to have on their spectators. Furthermore, we will also observe that the transition from an ecclesiastical practice (with a united, receptive and convinced audience) to a more autonomous aesthetic and theatrical practice (with a heterogeneous audience) had as an important effect that the gatherings were no longer homogenous and, by consequence, that the reception of these plays might also not be. Of course, the spiritual and religious foundations in which the persuasive depiction of biblical and hagiographic scenes seemed to be grounded remained of crucial importance, but the staging of great spectacles also gave rise to a less devout kind of theatrical pleasure and offered, at the same time, a means to re-animate a more immediate memory, that of the pillaging and exactions committed during the wars of religion – particularly in the region of Doué-la-Fontaine, given its history. Certainly, the aim of biblical tragedies is to depict, through drama, the relations between God and man, in this case man at the beginning of the seventeenth century, by taking its subject matter from scenes of the Old Testament. Whereas the New Testament was deemed no longer ‘representable’ on the stage or was less and less representable, the Old Testament became a major reference and a storehouse of exempla and of scenarios through



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which the contemporary world could be viewed. But it also triggered an alternative way of thinking about and representing the violence of this world and more specifically the violence of a terrible past still remembered by many in the audience: that of the wars of religion, for example. And the same goes for tragedies representing martyred saints: indeed, the authors of martyr tragedies from the early seventeenth century emphasise, as did their predecessors in the sixteenth century and perhaps with even more determination, the appeal to violent emotions and bloody scenes through the use of terrible legends, scenes of holy martyrdom, odious murders or awful executions (behind a tapestry or sometimes even on the scaffold of the theatre itself, in full view of the public), as explains Laudun d’Aigaliers, in his Ars poetica of 1598: The elements or subject matter of tragedy are the commandments of kings, battles, murders, the rape of girls and women, treasons, exiles, complaints, weeping, screams, falsehoods and other similar things … The more tragedy is cruel, the more excellent it is. … Horace in his Ars poetica says that one should not always depict the horrors of tragedy in front of an audience: Ne pueros coram populo Medea trucidet, Aut humana palam coquat exta nefarius Atreus. Aut in avem Progne vertatur. Such as the dismemberment of an infant, the cooking of entrails and other like things. The reason is simply that it cannot be done, for how can one dismember a man in the theatre? One can very well claim to go behind the scene and dismember him, then come back and say that he is dismembered, and bring his head or another part of him. Let me say here, in passing, that half of Tragedy is performed behind the theatre,: for this is where the executions which one proposes to do in the theatre are actually done.19

Laudun d’Aigaliers states that the cruel effects capable of provoking violent emotions are to be sought in tragedy but that they are often difficult to produce. Therefore, it is not on the principle that we must agree with Horace but on the possibilities of creation of cruelty; this is why one can and will stage horror in the best way he can: by masking it behind a tapestry if one cannot show it technically, or by showing it directly, if possible, so as not to put the greatest share of horrific depictions always out of the public’s view. The issue in question is the material possibility of the dramatic representation of horror rather than a reflection on what is allowed or not allowed to be shown on stage.20 This is actually one of the salient traits of the theatre of this period: rhetorical discourse and violent action operate side by side within the same staging protocol. Le Martyre de Saint Vincent (1618) If the biblical corpus seems to lend itself to great spectacles, the treasure trove of stories about the lives of ancient and medieval saints and martyrs similarly does so. At the end of the first twenty years of the seventeenth

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century, Le Martyre de Saint Vincent by Jean Boissin de Gaillardon – published in 1618 in an anthology entitled Les Tragédies et Histoires saintes de Jean Boissin de Gallardon – is equally symptomatic of the complementarity between striking staging and rhetorical effects. The volume published in Lyon by the printer Simon Rigaud contains five plays: three tragic pastorals (La Perséenne, La Fatale, Les Urnes vivantes), followed by two sacred tragedies (Le Martyre de Saint Vincent, Le Martyre de Sainte Catherine). While the details of the life of Jean Boissin de Gallardon remain largely unknown, we are certain that he was the author of dramatic pastorals, holy tragedies and that he was a Catholic. Boissin thus perfectly fits into the literary tradition of the first twenty years of the seventeenth century – Pierre Troterel, author of Sainte Agnès, published in 1615 in Rouen, also excelled at both genres. And if we date the ‘revival’ of Christian religious tragedy as beginning in 1632, when Baro published the tragedy of Saint Eustache (Saint Eustatius) and thus proved that first-rate dramatists were taking interest in the genre, the assumption that religious drama did not exist before that year becomes clearly less credible. For both of Boissin’s religious dramas testify, in fact, to continuity in the production of religious dramas. Admittedly, the genre is exploited more in the rest of the country than on the Parisian stage (Boissin’s work was published in Lyon and Troterel’s in Rouen), but only for a short amount of time. As of 1612, Christian themes return to dominance on the Parisian stage via the Christian pastoral and, far from being an isolated case, Boissin’s pious tragedies merely exploit a popular subject, a trend confirmed by the choice of Saint Catherine as subject of one of the tragedies, her martyrdom then being portrayed in a number of important plays throughout the seventeenth century.21 We have little information on the actual staging details of Boissin’s plays, except for the fact that the remark addressed to the ‘audience’ by the Christian rabble at the end of act V of the Martyrdom of Saint Vincent seems to suggest that the play was meant to be staged, despite the logistical difficulties implied by the last torture inflicted on the saint at the end. Vincent is burnt alive on stage before being offered as a feast to wild animals, and Boissin adds this detail to his primary sources, la Légende dorée (XXV),22 which proves that he wanted to accentuate the horror of the martyrdom while at the same time guaranteeing the striking nature of the depiction of torture. A summary of the plot will help the reader to understand the issues at stake here.23 Bishop Valère opens the play by praising the power of the Almighty and declaring to his young deacon named Vincent that the young man should replace him at the head of the bishopric in order to fulfil a divine decree. After some hesitation, Vincent heeds the calling. Then there is a change of setting. Dacian reveals his identity during the traditional tyrant’s soliloquy and declares his belief in the pagan gods, stating that his entire province will be forced to worship these, on the order of the Emperor Diocletian. He then orders his soldiers to arrest Valère and Vincent. When they



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get back to Dacian’s residence, the soldiers announce that the prisoners are in the dungeon. As Vincent and Valère refuse to yield to his decree (to worship pagan gods), the tyrant decides to starve them and reiterates the choice that he gives to all: conversion or death. Act II begins with the reprimand given to the jailor – he had received the order to starve the prisoners. Dacian, disappointed and surprised to see them in good health – he does not know that they are under divine protection – threatens to kill Valère for sedition. As Valère remains silent, Vincent speaks up to support his bishop’s resistance and then violently lambasts the tyrant and pagan beliefs, reaffirming his faith in one God. Dacian spares Valère but orders that Vincent be tortured with sharp-edged shackles. Under torture, Vincent maintains his profession of faith, assuring Dacian that the agony he suffers guarantees him salvation. Dacian sends him to be beaten, but Vincent still finds enough strength to insult the idols and to try to convert his torturer. Dacian opens act III by changing tactics and tries, as a tempting Satan would, to flatter his prisoner, offering him honours, possessions and protection, provided that he worships Dacian’s pagan gods. Vincent’s refusal is intensified by a bold reaffirmation of his beliefs. The tension escalates, and Vincent blasphemes and ridicules the idols, which leads again to his being condemned to torture. Kept on the theatre boards, the saint is beaten with huge sticks, butchered with sharp and burning irons: he commits himself to God, before being sent back to his cell where, as his next punishment, he will be rolled on pointed pipes laid out on the ground. Act IV begins with the apparition of angels who come to succour Vincent, encouraging him to keep Christ in his heart so that he will be able to face the trials to come and promising him salvation if he fully accepts his martyrdom. After Vincent accepts this pious deal, the angels treat his wounds and disappear. The soldiers, seeing a blinding light – which traditionally ushers spectacular event on stage, are filled with dread, fearing Vincent’s escape. Vincent reassures them and asks them to announce to Dacian that he is ready for another round of torture. Dacian hides his fury, tries again to corrupt the saint and, after another failure, condemns him to be burned on hot coals until suffocated by the smell of his own burning flesh; he is then to be offered as food to wild beasts. As the executioners seize him, Vincent pleads for time for one last prayer, committing his soul to God. He then succumbs to his agony, while the angels bear him up. Dacian begins act V with a soliloquy expressing satisfaction until a soldier comes to inform him that the animals were unable to feed on the saint’s corpse, miraculously protected from scavenger birds. Dacian, overcome with terrible fury, orders that the body be covered in weights and thrown into the sea, but the Christian rabble laments and prays to God to succour the Christians in their torture, and he decides to give the dead man a decent burial. Upon simply reading the summary of this play, one understands that this text, declaimed or performed with attention to details, is meant to move the

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spectator on a dramaturgical as well as a technical level: the striking effects add up to the violence expressed through the plot itself. The intrigue is carried out by a number of prototypical characters, all of them incarnating specific passions, which in their turn trigger specific emotions in the spectators: compassion for the martyr and repulsion toward the tyrant, contempt but also a certain ambivalence towards the tormentor etc. The spectator is struck by the sight of horror, but, at the same time, this sight is systematically explained and verbalised so that the details might be, if not seen (since stagecraft does not yet have the means to effect such special effects and must settle for placing the torture behind the tapestry), then at least imagined – put into images – in the minds of the spectators (and readers). The presentation of the instruments of torture, the commentary on the suffering and agony of the body, the verbal and physical participation of the character playing the executioner, everything comes together to cast this play in the mode of macabre, bloody, and indeed cruel tragedies (religious or otherwise) of the early sixteenth century. Furthermore, Boissin’s other religious tragedy, The Martyrdom of Saint Catherine,24 also plays on the paroxysm of violence: when the emperor gives up on changing the saint’s resolve, he resorts to burning her alive, on stage; in act IV, it is on stage that the saint is subjected to torture on the wheel, before a choir of women from Alexandria who describe the situation; and in act V, Catherine is beheaded by the executioner while a choir of women comments and relays the visual spectacle, providing the stage directions of the event, as it were. As in all of the hagiographic tragedies of the period, the life of the saint, in Le Martyre de Saint Vincent, is a factor of unification and intrigue, which allows, moreover, for a linear, episodic organisation. And, as in the Stations of the Cross, this type of stationedrama that follows the itinerary of the major, eponymous character, offers the possibility to show examples of the Christian marvellous (apparitions, glories, miracles) accompanied more or less by an extreme and clearly depicted violence. And even as, in conformity with legend, one sees Valère and Vincent in the dungeon before Vincent is subjected to all the different stages of torment, it is clear that the author’s main point of focus is the martyr’s two major moments of torture: the end of act III and the end of act IV. The Christian miracles that occur at the end of the legend are largely summarised in narrative accounts while the end takes on a religious and political tone, since a Christian rabble can stand up to the tyrant as if Boissin, perhaps a former leaguer, needed to remind the sovereign (to whom he bore allegiance) of the power of the Christian rabble. The other fundamental dramatic element is the figure of the tyrant (Dacian), the natural ‘opponent’ in the plot since he embodies paganism and heresy, but also the finite nature of human, fallible power faced with the embodied image of the saint, symbol of the infinite divine power.25 Dacian reveals his pagan convictions and sets the action in motion by seeking to force the faithful to violate divine law. The repeated refusal of the saint to



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convert to the pagan system set in place can then be perceived as a crisis capable of destabilising the hierarchies of the community over which the tyrant reigns, legitimating the elimination of the disruptor. As such, the conventional chain of events can be set in motion: faced with Vincent’s obstinacy, Dacian tries temptation, corruption, seduction, then threats, before resorting, inevitably, to a demonstration of force by means of an executioner. Those are the habitual, graduated stages of martyr tragedies so that the tyrant himself, by the violence he causes, ushers in the future sainthood of the martyr. Dacian states then that everything must be done so that word of the death of Vincent goes beyond the walls of Valence and spreads to ‘all nations’ (v. 1116), an argument that, evidently, establishes the martyr as a universal saint – and this play as an excellent example of religious tragedy. This is why Boissin can insist on the extreme violence of the tyrant through the text, through description or through the representation of horrors, resorting (through discourse) to an elaborate staging mechanism difficult to achieve: DACIAN Voici ce que tu veux: qu’on lie sa carcasse Dessus un gril de fer, et puis que l’on le fasse Rôtir sur les charbons, mais rôtir tellement Que je voie là ta fin, par un suffoquement ! Et comme tu seras grillé en cette sorte, Je veux faire soûler de ta charogne morte Les loups et les lions ! ainsi tu finiras Ta vie, ton erreur, et chez Minos iras.26 DACIAN This is what you want: that we tie your Carcass above an iron grill, and that we Roast it on coals, but roast it so much That I watch you die, from suffocation! And since you will be burnt in this way, I will make the wolves and lions surfeit From feasting on your dead flesh! Thus will you end your life and your error And to Minos go.

From that point onwards, no detail will be spared, from dripping fat to burning flesh. The spoken text describing instruments of torture and their function on the character’s body, serves then as description, hypotyposis or even possible stage direction, while simultaneously representing the opposition between the pagan emperor and the executioners (whom he encourages), and the saint who fears neither suffering nor the prince’s anger (he stands up to him with his body and his discourse). Vincent commits himself therefore to Christ (‘Oh God almighty! look down upon the terrible fury/ Of this man devoid of pity/ I suffer, my Saviour,

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but for the sake of Your friendship,/ for the glory of Your name and of your divine Power …’)27 and the suffering saint-character becomes, on all accounts, the witness of this Christ-like manifestation that no longer has its place on stage and that confines itself, during this period, to religious ritual. Moreover, it is as a fervent Christian that Vincent directs his prayer to God. He describes the gridiron upon which he will be thrown and transforms his discourse into a veritable confession, appealing for divine mercy and holy recompense (the heavens later open and Vincent’s soul is received into the precious bosom of God, v. 1215). At the same time, Vincent plays out, as martyrs so often do, the scene of the Mount of Olives (God can take the cup of suffering away from him, but does not; instead, He gives courage to Vincent who is happy to proclaim His glory). For, if the violence is imposed by the tyrant, it is also desired by the martyr who, by it, achieves sainthood and who vows to submit himself to be sacrificed, transforming the violence of the torturer into a radical but unique opportunity of salvation: ‘If ye be reproached for the name of Christ, happy are ye; for the spirit of glory and of God resteth upon you’.28 Driven by faith, the participation in the sufferings of Christ and the quest for redemption induce the dialectic of martyrdom so that the violence of suffering can guarantee eternal life in the Kingdom of God. But any tyrant faced with a martyr needs an executioner, who is by necessity an important figure in this type of tragedy and who will act as an assistant to the tyrant (and to the martyr also, objectively speaking, as he ‘assists’ Vincent in achieving the victory of salvation) since he is the right arm of the political and pagan power. His behaviour and that of the victim will shape one another because each helps to determine the other. The theatrical scaffold will then be the place where the torture will be carried out, and this violence, applied by the torturer to the body of the victim, imposed by the authority in place, forms a number of scenes so that the idea of sacrifice structures the main plot and offers to the spectators a visual exposition, exacerbated by the acts of violence. But, as we have seen with the tragedy of Saint Vincent, if the torturer characters know how to torture, describe their instruments, respond to the demands of their prince, use their tools in a gradually intensifying manner, and laugh at the person who suffers (‘He hasn’t had enough since he’s chattering so much!’ or ‘You are being paid for prattling too much’),29 they are also capable – and this is their second function in the hagiographic tragedies – of showing compassion, thus allowing an honest Christian emotion to be demonstrated to the spectator and a dynamic rapport to be woven between them and the martyr. Finally, their presence indicates that the process of the tyrant’s attempt at conversion is beginning and, as the case might be, is continuing until the end of the tragedy. As we have seen, by the exaltation of the martyr and thanks to the intervention of the torturer, the drama accentuates not only the quantity but also the exceptional quality of the devices of torture described and commented on in detail. All of the kinds of torture contained in the legend are therefore



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shown: the torturers present the scaffold, first of all (v. 700), Dacian demands that Vincent be beaten with stinging whips, and then that he be beaten with large and heavy clubs all over his body (v. 708–9), that he be tortured with cutting iron (v. 717), etc. In this way the staging apparatus, real or virtual, becomes charged with material, while, constantly, the tyrant adds other devices: ‘Parsemez le plancher de tuyaux faits en pointe, / Et le roulez dessus’30 (v. 782–3). And as the martyr must not be killed immediately, the drama, which strives to remain true to legend, provides the necessary respite – about 300 verses at the beginning of act IV – before a new round of torment begins. And, as if there needed to be an opponent to the executioner, or rather a figure that complements, as it were, the act of torture, the tragedy includes the intervention of the angel, who strengthens Vincent and treats his wounds so that he might be regenerated in time for another session of torture. At the same time, the angel reveals the power of God on the sublime and transfigured body of the saint.31 But this protection, or this transfiguration of the martyr’s body, turns into an exacerbated violence when one considers that, in regenerating the body, the angel multiplies the potential for torture. Paradoxically, therefore, despite their belonging to different spheres of dramatic representation (macro/microcosm), and the qualitative difference of their intervention (for the one, torture; for the other, restoration), executioner and angel perform the same function. As such, at a functional level, the regeneration of the body leading to the endurance of new sufferings and the violence of the torture meted out by the executioner achieve similar effects. But after the repeated alternation of torture inflicted by the executioner and the care given by the angels that recalls the resurrection of Christ and offers a demonstration of the infinite power of God protecting his lamb, Vincent finally gives up the ghost: the overexposure to the acts of torment and to the objects involved allow for the exaltation of the victim of the ordeal, but also his sacrificial, bodily transmutation and his transfiguration. Here again, we witness the classic deployment of martyr plays: we can but wait for the reversal, i.e., the moment when the executioner, after all the torment he has inflicted, becomes converted. At that moment, the emotions are conveyed or are guided, as it were, by grand, vibrant scenes, set out in such a way that an affective intellection can develop towards them, one capable of eliciting strong emotions. And in the theatres, during the performances, the spectators are presented with vivid (fictional) scenes that move them, dazzle them and incite them to judge, based on the emotions that they themselves contribute to producing. The emotions are thus physically and topologically shared and collectively felt, so much that the actions produced as a result of them oscillate between the several possibilities upon which the drama plays. And these scenes, like the plays, are conceived as machines for producing violent emotions which involve recourse to the affects as much as to judgement and understanding. It is also by the collision of images, both discursive and visual, and by performance, that emotions are produced. But

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as we have seen, the martyrdom of Saint Vincent is complemented here by an appeal to discourse via the rhetorical opposition between the tyrant and the saint: Vincent is also, in legend, the one who, possessing a marvellous gift of rhetoric, replaces the bishop Valère, who suffers from a speech impediment. As such, the struggles between the tyrant and the saint take place according to the rules of rhetoric: by enthusiastic outbursts on the part of Vincent, by utterances in rapid succession (v. 766–72), or by a wonderfully crafted prayer (v. 1163–1230) among other classic effects. The rhetorical treatment of the discourse bolsters the episodic depiction of the torture, and these together create a dual impact on the spectators. Two camps, two standards, one mechanism For the most part, the tragedies, like the narratives, function by gradual progression, by the establishment of episodes and scenes laid out in a linear and chronological way, culminating in a representation of sacrifice and then ending in a glorious, pious repentance. In the preparation phase, we are shown the reasons why the martyr is summoned before the pagans; these scenes give free rein to the martyr’s message of testimony. And at the same time that this testimony for God and in the name of God is being staged, a double trial is being framed: the trial of the martyr that the pagans are about to hold and the trial of holiness that is the mission of the Christian faith to produce. The theatregoers will therefore witness the deployment of a particular case and of a general cause, which will move them (by fear and by compassion) but will also shock and outrage them, to the point where they will experience the terrible journey of the martyr, the implacable, illegitimate justice of paganism and the triumph of faith and sacrifice. This narrative of stations is not new, since it is that of the New Testament and that of the lives of saints and of medieval mysteries, but one will note nonetheless that what gives the drama its defining quality is the attention given to the portrayal of sacrifice rather than to its general staging, an aspect that would seem to imply that all the parts of the performance are of equal importance. Therefore, the scenes prior to the sacrifice appear to be merely preparations, indeed often pretexts or justifications for the climactic scenes of violence and execution. And in the case of Martyre de Saint Vincent, the torture scenes culminate (at the end of acts II and IV, as already discussed) with, in the second scene, a surfeit of violence. All then seems to fix the martyrdom in the moment of suffering so that the shock of the depiction incites the spectators to identify (or identify even more) with this suffering by sharing in it through expressions of fear, indignation, compassion and admiration. Through the collective effusion of the spectators, via the shedding of tears, for example, the dramatic representation is ordered as an ecclesiastic ceremony, close to a ritual. Religious tragedy thus functioned as a true exercise or rather as a spiritual exercise that takes as its starting point the performance that the stage



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proposed to the spectator: when confronted with images and scenes affecting to the mind and the senses, spectators are invited to imagine these images themselves and to meditate upon them. As such, when seeing the tragedy performed, one can imagine the classic (dramatic) spatial organisation of a battle between the armies of God and of Evil (as in the spiritual exercise of the two standards)32 so as to produce ‘motions’ for the spirit and the soul. These active depictions of moving scenes taking place throughout the story draw the faithful towards an encounter with God, to see Him through his imagination, by portraying precisely the emotion of the scene that he himself produces. He is then able to act, to put himself in ‘motion-action’ in the world. And so the devout spectator exerting his imagination, causing it to move and moving himself, by soliciting the senses, sets in motion his mind which ‘moves’: by moving and being moved, then, the spectator can in his turn be moved to action. This action will necessarily be directed towards a direct communication with God, who, in His turn will act upon the open soul of the spectator, a soul made open and available thanks to the exercises, to the manipulation of images and sensitive emotions. According to Ignatius, communication with God is always based on the pleasure of the emotions produced by the imagination of the devout ready to play scenes in their minds (but not only). The pious spectator, as in a sort of fantasised scene, is thus present in the scene that he imagines himself, as if witnessing this scene while at the same time constructing it. He is at once the author of the scene, its inner and outer spectator, while being the one who, by his imagination, gives it life: his imagination takes on life, as does the image of an absent Christ. In the Spiritual exercises, the pious Christian must compose a strong, dynamic, striking and effective image, in which he has his place as subject (he portrays himself as spectator or as actor) and which, in appealing to the senses (the emotions), brings him, moved, both closer to God and towards action in the world. There is then only one step from the personal exercise to the theatrical exercise. And we have noted, particularly in the tragedies of Nancel, how much the principle of spatial and axiological opposition (on stage) between two camps, but also the fighting scenes, constituted a crucial element in the structure of religious dramas of that era. We can therefore observe a model, both formal and ideological, capable of undergirding the system of tragedies, borrowed from the Exercices as well as from the mysteries. Nevertheless, it remains to be seen whether, at the beginning of the seventeenth century – and Nancel’s tragedies are an example of this – it was not the staging mechanism itself which was the most important element of this specific type of early modern theatricality. In other words, did the pleasure one experiences in seeing these opposing worlds and then the spectacular battle between Good and Evil overtake (or not) religious meditation? That seems to be an important point given the turn that religious tragedies take in this period. While the religious interpretation seems to persist and even resist spectacular

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theatricality, spectators take more and more pleasure in seeing the performance itself. From that point, religious interpretation is gradually replaced by a broader one: why not use this system of violence and confrontation, of opposition and binary world views, to open up this very same mode of representation, to meditate upon the idea of structural opposition itself and on its aesthetic and political implications? Indeed, the recipients of this discourse and of this theatrical depiction are not, or are no longer, immersed in an ecclesiastical system, in other words in a unified reception. The representation of the body of Christ by an actor (professional to boot) on an altar other than the church altar (the theatrical ‘scaffold’) in front of an audience more heterogeneous than before will trigger comments or even social discord. As the authorities therefore became increasingly aware of the disruptive potential of this theatrical confusion, they became more and more worried about the mutations this kind of spectacle was going through. Behind the banning of the mysteries (1548 in Paris), there are numerous factors that cannot exclusively be explained by the theoretical and religious condemnation by the Church. The Church criticised the mysteries, not because these spectacles dramatised the gospels but rather because, from time to time, these particular portrayals caused a scandal and because the public got caught up in it. The banning of the mysteries by the local authorities came, therefore, as a reaction to the public disorder and to the habitual abuses that accompany all urban phenomena. However, even though, by parliamentary decree, performances of the mysteries under the aegis of Paris were outlawed from 1548 onwards, their disappearance happened slowly and gradually, for a number of them were still performed in France throughout the entire seventeenth century. The notable evolution is therefore not the outlawing, but the fact that these spectacles now had to be better supervised and were confined to be played in closed surroundings. Not the content itself of these plays changed: it was rather the conception of space itself that was gradually modified, as the places dedicated to theatrical activity also changed. It is then easy to understand that the growing interest in spectacle and rhetorical and poetic virtuosity, on the one hand, and the heterogeneity of the city audiences, on the other, came together to modify religious drama and gave rise to religious tragedy and that this religious tragedy moved away from its first objectives. At the time of the military, political and religious battles, and during the period of relative peace that followed the crowning of Henry IV, these new tragedies took increasingly greater distance from religious sources, combining poetic, rhetorically argued texts with moving images and striking scenes. Less pious pleasures gained in importance at a moment of genuine renewal in theatre history where theatre focused rather on a poetic dramatic discourse. While the religious plays initially overlooked the Gospels and the depiction of Christ, preferring instead the lives of biblical heroes and ancient



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and medieval saints, the scenes chosen from the Old Testament and from the lives of saints (including La Légende dorée) were, due to the circumstances of the times, now clearly selected for their aesthetic, spectacular quality and made to relate, directly or indirectly, to contemporary political situations: the struggles of biblical heroes and heroines against tyrants frequently served as inspiration to comment on contemporary political life. The battles and sacrifices of the martyrs against the power of pagan emperors thus came to be assimilated to the political and religious struggles against the heretics (Protestants and Catholics, depending on the point of view). Clearly the spectacular aesthetics of scenes went hand in hand with the virtuosity of rhetorical moments, of diatribes and of lyricism, and created in that manner a new theatrical language, but it was also to the detriment of the more pious aspects of the drama and of the desire for religious teaching and proselytising. This new approach grew in importance and became a professional norm. And even though the first aim of this theatre remained to establish intellectual and emotional communion with theatregoers seen, first and foremost, as an audience of the faithful, it developed more and more into a closed or confined, lucrative spectacle oriented towards a more heterogeneous audience, making it less apt to convey a single Christian lesson. The spectators of these plays are invited to judge the oppositions and contradictions at work in the plots offered up by the tragedies, and in a similar way, the questions posed by the plays, which continue to be grounded in biblical episodes and the lives of martyrs, but which become more political, stigmatising the role of the evil, misguided tyrant and suggesting the problematic links that sometimes exist between religion and politics, religious tragedy thus becoming more and more political. Conclusion What aim had these spectacles of suffering stages?33 And if the techniques and dramaturgical structure of the stationendrama sought to have an emotional impact on its spectators, what would have been the result? Did the martyr tragedy provoke an efficient activation of the spectator’s conscience, a meditative exercise or an active proselytising? All these questions are difficult to answer, as these performances were enormously varied as were the different ways in which they were received by audiences, cities and concerned communities. However, we do now understand, on the basis of the above examples, that the overtly spectacular representation of passions and emotions – and more specifically passions provoking suffering – is of crucial importance to theatre of that time, whether profane or religious. And this reality has too often been neglected from the point of view of French theatre historiography. Indeed, the spectacular performance of suffering (sometimes actually represented in front of a curtain or behind a curtain, but always – with enormous gusto – evoked by the words themselves) is at the heart of

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this particular practice, its first and sole aim being to touch. However, while it seems to be rather easy to understand the intentions behind the actual writing of these texts (Catholic or Protestant proselytising for example or the invitation for broader reflection or judgement) and it might even be possible to understand the logic behind the spectacular strategies deployed (propaganda or reflection, but also the celebration of a local saint or the festive production of an urban spectacle), it is very difficult to actually understand the impact of these pieces, knowing that the impact of any kind of spiritual exercise of theatrical nature – or rather any kind of theatrical exercise – is always biased, confusing and heterogeneous. Of course, this meeting of individuals, which any theatrical event in the first place must be, will necessarily take the form of ritual allowing more cohesion among the spectators. As a repeated event, as a social, aesthetic and political exercise, and as such also a religious and spiritual exercise taking place in a specific city and at a specific moment in history, theatre will play its crucial role in re-establishing the social, beyond death and massacres, beyond all possible signs of suffering, through a system of meditation provoked by these staged sufferings. These martyr plays re-established social cohesion based on a model that put faith to action through explicit theatricalisation. But if the theatre still seeks to become (or to produce) a political, religious and aesthetic common space capable of thinking through and representing a city that can be, or become, shared by all, it is also the aesthetic and political place for the problematic depiction of martyrdom, of the paroxystic aspect of suffering, of its purpose, and the emotions that emanate from it – with the caveat that these emotions, these experiences intended for the sharing of compassion and admiration of the saints, were not unifying even when they might sometimes be desired or declared to be unifying. Indeed, while this kind of theatre sought to stimulate emotions, which in their turn would be able to unify a public and to trigger Christian compassion and subsequently a renewed adherence to faith, the mere fact of seeing suffering performed might guide the same spectators to other places of joy less virtuous and less Christian. From the moment the community of spectators itself is divided and heterogeneous, the reception and interpretation of the violence represented might vary. We have seen how the performance of Doué-laFontaine and even the text itself of Saint Vincent also provoked a certain pleasure of violence, the pleasure of witnessing the great spectacle of suffering, which in its turn seemed to overrule the biblical histories, from the Old or the New Testament. And, indeed, we can then but conclude that theatre could no longer be (has it ever been?) the space of a ritual of harmony. Given the mechanism used at that time (the scaffold, more than 70 per cent of the spectators standing, no culture of silence or concentration, an interaction between the story being depicted and the spectators themselves, the diverse nature of the audience, etc.), the ritual of homogeneity, which is aligned to



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the desire for peace, is compensated or complemented by a system of theatrical experimentation within the moment of performance. Early modern religious tragedy represented suffering, even in an explicit way, with the sole goal to stimulate the spectators to engage in a truly spiritual exercise, which, in its turn would lead them, upon seeing these sufferings, towards a meditation on faith and on the practice of faith in the world, but at the same time these tragedies provided the spectators with access to other pleasures. The heterogeneity of the public, the inclination towards spectacularisation, the mere pleasure of witnessing suffering and understanding the techniques used to represent these sufferings, all of these phenomena take the spectator beyond the original spiritual exercise transforming it into a genuine theatrical exercise in which the audience not only witnesses a performance but also participates in what one could describe as a ‘séance’. The images at work and the different ways in which theatre represents these images are at the very heart of this practice. From that moment on, the martyrs were no longer exactly what they used to be and one is invited to admire them for different reasons, to the extent that the spiritual exercise becoming theatrical exercise triggers a truly reflective exercise and thus a more open, a more heterogeneous and heterodox interpretation. The representation of suffering gradually escaped its use as a tool for religious didactics, as it opened up other senses and emotions, as for example the pleasure one takes at seeing another’s suffering or the pleasure provoked by the aesthetic quality of that very same representation. Notes 1 A great deal of help in the preparation of this article has been given by Jason Allen (Oxford University, Department of French) for the translation from French and then by Karel Vanhaesebrouck. I would like to express my gratitude to both of them. 2 See earlier studies by Raymond Lebègue, La Tragédie religieuse au XVIe siècle (Paris: Champion, 1929); La Représentation des tragédies au XVIe siècle (Paris: Librairie Nizet, 1951); or Kosta Loukovitch, L’Evolution de la tragédie religieuse en France (Geneva: Droz, 1933); or Charles Mazouer, Le Théâtre français de la Renaissance (Paris: Champion, 2002). 3 On this point, see Christian Biet (ed.), Théâtre de la cruauté et récits sanglants en France (XVIe–XVIIe siècles) (Paris: Laffont, 2006); Christian Biet and MarieMadeleine Fragonard (eds), Tragédies et récits de martyres en France (fin XVIe– début XVIIe siècle) (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2009, 2012); Kerjstin Aukrust and Charlotte Bouteille-Meister (eds), Corps sanglants, souffrants et macabres. Représentations de la violence faite aux corps dans les lettres et les arts visuels en Europe aux XVIe–XVIIe siècles (Actes du Colloque international d’Oslo, 12–14 June 2008) (Paris: Presses Sorbonne nouvelle, 2010); Christian Biet and Marie-Madeleine Fragonard (eds), ‘Théâtre, arts et violence dans l’Europe de la fin du XVIe et du début du XVIIe siècle’, special issue, Littératures classiques, 73 (2010). These publications are the result of collaborative work carried out

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at the University of Paris-Nanterre (Charlotte Bouteille-Meister, Fabien Cavaillé, Sybile Chevallier-Micki, Géraldine Cordin, Aude Dubois-Godefroy, Sara Harvey, Romain Jobez, Tiphaine Karsenti, Corinne Meyniel, Cécile Petit, Johanna Porcu, Paul Tillit, dir. Christian Biet) then, as a result of an ANR (SETH) project with Paris 3 Sorbonne-Nouvelle (Kjerstin Aukrust, Mathilde Bernard, Nicolas Crémona, dir. Marie-Madeleine Fragonard), and finally, thanks to other researchers (Jean-Charles Léon, Michaël Meere Pierre Pasquier, Barbara Selmeci-Castioni, Anne Teulade). 4 As numerous articles have been published on profane tragedies of violence (see note 3), I have chosen to focus my contribution on the genre of religious tragedies, which have received far less attention. 5 Our team (quoted in note 3) has, in fact, conducted a systematic analysis of the process of transformation leading from medieval drama to that of the early seventeenth century. By choosing a few dramaturgical elements and observing their presence or absence in the entire corpus, we have been able to observe the ways in which the models inherited from the Mysteries endure in the French dramatic tradition, but also to note that their evolution was not linear, since the transformation of the Mystery into tragedy is, of course, the result of a long process at work during the entire second half of the sixteenth century which still continued into the beginning of the seventeenth century. I make particular reference in this chapter to the monograph of Corinne Meyniel, De la Cène à la scène: la tragédie biblique en France pendant les guerres de religions (1550–1625) (Paris: Classiques Garnier, forthcoming). The citations in this chapter are to Meyniel’s doctoral thesis of the same title, defended in 2010 at Paris-Nanterre University. 6 Pierre de Nancel, Le Théâtre sacré, Dina ou le ravissement, Josué ou le sac de Jericho, Debora ou la délivrance, Au Roy (Paris: Claude Morel, 1607). 7 Son sujet est fort haut, et ses paroles graves, / Ses concepts rehaussés, magnifiques et braves, / De Princes et de Rois, de guerre et de combat, / De vertu, de conseil, et de choses d’Etat. / Comme une mapemonde en un petit espace / Le vrai, mais non le grand de tout le monde embrasse, / […] / Ainsi la Tragedie en un petit volume, / Etale à nostre vue au pinceau de la plume, / Tout le cours d’une vie, et les faits et les dits / Surannés par le temps des Heros de jadis. 8 In her doctoral thesis (see n. 5) Corinne Meyniel indicates that Nancel may have been a converted leaguer. This is entirely possible if one considers the fact that Henry IV, to whom the work is dedicated, was obliged to move to the region – specifically to Angers – in order to obtain the total surrender of Mercœur in Angers on 20 March 1598. What is known for certain is that in this region the opposition between Protestants and Catholics during the wars of religion was particularly violent. 9 This is reminiscent of other tragedies played, for instance, in the cloisters during the same period, such as Sichem ravisseur ou la circoncision des incirconcis by François Perrin (another tragedy based on Dinah, the daughter of Job and Sichem, performed in the cloister of the cathedral of Autun in 1589). 10 This is true for the Catholic plays, as Corinne Meyniel has shown, and for the Protestant ones, see, even though this book covers dramaturgy and theology much more than staging, Ruth Stawarz-Luginbühl, Un théâtre de l’épreuve. Tragédies huguenotes en marge des guerres de religion en France 1550–1573



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(Geneva: Droz, 2012). See also Biet and Fragonard, Tragédies et récits de martyres en France; Céline Fournial, ‘Viol et ravissement sur la scène française: défi dramaturgique et évolution du théâtre sérieux’, Cornucopia (Cornucopia16. com), Le Verger, 5 (May 2013)  ; Florence De Caigny, Sénèque le Tragique en France. Imitation, traduction, adaptation (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2011); François Lecercle, Laurence Marie and Zoé Schweitzer, ‘Réécritures du crime: l’acte sanglant sur la scène (XVIe–XVIIIe s.)’, Littératures classiques, 67 (spring 2009); Elliott Forsyth, La Tragédie française de Jodelle à Corneille (1553–1640). Le thème de la vengeance (Paris: Champion, 1994). 11 Pierre de Nancel, ‘Récit pour l’entrée des jeux’, first (non-numbered) pages inserted at the beginning of Théâtre sacré (Paris: Claude Morel, 1607). 12 Débora … , in Nancel, Le Théâtre sacré, p. 61. 13 Corinne Meyniel, De la Cène à la scène, p. 336. (‘le site des arènes de Doué est … circulaire ; le cercle, fermé, a un diamètre d’une trentaine de mètres et l’espace de jeu ne dispose que d’une seule entrée. Les gradins et la piste sont séparés par des remparts crénelés, le fond de l’aire scénique comporte quatre petites tours, pratiques pour figurer des murailles, représenter des scènes de siège, faire escalader des soldats, monter des échelles, etc. Un souterrain a été aménagé dans le sous-sol, comprenant des embranchements et plusieurs entrées et sorties, ce qui permet de faire des coulisses. Les spécificités de l’endroit devaient être connues de Nancel lorsqu’il prît la plume, puisque dans les trois pièces, on assiste à une scène de combat qui selon le “récit pour l’entrée des jeux” liminaire, a dû être représentée avec soin.’) 14 Dina … , in Nancel, Le Théâtre sacré, p. 76. 15 Ibid., p. 77. 16 Josué … , in Nancel, Le Théâtre sacré, p. 145 (‘pause ; ils sonnent, tournent par sept fois, les murs tombent, ils mettent tout à sac’). 17 Ignatius of Loyola, Exercices spirituels, 1548, second week, fourth day, § 136 and following: ‘Meditation on two standards, one of Jesus Christ, our sovereign chief and our Saviour; the other of Lucifer, mortal enemy of human nature’. 18 Débora … , in Nancel, Le Théâtre sacré, p. 61 (‘Ici la bataille se donne’). 19 Pierre Laudun d’Aigaliers, L’Art poétique françois, book V, chapter 4, ‘De la forme, nature et définition de la tragédie’ (Paris: Antoine du Brueil, 1598), pp. 281–5. (‘Les choses ou la matière de la tragédie sont les commandements des rois, les batailles, meurtres, violements de filles et de femmes, trahisons, exils, plaintes, pleurs, cris, faussetés et autres matières semblables … . Plus les tragédies sont cruelles, plus elles sont excellentes. … Horace dans son Art poétique dit qu’il ne faut pas toujours représenter les horreurs de la tragédie devant le peuple: Ne pueros coram populo Medea trucidet, Aut humana palam coquat exta nefarius Atreus. Aut in avem Progne vertatur. Comme de faire démembrer un enfant, cuire les entrailles et autres choses. La raison est pource l’on ne le peut pas faire, car comment démembrer un homme sur le Théâtre? l’on pourra bien dire que l’on va le démembrer derrière, et puis venir dire qu’il est démembré, et en apporter la tête ou autre partie. Je dirai ici en passant que la moitié de la Tragédie se joue derrière le Théâtre,: car c’est où se font les exécutions qu’on se propose faire sur le Théâtre’). 20 And in his hagiographic play, Dioclétian, Laudun d’Aigaliers emphasises the fact that this was a dramatisation of one of the bloodiest persecutions of the reigns

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of Diocletian and of Maximian, which is no small statement; see Pierre de Laudun d’Aigaliers, Poësies (Paris: impr. de D. Le Clerc, 1596), pp. 1–60: p. 5. 21 Jean Labardac, Le Théâtre sanglant de Sainte Catherine martyre, 1618; Jean Puget de La Serre, Sainte Catherine, tragédie en prose de M. de La Serre, 1641–43); see also René de Ceriziers, Éloge de Sainte Catherine, vierge et martyre (1661); and Jean-François Sénault, Panégyrique de Sainte Catherine (1655–58). All these texts are edited in Biet and Fragonard, Tragédies et récits de martyre (see n. 3), p. 519 et seq. in the paperback edition of 2012. 22 Jacques de Voragine, La Légende dorée (in French, ed. Alain Boureau (Paris: Gallimard, 2004); in English, The Golden Legend: Reading on the Saints, ed. William Granger Ryan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). 23 See the introduction to Le Martyre de Saint Vincent, in Biet and Fragonard, Tragédies et récits de martyre, p. 455 in the paperback edition of 2012. 24 Concerning this play, see Anne Teulade’s article, ‘Lecture du Martyre de sainte Catherine de Boissin de Gallardon (1618) et de The Virgin Martyr de Dekker et Massinger (1622): Du théâtre hagiographique à l’esthétique baroque’, in Line Cottignies (ed.), Lectures croisées, théâtre, Etudes Epistémè 2 (2002), 198–226. 25 Paul Scott, ‘The Martyr-Figure in French Theatre (1596–1675)’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Durham, 2001), pp. 55–117. This is what the author has already observed when he entitles his second chapter ‘Politicizing the Religious’. 26 V. 1130–7. 27 V. 735–8. (‘Ô Seigneur tout puissant  ! vois la fureur lionne / De cet homme inhumain avide de pitié ! / Je souffre, mon Sauveur, mais pour ton amitié, / Pour soutenir ton los, ta puissance divine …’). 28 ‘Heureux, si vous êtes outragés pour le nom du Christ, car l’Esprit de gloire, l’esprit de Dieu, repose sur vous’ (1 Peter, 1:13–14). 29 ‘Il n’en a pas assez puisque tant il caquette!’ (v. 747), or ‘Tu es récompensé d’avoir trop babillé.’ (V. 1259.) 30 ‘Line the floor with pointed pipes, / And roll him on it’. 31 Sarah Kay, ‘The Sublime Body of the Martyr: Violence in Early Romances Saints’ Lives’, in R. Kaeuper (ed.), Violence in Medieval Society (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2000), pp. 3–21. 32 Again Ignatius of Loyola, Exercices spirituels, 1548, second week, fourth day, § 136 and following: ‘Meditation on two standards, one of Jesus Christ, our sovereign chief and our Saviour; the other of Lucifer, mortal enemy of human nature’. 33 One could consult the work of Antoinette Gimaret, even though she does not take into account theatre. Antoinette Gimaret, Ordinaire et extraordinaire des Croix. Les représentations du corps souffrant (1580–1650) (Paris: Champion, 2011).

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The Massacre of the Innocents: infanticide and solace in the seventeenth-century Low Countries Stijn Bussels and Bram Van Oostveldt

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, many writers, dramatists and visual artists from the Low Countries told the biblical story of the Massacre of the Innocents. The dreadful story of Herod’s slaughter, from which Jesus narrowly escaped, had already been popular for centuries, but in this period it was represented remarkably often in the Dutch Republic, as well as in the Spanish Netherlands. The many representations of one of the cruellest stories from the Western canon fitted well the taste for cruelty and the representation of violence that exerted a powerful influence on literature, the theatre and the visual arts throughout Europe in this period1 and which can be linked to the troubled times. Europe was riven by wars that would become legendary for their cruelty, and the Low Countries were deeply involved in one of the bloodiest of these conflicts: the Eighty Years’ War.2 This chapter will explain how representations of the Massacre of the Innocents functioned as a means to provide solace for all despair by offering a religious framework for doing so. However, it will also show that there is no direct connection between the actual violence suffered and the representation of violence. Most representations of the Massacre have a complex relationship with previous representations of this tale of cruelty and explore the ways in which cruelty can be represented. Moving the beholder deeply is certainly not only a matter of representing actual cruelty as graphically and recognisably as possible; the representations are not isolated from previous representations, but are part of a rich history of texts and images that all in their specific way dealt with violence. Matthew is the only evangelist who mentions the Massacre of the Innocents, albeit concisely. King Herod wants the three magi to tell him precisely where the new King of the Jews has been born in order to kill Him, but the magi manage to escape. Matthew writes (2.16):

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Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently enquired of the wise men.3

What the gospel only mentions, in very general and concise terms, with the use of the verb ‘to slay’, Basil of Seleucia evokes in gruesome detail in an influential sermon from the fifth century.4 Mothers desperately try to hold their child as closely as possible. As the soldiers attempt to get their babies, the mothers offer such powerful resistance that their boys are torn to pieces. Basil describes how some mothers are petrified by the appearance of the glittering swords, while others grasp the soldiers’ swords with their bare hands. When the little boys have eventually all been killed, their mothers gather their limbs and kiss them in utter dismay. Finally they begin to cry out loud. Influenced by Matthew and Basil, the story of the Massacre of the Innocents often functioned as a starting point to contrast the deepest human misery with God’s history of salvation or, in other words, to show how, throughout human history, He intervenes with punishment and mercy to articulate His eternal goodness.5 The mothers of the little boys in Bethlehem seem to have ended up in the most terrible situation due to a tyrant’s perverted exercise of power, but in the end it becomes clear that their sons have been blessed with a heavenly afterlife close to God as Christ’s first martyrs. The story urged Christians to preserve the belief that God will eventually be merciful while it taught them that hope should always overcome fear. In this article we will discuss how, in the late 1630s, the biblical story of the Massacre was incorporated into a 1638 song in Joost van de Vondel’s Gysbrecht van Aemstel; a 1639 tragedy, De Moord der Onnoozelen or The Massacre of the Innocents, by Daniël Mostart; and a painting from c. 1638 by Pieter Paul Rubens. We focus on how these three artists used the Massacre to emphasise the belief in God’s goodness, as well as on how these representations relate to previous representations of this particular biblical story and of violence in more general terms. These representations of the Massacre can all be seen as experiments that wilfully avoid the ‘hyperrealistic’ depiction6 of violence, since they do not directly stage or depict the most gruesome acts of murderous violence in great detail. Each of these three artists developed alternative ways of communicating the biblical slaughter to the beholder; none of them attempts to create an all-embracing illusion of living presence that would totally transform the beholder into an eyewitness. Instead, they experiment with strategies that are able to direct the audience to the representational character of the play or painting while at the same time achieving a powerful emotional impact on that same audience.



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We will relate these experiments to contemporary debates on the representation of violence, which express an increasing displeasure with hyperrealism because it would dumbfound the audience. As it concerned the representation of biblical violence, the Word of God itself had to be the centre of attention, with everything else subordinated to the role of conveying His message explicitly. Thus, the gruesome murders in Bethlehem should not in the first place send shivers down the spine; they should trigger a process of profound reflection that in its turn would bring the beholder closer to God. Although these experiments avoided confronting the audience directly with all the gory details of the scene, the artists did have the intention to move their audience deeply. In other words, avoiding hyperrealism was definitely not aimed at reducing the emotional impact. In our conclusion we will therefore connect our analyses of the three representations of the Massacre with Warburg’s concept of Denkraum. With this notion Warburg describes the way in which images can create space to reflect on what is most terrifying, precisely because the representational aspect of the image prevents its beholder from being completely overwhelmed. While Warburg’s concept has attracted much interest in recent art historical discussions, it has been neglected in theatre history and performance studies. This might come as a surprise as Warburg explicitly pointed out that performances, more than anything else, are capable of creating Denkräume. God moves in a wondrous way Vondel’s Gysbrecht was performed on the opening night of Jacob van Campen’s theatre, on 3 January 1638, a theatrical and an architectural highlight of the Golden Age coinciding on that particular night.7 But Gysbrecht was also a crucial turning point in Dutch historiography, as it evoked a heroic past for the people of Amsterdam. The play relates how, on Christmas Eve, Amsterdam’s neighbours, the Kennemers and the Waterlanders, had captured the city by means of a ruse. Led by Gysbrecht, the citizens stood against them in an exceptionally brave and virtuous way but eventually the eponymous hero was forced to flee. The final monologue became famous. In it, the archangel Raphael reveals to Gysbrecht that his escape will bring about a new and greater Amsterdam, which will rise from the ruins (vv. 1829–31): Although the city is destroyed, do not despair: She will rise from her ashes and dust with greater glory: Since the Lord on high works in a wondrous way.8

The end of Gysbrecht deals with the difficulties people might face in understanding God’s salvation history. Indeed, His plans transcend human reason, but anyone considering the history of Amsterdam from a longer perspective will see that in the end, after all the terrible suffering, God favours the city highly. In this way, Vondel’s Raphael refers explicitly to the new theatre as

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a highlight in the restoration of Amsterdam and to Vondel’s own play as a unique moment of remembrance of heroic acts (vv. 1843–50). The whole play is steeped in the idea that God’s salvation history is wondrous. When, thanks to a heavenly epiphany, the salvation history reveals itself to man, it causes great wonder and admiration, but it is impossible for man to achieve a full understanding of it unaided. Time and time again, Vondel’s personages declare that God’s ways are mysterious, and Vondel uses the Massacre of the Innocents to emphasise this opinion as well. It is sung in the song ‘O Christmas Eve, More Beautiful than the Days’, which soon became a much-loved Christmas carol and which was to remain popular for a very long time.9 The Clarisses sing it at the end of the third act, when it has become clear that the enemy has conquered the city (vv. 903–50). Older songs from the Low Countries also mention Herod,10 but while these songs deal with the Massacre only briefly as part of the larger story of Christ’s birth, Vondel’s nuns focus in great detail on the bloody results of the murderous attack on the little boys of Bethlehem. Their sense of detail equals Basil’s sermon. For example, the nuns sing that one of the mothers can still see her milk at the side of the pale lips of her dead infant; the little tears on his cheeks are polluted with blood; the murdered babies are like flowers broken in the bud (vv. 933–8): Who can describe the sorrow and grieving And can count so many flowers Withered in the bud Before their freshness could unfurl To scent the air for all And drink their first draught of morning?11

In the song, Vondel’s emphasis is on the result of Herod’s cruelty: on the grief and misery of the mothers, as well as on the incomprehensibility of all cruelty. The ferocious acts of the soldiers are not described. By leaving out the specific acts of cruelty, Vondel can rhetorically oppose the consternation of the mothers to God’s salvation. The nuns end their song as follows (vv. 946–50): Your children die as martyrs And they become the seed That grows out of your blood To blossom gloriously in praise of God, And which no cruelty shall destroy.12

Here, the Clarisses accentuate the fact that these boys from Bethlehem became Christ’s first martyrs. Their blood was the seed of His church, which will in its turn not be destroyed by anything or anyone. Their martyrdom serves as inspiration to the nuns to offer their own lives to God. Directly after the song, Vondel shows how the Clarisses refuse to flee before the enemy (vv. 951–77).13 The fifth act recounts the precise result of the nuns’ decision.



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A messenger relates in great detail how the nuns were violently killed (vv. 1406–87), with the rape of the abbess as a dreadful climax. The poor woman faints, but is subsequently battered without any compassion. When she regains consciousness, she calls with all her might on Christ, Mary and Saint Clare for help, finally addressing her own mother. The violator tells her with a smirk that she will die in spite of all these prayers. He kicks her so violently in the stomach and breast that blood spurts from her nose and mouth. Vondel does not restrict himself to the detailed report of this messenger. These lines were probably preceded by the performance of a tableau vivant (after v. 1072) planned by the author himself.14 Unfortunately, we do not know precisely what was shown in the first series of performances, but most Vondel specialists agree that most likely a large group of actors stood in static poses that conveyed the most terrible moments of the murder of the nuns. This would in its turn have been expounded in the report of the messenger, which directly followed the tableau vivant.15 Why sing? What did Vondel hope to convey with the song of the Clarisses? With their song, Vondel stages a process of group bonding while at the same time justifying the nuns’ determination in the rightness of their decision to sacrifice themselves. By singing, rather than merely telling, the biblical story, the idea of a community with the same convictions and ideals is strengthened. It is for this reason that both Protestants and Catholics relied heavily on songs for religious celebrations.16 With one voice, the nuns express their belief that God’s goodness will always prevail in the end. The song puts them into the right state of mind to calmly and resolutely wait for their cruel fate, or rather, a fate that in their eyes is only apparently cruel.17 As for the theatregoers, the song is a crucial moment for them too, as it aims to trigger a dialectical process of reactions in the audience, which will eventually strengthen their faith in God’s goodness. Initially, the audience might have been in sympathy with the nuns. As we have already mentioned, there is a long tradition in which the Massacre is instrumentalised to convince the believers to submit to the will of God.18 Vondel plays with this tradition, and develops the subsequent action of the play in such a way that the theatregoers might begin to doubt this. A more thorough comparison between the fate of the babes of Bethlehem and the conscious choice of the determined nuns causes some confusion. The death of the little boys had a clear purpose; to blind Herod so that Jesus could escape his murderous intentions. As far as the nuns are concerned, it is far less clear what their slaughter will actually bring about, as their sacrifice does not seem to influence the future of Amsterdam in any way. Vondel seems to suggest that the nuns might have embraced too enthusiastically their martyrdom, their anticipation of God’s salvation being too eager and thus egocentric. Nowhere does

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Vondel accord them the status of martyrs, which, of course, is no coincidence at all.19 Through his eponymous hero, Vondel questions the very idea of the true martyrdom of the nuns. After the nuns’ song, Gysbrecht risks his life to reach the convent. Once inside, he is surprised by the fact that the nuns resolutely refuse his help to flee (vv. 1019–26 and 1029–54). He accuses the abbess of committing suicide, saying that she will be responsible for the murder of the nuns and begs her not to make him complicit in this slaughter. The abbess prefers to remain silent in the face of these accusations.20 The only choice remaining to the hero of Amsterdam is to leave the nuns and to defend the entrance to the convent for as long as possible. For a moment, Vondel’s audience might linger on Gysbrecht’s incomprehension and see the nuns as religious extremists, but Vondel does not encourage his audience to hold such an explicit opinion. Gysbrecht proves to be as stubborn as the nuns until the very end of the play. Despite the desperate plea of his wife and the hopelessness of the situation, he decides to persevere in his attempt to defend Amsterdam. Raphael finally has to intervene to get Gysbrecht out of the burning city, although the archangel does not condemn his stubbornness. On the contrary, he praises the hero and reveals that God has great plans for him, for his descendants, and for the city of Amsterdam. As previously discussed, Raphael stresses that it is impossible for man to fathom God’s salvation unaided. Just as the mothers of Bethlehem could not know how blessed their sons actually were, so Gysbrecht, the nuns, and by extension Vondel’s audience, could not know God’s plan for them.21 However, Vondel emphasises that, in the end, God is merciful to those who mean well. Raphael’s reference to the flowering of seventeenth-century Amsterdam echoes the blessed afterlife of the little boys of Bethlehem as sung by the Clarisses. In this way, Vondel tries to offer the theatregoers fresh hope and an answer to all their doubts in these turbulent times, as he unfolds an analogy between God’s salvation subsequent to martyrdom, on the one hand, and the economic resurgence of Amsterdam long after its downfall, on the other. Vondel attempts to sow the seeds of doubt in his audience in order to eventually strengthen their belief in God’s goodness. This strategy is articulated not only through the plot; he also presents a well-ordered series of representations of violence to achieve it. First there is the song, in which the nuns sing explicitly of the results of Herod’s cruelty, which in its turn is followed by the probable tableau vivant. This visual episode would have completely interrupted the dramatic action to illustrate the terrible fate of the nuns to the theatregoers, and finally there is the messenger’s report of their slaughter. So Vondel disaggregates the violence against the nuns; he announces the violence, then he represents the atrocities by relating them, first in a purely visual way, then in words, thus splitting the combination of image and text that more usually characterises theatre performance.



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By using different media – a song, a tableau vivant and a report – Vondel avoids the direct staging of cruelty that he had used in previous plays22 and which would reoccur, for example, in the hyperrealistic Aran and Titus, a successful play by Jan Vos three years after Gysbrecht.23 In Gysbrecht, Vondel represents violence in an explicit but not hyperrealistic way; he does not represent violence by acting it out. Thus Vondel avoids paralysing his audience with horror, but the song, the tableau vivant, and the messenger’s report must nevertheless have had a significant emotional effect on his audience. Thanks to the plot, but certainly also thanks to the explicit representational character of the violence, he was able to align the audience with his reflections on God’s salvation history, thus inviting the audience to think about where religious extremism stops and true faith in God begins. Mostart’s De Moord der Onnoozelen Vondel’s Gysbrecht remained extremely popular for centuries. It would be performed in the Amsterdam theatre almost constantly until 1968, each time at the end of the year.24 However, its success was not immediate: for four years after the premiere run it was not staged again. Even before the premiere, the play had met with resistance from Calvinist preachers. They accused Vondel of planning to propagate Roman Catholicism, as they had heard a rumour that a Roman Catholic mass was to be performed on stage.25 This kind of resistance might have made it difficult to present the play again in the years following the premiere. It is characteristic of the popularity of the Massacre of the Innocents that the play that was to replace Gysbrecht also had the biblical story as its central subject.26 This was Daniël Mostart’s De Moord der Onnoozelen or The Massacre of the Innocents, which premiered in December 1639 in the Amsterdam theatre.27 The Amsterdam city clerk, Mostart was a prominent figure in the literary world of Amsterdam, friends with authors P.C. Hooft and Casparus Barlaeus among others.28 He was also a close colleague of Vondel. For example, in 1635 they had together translated Hugo Grotius’ biblical tragedy Sophompaneas to Jozef in ‘t Hof or Joseph at Court.29 Whereas in his song about the Massacre Vondel makes the victims the focus of attention to accentuate the human misery and elevate it to the level of a divine plan, Mostart’s De Moord der Onnoozelen shows the other side of the coin, focusing on the cruelty of the villains and their failure to see that God will punish all wrong-doers in the end. By taking the theatregoers on an emotional rollercoaster, Vondel urges them to reflect on the uncertain boundary between religious extremism and true faith. Mostart, by contrast, shows the radical consequences of all opposition to God in great detail. In Mostart’s play, Herod entices the mothers and their sons to his palace by means of a ruse. Then a messenger relates how the little boys were slaughtered. This is the beginning of the report, which glides from the past into the

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present tense in order to involve the audience with increasingly intensity (fol. Diiiv–Diiiir): Herod glimmered with gold, and, with stones enfolded, He sat on his high throne, and saw the Mothers standing, Each gazing sadly at the children. Death’s trumpet sounds, the steel and swords All glittering in threat. Here a head falls to the ground. There lays a torso; here falls an arm or leg. There lays a skull, the brain smashed on a stone, Here some intestines, there a shoulder. Yonder a trunk separated from the rest. A foot here. There something less. Here a child is stepped on. There a wound inflicted. Yonder another is dragged from where it stood Snatched so it was ripped in two: A soldier throws this one against a pillar.30 Herodes blonk van goud, en, met gesteente omhangen, Zat in zijn’ hooghen troon, en zagh de Moeders staen, En alle een treurigh oogh op haere spruyten slaen. Flux klinckt de moord trompet, het dreygend stael en zwaerden Die blinken elk om ‘t zeerst. Hier valt een kop ter aerden. Gins leyt een bekkeneel. Hier valt een arm of been Daer leyt een pan met breyn gemortelt aen een steen. Hier een deel ingewands. Daer leyt een schouder. Ginder Een romp geknot van kroost. Een voet hier. Daer wat minder. Hier wordt een kind vertrapt. Daer krijght een wond op wond. Gins wordt een ander uyt de plaetse daer het stond Gesleurt en wegh gerukt, en zoo aen tween gereeten: / Dees tegens een pilaer door een soldaet gesmeeten

Mostart sharply opposes this cruel slaughter, which continues for quite a while in the messenger’s report, with God’s retribution. At the end of the play, Mostart has a soldier relate in detail to Herod and his wife how their little boy’s nurse misled him (fol. Eiiv–Eiiiv). The woman also had a son of her own. The soldier, not being aware of her identity, forced her to show him where she had hidden the two boys. Her son gave away his hiding place – a firmly closed box – by beginning to cry, upon which the soldier threw the box, together with the child, into the fire. Hearing her child scream in pure agony, the mother completely lost her mind. She then revealed the hiding place of the second boy to the soldier. It was only after he had stabbed the boy to death that the nurse revealed it had been Herod’s own son.31 Upon hearing the messenger’s report, Herod’s wife cursed her husband for his cruelty, but even more for his short-sightedness (f° Eiii v°–Eiiii r°). Herod had wanted to preserve the throne for his son, but in doing so, all he had produced was death and destruction. And at that moment she also decides to put an end to her own life. Herod’s marshal eventually intervenes and



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assumes power. And so the cruel tyrant ends up losing everything. A choir of prophets addresses the theatregoers and urges them to learn a lesson from the story. In this effort, the choir uses a surprising metaphor: ‘The spit that he [Herod] has spat, dropped in his own eye’ (f° F r°).32 The play ends with a joyful David eager to welcome the souls of the Holy Innocents into heaven. Hellish ghosts Just as Vondel experimented with divergent media as a way to make a strong impression on the theatregoer while at the same time avoiding the direct, unmediated performance of cruelty, Mostart prefers to accentuate Herod’s unmistakable malice without overtly staging it. Not only does he use a messenger to report the Massacre in its most grisly detail, he also deploys other means to send shivers down the spines of his audience. An interesting example is the devil that appears to Herod in a dream. Mostart does not represent the devil directly, but in the guise of Herod’s murderous brotherin-law from hell. Even in this role-play the devil evokes Herod’s repugnance: ‘I am totally horrified, I break into a cold sweat, my heart stands still with fear, ah!’ (f° Biiii v°).33 With this dream scene, Mostart is pointing out that Herod could have reacted to these feelings of terror by abandoning his murderous plans, but as his initial fear is immediately replaced by his hunger for slaughter, the audience sees how the king is definitely destined for eternal damnation. So the theatregoer witnesses how a complex representation of horror – the appearance of the devil in a dream and in role-play – could have served a good cause had its beholder not been so recalcitrant and learns that being confronted with horror in a mediated way can be beneficial; it can even result in salvation as long as the beholder accords it serious consideration. In this way, Mostart seems to defend theatre itself and the confrontation with the representation of extreme violence: his audience is urged to learn from the atrocities. Moreover, this scene could be an attempt by Mostart to take a clear poetical position in the lively debate on the appropriateness of staging cruelties in representing the Massacre of the Innocents. This debate had been evoked by Daniël Heinsius’s 1632 play, Herodes infanticida,34 a play in Latin that had served as a direct model for De Moord der Onnoozelen, but which Mostart had not followed slavishly, as is exemplified by his adaptation of the dream sequence with the devil in disguise.35 Heinsius had explicitly staged the Furies: they show Herod’s previous victims in a dream, thus re-awakening his lust for murder. In a commentary on his own play, Heinsius legitimises the staging of the Furies by vigorously asserting that they serve to personify malevolence.36 However, in his Discours sur la tragédie de M. Heinsius of 1636, Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac explains why he does not accept this legitimisation.37 For Balzac, the Furies are goddesses called into existence by

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pagans. As a consequence, he argues, the use of this pagan invention in a biblical context is singularly inappropriate. In terms of the central concern of this article, however, it might be interesting to observe that Balzac adds that Heinsius’s play is all the more inappropriate because the Furies are actually staged, and thus brought to life for the theatregoers: We have to admit to Mister Heinsius that the Furies can signify the passions that affect the wicked and the remorse that accompanies their crimes. But, Sir, in tragedies we take into consideration their appearance and not their secret; what they present and not what they signify. We consider them just as poetry adorns them, and not in the mystical sense. This one plays upon the subtlety of grammarians; the other defines the intelligence of the spectator. One is of the theatre scene, the other of the school. The people see the furies, the scholars contemplate the passions. Since those spectacles are made for the people, who want to make every effort to find the dry and vulgar truth, who want to take away the pleasure of seeing strange and admirable things.38

For Heinsius, staging violence in a personification neutralises the overwhelming effect. Balzac sees this performance from a totally different perspective, arguing that the power of putting a real person on stage animates the violence far too strongly, as the theatregoer can no longer recognise the representational aspect of the performance. So it is not enough to say that a personage is an allegory; according to Balzac, this announcement falls short. In the theatre, actors enact characters, and thanks to their lifelike performances the theatregoer sees these personages as a living presence, forgetting that they are in fact representations. Therefore, Guez de Balzac argues that Heinsius should not have staged the Furies. Role-play cannot clearly communicate feelings on the level of personifications; the audience does not experience the Furies as the representation of malevolence because they can do nothing else than see these cruel goddesses in full presence. Even when staging a dream, it is necessary to depict violence in a way that clearly reveals that what is being shown is a representation of violence. The report of a messenger, for example, may evoke cruelty but is at the same time clearly and univocally a representation, which would not be the case for a direct staging of the Furies. Balzac’s critique caused a stir in artistic milieux in both France and the Republic. In both countries, positions were taken for or against Heinsius’s Furies.39 Literary historians see Vondel’s 1663 preface of Faëton as a defence of Heinsius’s staging of the Furies.40 In the preface, Vondel defends the idea that the performance of antique gods does not amount to the re-introduction of paganism. Actors cannot bring ancient figures back to life. However, Vondel does not explicitly argue in favour of portraying extremely violent goddesses on stage. As we have seen, in his Gysbrecht he even avoids bringing violence directly onto the stage, but uses diverse mediators to do so. He does precisely what Balzac would have wanted Heinsius to do: using devices



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2.1  Peter Paul Rubens, Massacre of the Innocents, c. 1610. Oil on panel, 142 × 182 cm. Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario, The Thomson Collection © Art Gallery of Ontario. AGOID.106855.

such as the report of a messenger to avoid the overt staging of terrible characters in their full fury. In his De Moord der Onnoozelen, Mostart too avoids staging terrifying ferocity directly. Probably taking into consideration Balzac’s critique of the Herodes infanticide, he chooses to transform Herod’s Furies into a devil; Balzac himself considered the devil to be a more appropriate agent for arousing Herod’s viciousness, more in line with the biblical context, as it takes the representation of horror out of the context of paganism.41 Moreover, the full horror of the devil is mediated by showing him in the guise of a specific person, namely a close relative of Herod. Mostart explicitly offers role-play as a possible way of getting people back on the right track while at the same time revealing that it does not always work, as in this very specific case: Herod had missed his chance for salvation. Rubens’s Massacre Both Vondel and Mostart demonstrate the importance of the Massacre as a means to illustrate God’s salvation. Both also avoid representing the

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slaughter directly. The extreme violence is mediated; direct confrontation with the horror of infanticide would render the audience insensible with shock, depriving them of the capacity to reflect on the underlying divine message of this brutality. At the same time, violence must be represented in a powerful, emotionally convincing way if it seriously aims to bring the audience closer to God. The heavenly afterlife of the Innocents can be deeply affecting only if the utmost misery of the mothers is experienced intensely by the audience. Only in this way can the belief in God’s salvation, even at what seems to be the worst moment imaginable, be reinforced. To convey the necessary violence without shocking the audience beyond endurance, Vondel and Mostart experiment with a number of diverse means offered by the medium of theatre itself, for example, through the use of the messenger’s report at a crucial moment in the plot. This raises the question whether other visual arts have experimented with different ways of depicting the Massacre, and if so, how. To what extent can we observe the same reluctance to graphically depict the slaughter of babies in other forms of expression, and are there similar experiments that confront the beholders with extreme violence while at the same time avoiding paralysing them with total horror? To answer this question, the work of Peter Paul Rubens, an artist who painted the Massacre twice, might offer a pertinent example. The first painting dates from c. 1610 (Figure 2.1); the second was produced in the same period as the Gysbrecht and De Moord der Onnoozelen, around 1638 (Figure 2.2). Although Rubens occupied a very influential position in the Republic at that time, there is no clear historical evidence that his work had a direct influence on the plays of the two Amsterdam playwrights discussed above.42 However, the two paintings might help us to clarify the way in which a painter such as Rubens would have experimented with his own medium, just as his fellow artists in the theatre did, with the sole aim of making the impact of the biblical story as powerful as possible. A cityscape serves as the background to Rubens’s earlier Massacre. It consists of an ancient ruin and a palazzo that gradually recedes into the distance, creating the illusion of perspective.43 This direct reference to the art of theatre helps the viewer to understand the theatrical and thus constructed nature of the depicted scene rather than suggesting the pure illusion of directly witnessing the Massacre as can be seen in earlier depictions of the Massacre from the Netherlands.44 Indeed, the background seems to evoke Serlio’s influential designs for the scene of a tragedy. Moreover, Rubens brings many figures to the foreground, frontally addressing an imaginary public, and arranges their gestures in an explicit composition, which further avoids total verisimilitude. The figures are closely entangled, with each separate gesture contributing to the general movement towards a theatrical effect that could be describe as a vortex. While Rubens clearly makes use of explicitly theatrical techniques to obliterate total verisimilitude, he also directly involves the viewer in the



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2.2  Peter Paul Rubens, Massacre of the Innocents, c. 1638

terrible event by depicting detailed acts of extreme cruelty. Rubens too seems to emulate the long tradition started by Basil,45 showing us a woman looking in utter despair at a man swinging a little boy high in the air. She seems to be imploring him to spare the child. She spreads her arms towards them, but also appears to be completely paralysed by fear. In contrast, an older woman at the heart of the destructive vortex resists fiercely. She grasps the sword of a grim-faced man, who in his turn attempts with all his weight to thrust the sword as far forward as possible. The blood on the hand of the old woman tells us that the sword has cut deep into her hand. While Rubens represents the aggression and misery in this first version of the Massacre by focusing the attention of his audience on a series of related actions, in the later c. 1638 version, he comes closer to the impact of the Gysbrecht and the De Moord der Onnooselen as he links the aggression and misery of the slaughter to God’s salvation. In the second painting, three angels hover above in a heavenly blue sky. Instead of the palm of martyrdom they hold roses. Here Rubens moves further away from natural verisimilitude. He reveals that the souls of the murdered children will meet a blessed fate while at the same time connecting the misery of the mothers of Bethlehem to the misery of Mary: the rosary directly refers to Her devotion,46 while the angels with roses symbolise the Catholic devotion to Mary.47 Saying 150 Hail Marys together with 15 Lord’s Prayers was believed to result in a heavenly wreath of roses honouring the Mother of Christ. This series of prayers

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had to be accompanied by a remembrance of Her sorrows. It offered believers the solace that even Mary in Her deepest sorrow was not able to fully acknowledge God’s salvation.48 If we continue our comparison between the painting from c. 1638 and the one from c. 1610, we can observe that they share the same deep perspective. However, the later painting seems to have fewer similarities to theatre: the perspective ends in a landscape that seems less reminiscent of Serlio’s designs for the tragedy. Moreover, the composition does not focus on the movement of one single group; three groups are represented in the foreground. In this later version, Rubens also pays attention to the figures at a deeper level, especially the figures on the stairs to the right. The effect produced by these changes in perspective and composition seems to blur the violence of the soldiers and the misery of the mothers as the viewer becomes lost in the chaos. To communicate this disarray as clearly as possible to the viewer, Rubens changes the clothing and physique in the new version of the Massacre. These had previously borne close similarities to, or were even inspired by, Hellenistic and Roman sculpture.49 This influence is still noticeable in the later version, as for instance in the central male figure to the right of the group in the foreground, who resembles the Trojan priest Laocoön from the famous sculpture group in the Vatican. Nevertheless, in the 1638 painting the helmeted soldiers and the women are in seventeenth-century dress. The landscape also bears a close similarity to contemporary Flemish landscape paintings of the time, but it is juxtaposed with antique buildings and ruins. In this way, although Rubens situates the biblical story in an ancient setting, as he had done in his first version of the Massacre, he also brings the story to the time and place of his audience. This combination of antique sculpture, buildings and ruins with seventeenth-century clothing and references to Flemish landscapes and landscape painting must have had an alienating effect on the beholder. As in the first version of the Massacre, in the 1638 painting Rubens shows the Massacre in graphic detail, but he avoids hyperrealism even more than in the first version. The artist does not attempt to give the beholder the total illusion of being an eyewitness to this terrible slaughter, but rather offers the viewer that mental space necessary to reflect upon the message behind the biblical story. Paradoxically, seeing the seventeenth-century clothing in this setting would have touched many viewers, bringing the biblical story closer to their own environment. It is clear that not all art connoisseurs appreciated Rubens’s experiment. In 1675, the second painting of the Massacre became part of the collection of the Duke of Richelieu,50 and once again the most important critical comments came from a French perspective. In the same year during which the painting arrived in Richelieu’s collection, the Lettre d’un amy a un provincial was published.51 This was an intriguing document in which an anonymous



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2.3  In his version of c. 1550, Frans Floris, an important predecessor of Rubens, had already used dramatic perspective to render complete chaos in the far depths of the scene. The painting itself has not survived, but there is still a print of it by Phillips Galle. In Rubens’s time Floris’s painting hung in the Antwerp town hall, where Rubens would undoubtedly have seen it. Phillips Galle, after Frans Floris (I), Massacre of the Innocents, second half sixteenth century. Engraving.

author forcefully rejects Rubens’s decision to dress the tragic mothers of Bethlehem in contemporary dress.52 The author ridicules them as Brussels innkeepers in their Sunday best, considering these women to be so fat that it would be doubtful whether in reality they would have been able to remain on their feet. Rubens would have done far better to show the mothers of Bethlehem in a dress adapted to the time of Christ’s birth and to substitute a Palestinian scene for the Flemish landscape, the author argues. Just like Balzac’s critique on Heinsius’s Herodes infanticide, this French attack on Rubens’s later version of the Massacre pays considerable attention to the rule of vraisemblance. The representation of a biblical story should not be polluted by other narrative traditions (such as the pagan Furies) or by other traditions of imagery (such as seventeenth-century northern landscapes and dress). However, the anonymous author seems to pay far less

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2.4  In contrast with Rubens’s version of the Massacre of c. 1610, the famous version of the Massacre by Cornelis van Haarlem makes elaborate use of depth. Moreover, in contrast with Rubens’s version of c. 1638 where the figures are dressed in the vogue of the time, Van Haarlem shows naked figures and traditional representations of ancient dress. Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem, Massacre of the Innocents, 1590

attention than Balzac to the underlying agitation caused by these violations of the vraisemblance. Rather than emphasising the peculiar experience of the visual presence, he or she ridicules Rubens’s use of references to his own time. Here, we arrive at the heart of the argument, as this critic refuses to believe that transporting the Massacre of the Innocents to the here and now of the beholder can have any beneficial effect. Indeed, the anonymous French author refuses to take into account the fact that this particular story might give solace if situated in a seventeenth-century setting. According to the author, this solace is neutralised or even obscured by the wilfully consistent deviation from Classicist rules.53 The experiments from half a century earlier are no longer appreciated. Denkraum and catharsis As we have seen in our three cases, the representation of the Massacre of the Innocents has inspired a lively debate circling around the same question: to what extent is an artist allowed to experiment with the depiction of



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violence? Moreover, although the cases involve different media, they nonetheless have one thing in common: they all use the Massacre as a vehicle for experimenting with the visualisation of extreme violence. In all of these cases the violence is portrayed in all its brutality, but each case also reveals a different strategy to accentuate the mediating nature of the artwork and thus to come to terms with that violence. As such, they form a complex network in which the sensuous effect of art intersects with a more contemplative mode of spectatorship. This dual mode is also central to Aby Warburg’s concept of Denkraum. This concept, which Warburg first introduced in his early theoretical writings on the effect of art, takes as its starting point the idea that an image can create a space in which the viewer may reflect upon the most terrifying ideas, exactly because of its representational aspect that in its turn protects the beholder from being overwhelmed. As such, Denkraum can be seen as a particular case in which art could be understood as Angstumarbeitung, as the transformation of fear through images or representations. Hence Warburg’s famous dictum ‘Du lebst und tust mir nichts’, followed by the note ‘Wir schauen es an, aber das tut kein Leid’.54 The ambiguity here resides in the fact that this effect is not an automatic realisation of any artwork whatsoever. On the contrary, it is always the result of a process that is never straightforward. Warburg was first and foremost interested in the different ways in which the encounter with the work of art does not necessarily imply contact with the living presence of the artwork, but evolves and becomes bearable only through the awareness of the artwork’s representational status, thus creating a Denkraum or space for reflection. At the same time, however, Denkräume are always very precarious spaces, which can never totally undo the uncanny agencies of representations. Warburg was heavily inspired by Nietzsche and his interest in the Dionysian aspects of ancient tragedy, and he therefore believed that a more self-reflective attitude towards a work of art, whether it be in terms of disinterested beauty or aesthetic distance, can never entirely replace or neutralise a more primitive reaction to representation. Indeed, the onlooker’s reception or decoding is constantly triggered by what Warbug called Pathosformel, such as draperies, facial expressions, attitudes, or gestures – elements that express strong emotions and give us the uncanny feeling that ancient art and its primitive foundations are haunting early modern and modern works of art. Warburg’s work has been of crucial importance for art historical and anthropological scholarship during the last decades. Remarkably enough, however, theatre and performance studies seemed to pay very little attention to his work, until recently.55 Warburg’s notion of Denkraum could be of interest for the analysis of theatre and performance because of its explicit spatial metaphor. Indeed, the idea of Denkraum neatly ties in with the conception of theatre as a space for reflection. Moreover, Denkraum also opens

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2.5  In his Trou-ringh Jacob Cats refers to the Massacre as a clear example of the fact that God tests man and only reveals His mercy after a long period of misery. If we put the engraving in Cats’s book next to the first version of Rubens, we notice similar strategies of persuasion to lead the onlooker into the story, just as in Rubens’s 1610 painting the illustration highlights the action in the foreground. Crispijn van den Queborn after Adriaen Pietersz. van de Venne, Massacre of the Innocents, 1637



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new perspectives for theatre scholars with a historical interest, as it offers a conceptual framework for anyone interested in a more anthropological perspective on the historical spectator. Indeed, Warburg’s notion of Angstumarbeitung provides a helpful perspective to analyse the attitude of this very same spectator towards representation itself. Along that line, the notion of Denkraum fits particularly well with seventeenth-century conceptions of catharsis. In 1611, the Dutch humanist Daniel Heinsius published his De tragica constitutione. This seminal text immediately found important resonance among dramatists, both in the Netherlands and far beyond.56 Heinsius interprets Aristotle’s concept of catharsis by pointing out that tragedy can affect the audience in a profound way without having to confront that same audience directly with violence. Aided by such devices as reports by messengers, theatregoers can experience powerful emotions of pity and fear without losing their capacity to reflect. The more they go to the theatre, Heinsius argues, the more they will learn to control their reactions to the violence represented on the stage, which in turn will help them to get a firmer grip on their reactions to the violence and emotional upheaval lived or witnessed in everyday life. Heinsius explains his view on catharsis by comparing it to the experience of a military doctor. Any layman confronted with battlefield misery would be unable to control his reactions and thus would fail to adequately help the wounded soldiers. An experienced doctor, however, would know what to do: he will do his utmost to help these soldiers without complete panic, as he maintains a degree of professional distance, which enables him to perform all necessary actions (which does not imply that he is not moved by the misery of his patients). According to Heinsius, the doctor needs to be able to create a mental space that in its turn allows him to control his emotions of pity and fear, which, again, does not mean that this space will completely undo these emotions. Similarly, an experienced theatregoer will be moved by the heart-rending violence portrayed on stage, but will also be able to control his fear. This control is possible because the spectator knows that the violence is representational, as it is deployed in a theatrical context. The theatregoer will still be deeply moved by pity for the misfortune of those on stage and by fear that the same misfortune might befall him or his relatives. However, thanks to the underlying awareness of the representational nature of the performance, he will still be able to reflect, and this reflection will help him to cope with the violent world outside the theatre. In Heinsius’s own words, the theatre functions as a ‘school of exercise for our emotions’.57 That school does not aim at completely banning all emotions: feelings of fear will always play an important role, but not completely dumbfound. When connecting the modern concept of Denkraum and the seventeenthcentury explanation of catharsis to the three representations of the Massacre

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of the Innocents discussed here, one can conclude that all of them reveal that the complex use of violence is not restricted to the 1630s. Representational experiments such as these can be connected, not only to Aristotelian poetical thought of the same period, but also to modern anthropological views on the agency of art. The representational character of an artwork is an essential factor in enforcing the artwork’s positive impact, while at the same time violence continues to play a crucial role in this very same mechanism. The combination of the awareness of the representational character and the large impact of the violence re-presented – in its literal meaning of made present once again – may enable viewers to deal with violence and learn from it.

Notes 1 Of the many publications on the representation of violence in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, we refer only to the recent volume: Allie Terry-Fritsch and Erin Felicia Labbi (eds), Beholding Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013) with an elaborate bibliography. For a wonderful overview and discussion of the use of cruelty in early modern theatre, see the introduction of Christian Biet (ed.), Théâtre de la cruauté et récits sanglants en France (XVIe–XVIIe siècle) (Paris: Laffont, 2006). 2 For a broad historical contextualisation, see Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic. Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). 3 The translation comes from the King James version that was completed in 1611: www.kingjamesbibleonline.org. 4 H. Maguire, Art and Eloquence in Byzantium (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 26. 5 For a more elaborate definition of ‘salvation history’, see the introduction to Jörg Frey, Stefan Krauter and Hermann Lichtenberger (eds), Heil und Geschichte. Die Geschichtsbezogenheit des Heils und das Problem der Heilsgeschichte in der biblischen Tradition und in der theologischen Deutung (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009). 6 In ‘Lichamelijkheid en emotie op het vroegmoderne podium. De Martelaar als theatraal effect’, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, 4:126 (2013), 516–29, Karel Vanhaesebrouck appropriated the term ‘hyperrealism’ from discourses on late twentieth-century art to discuss early modern martyr plays. 7 Joost van de Vondel, Gysbrecht van Aemstel, d’Ondergang van zijn stad en zijn ballingschap. Treurspel (Amsterdam: Wilhelm Blaeu, 1637). For a recent, exhaustive bibliography, see Jan Bloemendal, ‘Bibliography of Vondel’s Dramas (1850–2010)’, in Jan Bloemendal and Frans-Willem Korsten (eds), Joost van den Vondel (1587–1679). Dutch Playwright in the Golden Age (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 547–51. 8 ‘Al leit de stad verwoest, en wil daer van niet yzen: / Zy zal met grooter glans uit asch en stof verrijzen: / Want d’opperste beleit zijn zaecken wonderbaer.’ Joost van den Vondel, Gysbrecht van Aemstel, introduction and annotations by Mieke B. Smits-Veldt (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1994). All



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translations from the Gysbrecht are ours. All subsequent quotations are from this edition (verse numbers only are given). 9 ‘O Kersnacht, schooner dan de daegen’. The song has its own Wikipedia entry: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_Kerstnacht,_schoner_dan_de_dagen, accessed 11 January 2017. For its reception history, see Ben Albach, Drie eeuwen ‘Gijsbreght van Aemstel’. Kroniek van de jaarlijksche opvoeringen (Amsterdam: NoordHollandsche uitgeversmaatschappij, 1937). 10 One of the first Dutch songbooks to mention the Massacre is Veelerhande schriftuerlijcke liedekens or Many Biblical Songs (1552). Later, reference to the Massacre can often be found, among others in Matthijs de Castelein’s Diversche Liedekens or Diverse Songs (1574), Hendrik de Coster’s Het oudt Huysken van Bethleem or The Old Little House of Bethlehem (1590) and Marijn de Brauwer’s Schalmeye, inhoudende veel geestelijcke liedekens or Shawm, Containing Many Spiritual Songs (1614). However, other cruelties of Herod were sung about as well. During the Revolt many songs made a comparison between Herod’s actions and the Spanish oppression, including (repeatedly) the Geuzenliedboek or Beggars Songbook (1574). These songbooks can be found on dbnl.org. 11 ‘Wie kan d’ellende en ‘t jammer noemen, / En tellen zoo veel jonge bloemen, / Die doen verwelckten, eerze noch / Haer frisschen bladeren ontloken, / En liefelijck voor yder roken, / En ‘s morgens droncken ‘t eerste zogh?’ 12 ‘Uw kinders sterven martelaeren,/ En eerstelingen van het zaed,/ Dat uit uw bloed begint te groeien./ En heerlijck tot Gods eer zal bloeien,/ En door geen wreedheid en vergaet.’ 13 The nuns do this in support of the old bishop, Gozewijn, who had sought refuge in the convent and felt himself too old to flee further. 14 Ben Albach, ‘Vertoning van de kloostermoorden in “Gysbrecht van Amstel” ’, Literatuur, 4 (1987), 328–35. 15 It was certainly done in that way in the eighteenth-century performances of the Gysbrecht. Anna de Haas, ‘Prinses Mary en haar zoon Willem wonen in de Amsterdamse Schouwburg een voorstelling bij van het spel Beleg en ontset der stads Leyden. Vertoningen in toneelstukken in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw’, in Rob Erenstein (ed.), Een theatergeschiedenis der Nederlanden. Tien eeuwen drama en theatre in Nederland en Vlaanderen (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996), pp. 254–5. 16 Louis Grijp, Het Nederlandse lied in de Gouden Eeuw (Amsterdam: P.J. Meertens-Instituut, 1991). 17 Cf. Lia van Gemert, Tussen de bedrijven door? De functie van de rei in Nederlandstalig toneel 1556–1625 (Deventer: Sub Rosa, 1990), esp. pp. 86–92. 18 The audience could also have called to mind the many martyr plays in which the combination of representing evil cruelty and strong faith was used to bring the theatregoers closer to God. Vanhaesebrouck, ‘Lichamelijkheid en emotie op het vroegmoderne podium’, 561–92. 19 Cf. Johan Koppenol, ‘Nodeloze onrust. Het “roomse karakter” van Vondels Gysbrecht van Aemstel’, Nederlandse Letterkunde, 4 (1999), 313–29: 317–20; and M.B. Smits-Veldt, ‘Vondels Gysbrecht van Aemstel onder de loep. Twee gevallen van tekstinterpretatie’, Spektator, 17 (1987–88), 381–96: 387–93. 20 Only Bishop Gozewijn, who plays a large part in this sacrifice, answers Gysbrecht. He talks about himself only by saying that he is an old man who

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wants to die (vv. 1055–69). Gysbrecht feels powerless against such a strong death wish. 21 In doing so, Vondel was responding to the heavy debates on predestination that scourged the Dutch Republic, certainly the intense conflicts between the Remonstrants and the Counter-Remonstrants. The poet does not choose sides in his Gysbrecht, but deals with all terrifying doubts concerning the divine plan. 22 Most clearly in Vondel’s Hierusalem verwoest or Jerusalem Destroyed of 1620. For the latest analysis of the play and further bibliography, see Jürgen Pieters, ‘New Historicism – Hierusalem verwoest (1620) and the Jewish Question’, in Bloemendal and Korsten (eds), Joost van den Vondel (1587–1679), pp. 201–24. 23 For the latest analysis of the play and further bibliography, see Nina Geerdink, ‘Het vraagstuk van een wraakstuk, Jan Vos’ “Aran en Titus” ’, in Rick Honings, Lotte Jensen and Olga van Marion (eds), Schokkende boeken! (Hilversum: Verloren, 2014), pp. 39–46. 24 Ben Albach, Drie eeuwen “Gijsbreght van Aemstel”. Kroniek van de jaarlijksche opvoeringen (Amsterdam: Noord-Hollandsche uitgeversmaatschappij, 1937), p. 25. 25 For a nuanced discussion of the Roman Catholic character of the Gysbrecht, see Koppenol, ‘Nodeloze onrust’, 313–29. 26 The anonymous sixteenth-century Josep ende Maria or Joseph and Mary from the volume of Trou moet blijcken is to a certain degree a predecessor. With the exception of Joseph’s beginning monologue the play deals entirely with the reaction of Herod to the birth of Jesus. In contrast to Mostart’s attention to the murder, Josep ende Maria focuses on the flight of the three magi. My thanks go to Samuel Mareel and Bart Ramakers for bringing this play to my attention. Moreover, two mystery plays might be of interest to our analyses, Het spel van Herodes or The Play of Herod (1418) and Spel van de drie Coningen or Play of the Three Magi (1498), but unfortunately only references to these plays are preserved and not the plays themselves. W.J.A. Jonckbloet, Geschiedenis der Nederlandse letterkunde. De Middeleeuwen (Groningen: Wolters, 1889), ii, 346. 27 Th. Ag. [Theocritus a Ganda, i.e. Daniël Mostart], Treurspel. De Moord der Onnoozelen (Amsterdam: Dominicus vander Stichel, 1639). For the attribution of De Moord der Onnoozelen to Daniël Mostart, see Pieter Hendrik van Moerkerken, ‘Wie is de schrijver van het treurspel “De moord der onnoozelen”?’, Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde, 13 (1894), 136–43. For its premiere, see Karel Porteman and Mieke B. Smits-Veldt, Een nieuw vaderland voor de muzen (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2008), pp. 381–2. 28 P.C. Blok and P.J. Molhuysen (eds), Nieuw Nederlandsch biografisch woordenboek, 10 vols. (Leiden: A.W. Sijthoff), vol. x, pp. 653–4. Even a letter to Mostart is preserved in which Hooft praises De Moord der Onnooselen as a play that could be put on stage perfectly. H.W. van Tricht (ed.), De briefwisseling van Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft (Culemborg: Tjeenk Willink/Noorduijn, 1979), letter 953, iii, pp. 126–7. 29 In 1657 their joint translation of Horace’s poems would follow. 30 Herodes blonk van goud, en, met gesteente omhangen, / Zat in zijn’ hooghen troon, en zagh de Moeders staen, / En alle een treurigh oogh op haere spruyten slaen. / Flux klinckt de moord trompet, het dreygend stael en zwaerden / Die



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blinken elk om ‘t zeerst. Hier valt een kop ter aerden. / Gins leyt een bekkeneel. Hier valt een arm of been / Daer leyt een pan met breyn gemortelt aen een steen. / Hier een deel ingewands. Daer leyt een schouder. Ginder / Een romp geknot van kroost. Een voet hier. Daer wat minder. / Hier wordt een kind vertrapt. Daer krijght een wond op wond. / Gins wordt een ander uyt de plaetse daer het stond / Gesleurt en wegh gerukt, en zoo aen tween gereeten: / Dees tegens een pilaer door een soldaet gesmeeten. 31 Thus Mostart contributes an elaborate addition to the centuries-old hymn of Peter Abelard that had already mentioned the murder of Herod’s son. The hymn is sung every year for the feast of the Holy Innocents on 28 December. See www. newadvent.org/cathen/07419a.htm, accessed 11 January 2017. 32 ‘Het spogh, dat hy om hooge spoogh,/ Dat valt hem in sijn eygen oogh’. 33 ‘Mijn hair dat rijst te bergh, het zweet dat breekt my uyt,/ Mijn harte sluyt van angst, ach! … Hoe trillen my de beenen?’ 34 Daniël Heinsius, Herodes infanticide, Tragoedia (Leiden: Ex Officina Elzeviriana, 1632). 35 Marijke Spies, Rhetoric, Rhetoricians and Poets. Studies in Renaissance Poetry and Poetics, eds Henk Duits and Ton van Strien (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999), pp. 75–7. 36 Daniel Heinsius, Epistola, qua dissertatinoi D. Balzaci ad Heroden Infanticidam respondetur (Leiden: Ex Officina Elzeviriana, 1636). 37 Jan Bloemendal, ‘Daniel Heinsius’s “Herodes Infanticida” (1632) as a Senecan drama’, in John Hilton and Anna Gosling (eds), Alma parens originalis? The Receptions of Classical Literature and Thought in Africa, Europe, the United States, and Cuba (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 217–36; and Spies, Rhetoric, Rhetoricians and Poets, pp. 74–7. 38 ‘Avoüons à Monsieur Heinsius que les Furies peuvent signifier les passions qui travaillent les meschans, et les remors qui accompagnent les crimes. Mais, Monsieur, dans les Tragedies nous jugeons de leur apparence et non pas de leur secret; de ce qu’elles declarent, et non pas de ce qu’elles signifient. Nous les considerons comme la Poësie les pare, et non pas dans le sens mystique. Celuy-cy exerce la subtilité du Grammairien; Celuy-là borne l’intelligence du Spectateur. L’un est de la Scene, l’autre de l’Eschole. Le Peuple regarde des Furies, et les Doctes devinent des Passions. Or est-il que ces Spectacles estoient pour le Peuple, qui alloit en peine de chercer yne verité seche et vulgaire, qui luy eust osté le plaisir qu’il recevoit à voir des choses estranges et admirables.’ Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac in L. Moreau (ed.), Oeuvres (Paris: Lecoffre, 1854), p. 339. 39 ‘In May 1634, Balzac sent a letter to Huygens with a manuscript version of his Discours sur la tragédie de M. Heinsius, entitulée Herodes Infanticida, 26 pages. In January 1636 Balzac published this Discours in a slightly extended form (156 pages, 8°). In December Heinsius’s response saw the light of day, i.e. Epistola, qua dissertatinoi D. Balzaci ad Heroden Infanticidam respondetur, 264 pages, 8°. In 1642 Jean de Croï, a minister in Bézier, published a voluminous Response à la lettre et au discours de Balsac sur une tragédie de Heins intitulée Herodes infanticida, 189 pages, 8°, defending Heinsius. The next year, Balzac found his great defender in Heinsius’s colleague and fierce enemy, the irascible Claudius Salmasius (Claude Saumaise), who published his Ad Aeg. Menagium Epistola

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super Herode Infanticida Heinsii Tragoedia et Censura Balsacii (Paris, Dupuis, 1643 or 1644, 77 pages, 4°). Finally, in 1646, the polemic ended when Heinsius’s son Nicolaas sent some verses of praise to Balzac.’ Jan Bloemendal, ‘Mythology on the Early Modern Humanists’ and Rhetoricians’ Stage in the Netherlands: The Case of Heinsius’ Herodes infanticida (1632)’, in Carl Van de Velde (ed.), Classical Mythology in the Age of Renaissance and Baroque (Leuven: Peeters, 2009), pp. 333–50, p. 334. 40 E.g. Spies, Rhetoric, Rhetoricians and Poets, p. 76. 41 Balzac in Moreau (ed.), Oeuvres, p. 339. 42 Jürgen Pieters, Tranen van de herinnering. Het gesprek met de doden (Groningen: Historische uitgeverij, 2005), pp. 132–64; Simon Schama, Rembrandt’s Eyes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), esp. Chapters 2, 3 and 4; and Hans Vlieghe, ‘Constantijn Huygens en de Vlaamse schilderkunst van zijn tijd’, De zeventiende eeuw, 3 (1987), 190–207. 43 This painting is thoroughly discussed in David Jaffé, Rubens’s Massacre of the Innocents. The Thomson Collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto: Skylet Publishing, 2009). 44 Ekaterini Kepetzis, ‘Der “Bethlehemitische Kindermord” in der Kunstliteratuur: Vasari, van Mander und die Darstellungen des Rubens’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 69:2 (2006), 169–93: 183–5. 45 Jaffé, Rubens’s Massacre of the Innocents, p. 74. 46 See the Catholic Encyclopedia, lemma ‘rosary’: www.newadvent.org/cathen/ 13184b.htm, accessed 11 January 2017. 47 However, the presence of angels is not restricted to Catholicism alone. The Reformed Protestant Jacobus Revius, for example, gave them a central place in his poem Kinder-moort or Child-Murder from 1630 that emphasises the heavenly reception of the first martyrs. Jacobus Revius, Over-Ysselsche sangen en dichten, ed. W.A.P. Smit (Amsterdam: Uitgeversmaatschappij Holland, 1935), p. 194. 48 For the centuries-old devotional practice of Mary’s sorrows and its effect on the arts, see Susie Speakman Sutch and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, ‘The Seven Sorrows of the Virgin Mary: Devotional Communication and Politics in the Burgundian-Habsburg Low Countries’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 61:2 (2010), 252–78. 49 Jaffé, Rubens’s Massacre of the Innocents, pp. 119–41. 50 Alexis Merle du Bourg, ‘Les Rubens de Duc de Richelieu précisions et réfutations des certaines idées reçues’, Rubens bulletin, 1 (2007), 1.1: www.kmska.be/ export/sites/kmska/content/Documents/Collectie/Rubensbulletin_2007/Rubensbulletin_-_1_1.pdf, accessed 11 January 2017. 51 Fiona Healy, Rubens and the Judgement of Paris. A Question of Choice (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997), pp. 119–22. 52 ‘L’enlèvement de Sabines et le Massacre des Innocens font voir sur le devant de grosses hostellires de Bruxelles revetues de leurs habits de dimanche, si grasses et si replettes que ne se pouvant soustenir sur leurs pieds, il a esté oblige de leurs donner des appuis au lieu d’avoir orné les devants de belles figures d’illustres matrons de l’Antiquit, comme les subjectz le requierent avec leurs habitz et leurs parures magnifiques dans leurs simplicit, sellon l’usage des temps.’ Jacques Thuillier, ‘Doctrines et Querelles Artistiques en France au XVIIe siècle’, Archives de



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l’art français, Documents inédits sur l’art Français du XVIIe siècle, 23 (1968), 183–91. 53 These Classicist rules with the rigorous demand for vraisemblance become more and more dominant in the Netherlands in the 1670s, see Porteman and SmitsVeldt, Een nieuw vaderland voor de muzen, pp. 692–720 (for the Republic) and p. 728 (for the Spanish Netherlands). 54 Caroline van Eck, Art, Agency and Living Presence. From the Animated Image to the Excessive Object (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2015), pp. 175–96. 55 Besides Van Eck’s Art, Agency and Living Presence, see among various other publications the many stimulating contributions in Martin Tremi, Sabine Fach and Pablo Schneider (eds), Warburgs Denkraum. Formen, Motive, Materialien (Munich: Fink, 2014); as well as Christiane Brosius, Kunst als Denkraum. Zum Bildungsbegriff von Aby Warburg (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1997); Georges Didi-Huberman, L’image survivante. Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg (Paris: Minuit, 2002); Christopher D. Johnson, Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg’s Atlas of Images (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012); and Matthew Rampley, The Remembrance of Things Past. On Aby M. Warburg and Walter Benjamin (Wiesbaden: Harrassowiz Verlag, 2000). 56 J.H. Meter, De literaire theorieën van Daniël Heinsius (Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1975), p. 357. 57 Meter, De literaire theorieën van Daniël Heinsius, p. 361.

3

To travel to suffer: towards a reverse anthropology of the early modern colonial body Karel Vanhaesebrouck

In Les Portuguais infortunés, an intriguing play by Nicolas Chrétien des Croix from 1608, a group of Portuguese land on the African coast after a shipwreck.1 A European crew end up on the African continent as a party of helpless tourists and find no hospitality. They immediately start negotiating with the local population, but their commercial cunning, turning everything into merchandise, does not appear to work. On the contrary, the locals turn out to be even craftier. For this cultural miscalculation the shipwrecked Portuguese will be punished severely and painfully, even deep into their physical integrity. Little is known about the Norman poet, translator and playwright Nicolas Chrétien des Croix. In 1608 he published a second play, Amon et Thamar, this time with a biblical motive and incest as a central theme. With Les Portuguais infortunés he seeks alliance with the popular theme of the shipwreck, which permeates Western cultural history from the shipwreck paintings by Bonaventura Peeters de Oude (1614–52) and Le Radeau de la Méduse (1818–19) by Géricault to James Cameron’s film Titanic (1991).2 The route the Portuguese followed was the so-called Carreira da Índia, discovered by Vasco da Gama (1469–1524), who was the first to sail around the African continent and thus arrive in India. At the beginning of the sixteenth century this route had an almost mythical status as the longest sea voyage possible: it took eighteen months to travel from Portugal to India. Des Croix based his play on historical facts: the heavily laden ship Saint-Jacques put out to sea in India in February 1552 under the command of Sépulvède. Around 11 May the ship was hit by a heavy storm just before the Cape of Good Hope. On 8 June 1552 the party washed ashore at the spot that is now Port Edward. Underwater expeditions later found a naval gun and Chinese porcelain. The shipwreck itself was not so fascinating as the fact that a group of Europeans ended up in a totally unknown territory.



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In Les Portugais infortunés Des Croix describes a group of Lusitanians (Lusitania was the name of the Roman province that more or less overlaps present-day Portugal) who are returning from India under the command of Sose Sépulvède and wash up on the African continent. When they try to go by the Cape of Good Hope they are shipwrecked and land in Natal, virgin territory to them. In the second act Pontife, a local inhabitant (the author uses the word cafre)3 promises to ask his king for help. But Sérif, the king’s counsellor, emphasises that white people are not to be trusted, as they tried before to submit native peoples and turn them into slaves. Meanwhile the Portuguese try to sympathise with the cafres, in vain, as these take to their heels for fear of the Europeans’ pale skin. In the third act Mocondoz, the black king, refuses to help the whites. Trying to mollify him, Sose sends his wife Eléonor to the black queen Mélinde. Mélinde, as the fourth act shows, is not indifferent to the miserable fate of the Portuguese crew and Sose’s family. She vainly tries to induce her husband to sympathy. With his confidant, Sérif, the king, decides that the Portuguese should prove their good intentions by handing in their weapons. Once they do so they will be easy prey. The final act is a fascinating and gruesome tableau in which Sose and his retinue are undressed and flee naked into the wilderness, where some of them will die of hunger and thirst. Eléonor’s and her children’s sufferings are stretched to the utmost limit by the author: buried in sand on the beach they wail and die, first the children and then the mother. Sose himself is torn to pieces by wild animals. Only André Vasco, the captain of the ship, and Pantaléon Sala manage to escape. With Les Portuguais infortunés Des Croix directly appeals to his early modern spectator as a voyeur: the spectator is not only invited to pity the shipwrecked but also to enjoy the idea that he is not in that situation and at the same time to be surprised about the spectacular adventures and surroundings the Portuguese end up in (thus Des Croix perfectly links up with seventeenth-century views of theatre in which amusement and learning go hand in hand). But he does more than just capitalise on the spectator’s appetite for exoticism. This chapter will analyse how Les Portuguais infortunés pays special attention to the ritual suffering of the Portuguese to show how this play not only explains the cultural phantasm of the ‘wild’ (le sauvage) but also criticises it. It will show that this play puts the colonial relationship between Portugal and the African continent in a complex and nuanced perspective and at the same time, via Portugal, comments on the colonial exploits of the French. In this the suffering body of the Portuguese (the characters keep on repeating how much they suffer) functions as a theatrical canvas onto which cultural fantasies are projected but also problematised. The chapter will refer to recent research material about early modern French theatrical culture and travel literature from that period, but at the same time will try to embed this play in an early modern cultural reference framework, not only by linking it to specific contextual elements (the so-called Valladodid

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discussion, the early colonial ambitions of France, etc.), but also by showing that this play can contribute to a better understanding of a transcontinental imagination that could be described as ‘baroque’. First this chapter will explain how the play questions categories such as ‘exotic’ and ‘not exotic’; and next show how the author literally reverses the colonial relationship and therefore also the accompanying theatrical view. Finally it will show in what way Les Portuguais infortunés fits in a broader cultural framework in which man tries to find a place for himself in an everexpanding world. Following the performance artist and post-colonial activist Guillermo Gómez-Peña one could read Les Portuguais infortunés as a form of reverse anthropology which problematises the hegemonic cultural imagination that establishes itself as the norm and thus automatically sees the ‘other’ as an aberration from that norm. At the same time the play also provides insight into a baroque culture of spectacle that is taking shape at that moment, a trans-global imaginary world in which the specific meeting that the play sketches cannot be dissociated from a broader story of cultural contaminations between Europe, Africa and South America, with the imperialistic slave trade as central axis. In this Nicolas Chrétien des Croix focuses on the suffering body of the Portuguese, who will die of hunger and deprivation, naked, like wild, hunted animals, with no culture left. Imagining the exotic in early modern Europe In Les Portuguais infortunés Des Croix stages the fear and despair of a tourist, stranded in an exotic country where he finds a population that does not speak his language and refuses to help him.4 In each act he simultaneously emphasises the mutual lack of understanding (the Portuguese, in particular, are not interested at all in the local population) and thus the ethnocentric perspective on the African continent. The central question for the then early modern public (also found in, for instance, Le More cruel) is the question of alterity. What is the status of the other? How exotic, civilised or uncivilised is he? And how does this alterity relate to the universality of the Christian faith? Do we have the right to impose our faith on others or are these others just savages, without king, creed or commandment? In other words, Nicolas Chrétien des Croix focuses on a number of problems that determine the postcolonial debate, even today. In early modernity two views on theatre were invariably opposed. The first considered the theatrical illusion – mentally carrying a spectator off to another time and space – as potentially dangerous, as a form of delusion and therefore loss of control. A more positive view sees that same theatrical illusion not only as something pleasant, but also as something positive for the development of the spectator. In both instances the theatre is considered to be a sort of trip, a relocation to a literally extra-ordinary place, a ‘machine à voyager’.5 Via this travel machine the spectator is not only



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able to relish a vast exotic display, from the harems in the Middle East and the zombies in the volcanic mountains of Peru6 to the imperial grandeur of China, he also gets the opportunity to give sense to the violence of his own surroundings, via the bodies of the personages. In this connection Guy Spielmann indicates an interesting parallel between theatrical history and the development of cartography. Just as the theatre does, a map also explicitly addresses the imaginative world and the expectations of the spectator, rather than just describing a concrete, geographical reality: ‘maps and atlases transcend the geographic dimension to allow the reader to transport himself out of his own familiar context’.7 Topographical data can be supplemented with phantasmic representations of inhabitants, animals and local clichés. As Spielmann puts it, theatre and cartography thrived on the same form of speculation: Spectacle and cartography shared the fundamental necessity to visualise a precise reality (places, people), without having at hand all details that would allow for a trustworthy representation, while at the same time using words that invite the reader to evoke his own mental images.8

The spectator or the reader is not looking for realistic representations of other places, but for a possible representation, which does not have to imitate an exact reality, but does answer the cultural pattern of expectations. In its turn this pattern is fed by other representations of that same ‘other’ continent. In other words, the exotic imagination is fundamentally performative or reality forming. Whoever wants to better understand the performative functioning of Les Portuguais infortunés (how this text encroaches on the imagination of the spectator, and, reversely, how the spectator’s expectations determine this impact) needs to have an idea of the place of the African continent in the European imagination. As the French also knew, Portugal was the gateway to Europe for Africans. The first Africans, caught or bought by slave traders, arrived in Portugal around 1440, as for instance Zurara describes in Chronique du Guinée (1444). Between the middle of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth century between 700 and 900 captured Africans were sold in Portugal every year. By the middle of the sixteenth century about 10 per cent of the population of Lisbon was black. In the seventeenth century Portugal counted more than 100,000 black inhabitants.9 From the very beginning of the discovery of the new world10 people of colour were brought to the European continent as specimens. Thus, in 1505, the French got to see their first Indian: Essomericq from Brazil. At the same time the collections of curiosities fostered the passion for the wild, the unknown, the far-away. From the seventeenth century onwards especially a true frenzy for everything strange reigned: ‘people collected about everything they considered to be curious, exotic, anormal or monstrous’.11 Even the fictitious unicorns became all the rage. Along with the Homo monstrosus

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(dwarfs, giants, microcephalics) and the Homo ferus (a human being on four feet) representations of or objects related to the Homo Africanus were popular. People collected anything that deviated from the norm in order to further confirm their own normality with every specimen. The idea of savageness was thus directly linked to the context of the freak show, in which the other is reduced to his spectacular alterity, at once being denied any identity. In the European public space Africans were presented time and again with the same exchangeable costumes and stereotypical accessories.12 The ‘other’ functions as a projection screen for one’s own fears and obsessions and, at the same time, enables one to confirm one’s own identity as homogeneous. Africans and American Indians are then often included in one and the same phantasmic space: whoever is non-Western is classified as exotic, no exceptions made. Therefore, in early modern Europe the cultural imagination concerning alterity is, to a great extent, a transcontinental fact. A good example of that historical, ‘global’ exoticism can be found in the procession of Tupinambas, in Rouen in 1550, in the hometown of the author of Les Portuguais infortunés: ‘fifty Tupinambas coming from Brazil as well as fifty sailors, who just coming back from the new world, impersonate the Amerindians wandering around in a landscape reconstructed in honour of Henri II’.13 The theatricalisation of an imagined exotic identity is central. Public events such as this procession constituted the foundation of theatrical dramaturgy in the future world and colonial expositions.14 Travel stories and scientific essays are translated and circulate all over Europe along with various stereotypical representations and thus support a homogeneous formation of the image of the ‘other’. At first sight the travel story of Les Portuguais infortunés also seems to address this exotic tradition. The author has his Portuguese characters land on an exotic, inhospitable continent that terrifies and at the same time fascinates. As far as exotic places were concerned the seventeenth-century French spectator steered a middle course between prejudice and genuine curiosity. His view of the inhabitants of the African continent is characterised, according to Sylvia Requemora-Gros, by a ‘strange dialectic between humanisation and animalisation’.15 In Furetière’s Dictionnaire universel we find two meanings for ‘autre’ (other). The ‘barbare’, first of all, is different: ‘He is a stranger who comes from a remote country, who is rude and cruel and who cherishes mores different from our own’.16 In his definition Furetière also addresses the evident association of distance, savageness and cruelty. Whatever lives outside European culture can only entail an absence of culture and therefore be pure nature: unpredictable, dangerous and violent. Apart from ‘barbare’ the ‘other’ is also ‘estrange’ (foreign): ‘who comes from a country far away, and who was born under another dominion’17 but also, ‘what is surprising, rare, extraordinary’.18 In other words: geographical and cultural distance always go hand in hand. This widespread anthropological view of the other is, to a large extent, based on what is described as ‘climatic determinism’,



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a scientific theory which starts from, just as for instance Jean Bodin did in his Théâtre de la nature universelle (1597), a structural link between climate and man.19 In this relationship between ‘own’ and ‘other’ the European stays out of the picture: how the ‘other’ views the European is recorded only via indirect evidence, from a story-telling traveller. Sometimes this ‘other’ is also subject to a far-reaching romanticising vision, with the non-European assigned qualities the European would lack. Here too the other is denied his own identity. Thus he functions as the projection screen for the malaise of the Western European. After a first reading therefore, Les Portuguais infortunés seems to fit in perfectly with the then fashion of theatrical and literary exotica, addressing the curiosity of the spectator and his fascination with far-away, unknown territories where the modern European confronts the exotic ‘other’, thereupon to triumph and to ‘present’ that same ‘other’ with civilisation. A colonial reversal Les Portuguais infortunés uses this exotic imagination and wilfully addresses the culturally and historically determined expectations of its spectators, but the prologue already shows that Des Croix’s view of colonial relations is layered, less univocal. Two voices elaborately expand on two possible views in the prologue: respectively the Génie or the Demon of the Cape of Good Hope and the archangel Raphael, protector of travellers. The first one has ‘la clef de l’Orient’ and is determined to take revenge on anyone violating the integrity of the African continent. Des Croix allows the first one plenty of time (well over 160 verses) to lambast the European colonial hunger. He brings charges against how the Europeans entice the natives with sundry modern nick-nacks in order to subjugate them. This impressive courage, this war-like address Fills me with joy but also worries me I am happy to see how thousands of vessels Charged with men float upon my seas Of which my black inhabitants will receive Mirrors, clocks and axes in exchange for their cows But I am strongly displeased by their subjection Ce courage si haut, cette guèrrière adresse D’un côté m’éjouit, d’autre par m’intéresse; Je suis content de voir mille et mille vaisseaux Chargé d’hommes divers flotter dessus mes eaux Dont mes habitants noirs en échange de vaches Reçoivent des miroirs, des cloches et des haches, Mais je me déplais fort de la subjection20

He explicitly accuses them of greed. Indeed: there is no need at all to export goods, since their own country is rich enough. And the relationship is reversed

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immediately: the Africans are not the ‘barbarians’, but the Europeans. They lack any form of humanity. What are they looking for? Is their own country Not rich enough with fruit to prepare their meal? Are they hungry? Or does their enterprise Thrive on foolish lust only? Barbarians, they are! Deprived of humanity They ravage our countries with impiety. Que vont-ils recherchant? Leur pays n’est-il pas Riche d’assez de fruits pour leur donner repas? Sont-ils pressés de faim? Ou si leur entreprise Se conduit seulement de folle convoitise? Les barbares qu’ils sont! Privés d’humanité, Ravagent nos pays par leur impiété.21

And that way they destabilise the social order like a dangerous virus: O foolish ambition, what damage do you cause! With the excuse of your search for whatever kind of metal You attenuate the honor of legitimate princes With pestilential discords you contaminate our provinces You spoil the natural mildness of humans By making them gulp a poison in disguise That destabilises and confuses the world, Removed by your skills from its candor. Ô folle ambition que tu causes de maux! Sous couleur de chercher je nes ais quels métaux Tu rends faible l’honneur des légitimes princes De pestilents discords tu remplis leurs provinces, Tu changes des humains le naturel bénin Et leur fais avaler un déguisé venin Qui brouille, qui confond pêle-mêle le monde, Détourné par tes arts de sa franchise ronde.22

As early as his prologue Des Croix clearly shows that European imperialism has negative consequences for the native population, and he questions the legitimacy of this invasive policy which subjugates and uproots communities under the guise of civilisation. By explicitly confronting, already in the prologue, this perspective with the voice of the archangel (who subsequently defends the mercantile imperialism of the Portuguese) the author shows, from the very beginning, that various views on the same reality are possible. At the same time he also interpellates the spectator, who at the end of the tragedy will have to take a position, as a sort of judge. Who is the real culprit? Are the Africans to blame because they left the Portuguese to fend for themselves or did the Portuguese call down their misfortune upon themselves because of their blind greed?



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Thus the author of Les Portuguais infortunés offers an intelligent criticism of colonial imperialism. Moreover, in a refined way this tragedy links up with the historical debate about colonisation by bringing up two opposed views: the typically Christian logic of conquest where a faith brings culture and civilisation to a primitive society whose members, without this civilisation, risk remaining the captives of their Hobbesian natural condition versus the defence of the autonomy of the native peoples, starting from the fact that all people on earth are God’s children and therefore have the right to lead their own lives. These two views are juxtaposed by Des Croix in his play, including quite clearly and didactically in the prologue. Therefore one could also read Les Portuguais infortunés as a contribution to the debate about the legitimacy of colonial violence that has been going on since the so-called Valladolid discussion (1550–53).23 The debate concerned the treatment of the native population of South America and involved two contrasting points of view: Chiapas Bartolome de las Casas24 put forward that the American Indians were free by definition as they were part of divine nature, whereas Ginés de Sepulveda (so Chrétien des Croix did not just accidentally choose the name of Sose Sépulvède) uses the same Catholic theology and natural laws to legitimise colonial violence: it is indeed the task of the colonisers to fight, Bible in hand, heathen practices such as ritual sacrifices, cannibalism and other ‘counter-natural’ phenomena.25 Nicolas Chrétien des Croix consciously complicates this dichotomy: the African, native population appears to have its own monarchy, its own culture and social order. They turn out to be not only as Machiavellian as the Portuguese, but at least just as crafty, particularly the men. Thus Des Croix knowingly confuses his spectator: in his tragedy black as well as white are bad and good. Or to put it this way: the native population turns out to be just as violent, sinful and unreliable as the Christian conquerors themselves. In an ingenious game of cultural counter-identification the author holds up a mirror to his European spectators, reflecting them in the mores of the African population. Simultaneously Les Portuguais infortunés formulates a stinging criticism of the imperialistic hubris of the Portuguese. Their actions are driven by a naive but real feeling of moral and cultural superiority. They hope to tempt the African exotics with a few modern trinkets: ‘We have our spoons, our cases, our bells and watches that we will keep secret / until the moment when upon seeing these they are willing to exchange them / for something that would solace our hunger’ (Nous avons nos cuillers, nos étuis, nos sonnettes, et nos montres encor que nos tiendrons scecrètes / jusqu’à tant qu’ayons vu s’ils les voudront changer / en choses qui la faim nous puisse soulager).26 Precisely this inflated ego, thinking that everything is up for sale, would reduce the Portuguese to their naked natural condition, devoid of all their external signs of self-imagined superiority (clothing in the first place) and make them ashamed of their own naked condition, just like Adam and

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Eve. When Eléonor, the white queen, is undressed she cries out, calling the Africans Laestrygonians:27 You diabolical race! Scum of Pluto, excrement of the earth! Have us endure the cruellest torment Kill me, rather than setting my skin naked. […] Is it not enough to take our goods from us Without, Lestrigons, depriving us of our clothes Ha diabolique race! Engeance de Pluton, de la terre excrément! Faites-nous endurer le plus cruel tourment, Et me tuez plutôt que rendre ma chaire nue; […] Ne vous suffit-il pas notre bien emporter Sans encor, Lestrigons, nos habits nous ôter?28

The colonisers are the sinners, as the play seems to tell us, who overvalue themselves and as a virus contaminate and violate the pure, uncorrupted nature of the ‘other’ (also see the above mentioned prologue of the Génie). They are sinners because they try to dominate their equals (also children of God). Therefore they are made to suffer nakedly and to die, reduced to the same status as the people they tried to colonise. Thus at the end of the play André Vasco, the Portuguese captain, can only announce that Sépulvède and his family are dead: […] Sépulvède is dead And, even though we tried hard, we were not able to find His body to bury it. A wild animal Has just devoured him, over there, in this small hedgerow Where he had retreated in complete despair After having buried his wife and his son […] Sépulvède est mort, Et nous n’avons pu trouver avec tout notre effort Son corps pour l’enterrer. Une bête sauvage Le vient de dévorer en ce petit bocage Où il était allé comme désespéré, Après avoir sa femme et son fils enterré.29

This immediately makes clear whose side Des Croix is on in the Vallododid dispute. Modern Western man – represented here by Sépulvède – is punished for his hubris: his unbridled urge for expansion and the acquisition of knowledge – the libido sciendi – will reach a saturation point and reduce him to his premodern natural condition.30 At the same time the tragedy gives a warning, following Chiapas Bartolome de las Casas: that the black African is also a human being, created and moulded by God, who therefore has to be treated in the same way as Europeans.31 The play frankly questions the



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legitimacy of colonial violence and the conquest and oppression of so-called ‘primitive’ peoples. And this debate, as we have shown, is pointedly opened in the prologue. The author not only overturns the balance of power in Les Portuguais infortunés. Des Croix plays an ingenious game of shifting the point of view and thus also the position of the spectator himself (who watches whom?). Already during the first intercultural meeting there seems to be a misunderstanding: Pontife, the right-hand man of the black king, thinks the white people are painted: Your clothing, your voice and your skin too Reveal for sure that you are not from here. Moreover, this whiteness, if it’s not artificial, Is a certain indication of your remote countries. Come a bit closer so that I can see whether or not the water Can wash it off your skin. Vos habits, votre voix et votre poil aussi Sont assurés témoins que vous n’êtes d’ici. Outre, cette blancheur, s’elle n’est d’artifice, De vos pays lointains est un certain indice. Approchez-vous un peu que je voie si l’eau La pourrait effacer de dessus votre peau.32

Pontife considers a white skin to be a deviation from the norm and that norm is black. Once more the author plays off two possible interpretations of the same reality, one against the other, as immediately afterwards Pantaléon asks Pontife where his black skin comes from: But do you know the origins of your black skin? Is it the burning heat of the sun Which dries out the skin, gives it its burnt appearance Or is it the dryness of the sunburnt land Or is it the seed, and the over-cooked blood That cause your flesh to shine that black. Mais savez-vous d’où vient votre noire couleur? Est-ce point du soleil la brûlante chaleur, Qui desséchant la peau, la rend comme brulée, Ou bien l’aridité de la terre hâlée Ou bien que la sémence, et le sang trop cuit Cause que votre chair si noirement reluit?33

Another good example of this game is the breast scene in which Mélinde and Eléonor, the black and white queen respectively, compare their breasts, as two young girls curious about each other’s body: Mélinde: White women have small breasts Let me touch them to see if you have them In this country we have long ones

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But yours we find them to be even more beautiful I would like to see them. Eléonor: Excuse me, Madam If I would do so in public, I would be accused of baseness Just as in different climates the mores are different Skin color can vary too; Equally each one is of different height What pleases one individual, discontents the other. Mélinde: Les femmes blanches ont petites les mamelles Que je tâte pour voir si vous les avez telles En ce pays ici longues nous les avons Mais les vôtres encore plus belles nous trouvons. Je les voudrais bien voir. Eléonor: Excusez-moi, Madame, Si ce n’est en secret, j’en aqcuerrais du blâme Comme en divers climats diverses sont les moeurs, Tout de même les teints variés de couleurs ; chacun est en pareil de grandeur différente, De ce qui plaît à l’un, l’autre ne se contente.34

The author turns colonial curiosity around: the white queen becomes the object of the exotic, surprised gaze of her African equal. The black queen looks at her Portuguese colleague as a bizarre, exotic animal. The black queen examines her white equal with the same look a white spectator casts on the black body: intrigued, curious, but also slightly alarmed. Thus Des Croix makes the white spectator (who cannot help identifying with the white people in the play) literally experience how it feels to become an exotic object. The white queen becomes an object of the animalisation process that is normally the native population’s destiny. And so we get a reversal of the colonial libido sciendi. This funny, somewhat coquettish scene (because in this case the two women are really curious) subtly announces the physical violence that will conclude the play. And the author will also continue his reversal at this level: the Europeans become the slaves of the Africans and perforce suffer the violence that is normally the privilege of the coloniser to inflict. Thus Nicolas Chrétien des Croix not only inverts the colonial view, but also the imperialistic violence, producing ‘a synthesis of the anti-slavery and anti-colonial discourses that were very innovative for that epoch’.35 The author severely criticises colonial violence, which does not respect the sovereign integrity of the African principalities and thus the universal natural law (Montaigne). That is why the black people in Les Portuguais infortunés are not savages at all. On the contrary, they are proud to be black, they are sophisticated, they know their way in the world and their surroundings and they are in a superior position, and they are well aware of that.



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Therefore, they are the opposite of ‘savage’ and the mirror image of the Westerner. With his tragedy Des Croix stingingly criticised the colonial imperialism of Europe, almost three centuries before Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902). At the same time the author also sharply criticises the machismo among colonisers: only the women, European and African, are really interested in one another and capable of emotional involvement. But the European women too will be punished along with their men for the lack of emotional intelligence. Finally the play relentlessly reveals the moral selfoverestimation of the European Catholics who are not able to apply their own ethical framework when meeting the ‘other’. Therefore Les Portuguais infortunés remains, even today, worth reading and a most relevant attack on the superior thinking and self-overestimation at the heart of Western European (early) modernity. At the same time the play reads like a parable of present-day economic imperialism where everything seems to be for sale. Precisely this reckless mercantile culture36 will become the white people’s nightmare: the Portuguese, without weapons, clothes and other symbols of civilisation, are cast back to their natural condition in all its naked violence. Thus Les Portuguais infortunés ends with an improbable tableau: the queen, buried in the sand (she is ashamed of her nakedness), dies in front of her husband after she saw both her children die of hunger. And the Portuguese learn – whether they like it or not – that their own imperialistic greed is at the root of this natural condition in which man, without any external signs of civilisation, is reduced to a naked and pure physicality, and that violence lurks underneath the varnish of every civilisation. In death the Portuguese will understand (or the author makes us understand) that precisely this violence takes man back to his abysmal nakedness.37 And even if, unlike many other French tragedies at the time,38 Les Portuguais infortunés does not put any explicit torture or martyr scenes on stage, this play directly focuses on the suffering body and its deprivations. Even more so: the suffering body functions as a central symbol that represents the consequences of colonial violence. Moreover, Les Portuguais infortunés develops a specific perspective on that suffering body, which is here the body of the coloniser (and not of the ‘other’). Thus Des Croix makes the symbolic suffering of European civilisation central, as it is punished twice in this play: first with a shipwreck and subsequently with the misfortune that the group will suffer on the African continent. His trick here is an ingenious reversal of the Western view of the ‘other’. Indeed, this view appears to be wrong. Precisely because the Portuguese are not able to see the civilisation of the local inhabitants, let alone to understand it, they will be robbed of everything they associate with their own civilisation, weapons, clothes, dignity. The play thus ends with a painful reversal: the white people end up in their own fantasy, as naked ‘wild’ creatures in inhospitable nature, precisely because the Africans want them to

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experience personally their (erroneous) view of the ‘other’. To put it this way: the Portuguese will perish because they are not able to understand that the Africans resemble them more than they can imagine. Thus Des Croix problematises the view by which the ‘other’ is construed and ingeniously turns around the logic of identification: the spectator cannot identify himself with the white conqueror, but is forced by the author to feel affinity for the shrewd but also morally superior African (who turns out to be more than just absence of culture). And what the spectator is confronted with is a helplessly floundering European bereft of all culture. Towards a transcontinental perspective Les Portugais infortunés does not only criticise the colonial ambitions of the Portuguese. It is no coincidence that, in the prologue, the archangel refers to the colonial ambitions of France: The French, sons of Mars, their courage unbeaten They too have defied his [Neptune’s] proud rage Planting their fleurs de lis from their Indian stay To the place where Phoebus [Apollo] in the evening snatches away from them the day Les Français, fils de Mars, d’un invaincu courage Ont aussi défié son orgueilleuse rage, Plantant leurs fleurs de lis depuis l’indois séjour Jusqu’où Phébus le soir leur dérobe le jour.39

The publication of the play coincides with the foundation of Québec and the first French outpost in Canada by Samuel de Chaplain in 1608 (in an earlier expedition in 1603 he had sailed down the St Lawrence River).40 Nicolas Chrétien des Croix therefore also criticises the beginning of the French colonisation and, to say the very least, formulates an exhortation to do things differently, not like the Spaniards and the Portuguese, and to develop a more humane form of imperialism. Moreover, Les Portugais infortunés develops a broader transcontinental perspective on the history of the colonial exploits of the European powers. France as well as Portugal was active in Brazil, which was supplied with slaves from Africa. The reflections upon the ethics of colonial imperialism are therefore linked to a broader, transcontinental perspective. Nicolas Chrétien des Croix’s tragedy appeals to this early modern, globalised imagination, which does not only travel to Africa, but also to South America. On 22 April 1515 a Portuguese expedition under the command of Pedro Alvares Cabral, en route to East India, landed instead on the Brazilian coast somewhere south of Bahia. This expedition fits within the reckless expansion plans of a relatively small country (at that moment Portugal had about 100,000 inhabitants).41 Soon slaves would be imported from the African



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continent. In the sixteenth century ‘only’ 20,000, while in the seventeenth century more than half a million slaves were imported.42 Pretty soon also the travel stories would nourish the exotic imagination on the European continent, characterised by a typical ‘dualism of innocence and bestial barbarism’43 and cranked up by lust and masculinity. From the beginning of the sixteenth century the French were also active on the Brazilian coasts and started competing with the Portuguese. In 1557 André Thevet published Les singularités de la France antarctique,44 the first elaborate, illustrated survey of Brazil, and a little later, in 1578, French readers made the acquaintance of the Protestant Jean de Léry’s Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil, containing, among other things, a detailed description of cannibalism.45 De Léry ascribes this phenomenon to the devil, but also to the Catholic influence in the New World (were not Catholics also cannibals or ‘theophagans’ who drank and ate the blood and body of Christ?) De Léry’s colourful travel report would have an important influence on Montaigne, among others, more precisely on his Essais des cannibales (1580).46 Montaigne himself had never been to Brazil and based his work on second-hand information. For Montaigne Brazil was a phantasmic projection screen that enabled him, via an exotic idealisation, to formulate his criticism of the inequality in French society, emphasising that the cannibalism described by De Léry would be nothing compared to the atrocities of the religious wars. With Montaigne the myth of the ‘bon sauvage’, uncorrupted by the mores of Western culture, is born. Thus the Brazilian Indians became ‘utopian figures of innocence and equality in the European conscience’.47 This idealised image was always in tension with the myth of the diabolic wild people that was obstinately maintained by, for instance, the Calvinistic missionaries who highlighted cannibalism. Even if Les Portuguais infortunés was set on the African continent, these new, to a large extent imaginary spaces, from Québec to Bahia, still determined the expectations of the European spectator/reader of this play. Together they defined a broader cultural framework in which the exotic was shaped time and again within the same fraught relationship, stretched between diabolic violence and romanticised untaintedness. A third imaginary space that helps to define Les Portuguais infortunés (apart from Canada and South America) is, of course, Africa itself. The principality that is not specified and is situated by the author somewhere in Natal seems to refer to the Congo Kingdom48 (even if there is no clear historical proof for this, neither in the text itself, nor in the rare peripheral sources relating to the life and work of Nicolas Chrétien des Croix). This mythic kingdom that coincides geographically with parts of Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Congo-Brazzaville was discovered in 1482 by the Portuguese explorer Diogo Cão, who found the estuary of the Congo River in that year. The Portuguese found a well-established kingdom with a rich culture and a fully-fledged state structure, and they realised that, with these Africans, a colonial annexation is not the most evident option.

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The two kingdoms formed an alliance that should have benefited both. Pretty soon the local elite was converted to Christianity (their king was baptised in 1491) and Congolese noblemen resided in Portugal. Congo would supply Portugal with slaves, while the Portuguese would provide mercenaries for the Congolese army. In the course of the sixteenth century this relationship would become more and more unequal and half a million Congolese would be shipped as slaves. The largest group of slaves in Brazil were therefore of Congolese-Angolan origin with their roots in the oldest Bantu culture.49 Thus the Congo Kingdom played a central part in the transcontinental exchange between Africa, South America and the European continent, and it was the base of a far-reaching cultural hybridisation. The imaginary kingdom where the Portuguese under the command of Sose Sépulvède find themselves strongly reminds us of the Congo Kingdom. These Portuguese, however, are not able to understand that this African primitive people has an independent, sovereign state structure and does not flinch from using the same Machiavellian tactics and the same (male) violence as the colonisers do. In other words, the Portuguese see themselves reflected in the African monarchs. In his play Des Croix emphasised the violent but calculated technocratic cruelty of the Africans, who refuse to enter into negotiations with the Portuguese, and thus he explicitly showed the colonial violence of those same Portuguese, but also of the French. Thus Des Croix reverses the logic of the spiral of violence: he lets the Europeans suffer, desolate and lost on that phantasmatic continent, which is not only linked to the European imagining of Africa but at the same time evokes the colonial exploits of the French in Canada and addresses the fascination of the Europeans for the South American continent. The belief in the technocratic ingenuity of the Europeans must make way for cultural, even existential doubts. Therefore the violence in Les Portuguais infortunés is not just a gratuitous spectacle (which it also was, of course). The central theme is neither the rhetoric of conquest nor the carnivalesque fascination for the monstrous and the exotic. Via the suffering body of the Portuguese, who do not stop referring to their deplorable physical condition and their hunger, pain and suffering, Des Croix problematises colonial relations. The sophisticated, transcontinental reflection Nicolas Chrétien des Croix creates in his tragedy perfectly fits in with the baroque culture which, via a theatrical experience in which reality and fiction continuously mingle, tried to represent the fundamental instability of the early modern world view. Colonialism not only confronts the European with the ‘other’; it also causes the boundaries of one’s own cultural imagination to keep expanding. Moreover, this mental expansion was nurtured by the Reformation and the Counter Reformation, with the early modern believer being forced, willy-nilly, to think about good and evil, against a background of ever louder religious violence. This expanding world view, in which man is an ever-shrinking particle, is characterised by a far-reaching métissage or blending, and thus



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an evolution towards ‘hybrid modes of seeing and thinking about the world’.50 Fixed categories need to be reconsidered or recalibrated as the world seems to be in a state of permanent change. The wilful confusion that is typically baroque thus gets a general, transcontinental status – it is a way of ‘beingin-the world’, as Edouard Glissant writes in Poetics of Relation: The generalization of baroque métissage was all that needed to become naturalized. From then on what it expressed in the world was the proliferating contact of diversified natures. It grasped, or rather gave-on-and-with, this movement of the world. No longer a reaction, it was the outcome of every aesthetic, or every philosophy. Consequently, it asserted not just an art or a style but went beyond this to produce a being-in-the-world.51

In Les Portuguais infortunés the Portuguese, and thus by extension the Europeans, get lost in their own colonial phantasy, an unknown wasteland the contours of which are not known or understood. The theatrical space of that unknown African continent functions as a perfect metaphor for the baroque, existential doubt caused by the confrontation with the ‘other’. And this confrontation is always violent, not because the ‘other’ is monstrous, but precisely because the Portuguese are not able to see the human being in the ‘other’. Therefore Les Portuguais infortunés is also a distinctly baroque tragedy, not because of stylistic excess or the many settings, but because of the pleasure and the desire to go on an exploratory expedition, beyond the boundaries of fixed frameworks of thought: ‘[b]aroque art was a reaction against the rationalist pretense of penetrating the mysteries of the known with one uniform and conclusive move’.52 And even if the baroque has universal ambitions (that is why it is also a privileged instrument of the Counter Reformation), the approach still remains anti-uniformising: people know and realise that different readings of the same reality are possible. The baroque wants to show the fragmentation and the many facets of the early modern world view.53 In contrast to a simplified unified way of thinking the baroque world view engrafts itself onto an ever wider expanding field of knowledge that is fundamentally uncontrollable. In other words, the uncontrollable becomes an integral part of every form of knowledge acquisition. The baroque is the art of expansion, not only colonial but also mental. Precisely with this expanding world and the growing number of transcontinental connections this world view, in which knowledge and reality keep fluctuating and are therefore never definitive, is generalised. The baroque reveals the chaos that is inherent in reality, while classicism obscures it with an imposed order. The essence of the baroque is in the fragmentation, even on the level of the representation modus: it is ‘a state of mind and a style characterized by dispersion’, of fanning out.54 As a project of the Counter Reformation the baroque always focused on South America,55 but Les Portuguais infortunés provides a historiographical

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framework of thought in which Africa becomes the missing link to understanding global culture and the exotic imagination of the seventeenth century. And in this imagination the suffering body is central. Therefore Les Portuguais infortunés is a baroque play through and through, not because of excess, but precisely because the contours of the dominant world view (even world order) are questioned, using the body as a central focal point. All aspects of exotic fantasy (the prejudices, the feeling of superiority, etc.) are dealt with but are reversed by the author: the African continent with all of its underlying layers (the slave trade, the link with South America, the French colonisation in Canada) appears to be anything but a utopian space, rather a hell of physical suffering. Via this ingenious reversal Des Croix assigns the suffering to the coloniser, who is punished for his recklessness. The French spectator/reader cannot but sympathise with that suffering and at the same time keep a distance from the overconfidence of the Portuguese. Conclusion Les Portuguais infortunés is a very contemporary theatrical text, which invites a post-colonial re-reading, but at the same time this play links up with a specific historical and national context. The emotions roused by the suffering bodies of the Portuguese are, in other words, determined contextually. Des Croix ingeniously uses Africa as the theatrical setting for an intercultural encounter, and the performance becomes a geographical as well as a mental voyage. Des Croix plays a complicated game with cultural relations and colonial perspectives. He sharply questions the all too unilateral cultural dichotomy between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’. Les Portuguais infortunés presents a reversal of the classic explorer’s story and thus anticipates the post-colonial re-interpretations of the imaginary constructions concerning the cultural ‘other’. The American-Mexican performance artist and post-colonial activist Guillermo Gómez-Peña describes this colonial reversal as a form of ‘reverse anthropology’,56 which intends, via performances, to show how phantasms about race and identity nurture our cultural fears and desires and therefore also our obsession with ‘everything exotic’. He does so by subverting dominant representations in his performances and critical writings, by reversing the direction of the ethnographical gaze. The colonised person becomes the observer, the subject, and the coloniser becomes the object of that view and also of the critical analysis. In that way he tries to indicate the contingent status of our historical, political and cultural realities. And thus the power relations are reversed: ‘In our performance world, Spanish is the lingua franca, Mexicans are the dominant culture and Americans are exotic, nomadic minorities’.57 With that GómezPeña uses theatre as a sort of ‘agent provocateur’ to question the fixed codes relating to gender, race and sexual orientation and, in one and the same move, to ridicule cultural globalisation and colonialism. With his work he



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wants to ‘de-colonise’ the colonised. The coloniser himself becomes the object of the colonial view, with all the violence, but also all the ludicrous misunderstandings that this view brings about (see the breast scene). That is precisely why Les Portuguais infortunés is also an experiment in ‘reverse anthropology’ in which the former research objects study their former researchers, with barely concealed enjoyment. At the same time this play reads as a prefiguration of our tourism/ migration crisis, even if the intensity of the mental voyage presented by the theatre in early modern times is difficult to grasp from the perspective of our globalised tourist industry. The white ‘explorer’ no longer lands on an exotic continent, bereft of every cultural reference. At the beginning of the twentyfirst century European tourists on pristine pearly white beaches are startled at the harsh, violent reality of the globalisation process: rickety small boats full of exhausted Africans looking for a better life, away from their continent, which is sinking into structural poverty. And that poverty has its roots in early modern colonial expansion. That is precisely why Les Portuguais infortunés invites us today to re-think transcontinental relations and via that exercise to question our own position. Because the baroque state of confusion has never been more contemporary. Or, as Glissant puts it: ‘baroque has undergone a naturalization, not just as art and style but as a way of living the unity/diversity of the world’.58

Notes 1 Nicolas Chrétien des Croix, ‘Les Portugais infortunés (1608)’, in Christian Biet (ed.), Théâtre de la cruauté et récits sanglants en France (XVI–XVIIe siècle) (Paris: Laffont, 2006), pp. 711–804. 2 Also see the recent exhibition Vlaanderen en de Zee. Van Pieter Bruegel de Oude tot de fluwelen Brueghel, about the imagination of the sea in Flemish early modern painting (Musée de Flandre, Kassel, 2015) and the publication Vlaanderen en de Zee. Van Pieter Bruegel de Oude tot de fluwelen Brueghel (Ghent: Snoecks Publishers, 2015). 3 Kaffir from Arab ‘kafir’ was originally used by Arab slave traders to indicate nonbelievers, non-Muslims, and soon became a synonym for the black peoples living on the African East and South West coasts. Later the Europeans (and first of all the Portuguese) adopted the term. 4 Ruud Welten, Onder vreemden. De ander in de reisliteratuur (Zoetermeer: Klement, 2014). 5 Guy Spielmann, ‘Voyages dans un fauteuil: mises en scène de l’exotisme au théâtre et sur les cartes géographiques (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles)’, in Loïc P. Guyon and Sylvie Requemora-Gros (eds), Voyage et théâtre (Paris: Presses de l’université Paris-Sorbonne, 2011), pp. 42–52, p. 42. 6 See for example, Pierre-Corneille Blessebois, Le zombie du grand Pérou ou la contesse de Cocagne (1697), http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1050610, accessed 23 January 2017.

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7 Spielmann, ‘Voyages dans un fauteuil’, p. 42 (‘Cartes et atlas transcendaient la dimension géographique pour également fournir au lecteur les moyens de se transporter hors de son contexte familier’). 8 Spielmann, ‘Voyages dans un fauteuil’, p. 44 (Spectacle et cartographie ont en partage la nécessité fondamentale de visualier une réalité précise (lieux, peuples), sans disposer de toutes les données qui permettraient de la représentation de manière fidèle, … en utilisant des mots qui laissent au lecteur la responsabilité de susciter ses propres images mentales.) 9 Sandrine Lemaire, ‘Le portugal, porte d’entrée des “Noirs” en Europe’, in Pascal Blanchard, Gilles Boëtsch and Nanette Jacomijn Snoep (eds), Exhibitions. L’invention du sauvage (Paris: Actes Sud, 2011), p. 62; Didier Lahon, ‘Africains noirs esclaves et affranchis au Portugal durant la Renaissance: l’élaboration d’un nouvel ordre du réel’, in Thomas Foster Earle and Kate Lowe (eds), Les africains noirs en Europe à la Renaissance (Toulouse: MAT Editions, 2010), pp. 261–79. 10 See for example: Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 11 Gilles Boëtsch, ‘Des cabinets de curiosité à la passion pour le “sauvage” ’, in Pascal Blanchard, Gilles Boëtsch and Nanette Jacomijn Snoep (eds), Exhibitions. L’invention du sauvage (Paris: Actes Sud, 2011), pp. 78–101, p. 78 (‘on collectionne tout, ce qui est jugé curieux, exotique, anormal ou monstrueux’). Also see Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature (New York: Zone Books, 1998). All English translations are by the author. 12 See also Johan Verberckmoes, ‘The Imaginative Recreation of Overseas Cultures in Western European Pageants in the Sixteenth to Seventeenth Centuries’, in Herman Roodenburg (ed.), Forging European Identities, 1400–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 361–80. 13 Nanette Jacomijn Snoep, ‘Sauvages images’, in Pascal Blanchard, Gilles Boëtsch and Nanette Jacomijn Snoep (eds), Exhibitions. L’invention du sauvage (Paris: Actes Sud, 2011), pp. 102–25, p. 105 (‘cinquante Tupinambas du Brésil ainsi que cinquante marins qui, de retour du nouveau monde, jouent les Amérindiens évoluant dans un paysage reconstitué en l’honneur d’Henri II’). 14 Cf. Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, Gilles Boëtsch and Eric Deroo, Zoos humains: au temps des exhibitions humains (Paris: La Découverte, 2004). 15 Sylvia Requemora-Gros, Voguer vers la modernité. Le voyage à travers les genres au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Presses de l’université Paris-Sorbonne, 2012), p. 591 (‘une étrange dialectique entre humanisation et animialisation’). 16 ‘Estranger qui est d’un pays fort éloigné, sauvage, mal poli, cruel & qui a des moeurs fort différents des nostres’. 17 ‘qui est d’un pays éloigné, qui est né sous une autre domination’. 18 ‘ce qui est surprenant, rare, extra-ordinaire’. 19 Jean Bodin, Le théâtre de la nature universelle: auquel on peut contempler les causes efficientes et finales de toutes choses … . Translated from Latin by M. François de Fougerolles (Lyon: J. Pillehotte, 1597). Available at http:// gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k81286z, accessed 23 January 2017. 20 Portuguais infortunés, vv. 45–52. 21 Ibid., vv. 99–104. 22 Ibid., vv. 135–42.



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23 Lewis Hanke, All Mankind Is One: A Study of the Disputation Between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in 1550 on the Intellectual and Religious Capacity of the American Indians (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974). 24 Bartolomé de las Casas. In Defense of the Indians, ed. and trans. Stafford Poole (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974). 25 Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, Apology for the Book On the Just Causes of War, trans. and ed. Lewis D. Epstein (Brunswick, ME: Bowdoin College, 1973). 26 Portuguais infortunés, vv. 787–90. 27 A people of cannibalistic giants living close to the Etna volcano that Odysseus will encounter on his journey. In a more figurative sense the term refers to any form of sanguinariness. 28 Portuguais infortunés, vv. 2061–5, 2070–1. 29 Ibid., vv. 2702–5. 30 ‘Notice’, in Biet (ed.), Théâtre de la cruauté, pp. 703–10. 31 Christian Biet and Sylvie Requemora, ‘L’Afrique à l’envers ou l’endroit des Cafres, tragédie et récit de voyage au XVIIe siècle’, in Alia Baccar-Bourmaz (ed.), L’Afrique au XVIIe siècle (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2003), pp. 371–402. 32 Portugais infortunés, vv. 495–500. 33 Ibid., vv. 507–12. 34 Ibid., vv. 1608–17. 35 Requemora-Gros, Voguer vers la modernité, p. 691 (une synthèse des discours anti-esclavagistes et anti-colonisateurs très novatrices pour l’époque). 36 See, for example, Guillaume Calafat, ‘Familles, réseaux et confiance dans l’économie de l’époque moderne’, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 2 (2011), 513–31, www.cairn.info/revue-annales-2011-2-page-513.htm (accessed 1 April 2016); Philip D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, A Nation Upon the Ocean Sea: Portugal’s Atlantic Diaspora and the Crisis of the Spanish Empire, 1492–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 37 See also Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and bare life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988). 38 See Karel Vanhaesebrouck, ‘Reboot your Culture. The Theatricalization of the Unbearable’, Image & Narrative, 14:3; Arne De Winde, Sientje Maes and Bart Philipsen (guest-editors): ‘Beyond all Bearing. (Con)Figurations of the Intolerable, part 2’, pp. 19–33; Karel Vanhaesebrouck, ‘Lichamelijkheid en emotie op het vroegmoderne podium: de martelaar als theatraal effect’, in Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, 3 (2013) (special issue ‘De lichamelijkheid van emoties’ eds Tine Van Osselaer and Josephine Hoegaerts), 516–29. 39 Portuguais infortunés, vv. 189–92. 40 See Gilles Havard and Cécile Vidal, Histoire de l’Amérique française (Paris: Flammarion, 2003). 41 Eddy Stols, Brazilië. Een geschiedenis in dribbelpas (Leuven: ACCO, 2012), p. 90. 42 Ibid., p. 56. 43 Ibid., p. 87. 44 André Thevet, Le Brésil d’André Thevet. Les singularités de la France Antarctique (1557) (Paris: Chandeigne, 1997).

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45 Stols, Brazilië, p. 87. 46 Montaigne, ‘Des Cannibales’, in Essais, Livre 1, XXXI (Paris: Arléa, 1992). 47 Stols, Brazilië, p. 99. 48 See, for example, Ann Hilton, The Kingdom of Kongo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982); John K. Thornton, ‘The Origins and Early History of the Kingdom of Kongo’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 34: 1 (2001), 89–120. 49 For a better understanding of the fundamental interrelationship of Brazilian culture and Kongo culture see Zeca Ligiéro, Initiation in Candomblé. Introduction to African-Brazilian Religion (New York: Diaspora Africa Press, 2014). 50 Dorothy Z. Baker, ‘Baroque Self-Fashioning in Seventeenth Century New France’, in Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Knaup (eds), Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 450–66, p. 450. 51 Edouard Glissant, ‘Concerning a Baroque Abroad in the World’, in Parkinson Zamora and Knaup (eds), Baroque New Worlds, p. 626. 52 Ibid., p. 624. 53 Ibid., p. 624. 54 Eugenio d’Ors, ‘The debate on baroque in Pontigny’, in Parkinson Zamora and Knaup (eds), Baroque New Worlds, pp. 78–92, p. 80. 55 See Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Knaup, ‘Baroque, new world baroque, neobaroque: categories and concepts’, in Parkinson Zamora and Knaup (eds), Baroque New Worlds, pp. 1–35. 56 Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Dangerous Border Crossings (London/New York: Routledge, 2000); Guillermo Gómez-Peña, The New World Border: Prophecies, Poems, and Loqueras for the End of the Century (San Francisco: City Light Publishers, 2001); Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Ethno-Techno. Writings on Performance, Activism and Pedagogy (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). 57 Gómez-Peña, Ethno-Techno, p. 246. 58 Glissant, ‘Concerning a Baroque Abroad in the World’, p. 626.

Part II

Beholders

4

‘I feel your pain’: some reflections on the (literary) perception of pain Jonathan Sawday

Though our brother is on the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)1

Imagining pain When we contemplate the gloomy demography of pain in the modern world, it would seem that Adam Smith’s claim above, that even the prospect of ‘our brother … on the rack’ cannot ‘inform’ the senses of another’s suffering, is essentially true. How else are we to explain the inequitable distribution of human pain, even within advanced countries, let alone on a global basis, other than through a lack of what, now, we might term ‘empathy’ but which Smith, in the eighteenth century, would have been more likely to have described as an absence of ‘fellow-feeling?’2 We shall return to Smith’s observation, and to its larger context, at the very end of this chapter. But for the moment, his statement may help us to approach the difficult problem of the extent to which the perception of pain and suffering can indeed be shared, which is the subject of this essay. Pain necessarily feels unique to each sufferer at the point at which it is being endured, and yet even though we know others to feel pain, and we can thus describe it as a shared human phenomenon, the distribution of pain is not equitable within larger human populations. Rather, the chances of encountering pain during a single human life differ radically according to a variety of factors. In the contemporary United States, for example, a recent (2011) study reports that approximately 100 million American adults are affected by chronic pain.3 But this reservoir of suffering is not distributed either evenly or randomly through the population. Who you are (black or white, male or female, young or old), together with where you live, whether

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4.1  Albrecht Dürer, Self-portrait, sick, c. 1509–11

or not English is your first language, and how much you earn, are all factors which drastically impact upon the likelihood of your suffering pain, or gaining access to pain relief. Race or ethnicity, at least in the United States, is a crucial factor in contemporary pain management, determining ease of access (or otherwise) to prescribed analgesic medicine, and even the distribution of pharmacies with adequate stocks of pain relief in racially segregated neighbourhoods.4 The experience of pain in human populations is not simply or solely a function of your lifestyle, or your genetic inheritance, or even the dictates of chance. These contemporary demographic accounts of pain incidence and pain management may give a peculiarly modern twist to the familiar etymological



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observation that pain has long been connected to punishment in deep-rooted even if unquantifiable ways. The very word ‘pain’ springs from its Latin roots in punishment and (in the Christian world) penance.5 ‘Pain’ is related to the Middle French word ‘peine’, expressive of a penalty which (until the eighteenth century in England) persisted (for example) in the old judicial procedure of peine forte et dure – the pressing with weights of the body of a suspect who refused to plead.6 If pain, in the theological dimension, was the punishment of humanity’s first transgression, then in the legal sense it was also the judicial outcome of maintaining silence in the face of an accusation. In the contemporary United States, we might conclude, part of the unacknowledged ‘punishment’ for being poor or belonging to a minority community is that you are more likely to experience pain. Pain is, in this sense, indeed political.7 And yet, whatever demographic analysis may tell us, for perfectly understandable reasons, we tend to believe that the experience of pain transcends all human categories, as well as the ebb and flow of human history. Pain is understood as the great leveller. Hamlet’s evocation of the ‘thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to’ (Hamlet, act III, scene 1) seems to represent a profoundly common bond uniting the generations across time. We are all of us ‘flesh’ and this common inheritance of pain to which ‘flesh’ must succumb represents the single most irreducible sensation reminding us that, individually and collectively, we do not merely live in our bodies, but that our bodies are, in some sense what we are. The experience of pain also informs us, in the most immediate fashion, that we are corporeal. And it is when we experience pain, paradoxically, that we are most distressingly aware of being alive. This thought is culled from St Augustine, who, in the final pages of De Civitate Dei observed that: ‘one thing is certain, anything that feels pain is alive, and no pain can exist except in a living thing’. But the paradox of Augustine’s conception of the pain of living is that, although pain is indissolubly linked to corporeal existence, in fact its true nature is extra-corporeal: ‘For pain is really an experience of the soul, not of the body, even when the cause of pain is presented to the soul by the body.’8 The body is, in this sense, the medium through which pain presents itself to the thinking and feeling entity – the human psyche – wherein pain actually resides. Thus, the agonizing and yet commonplace pain we experience as a result of a decaying tooth, if we are to follow Augustine, resides not in the tooth itself, far less does it reside in the abscess caused by infection, though these are indeed the precipitators of the pain experience. Rather, it is the apparatus of perception, residing in what Augustine loosely described as ‘the soul,’ which enables us to localize the sensation and thus to name it. But what of pain considered in a historical context? ‘A Jacobean individual’s pain’ writes Jenny Mayhew, in her exploration of the godly dimension of pain in English protestant writing of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, ‘is not necessarily more alien to us than the pain of a contemporary

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neighbour’ though the metaphors that both might deploy to characterize their pain, as Mayhew demonstrates, may be very different.9 The problem, here, resides in that word ‘alien’. How can the pain of another be anything other than alien to us, given that we cannot, in anything other than a loosely metaphoric (or even rhetorical) sense, ‘feel’ another’s pain?10 Words, it would appear, are all that we have, and yet words, particularly those which stem from the distant and (even) not so distant past, are not entirely to be trusted when it comes to the matter of pain. Historians (as Joanna Bourke has cautioned us) tend, quite properly, to tread warily in any attempt to ‘overlay a late twentieth- and early twenty-first-understanding of pain onto earlier periods’.11 And Bourke further alerts us to the historically complex layers of linguistic, social, somatic, and even environmental factors which may be at work when we try to reflect on the vexing relationship between a subjective sensation and the words which we harness in order to describe that sensation to others. ‘Pains’ she writes ‘are modes of perceptions … not the injury or noxious stimuli itself but the way we evaluate the injury or stimuli.’12 That process of evaluation, of course, turns us back towards language, since it is in the communication of our perception of sensation via words, that we appeal to what we hold to be a common experience. In this sense, we might understand the expression of pain as an attempt to evoke in the listener or witness some memory not of pain itself, since neither the body nor the apparatus of sensation possess such a memorial facility, but of the distressing emotions associated with the experience of pain. This appeal to some common or shared recollection of emotional experience, an empathetic response in other words, is also an appeal to the imaginative capacity. But, invoking a term such as empathy perhaps only poses a further problem – the problem of authenticity. This is a dimension to which Michel de Montaigne, writing towards the end of the sixteenth century, alerts us. For Montaigne, whose own body was racked by that most agonising of ailments, the kidney stone, the imaginative faculty lay at the core of the perception of another’s pain.13 In his essay, ‘Of the Power of the Imagination’, Montaigne wrote of how ‘the sight of other people’s anguish causes very real anguish to me’, and yet he immediately qualifies this (as we would now say) empathetic response even as he seeks to amplify it: ‘and my feelings have often usurped the feelings of others’.14 To term the process of empathetic response a ‘usurpation’ of some sort is to raise precisely a question of authenticity. For no matter how much the anguish of another may be sympathetically ‘felt’ by a third party, it can never reproduce, in all its somatic force, the actual perception of anguish which is felt by the sufferer. Pain, in this imaginatively transferred sense, would appear to be a kind of simulacrum, a mere imitation (no matter how profound its effect) of an original perception. Moreover, Montaigne seems to hint that pain ‘belongs’ in some unique sense only to the sufferer, and that the feeling of empathy which might be engendered in witnessing it represents a kind of appropriation. The



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question Montaigne poses is one that is informed by the guilty possibility that, in attempting to understand the pain endured by another, we can never be much more than casual tourists, gazing in sensible incomprehension at the sight of pain – an observation which perhaps returns us to Adam Smith’s remark on the inevitable inability of the ‘senses’ to allow us access to the pain of ‘our brother … on the rack’. And if this is true of witnessing the immediate pain of another, then how might it ever be possible to ‘feel’ the pain of past generations?15 Pain as excess For Montaigne, it was the ‘sight’ of another’s agony which elicited a reciprocal response. Words, it would seem, are not enough. Pain must be witnessed – seen – in order to be imaginatively (if distantly) felt by a third party. It is this appeal to visual perception which, of course, lies at the heart of those numberless depictions, in the art of the Christian west, of the pain and suffering not only of the crucified Christ, but of the legions of martyrs whose pains and punishments would be depicted on the walls and in the statuary of medieval, renaissance, and baroque churches and cathedrals, in the illustrated pages and borders of breviaries and devotional texts in the pre-print age, in large-scale commissioned art works, and (in the course of time) in the dissemination (via the new medium of print) of visual images of suffering such as those that were to be found (for example) in the Actes and Monuments (1563) of John Foxe and his imitators, whether Catholic or Protestant. This almost infinite gallery of human agony emerged as a sensible evocation of pain, designed to stimulate, in the mind and the imagination of the pious onlooker, something of the quality of pain (and a hoped for reciprocal sense of fortitude and redemptive faith) endured by the individuals who are the subjects of these images. But the idea of pain as spectacle also takes us into a different (though related) realm, whose history is, if anything, buried even deeper within Western cultural history: the spectacle of suffering which inhabited ancient Greek drama, and which, in the early modern world would re-appear on the late Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. What was inherited from the Greek world was the belief that the representation of suffering (whether mental or physical) demanded from the onlooker an affective response, no less real for being a response engendered by a fiction rather than a reality. As Brian Vickers puts the matter, the ‘expression of human suffering’ in Greek tragedy involving ‘the most extreme states of pain’ was ‘an invitation to “see, and so, feel” ’.16 And out of that experience of feeling, so it has long been argued, the witness or spectator to enacted suffering might experience the release of catharsis – a purification or purgation of the emotions.17 Seeing and feeling, then, appear to go hand in hand. We might (for example) agree that William Shakespeare’s King Lear (composed c. 1603–06)

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is a deeply painful or hurtful play, given the many scenes in the drama in the course of which human suffering (both mental and physical) is represented. As such the play is often taken to be representative of that Jacobean theatre of pain or cruelty which seems to have entranced the audiences of early seventeenth-century London, and which embraces not just play texts, but also the many stage-managed performances of pain (judicial execution in its variously protracted forms, or publicly enacted punishments such as whipping, branding, burning and disfigurement) to which the spectator might be witness in the city’s streets.18 It is difficult to believe that gazing at such scenes was a matter of indifference to the early modern onlooker – ‘they’, surely, were no more indifferent to the spectacle of pain than are ‘we’. Indeed, the very production of such rites argues a quite opposite conclusion – that the early modern world invested considerable significance in the belief that ‘pain as spectacle’ might instruct, inform, chastise, subdue, terrify, or (even) cower a population. Pain, in this judicially ritualised sense, was indeed felt to be communicable, in that it could be inflicted and displayed as part of a larger process, one that has been (famously) characterised as the restitution of a ‘momentarily injured sovereignty’.19 But, at some point, this cultural understanding of the social role of the perception of pain seems to have shifted. If it were possible to mark the moment at which a new idea of pain emerged, then the text of King Lear, or rather, the refusal to countenance the implications of the Shakespearian text(s) of the play, is perhaps one marker of that shift. As is well known to theatre historians and Shakespeare scholars, the ending of King Lear was considered too ‘painful’ (a term which is usually taken in a moral and philosophical sense) for the late seventeenth-century stage, so that throughout the eighteenth century, and well into the nineteenth century, the play was usually performed in the Nahum Tate version, first performed in 1681. In Tate’s version of the play, Lear is restored to health and Cordelia to a futurity of wedded bliss with Edgar, as well as sovereignty as the future queen of Britain.20 In a more directly political sense, if, in Shakespeare’s play, ‘sovereignty’ was not merely ‘injured’ but irretrievably torn apart, then Tate’s version of the play could be taken as an attempt to reconstitute that sovereignty in a way that was politically acceptable to a Restoration audience, for some of whom the sundering of the sovereign’s body in 1649, on the scaffold before Whitehall, would have been a not so distant memory. Tate’s ‘King Lear for optimists’ as it has been termed is now rarely performed. And it is, perhaps, difficult to recapture the aversion that Restoration, eighteenth-century and early Victorian audiences felt towards the Shakespearian versions of the play. In England in the eighteenth century, it was Dr Johnson who most famously articulated that aversion, when he observed (in 1765) of the Shakespeare play: ‘… if my sensations could add anything to the general suffrage, I might relate, that I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death, that I know not whether I ever endured to



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read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor’.21 Johnson’s comment is intriguing. It is not that he could not endure seeing the play, but that even reading it summoned up a response which he characterised as unendurable. Today we might tend to see Johnson’s account as hyperbolic or even evidence of a morbidly over-sensitive reaction to what is, after all, a fiction.22 It is as if Johnson had to force himself, out of a sense of editorial duty, to revisit a text which gave him almost a physical sensation of pain: via his own ‘sensations’ he was ‘shocked’ at the death of Cordelia in scenes which could not be ‘endured’. But behind Johnson’s evocation of the pain of encountering the text of Lear lay not only his own experience of pain, but a more general theory of the perception of pain which is no longer immediately available to us. Samuel Johnson was no stranger to the realities of pain, whether mental or physical. Both in his body and his mind he was plagued by somatic convulsions, tics and nervous disorders. He lingered under the fear of madness, of his wits ‘turning’, for most of his adult life.23 Perhaps Johnson’s own physical and mental frailty explains why a term such as ‘endured’ sprang to his mind so readily when he set out to describe the act of reading (or re-reading) King Lear. He was, after all, a critic and author for whom all of human life could be described as little more than painful interlude. In his philosophical novel, The History of Rasselas (1759) he famously has his philosophical alter ego, Imlac, proclaim that ‘Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.’24 But it was not just that the predominance of suffering in human existence outweighed any balance of pleasure or delight. For Johnson was also writing at a moment when an idea of pain as an excess of sensation was emerging – a theory which would, in time, become known as the ‘intensive’ (or sometimes ‘intensity’) theory of pain.25 Indeed, it is to the basis of this theory that Johnson refers us in his 1755 Dictionary of the English Language when, defining the verb form of the word ‘pain’, he cites Locke as one of his authorities for trying to pin down a lexical definition of the sensation: ‘excess of cold as well as heat pains us because it is equally destructive to that temper which is necessary to the preservation of life’. Johnson’s quotation is culled from Locke’s 1689 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, specifically that section dealing with what Locke terms ‘simple ideas of sensation and reflection’.26 Pain, Locke argued, should be considered as an excess. But, paradoxically, it is produced by the same objects, sensations and (even) ideas that induce pleasure. So, just as heat or light in moderation can produce pleasure, so, in excess, they produce pain, by overwhelming the senses. It is the ‘vehmency’ (Locke’s word) of the ‘operation of the … object’ which in turn ‘disorders the instruments of sensation’ – those delicate and easily damaged structures by which we experience the world around us. ‘We might by the pain be warn’d to withdraw before the Organ be quite put out of order, and so be unfitted for the proper Functions for the future’, Locke

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wrote.27 Hence, Johnson’s own use of the term ‘sensations’ when he writes of his difficulty in encountering, once more, a text of a play which had so ‘shocked’ him in the past. For a ‘sensation’, in the philosophical sense described by Locke (and, it seems shared by Johnson), was more than just a feeling, as we might now understand that term. Rather, it was part of the apparatus of perception, so delicate in its operation, that it was all too easily overwhelmed by excess. Locke’s view was that the very thing that gives you pleasure, carried to excess produces pain, disturbing the ‘temper’ – the harmony – of the complete organism. And, in Johnson’s case, texts, reading, ideas and, above all, conversation, were all vehicles of pleasure. But Locke’s theory of pain (as much as Aristotelian mimesis) lurks behind Johnson’s more general comments on the way in which literary texts engage the mind of the reader or, in the case of drama, the spectator. ‘Imitations’, he wrote in his Preface to Shakespeare (1765), ‘produce pain or pleasure, not because they are mistaken for realities, but because they bring realities to mind’. We are returned, it would seem, to the imaginative dimension of pain which Montaigne, too, had described when he recorded his ability to imaginatively experience, at second-hand, the pain of another. Except that Johnson goes further. For Montaigne, it was the sight of another individual in agony that precipitated a reflexive sensation in his own mind and imagination. In Johnson’s formulation, an even more indirect experience – the experience of a fiction – can work to a very similar end. It is not (Johnson claims) that we mistake a play for a reality that lies at the heart of the drama’s power to engage us. Rather, in that famous dictum (also to be found in Johnson’s Preface to Shakespeare): ‘a play read affects the mind like a play acted’.28 A play – a literary fabrication, an artefact – ‘affects the mind’. The mind has been changed, transformed in some unspecified fashion by what has been enacted before it. This is because, in Johnson’s view (following Aristotle), we are imitative creatures: creatures in whom imitation is a highly developed facility. As Johnson explains: ‘We are agitated in reading the history of Henry the Fifth, yet no man takes his book for the field of Agencourt.’29 The word ‘agitated’ returns us to the idea of an excess of sensory stimulation. The stimulus of the drama or a conversation was an irresistible pleasure to Johnson. But that same pleasure in mental activity, taken to excess could give rise to agitation, in accordance with Locke’s theory of pleasure and pain. Agitation was the sign of a disordered or unregulated mind. Shakespeare’s King Lear, with its graphic linguistic and dramatic depictions of a mind losing its bearings, may well have been particularly shocking to Johnson, in bringing home to him one of his own deepest fears – that his own hold on reason was, somehow, tenuous. It was, in other words, Johnson’s capacity for ‘fellow-feeling’ – empathy as we might now say – which turned him away from a play such as King Lear until editorial duty forced him to re-visit those distressing scenes of remembered suffering.



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It might be objected that there is a narcissistic quality to Johnson’s response. The paradox of King Lear, for Johnson, was that, for all of its dramatic power (or rather, precisely because of its dramatic power), it could not be ‘endured’ because of the shock it had administered to Johnson’s own ‘sensations’. It was a text which might, just possibly, lead him to a degree of agitation which might be unendurable if it was true that plays, whether read or acted, did indeed ‘affect’ the mind. Nobody, today, would take Johnson’s exquisite reaction to a literary text seriously. Can one really be driven mad by a text? Or, can one be made to feel – in a somatic sense – the pain of purely fictional characters and situations? Surely not. Nevertheless, prompted (in part) by Johnson’s response to Shakespeare’s play, the question is worth posing: do our contemporary theories of pain, or the perception of pain, in any way answer to the ways in which, in Johnson’s time, a theory of pain perception seemed to possess the ability to encompass the experience of a work of the imagination? Vocabularies of pain ‘Where does it hurt? How bad is it?’ These simple, if inevitably clumsy, inquiries have formed the basis of the attempt to treat human pain for (one imagines) quite possibly thousands of years. They are phrases which, in their solicitude, are also redolent of sympathy for the sufferer, who is being invited to share some quality of his or her perception of pain with the questioner, though not, of course, the experience itself, which would be profoundly undesirable, even if that were possible. We have a rich and varied vocabulary for communicating the perception of pain. But sometimes, it seems, we need to go beyond words in an attempt to explain, more precisely, the location and quality of pain which is being endured. The impulse to communicate pain by some means other than words, such as bodily gesture, is uncovered (for example) in a delicate but perhaps hastily sketched self-portrait, dating from c. 1509–21 by Albrecht Dürer [Figure 4.1]. What illness or injury Dürer may have been afflicted by is unknown. But this image has something of the quality of a visual memorandum sent to a physician who could not examine the patient directly; indeed, one neurologist has described the image as the ‘renaissance prototype’ of the modern pain map.30 In the small image, the artist depicted himself, half-naked, with his finger pointing to his left side. A circle has been drawn and coloured over the area of the body to which our attention is being drawn. Above the image we read the inscription: ‘There where the yellow spot is, and the finger points, there it hurts me.’ The image is an attempt at the communication of affliction which the art historian, Joseph Leo Koerner, has described as Dürer’s mobilisation of ‘all possible modes of signification to refer to, and specify his pain: language … bodily symptom … pictorial mimesis … gesture … and diagrammatic mark’. But, Koerner concludes, ‘in these multiple signs, we discern not so much the efficacy of

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the deictic in Dürer’s art as its inadequacy for articulating what ails him. For the hurt itself, that experience, to which all representations refer, remains quintessentially accessible only to the body in pain.’31 ‘Accessible only to the body in pain’ – in that expression the art historian has put (as it were) his own finger on the paradox which pain presents. Encompassed by the experience of our own pain, how can we communicate that pain to others? Nevertheless, where, once, a sixteenth-century artist drew upon all the available ‘modes of signification’ to communicate his suffering, today a standard diagnostic tool by which modern clinicians attempt to assess the degree of pain which a patient is presenting is the McGill Pain Index, sometimes known as the McGill Pain Questionnaire. The McGill Pain Questionnaire, devised by the Canadian clinical psychologist, Ron Melzack, is based on ideas which he first set down together with his co-investigator, Warren Torgerson, in 1971. Melzack, who had begun his work on pain by studying the phantom limb phenomenon, had collected over one hundred different words, or ‘pain descriptors’ culled from his reading in clinical accounts of pain. These ‘pain descriptors’ were not generated by the clinicians themselves, but by those suffering from pain who were attempting to describe the quality or intensity or effect of the pain they felt to those seeking to alleviate the conditions producing the pain. Melzack sorted his terms into four categories, classified as ‘sensory’, ‘affective’, ‘evaluative’ and ‘miscellaneous’. By scoring these different terms, Melzack was hoping to produce a way for clinicians to ‘rate’ not pain itself, but the recorded experience of pain. As Melzack put it, looking back on his earlier work, in the conclusion to a 2005 survey of the genesis of his pain index: Pain is a subjective experience that is generated by widespread, parallel neural networks in the brain on the basis of multiple inputs from sensory systems as well as from brain areas that underlie past experience, attention, evaluation, and meaning. Pain is produced by the output of these neural networks, not solely by the sensory input into them. Humans are fortunate to have language to express their pain so that it can be known to others …32

Known but not felt. For in some measure, the pain index is a way of separating pain from its subjective expression in language. By using the pain index, the clinician produces an aggregate score for the ‘quality’ of pain, expressed as a single number, which ranges from zero (no pain) to five (excruciating pain). But pain, in Melzack’s view was not a single phenomenon, varying solely in its intensity. Rather, it was multi-dimensional, and yet expressed through language in ways that were remarkably consistent from one individual to the next. There have been (as Melzack himself records in his 2005 paper) many criticisms both of his methodology, and the index itself. Not the least of these is that the ‘pain descriptors’ were drawn from, and sorted by, subjects who were predominantly middle-class, educated and highly literate. Nevertheless Melzack’s index has come to be a standard diagnostic



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tool by which pain, and the treatment of pain, is calibrated in modern clinical settings. These descriptors, generated by sufferers themselves, present a rich framework of terms associated with pain. The first category (‘sensory’) contains, for example, terms such as ‘flickering’, ‘pulsing’, ‘quivering’, ‘throbbing’, ‘beating’ and ‘pounding’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the pain descriptors to be found in the McGill Pain Questionnaire, are also to be found in Shakespeare’s King Lear – of the seventy-eight pain descriptors in the Questionnaire, with which patients described the subjective experience of pain, thirty-seven (48 per cent) are to be found in Shakespeare’s text, which also includes representative terms from all but one of the Questionnaire’s twenty sub groups. Verbal forms contained with the Questionnaire, or their adjectival or adverbial equivalents such as ‘sharp’, ‘cutting’, ‘burning’, ‘scalding’, ‘hurting’, ‘tender’, ‘killing’ and, of course, ‘blinding’, occur with considerable frequency in Shakespeare’s play. Compared to a human subject, who, when they are completing the Questionnaire, is asked to pick just one or two words from each group to describe their pain, and no more than eleven words in total, the text of King Lear seems almost overburdened with pain descriptors. Texts, of course, are not autonomous organisms, but fabricated literary artefacts. They do not possess neural networks. They are not subject to trauma. They are rarely produced as a response to pain as it is being endured. One could go on. Nevertheless, this admittedly crude appropriation of a modern diagnostic tool helps to remind us of how, in the text of King Lear, the verbal invocation of pain transcends characters’ attempts to express their suffering, or even the enactment of suffering as spectacle. The ‘pain’ of Lear exists at a level that is deeper than the narrative or the dramatic action of the play. Rather, the text as a whole is suffused with words associated with the perception of pain, to an extent that ‘painfulness’ seems to be embedded within the entire texture of the drama. Painful words – words which seem to possess associative relationships to the experience of pain – inhabit Shakespeare’s text at an almost incidental level. To take just one pain descriptor, the world ‘burn’ or ‘burning’, which, in common iterations of the McGill Pain Questionnaire appears in group seven alongside the terms ‘hot’, ‘scalding’ and ‘searing’: King Lear contains six instances of this term. But not all such instances are being used to describe an inherently painful experience. Indeed, sometimes the opposite effect seems to be intended, and yet, nevertheless, pain, as it were, leaks into the verbal texture of the scene. Thus, when Lear says to Regan of her sister that ‘her eyes are fierce; but thine / Do comfort and not burn’(King Lear, act II, scene 4) the very negation of ‘burn’ seems to outweigh the idea of ‘comfort’. Goneril’s fiercely burning eyes, rather than Regan’s supposedly comforting eyes, become the true subject of Lear’s (and, I would suggest, the audience’s) perception. And to these instances of linguistic registers of pain, of course, we would need to add the spectacular dimension – the fact that pain is not merely present in the play considered

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as a script, but it is present in the many visual enactments of pain as it is experienced on the stage. Thinking of a text such as King Lear which, historically, seems to have become representative of the painful possibilities of the experience of drama, in terms of modern clinicians’ attempts to map the linguistic registers of pain also draws us towards another feature of pain as it is expressed in words. Some of the most painful effects in Lear – as in all literary texts – are anchored to metaphors in which the experience of anguish is captured or conveyed by words operating in a realm which is divorced from their primary, literal, meanings or set of meanings. Lear’s image of his mental turmoil, for example, as being comparable to being ‘bound / Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears / Do scald like moulten lead’ (King Lear, act IV, scene 7) can have no real part in an undertaking such as the McGill Pain Questionnaire. Only one word in these lines (‘scald’) is to be found in the Questionnaire, where it appears (as we have seen) in sub-group seven as ‘scalding’. Though we might recall that (interestingly) this phrase is spoken to Cordelia as Lear is being examined by a physician, the force of the image resides not in its deployment of a single ‘pain indicator’ nor in its allusive classical reference to the god, Ixion, bound by Hermes on the order of Zeus, to a fiery wheel for eternity. Rather, we are left with the mental image of a body selfreflexively torturing and re-torturing itself with the products of its own anguish, which, rather than giving some slight somatic relief, serves only to intensify the pain which is being described: ‘that mine own tears / do scald like moulten lead’. It is, in other words, the cumulative metaphorical effect which works to produce an image of pain which (paradoxically) appears to lie beyond language. And it does not matter that the reader/spectator, encountering this phrase, does not have to have endured the experience of molten lead, poured onto the face (any more than has Lear himself), to appreciate the potency of the image. But what is it about such an artfully contrived manipulation of the imagistic properties or possibilities of language which allows us to label such language as ‘painful’? Perhaps another area of contemporary physiological exploration of pain perception might help us to approach this problem. Painful words In certain areas of cognitive research, thinking about the experience of pain in terms of metaphor or imagistic language more generally has become an area of intense study in the past few years, prompted by the growing awareness of the possible role of what have been termed ‘mirror neurons’ in the brain. ‘Mirror neurons’ are held, by some (but not all) cognitive neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists, to be those neurons which appear to ‘fire’ in response to seeing an action performed by another individual. The subject, in other words, does not have to perform the action, but only to see the



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action performed, for the stimulus to be recorded within the brain, where the same areas appear to be activated as would be the case were the roles of actor and spectator to be reversed. If we were to think of mirror neurons in terms of a ‘grammar’ of experience, they are passive rather than active indicators of feeling, but they are indicators, nevertheless. Conclusions based on research into the presence of mirror neurons, which is itself based largely on studies of monkeys, is still highly controversial, particularly in extending the observations to human subjects.33 But proponents of mirror-neuron theory suggest that the presence of such mechanisms may have important implications for our understanding of concepts such as imitation, mimicry, self-awareness and even empathy – terms which encompass not only cognitive psychology but some areas of literary criticism. At any rate, the presence of mirror neurons, it might be argued, is part of that human repertoire of responses which force us, perhaps involuntarily, to turn away not only from scenes of real human (or animal) suffering, but from their representation, whether on stage, or in the darkened cinema, in visual images, or (even) in a written text. The shudder, in other words, which we may involuntarily experience when we come upon an image or representation of intense cruelty may not be (as we might like to think) simply a product of our moral sensibility, so much as it is also a physiological response over which we can have little or no conscious control. The theoretical framework of the mirror neuron has been taken up (and extended) in some areas of language study, to embrace some of the ideas that we are considering in relationship to the ability to ‘feel’ pain which is exterior to the subject’s own body. Some of these areas of study include investigations into the possibility that metaphors are ‘processed’ differently by the brain when compared to the processing of literal statements.34 Another area of research has involved exploring the neural mechanisms which might be involved in our sense of empathy or ‘the interpersonal sharing of affect’, where neural activity associated with those areas of the brain known to be involved in ‘pain processing’ can be observed in subjects who have been shown deliberately ‘painful’ images.35 More directly relevant to this discussion is a study which argues that ‘Words have the potential to selectively stimulate specific brain areas.’ The report goes on to explore the ways in which, in Japanese, onomatopoeic words used in response to pain (the equivalent to the English ‘Ouch!’ or ‘Ow!’) appear to stimulate those areas of the hearer’s brain where different kinds of pain are themselves processed. To a non-Japanese speaker, these words are essentially meaningless. But to the Japanese listener, a particular combination of sounds commonly used to describe different qualities of pain would appear to produce measurable neurological activity, described as ‘word induced pain’.36 If it does indeed exist, then ‘word induced pain’ is a kind of pain of which we would appear to be consciously unaware. It is a manifestation of pain that cannot be felt or perceived, in the conventional sense, but which

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is, nevertheless, present in a neural state: a ‘pain’ in other words, which is (strictly speaking) painless, in that it exists beyond the boundaries of our everyday perceptions. Building on this area of work, the linguist Elena Semino has argued that ‘metaphor may facilitate some form of embodied simulation of pain experiences on the part of listeners/readers, which may in turn provide the basis for an empathic response’. Such ‘metaphorical patterns for the description of pain experience’, she claims, ‘are motivated, at least in part, by the urge to convey one’s pain sensations in a way that allows others to experience something that approximates as closely as possible what those sensations feel like’. Those sensations she terms ‘embodied simulations’.37 There is, as yet, very little conventional textual or literary criticism which has attempted to take seriously the implications of this emerging and (for some) very tentative field of study for understanding the ways in which texts seeking to evoke the experience of pain (or, conversely, pleasure) may actually achieve their desired object, even if we have long used terms such as ‘sensitivity’, ‘sensibility’, or ‘affective’ as part of the vocabulary of critical discourse.38 And yet, the idea of an ‘embodied simulation’, is not altogether foreign to those historians and critics who have looked at the role performed by specific literary or artistic representations of suffering, particularly in a religious context, in former ages. The idea of the imitatio Christi, those countless images of the suffering Christ, or of the Ignatian spiritual exercises, or the sufferings recorded in a spiritual autobiography such as that offered to us by (for example) St Teresa, were designed to induce some sense of ‘embodied simulation’ devoted towards a spiritual or devotional end, whose end was the paradoxical desire to transcend the body. As Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen has observed of these categories of images: ‘part of the essence of pain was precisely that it could be shared, that it had the power to engender compassion, and even create in others a desire to suffer with those in pain … emotional and physical participation in the Passion is one of the great themes of late medieval and early modern Catholicism …’.39 How deep that participatory desire may have stretched, however, also rests on the active presence of a shared belief system, in which mere spectatorship, or the dispassionate observation of an image or a text was barely possible, bounded as it was (we have to assume) by a framework of religious faith and consolation. But, to think in these terms is to re-introduce the larger cultural or social networks which foster the possibility of imaginative participation and which would appear to be historically and socially contingent. How, in other words, might it be possible to reconcile these emerging theories of sensory perception, which our modern scientific access to the architecture of the apparatus of perception seems to promise, albeit hazily, with the dense networks of values and meanings which we have inherited not from our physiology, but from the cultural forces which have surrounded us, and which still operate? And if this question seems (at the moment) intractable, then what of the larger question: that such scenes of suffering (the text or performance of King Lear



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may come to mind once more) might also induce certain forms of cathartic pleasure? Or do we conclude (along with Locke) that pleasure and pain are inseparably conjoined? Conclusion: ‘I feel your pain’ The ‘intensive theory’ of pain, which first arose in the eighteenth century, has now been superseded by quite different ideas of pain perception. Brilliantly parodied in Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man (1734), where he imagines the exquisite suffering of a subject whose heightened senses are so overwhelmed by ‘quick effluvia darting thro’ the brain’ that they ‘Die of a rose in aromatic pain’, the ‘intensive theory’, nevertheless, helps us to understand Dr Johnson’s exquisitely painful response to the experience of a literary text.40 Today, that much derided cliché, first attributed to an American politician seeking office – ‘I feel your pain’ – is rarely used other than in an ironic sense. ‘I feel your pain’ has become a phrase used to mock the fake or inauthentic expression of pretended empathy. And, of course, ever since the advent of the ‘New Criticism’ in the mid-twentieth century, and with it the dismissal of what became known as the ‘Affective Fallacy’ we have been taught to be wary of any appeal to the emotional affect of a literary work. As the classic essay on this theme has it: ‘The report of some readers … that a poem or story induces in them … intense feelings, or heightened consciousness is neither anything which can be refuted nor anything which it is possible for the objective critic to take into account. It is either too physiological or too vague.’41 Perhaps it still is. But that was not how Adam Smith conceived the matter when, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments he gave us his unforgettable image of our sensible incomprehension of suffering at the prospect of ‘our brother … on the rack’, while ‘we ourselves are at our ease’. Smith’s observation, however, continues by invoking an ‘instrument’ of perception which is unquantifiable, but which Montaigne (as much as Dr Johnson) believed to be inherent to the process by which we register a sense of ‘fellow-feeling’ with the sufferer: the imagination. For, having contemplated ‘our brother … on the rack’, Smith turns to the imagination to argue that it is indeed possible to ‘feel’ his pain, once the force of the imagination is reckoned with: By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body and become in some measure him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them.42

Undoubtedly this observation is a tissue of qualifications (‘as it were … in some measure … some idea … even … though weaker in degree … not altogether unlike …’), indicating that Smith was groping towards some more philosophically stable anchor point for his primary claim: that it might be

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possible for two bodies to endure the same or (at least) very similar sensations. Nevertheless, it is an observation whose striking parallels with our own emerging theories of the perception of pain it seems unnecessary to underline, even if we are still searching for just that same fixity which, in the end, eluded Adam Smith. That empathy or sympathy or the active role of the imagination – terms which have long been the domain of the literary critic – might have some neural basis does not, of course, either lessen or heighten their moral force. ‘Humans are fortunate to have language to express their pain’ observes the psychologist. Indeed, we are. But pain, whose effects are so familiar to us all, but the perception of which must primarily be communicated via the imperfect medium of words and images still presents us with a series of paradoxes. We are fortunate to have language with which to express this sensation. We are perhaps even more fortunate to have no finer instrument, other than the imagination, to convey that sensation amongst ourselves. And most fortunate of all: we have no memory of that sensation once it has passed. Notes 1 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (London: 1759), p. 2. 2 The term ‘empathy,’ the OED informs us, derived from the German Einfühlung, did not enter the English language until the very end of the nineteenth century. 3 Institute of Medicine (US) Committee on Advancing Pain Research, Care, and Education, Relieving Pain in America: A Blueprint for Transforming Prevention, Care, Education, and Research (Washington DC: National Academies Press, 2011), available at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22553896, accessed 21 November 2013. 4 Joshua H. Tamayer-Sarver, Susan W. Hinze, Rita C. Cydulka and David W. Baker, ‘Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Emergency Department Analgesic Prescription’, American Journal of Public Health, 93 (2003), 2067–73. 5 OED, ‘pain,’ n.1 1. A. 6 The procedure of Peine forte et dure was finally abolished, in England, under the Felony and Piracy Act of 1772 (12 Geo. III, c. 20), when a prisoner’s silence was held to be the equivalent of pleading guilty. On the practice of peine forte et dure see John H. Langbein, Torture and the Law of Proof (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 74–7. 7 For the political debates surrounding pain, see Keith Wailoo, Pain: A Political History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). 8 St Augustine, Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans (5. 21. 3), trans. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 966. 9 Jenny Mayhew, ‘Godly Beds of Pain: Pain in English Protestant Manuals (ca. 1550–1650)’, in Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen and Karl A.E. Enenkel (eds), The Sense of Suffering: Constructions of Physical Pain in Early Modern Culture (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009), p. 315. On the more general history of pain, see (for example) Roselyne Rey, The History of Pain, trans. Louise Elliott Wallace, J.A. Cadden and S.W. Cadden (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University



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Press, 1998); and Javier Moscoso, Pain: A Cultural History (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 10 The phrase ‘I feel your pain’ has been widely attributed to Governor (as he then was) Bill Clinton in the course of his 1992 US Presidential campaign. For a discussion of the phrase and its possible meanings, see Hans Bernhard Schmid, ‘Shared Feelings. Towards a Phenomenology of Shared Collective Intentionality’, in Hans Bernhard Schmid, Katinka Schulte-Ostermann and Nikos Psarros (eds), Concepts of Sharedness: Essays on Collective Intentionality (Heusenstam: Ontos Verlag, 2008), pp. 75–6. 11 Joanna Bourke, ‘What is Pain? A History’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 23 (2013), 155–73: 157. 12 Ibid., 162. 13 Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, trans. Donald M. Frame (London: Everyman, 2003), pp. 310–11. 14 Ibid., p. 82. 15 This question has also been posed by other cultural historians of the early modern period. See, for example, the conclusion to Sharon Howard, ‘Imagining the Pain and Peril of Seventeenth-Century Childbirth: Travail and Deliverance in the Making of an Early Modern World’, Social History of Medicine, 16 (2003), 367–82. On Montaigne’s experience of pain see Stephen Pender, ‘Seeing, Feeling, Judging: Pain in the early Modern Imagination’, in Dijkhuizen and Enenkel (eds), The Sense of Suffering, pp. 469–95. 16 Brian Vickers, Towards Greek Tragedy (London and New York: Longman, 1973), p. 70. 17 Catharsis is, of course, a vexed term, subject to a wide variety of historical and philosophical interpretations. See Donald Keesey, ‘On Some Recent Interpretations of Catharsis’, The Classical World, 72 (1978), 193–205. 18 See James Robert Allard and Matthew R. Martin (eds), Staging Pain, 1500–1800: Violence and Trauma in British Theatre (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). 19 See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 48. 20 On Tate’s revision of Shakespeare’s texts, see Sonia Massai, ‘Nahum Tate’s Revision of Shakespeare’s King Lears’, SEL Studies in English Literature, 40 (2000), 435–50. 21 Samuel Johnson, ‘Notes to Shakespeare (King Lear)’, in Mona Wilson (ed.), Johnson: Poetry and Prose (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1970), p. 593. 22 On the response to fictions in which pain is represented (including Dr Johnson’s response to the text of King Lear) see Oliver Conolly, ‘Pleasure and Pain in Literature’, Philosophy and Literature, 29 (2005), 305–20. 23 On Johnson’s physical and mental constitution, see Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2003) particularly the chapter ‘Johnson and Incorporated Minds’, pp. 167–93. 24 Johnson, Poetry and Prose, p. 413. 25 See Massieh Moayedi and Karen D. Davis, ‘Theories of Pain: From Specificity to Gate Control’, Journal of Neurophysiology, 109 (2013), 5–12. 26 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 130. Original emphasis. 27 Ibid.

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28 Johnson, Poetry and Prose, p. 503. 29 Ibid. Original emphasis. 30 G.D. Schott, ‘The Sick Dürer: a Renaissance Prototype Pain Map’, British Medical Journal, 329 (18–25 December 2004), 1492. 31 Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 177. For further discussion of this image, see Jonathan Sawday, ‘Self and Selfhood in the Seventeenth Century’, in Roy Porter (ed.), Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 41–2. 32 R. Melzack, ‘The McGill Pain Questionnaire: From Description to Measurement’, Anaesthesiology, 103 (2005), 199–202: 202. 33 For a review of work on mirror neurons, see Giacomo Rizzolatti and Laila Craighero, ‘The Mirror-Neuron System’, Annual Review of Neuroscience, 27 (2004), 169–92. 34 See Dedre Gentner and Brian F. Bowdle, ‘Convention, Form, and Figurative Language Processing’, Metaphor and Symbol, 16 (2001), 223–47; Rachel Giora, ‘Is Metaphor Special?’, Brain and Language, 100 (2007), 111–14. 35 Philip L. Jackson, Andrew N. Meltzoff and Jean Decety, ‘How Do We Perceive the Pain of Others? A Window into the Neural Processes Involved in Empathy’, NeuroImage, 24 (2005), 771–9. 36 Naoyuki Osaka, Mariko Osaka, Masanao Morishita, Hirohito Kondo and Hidenao Fukuyama, ‘A Word Expressing Affective Pain Activates the Anterior Cingulate Cortex in the Human Brain: an fMRI Study’, Behavioural Brain Research, 153 (2004), 123–7. 37 Elena Semino, ‘Descriptions of Pain, Metaphor, and Embodied Simulation’, Metaphor and Symbol, 25 (2010), 205–26. For further discussion of ‘embodied simulation’ within a psychoanalytic setting see Vittorio Gallese, ‘Mirror Neurons, Embodied Simulation, and the Neural Basis of Social Identification’, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 19 (2009), 519–36. 38 Professor Philip Davies, of the Department of English at the University of Liverpool, working with scientists at the Magnetic Resonance and Image Analysis Research Centre (also at the University of Liverpool) has attempted to explore this possibility in more depth. See http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/theshakespeared-brain, accessed 21 November 2013. 39 Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen, Pain and Compassion in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2012), p. 32. 40 Alexander Pope, Poems, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1968), p. 511. 41 W.K. Wimsatt Jr. and M.C. Beardsley, ‘The Affective Fallacy’, The Sewanee Review, 47 (1949), 31–55: 47. 42 Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, pp. 2–3. The extent to which eighteenthcentury philosophers of the sentiments saw ‘sympathy’ as a ‘hard-wired system’ capable of transmitting sensations from one person to another is discussed in Rebecca Garden, ‘The Problem of Empathy: Medicine and the Humanities’, New Literary History, 38 (2007), 551–67: 558–60.

5

Masochism and the female gaze John Yamamoto-Wilson

Masochism depends on fantasy, whether acted out or merely imagined, and the fantasy depends on an Other, who witnesses – either as an observer or as a participant – the suffering, real or imagined, of the fantasist, who in turn feels gratified. Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs (1870) may be the first sustained narrative description of this phenomenon, but it is generally considered to have emerged, in discourse and (probably) in practice, in the early modern period. Havelock Ellis identifies Pico della Mirandola (1496) as making ‘the earliest distinct reference to a masochistic flagellant’ and Heinrich Meibom (c. 1639) as the author of the first treatise on the subject,1 and Gordon Williams notes the emergence from late Elizabethan times on of an early modern sexual identity which came, in the later part of the seventeenth century, to be known as a ‘flogging cully’ (a man who could only be sexually aroused by being whipped).2 The taxonomy of sexuality as defined by KrafftEbing, Sigmund Freud and others does not call concepts like sadism and masochism into existence, but simply gives us more precise tools with which to discuss them. Nevertheless, while these tools have been used to enhance our understanding of literature and culture from the late Victorian period onwards, there remains, as Jonathan Sawday points out in Chapter 4, a reluctance to read our modern understanding of pain and suffering back into the past. Some attempts have been made to identify masochism avant la lettre, and Baumeister notes ‘The abundant evidence of masochistic activity beginning in the eighteenth century’, but contrasts it with ‘the lack of any record of such activities prior to the Renaissance’, leaving a gap that covers the entire early modern period.3 While a certain amount of caution is clearly called for, the sense of anachronism is at least partly illusory. If Krafft-Ebing4 had chosen to name the phenomenon of sexual arousal through pain after the first person to describe it, rather than after the first to write an extended narrative about it, we might

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5.1  Johannes Sadeler I after Bartholomeus Spranger, Phyllis riding Aristotle, sixteenth century



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be talking today of ‘mirandolism’, rather than masochism, and scholars might deem it quite normal to trace its development from the end of the fifteenth century, rather than the middle of the nineteenth or, at most, the early eighteenth. This chapter will explore the motif of the captivating power of the woman’s gaze as part of a wider discourse of male anxiety in early modern literature, a discourse in which, as Nussbaum says in relation to Butler’s Hudibras, ‘Women use their sexual powers to make foolish men weak and feminine’ and the male becomes ‘a captive of his own stupidity’.5 Within the chivalric tradition of courtly love the man places himself in ritual submission to the woman and the anxiety thus generated is conventionally resolved by the woman reciprocating the man’s love and entering marriage, thus restoring the societal norms of male hegemony. However, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries see a marked development in narratives of rejection and denial, in which there is no resolution of the man’s anxiety and he has four basic courses of action open to him. He can turn his back on love altogether, he can search for love elsewhere (including homosexual relations), he can punish the woman for humiliating him, or he can sexualise and eroticise the rejection itself, reconstructing the woman as a coldhearted Other who takes pleasure in his humiliation, leading him to the point where he, in turn, derives pleasure from performing (or imagining performing) his humiliation before the gaze of his ‘cruel Maid’.6 These responses can be traced in the poetry of (among others) Jane Barker, William Browne, Aston Cokain, Michael Drayton, William Habington and Philip Sidney, the prose romance of John Crowne, the satire of Robert Greene and Thomas Nashe, a novella by Matteo Bandello, and the writings of Aphra Behn and Mary Wroth. By focusing on the tropes of the captivating female gaze and eyes like the sun that set men aflame with desire and turn them blind, this chapter charts the discursive evolution of the transgressive woman and the foolish man and highlights the male anxiety generated by the female Other. Among the interpretative tools used are the idea of the theatricality of self-humiliation, drawing largely on the psychoanalytical writings of Theodor Reik,7 the perception of the witness to suffering as one who actively and creatively ‘beholds’ it, rather than one who merely ‘sees’ it,8 and the application, derived from film studies, of the concept of ‘absence-in-presence’ as shorthand for the failure of male protagonists to fulfil their role – what Sherwin calls ‘an absence in the space the male protagonist is supposed to inhabit’ – at the centre of the narrative.9 A woman’s eye Oh, cruel Nymph! why do’st thou thus delight To torture me? why thus my suff’rings slight? My mournfull Songs neglected are by thee, Thou art regardless of my Verse, and me.

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Thou canst behold, with an unpittying Eye, My sorrows, and art pleas’d to see me dye.10

These lines, penned by the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century poet and novelist Jane Barker, are an elaboration of two lines in Virgil: You are so cruel Alexis, do you care nothing for my songs? Have you no mercy on me? Will you force me in the end to die?11

However, whereas the unattainable object of desire in Virgil’s poem is essentially indifferent, in Barker’s version the woman ‘delight[s] / To torture’ her admirer. Barker, who eschewed marriage and whose writings are characterised by ‘a complicated and tangled relationship to male authority’,12 here configures the man’s suffering and the woman’s pleasure in terms of the gaze; she is ‘regardless’ of her admirer’s efforts to woo her, beholds his sorrows ‘with an unpitying Eye’ and is ‘pleas’d to see [him] die’. The scene is underpinned by the idea that a woman’s cruelty consists primarily, not of acts of violence, but of withholding love. What matters is how she looks on her admirer. The literature of the early modern period abounds with representations of a woman’s eyes as possessing an irresistible power that transcends physical strength and, in effect, unmans a man. As Spenser puts it, … mighty hands forget their manlinesse; Drawne with the powre of an heart-robbing eye …13

Within the terms of the conventions of courtly love a woman’s eyes have the power to bring either supreme happiness or direst misery to a man, a dichotomy that reinforces stereotyped perceptions of womankind as being either supremely virtuous or supremely wicked and echoes the language of the Bible: The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness.14

The attributes of the eyes as a source of ambivalent power and light are encapsulated in the image of a woman’s eyes as being like the sun, an image so frequently used that it is parodied, along with other clichés of the period, by Shakespeare.15 Typical examples of the cliché include Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedie, in which Balthazar speaks of Bel-imperia’s ‘Sunne bright eies’,16 Aston Cokain’s praise of a woman for ‘those two Suns, your heartbewitching eies’17 and Drayton’s praise of ‘Thy blessed eies, the Sunne which lights this fire [i.e., the fire of the poet’s love]’.18 Drayton uses fire here as a metaphor for passion, and the early modern sense that passion should be kept in check by reason is clearly evident; the fire is carefully contained, a sacred flame, ignited by a ‘celestiall heate’, and the ‘fuell’ in the poet’s breast is a ‘chaste desire’.19 Unchecked passion,



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though, is like a fire that has raged out of control, rendering helpless those who are exposed to it. Spenser, in the sonnet sequence Amoretti, emphasises male weakness in the face of female power, begging the woman ‘that your bright beams of my weak eies admyred, / may kindle liuing fire within my brest’. There is nothing, not even the sun, to which he can compare ‘those powrefull eies, which lightē my dark spright’ except ‘to the Maker selfe … whose light doth lighten all that here we see’. Having thus elevated the woman to the level of deity, he laments that ‘the Tyrannesse doth ioy to see / the huge massacres which her eyes do make’ and ‘she doth laugh at me & makes my pain her sport’.20 Fire also functions as a metaphor for the passion kindled by a woman’s gaze in the opening ‘song’ of Browne’s Britannia’s Pastorals. Marina, spurned by her lover, gives way to ‘The burning rage of hellish Iealousie’.21 She tries to kill herself, but is saved by a shepherd who in turn falls in love with her and follows her around, ‘Bearing a fuell [that is, his love for her], which her Sun-like eies / Enflam’d, and made his heart the sacrifice’.22 Marina, ‘languish’d of another flame’,23 rejects him, whereupon he too determines to kill himself, and is only dissuaded by another shepherd, who urges him to ‘quench the flame … / And neuer loue except thou be belou’d’.24 The unrequited shepherd in Browne’s ‘song’ is ‘voyd of sense’; ‘Making his teares, the instruments to wooe her’25 dooms him to failure, since a woman ‘loues not him that plaineth, but that pleaseth’.26 His behaviour exemplifies a form of what Theodor Reik, a student of Sigmund Freud’s, calls the ‘demonstrative’ aspect of masochism, whereby the masochist ‘appears as the actor of his own misery, praising and proclaiming his suffering’.27 This ‘demonstrative’ quality differs from exhibitionism in that the masochist makes a display, not of that which he or she is proud of, but of something shameful and demeaning, something which invites not admiration but disdain, not reward but punishment.28 The assumption, however, is that the rejected lover learns from his mistake, and Browne’s tale ends on much the same practical note as Virgil’s second Euclogue. The male’s perverse response to the female gaze is a passing phase, a mistake that serves as a lesson. Again, while Spenser’s Amoretti ‘displays masochistic elements that go beyond conventional Petrarchan selfhumiliation’, ultimately he is writing within the conventions of the courtly tradition; ‘the lady’s “cruelty” acts merely as a challenge: the goal … is the lady’s surrender and his own enhanced pleasure’.29 If it is paradigmatic that a prize worth winning is worth taking some pains for, then any temporary suffering and heartache is merely the price the man undertakes to pay for the sake of attaining his goal. In the courtly tradition the male’s subservience to the female is largely a ritualistic ploy and – always supposing her admirer is sincere and of an appropriate social station – the woman will ultimately yield and the traditional sex roles of male supremacy and female submissiveness will be

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reinstated. If the woman continues to scorn the man’s favours the tension can be resolved by the man either renouncing love altogether or loving elsewhere – usually the latter. As Alexis puts it in Rochester’s pastoral: … if her haughty Heart despise My humble proffer’d One, The just Compassion she denies, I may obtain from other’s Eyes; Hers are not Fair alone.30

Reason dictates that, if the desired goal is unattainable, then it must be abandoned. Constructing the Other While Alexis exults at the idea of rejecting his cruel mistress and even lording it over her in ‘Triumphant Scorn’, his fellow suitor Strephon can see no other option than to persist in his love until she accepts him or, if she will not, ‘at her Feet despair’. If Alexis’s love is so shallow, says Strephon, then clearly he does not merit ‘so Divine a Flame’.31 The idea that a woman had the power to enflame a man had a particular resonance in early modern England. The woodcuts and descriptions in Foxe’s Actes and Monuments give graphic testimony to the burning of martyrs during the reign of Queen Mary, and somewhere in the reader’s mind is the awareness that many of these scenes are taking place at the behest of a woman. This association seems to underlie the discursive link – particularly evident in seventeenth-century poetry – between the fate of the religious martyr and the power of the female gaze: Bright Lady, from whose eye, Shot lightning to his heart, who joyes to dye A martyr in your flames: O let your love Be great and firme as his: Then nought shall move Your setled faiths, that both may grow together …32 … so Powerful are her eyes, Those killing Charms prevail’d above, and all my thoughts surprize: In coolest shades fierce feavors burn, martyr’d by Love I fry, And now except Parthenia Turn, and smile on me I dye.33

Of course, this is still the language of poetic convention, not of sexual perversity; the expectation is that the woman will reciprocate the man’s affections and, even on those exceptional occasions when she does not, no one is actually being consigned to the flames. In a sense, though, that is precisely the point. In addition to demonstrativeness, Reik’s analysis of masochism defines two other ‘constituent elements’ – fantasy and suspense – of which



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‘phantasy is the most important’.34 Masochism is constituted, not by the reality of an Other, but the constructed, idealised fantasy of an Other; ‘Stated in Lacanian terms, masochists position themselves to serve as instruments of enjoyment to a non-existent Other’.35 The masochistic fantasy may or may not be acted out, with an actual Other acting the part of the idealised, imagined Other, but any such acting out is simply a reconstructing of an original fantasy.36 A lively imagination is a feature of the masochistic mind37 and, while these poems are not in themselves masochistic, they are fertile ground for masochistic fantasy to develop. Barker’s nymph exemplifies the paradigm of a woman’s power consisting of her ability (consciously employed or otherwise) to make a man love her and, having done so, to bring him joy or suffering depending on whether or not she reciprocates his love. The most common outcome, in courtly poetry, dramatic comedies and romance novels, is that the woman eventually reciprocates, whereupon the power relationship is reversed, and the woman becomes (reverts to being) subordinated to the man. Barker’s nymph belongs to the smaller group of women who retain their power by continuing to withhold their love, either overtly or by pretending to submit to the man and then betraying him. The poem maintains the tension and anxiety generated by the man’s interest and the woman’s enjoyment of his distress, and it is only at the very end that (following Virgil) the narrative comes to rest at a point of common sense; the unrequited male can turn his back on love or seek the love of another: Shake off for shame at last this fruitless Love, And wasting Time to better ends improve: Or if you needs must love, hereafter chuse Some gentler Nymph, who’ll not your Love refuse.38

The idea that in a man’s world a woman can get what she wants by denying a man what he wants goes back at least to Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, but here she has a motive; Lysistrata wants to end a war. Stories of a woman allowing a man to persuade himself that there are sufficient bonds of affection between them to trust her with a secret (Achilles and his heel, Samson and his hair) or to be off his guard (Holofernes receiving Judith in his tent, or Yael receiving Sisera into hers) also typically involve a motive. Polyxena, Judith and Yael want revenge on a warlike enemy; Delilah betrays Samson not for the fun of it, but for a substantial bribe. Barker’s nymph, however, has no apparent motive other than caprice. Early modern society defined itself in part through establishing the acceptable limits to suffering as ‘performance’ and in itself there was nothing unusual in the idea of a spectator deriving pleasure from the suffering of another. On the one hand, ‘the barbarous spectacles of the Roman swordplayes’39 were generally condemned and ‘all those Storys full of horrour and cruelty, which made the pleasure of the Roman and Athenian Stages’40 were

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the subject of controversy, while on the other public flogging, executions and bear-baiting, though slowly declining in popularity over time, were still integral features of the early modern cultural landscape. Nevertheless, the idea of a woman who takes pleasure in the suffering of a rejected suitor could scarcely be countenanced and, in the earlier appearances of such a woman in the literature of the period, the focus is generally on her punishment. Such is the case in Boccaccio’s tale of a knight who kills himself in despair because a woman will not return his love, instead ‘reioycing immeasurably in mine vnhappie death … and taking pleasure in my oppressing torments’.41 This is precisely the masochistic tableau epitomised in Barker’s poem, but whereas for Barker the tableau as it stands is sufficient, Boccaccio’s story focuses primarily on the punishment and humiliation of the woman. Absence-in-presence: lost in translation A similar motif of a coldhearted woman getting her comeuppance is featured in one of Matteo Bandello’s Novelle. This merits detailed scrutiny since the story undergoes a significant metamorphosis in its translation from Italian into French (by François de Belleforest) and thence into English (by Geoffrey Fenton). A ‘malicious Ladye’42 spurns her admirer Philiberto, commanding him to leave her alone, and when he begs her for a farewell kiss she agrees providing he will ‘do one [unspecified] thinge wherein she was to require hym’, which turns out to be that he must not speak to anyone for three years.43 Philiberto wins the favour of the king, who offers a reward to anyone who can cure him of his dumbness, and Zilya presents herself at court in order to ‘absolue him of his vowe’.44 He, however, sees a chance to take revenge on her and continues to play dumb. She is duly taken away and condemned to death for her false claim that she can cure him, whereupon he at last speaks, interceding on her behalf to the king, and she is set free. In Bandello’s telling of the story, Zilya’s coldness towards her suitor is essentially a misguided attempt to protect her chastity, and she is punished because, as Hall puts it, she denies Filiberto’s ‘satisfaction of his masculine desires’, which he asserts as ‘his natural right’. In its larger lines, the ‘especial interest’ of Bandello’s tale ‘lies in its presentation of … the Puritan, exemplified in Madonna Zilia, and the libertine, in Filiberto’, and ‘it is clear that Bandello’s and his audience’s sympathies lay with Filiberto rather than with Zilia’. The story is less about Zilya’s abuse of Philiberto than about his ability to turn the situation to his good account and achieve ‘success and reward’, while Zilia ‘loses the honor that she had tried to keep and returns home in shame’.45 In Bandello’s tale, as in Boccaccio’s, the female Other envisaged by the masochistic fantasist is glimpsed only momentarily. Her main function is to be punished for subverting the established roles of male supremacy and female acquiescence. However, Belleforest’s French translation of Bandello tells a very different story, the effect of which is to destabilise the narrative



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of male supremacy, leading to a deconstruction of the male protagonist, whose misfortunes are recast not so much as the result of the wickedness of the woman’s demands in itself as of his own folly in acceding to those demands. As a result, Belleforest’s Philibert is comparatively decentred and marginalised – what Sherwin calls absence-in-presence46 – and Zilie emerges as a much stronger, more fully-realised character than in Bandello’s tale. This is the main thrust of the tale as it reached English readers through Fenton’s translation.47 The ‘contracted alliance’ is ‘the particular form of madness’ of the masochist,48 and the manner in which the agreement between the protagonists of the tale is made is therefore of central importance. In the Italian text, Zilia claims she wants to test the true depth of Filiberto’s love for her and agrees to kiss him provided he will accede to an unspecified request; ‘She then puts her arm around his neck and kisses him on the mouth’,49 before telling him that the price of the kiss is to absent himself from her presence adding, for ‘three whole years, do not speak at all to anyone in this world, whether man or woman’.50 Zilia’s avowed aim is to make sure that the man who claims to love her is truly sincere. Filiberto feels that what she commands is ‘indiscreet, unreasonable and very difficult to fulfil perfectly’,51 but Bandello refrains from commenting on the rightness or wrongness of Filiberto’s actions in complying with her request. Belleforest deviates from Bandello, firstly, in making Zilie’s kisses much more lascivious than in the Italian; ‘she embraced him and kissed him most lovingly’, and Philibert is quite carried away, ‘piling kiss on kiss with such pleasure that his soul began to take flight’ (the soul in flight being a metaphor here for sexual arousement).52 Zilya, too, gives Philiberto more than he bargained for, kissing him passionately, ‘as yf it had bene the firste nighte of theyr mariage’,53 and Fenton follows Belleforest closely as the scene develops; Zilya tells Philiberto he will be guilty of ‘villānie’ and ‘periurie on the behalfe of a Gentlewoman’ if he does not keep his promise, and hints at some vague ‘further benefit’ (implying sexual favours) if he fulfils it.54 Zilie / Zilya’s blatantly sexual behaviour completely undermines the intent of the original tale, in which she is chaste to a fault. The French narrative differs from the Italian also in the apparent enthusiasm with which Philibert accedes to Zilie’s demands. This feature is also carried over into Fenton’s version; Philiberto is ‘so papisticall in performynge hys vowe’ that as soon as Zilya tells him what he must do ‘he began euen then to enter into the pointes of her commaundement, declarynge by signes that she should bée obeyed’.55 The word ‘papisticall’, suggesting fanatical allegiance to a corrupted code, is Fenton’s translation of ‘religieux’56 (religious) in Belleforest’s French. This implicit disapproval of Philiberto’s acceptance of the contract is made explicit when Fenton’s narrator, again following Belleforest, asserts that the promise Zilya has bound Philiberto to is ‘vnworthy any way of such firme regard’:

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wher fraude and force do occupie the hart, the religion of promises, yea the very bond of faith already giuen, do loase their force, neyther is a man bownde to performe yt, wherin is cōstraint of bond …57

Zilya not only rids herself of Philiberto’s presence by means of this contractual arrangement with Philiberto, but imposes an ‘absence-in-presence’ on him through his vow of silence; wherever he goes, being without speech, he is incomplete, reduced to ‘the shapp of brutalitie, betwene whom and the creatures of vnderstandinge, the philosophers conclude an only difference of the vse of reason, and speache’.58 Conversely, her demands ensure (to invert Sherwin’s term) her presence-in-absence in his mind at all times; though he is banished from her physical presence she is ever-present in his mind’s eye as the cause of his predicament. Whereas Zilia is apparently simply overprotective of her chastity and makes too strict a demand on Filiberto to prove his sincerity, Fenton, following the French, has Zilya using her sexual attraction to tease Philiberto. Although ‘At first sight’ Fenton’s version of the tale ‘seems to conform to a model of masculine virtus that is essentially chivalric and feudal’59 (which, indeed, would be a fair assessment of Bandello’s original tale), at heart it ‘is not … a liminal space for the proof of Virly’s [Philiberto’s] chivalric worth, but the displaced agent of his eventual success in the emplotment of the widow as a territorial gain’.60 Behind his very success, though, lies another subtext; not only does Zilya’s licentious behaviour expose her as unworthy, but Philiberto, in choosing to keep to the miserable and self-demeaning bargain he has made with her, becomes (at least for a while) complicit and culpable. Philiberto’s voluntary acceptance of the conditions Zilya imposes on him maintains the tension, or suspense, that Reik proposes as an essential feature of masochism, as well as suggesting that she is only superficially in control and that, at another level, he is in control of his submission to her from the outset. This, too, is a characteristic feature of the masochist, whose primary aim is not to lose control, but to fantasise – or act out the fantasy of – losing control.61 Philiberto’s underlying control becomes abundantly clear when he refuses to be set free from his pledge, using the very constraint Zilya has placed on him as a means to turn the tables on her. When he procures a stay of execution and she is set free there is a power switch, whereby he can show off the extensive lands he has been given by the king and ‘satisfye his appetitt at the full, with the frutes, whereof he had fealte earste so pleasant a taste’,62 that is to say, he can enjoy the sexual pleasures she has hitherto conferred only in part. The situation reverts, seemingly, to the traditional power relationship, with the man on top and the woman reduced to an absence-in-presence, existing only to comply with and fulfil a man’s desires, ‘her punishment by death staved off only for [Philiberto’s] sexual gratification and his pleasure in showing her [his] estates’.63 However, even as Philiberto holds the object



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of his desire in his arms, she somehow eludes his grasp. He can engage in the sexual act, but he can never truly consummate his love. What becomes of him is not revealed, and he merely fades from view as the story ends, leaving the reader with the description of Zilya returning to her home to spend the remainder of her days in contemplation of her own defects and the grace of God.64 Philiberto is effectively displaced by the woman by whom he has been captivated, in marked contrast to Bandello’s original Italian, in which Filiberto essentially comes to his senses – ‘he felt his fervent love change to a desire for just revenge’65 – and, far from enjoying her sexual favours, provides her with an escort and money and sends her away, whereupon the king bestows on him the hand of ‘a rich young woman who had inherited several castles’.66 Where Filiberto retains his honour and is happily married, the focus of Philiberto’s tale is not on the protagonist renouncing love, or seeking it elsewhere, or even on punishing the unresponsive female (though there is an element of this in the switching towards the end of the tale), but on his essential complicity in the woman’s control over him, bringing, as Fenton puts it, ‘generall discredit to the whole masculyne sect’.67 Folly, blindness and the gaze Fenton, following Belleforest, speaks of a ‘secret misterie, hydden in the eyes … of a woman’, which can ‘sommon and steale thaffections [sic] and hartes of men’. This ‘misterie’ is the ‘force in a woman’, which brings out the ‘folly in a man’.68 It is the woman’s gaze that gives rise to the masochistic dynamic, which depends basically on an Other who takes pleasure in witnessing the suffering of a victim who either fails or chooses not to realise that there are alternatives, becoming blind to reality and in thrall to delusion. Philiberto is led ‘thorowe the blynde vale of vaine hope’, encouraged by ‘the conceite of his owne phantasie’.69 Even when he realises that he has fallen for ‘A serpent and masqued basylyke in whome is rather a fayned showe, then true effect of any curtesye’ and laments that ‘the only glaunces of thyne eyes haue had power to fill euery corner of my hart full of poysoned infection’, he has no ‘arte or droague’ to cure himself of his affliction.70 The discursive link between blindness and folly can be traced back to Homer,71 and the ability to cause blindness is yet another facet of the power of the sun; John Donne, in one of his most celebrated poems, unites blindness, the sun and the woman’s gaze in his joking suggestion that the sun, which he calls a ‘Busie old fool’, might be blinded by the radiance of his lover’s eyes.72 The Elizabethan playwright Robert Greene develops the image of a foolish man blinded by the ‘sun’ of a woman’s gaze in his satirical, posthumously published prose narrative, Greene’s, Groats-VVorth of Witte, in which Roberto tells Lamilia that his brother Lucanio ‘is blinded with the beautie of your sunne darkening eies’.73 Roberto, who has been disinherited in favour of his brother, is conspiring to rob Lucanio of his wealth by luring

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him into the clutches of the prostitute Lamilia, and she ‘like a cunning angler made readye her … baytes that shee might effect Lucanios bane’.74 It is Lucanio’s foolishness in being tricked into falling for a prostitute that first defines him as inferior, a status confirmed when Lamilia (having cut Roberto out and appropriated Lucanio for herself) bleeds him of his wealth and abandons him, leaving him to live out his days as a pimp. The English playwright John Crowne employs similar tropes in his first work, a prose romance entitled Pandion and Amphigenia. With its captivating glances and eyes that blind, and depiction of a ‘burning heart and raging soul’75 inflamed to martyrdom for love, this work mimics much of the action and even the language of the Arcadia.76 The protagonist, enflamed with ‘unbridled passions’77 for Amphigenia – ‘every beam shot from her eye had darted into him an Enthusiasm’78 – poses as a woman under the name of Celania: If Amphigenia afforded her [that is, Pandion disguised as Celania] a glance, the lustre of her eyes (like the Sun whose own brightness is his shade, and sends a drop to veil a gazers eye) would strike Celania blind.79

Pandion bewails his ‘extreme folly, and baseness of spirit, that he was not able to bridle his passion’,80 but essentially he comes to terms with himself, articulating very clearly the patterns of thought and behaviour that would lead him astray: Amphigenia shall never make me unman my self, and degenerate from my masculine aequanimity into a leaden feminine spirit, whose embased flexibleness will bend and yield to every cross mischance that thwarts their desires. And what though I love Amphigenia, must I therefore do that that will make me hate my self? No, henceforth I am resolved to abandon all abject discontent and grief, and leave whining despair to those dejected souls, who conscious of their own small worth, become Loves footballs, and suffer themselves to be kicked and spurned by tyrannizing Beauty.81

Pandion has a tendency to love unattainable women; his first love was a nun, and Amphigenia ‘hath a perfect Antipathy against all men’.82 Nevertheless, he resolves the tension of his apparently hopeless position in a creative and constructive way, notably by pretending to be a woman. Like Pyrocles in the Arcadia he is a ‘tactical (as opposed to comic or fetishistic) transvestite’,83 who adopts his disguise in order to gain access to a woman. However, whereas Sidney’s protagonist ends up winning the object of his desire, Pandion – though he manages to win a sisterly affection from Amphigenia as Celania – never succeeds in winning her heart as a man. He has first taken on a counterfeit male identity, going by the name of Danpion, and then adopted a female disguise because, as the prince of a neighbouring country, he is at war with Amphigenia’s father, King Hiarbus, and can approach her no other way. At the end of a convoluted storyline, Pandion at last resumes



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his true identity and sets Amphigenia free from captivity by a rogue who has assumed his identity while he was pretending to be Danpion and Celania. When he reveals that his heart has been captured by her and kisses her hand, she allows it ‘with a countenance that shewed rather how she hated her captivity [at the hands of a villain who has assumed Pandion’s identity], than loved her Captive [that is, Pandion, who is captivated by his love for her]’.84 Amphigenia’s lukewarm response contrasts starkly with that of a male character who, a little earlier on in the story, recognises that the man supposed to be Danpion is in fact Pandion: as he seeth him, as if Danpion’s beauty had turned him into Marble, he stands still, as if he grew to the ground, and fixes his eye stedfastly upon him, as if he would inoculate his soul into him.85

The reaction is legitimised in the narrative by the fact that he recognises Danpion as the prince to whom he acted as foster father as an infant, but it is the culmination of a narrative in which a man first disguises himself as another man in order to pursue an unattainable woman, then forms a sisterly relationship with her by disguising himself as a woman, ousts an imposter who has usurped his identity and made off with the woman he loves and, finally, eschews love (or at least heterosexual love) altogether: I esteem Ambition a more tolerable, and Masculine distraction than Love: And therefore I had rather place my Hero in the more noble embraces of Fortune, than in the soft Effeminate Arms of a Lady.86

The potentially masochistic tension created by the man’s unrequited love is here resolved overtly through a reversal of the apophthegm ‘a world well lost for love’, but the queered subtext suggests that the real tension of the story lies elsewhere. Despite the deconstruction of male hegemony through the power of the female gaze, neither Lucanio nor Pandion display masochistic volition. They do not consciously choose to suffer. Lucanio is a knave who is cozened by a knavish woman in picaresque fashion, while Pandion’s narrative is perhaps best understood as an example of how ‘the ambiguity resulting from crossdressing becomes a vehicle for discussing homosexuality’.87 Though both have elements of men blinded to reason through the gaze of a woman, neither is a sustained proto-masochistic narrative in the way that Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey’s amorous misadventures are in Thomas Nashe’s picaresque tale, The Vnfortunate Traueller. The terms in which Surrey tells Jack Wilton, the picaresque protagonist of the tale, how his beloved Geraldine has captivated him mark him out as a self-confessed infatuated fool: Her high exalted sunne beames haue set the phenix neast of my breast on fire, and I my selfe haue brought Arabian spiceries of swéete passions and praises, to furnish out the funerall flame of my folly.88

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Banished from Geraldine’s presence, Surrey goes with Wilton to Italy where, imprisoned for fraud, they meet the mysterious Diamante, wrongly imprisoned for adultery, and he confuses her with his true love. Wilton comments: he woulde imagine her in a melancholie humour to be his Geraldine, and court her in tearmes correspondent, nay he would sweare shee was his Geraldine …

Wilton shrewdly concludes that ‘he was more in loue with his owne curious forming fancie than her face’, establishing the Other as a construct of the imagination, and Surrey writes ludicrous verses, whose ‘mockery of courtly romance is too plain to miss’,89 addressed to Diamante as his imagined mistress: Thy eies like searing yrons burne out mine, In thy fair tresses stifle me outright, Like Circes change me to a loathsome swine, So I may liue for euer in thy sight.90

Nashe’s fictionalised representation of Surrey is a sustained portrayal of the foolish man blinded by love, seeking to humiliate himself before the gaze of an idealised woman who is a construct of his own fancy and does not really exist. The deluded lover, set aflame with passion by the ‘sunne beames’ of a ‘high exalted’ woman and blinded by her ‘eies like searing yrons’, is content to grovel like a pig in her presence. It is Jack who succeeds in winning Diamante, however and, like Philibert / Philiberto in Belleforest’s and Fenton’s retelling of Bandello’s tale (though at a considerably earlier stage of the narrative), Surrey simply fades out of the picture, having been recalled to England. Jack says, ‘What aduentures happened him after we parted, I am ignorant’. Whether he claims his mistress on completion of his quest, or whether, even then, she rejects him, we do not know. The implication is that it simply does not matter. As Zilya dismisses Philiberto from her presence, so Geraldine dispatches Surrey on his quest, ostensibly so that ‘the plaister of absence’ may heal his love through ‘forgetfulnesse’.91 Almost immediately, however, she contradicts herself, saying, ‘forget mée not, continued deserts will eternize me vnto thée’ and, echoing Zilya, offers the ambiguous assurance that ‘thy full wishes shall bée expired when thy trauell shall bee once ended’.92 In this respect, Philiberto and Surrey are much alike. In both cases, physical removal from the gaze of the loved one strengthens the fantasy of the gaze of the Other but, whereas Philiberto tires and his love gives way to a desire for revenge, Surrey enters ever more enthusiastically into his delusion. The authorial eye Having used Jane Barker’s Virgilian pastoral as a springboard for this analysis of male reconstructions of the female gaze, it would be remiss to



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pass without remark the frisson occasioned by the fact that the unrequited lover’s complaint against the cruel nymph who delights at the suffering of her admirer was penned by a woman. Is the nymph’s gaze in some sense her gaze? Is she describing how she wants to see a man, wants to enjoy his pain and exult in her dominance over him? Whatever lies in the author’s mind – consciously or unconsciously, literally or metaphorically – there is certainly material here for the masochistic construction of the fantasy of the female Other. Masculinity in the seventeenth century was coming under assault in various ways.93 Ben Jonson complains about the ‘masculine, or rather Hermaphroditicall authoritie’ women were beginning to exercise in the public sphere94 and, as Nussbaum notes, women who had both intelligence and education were a threat to male hegemony: Capable of corrupting other women with her ideas, the learned lady becomes a pervasive metaphor for the unnatural woman who refuses to perform the natural functions of her sex and who actively usurps the functions of the male sex.95

As Abraham Cowley indicates in his dedicatory verses prefaced to the Poems of Katherine Philips, the autonomous female author is a challenge to male assumptions of superiority: We allow’d your Beauty, and we did submit To all the tyrannies of it. Ah, cruel Sex! will you depose us too in Wit?96

The mere fact of the female author is such a disruption of hierarchical norms that it can almost be considered to constitute in itself a form of sexual inversion, calling into question male and female roles. If the female writer destabilises the male just by her existence, what effect does she have when, not content to limit herself to themes conventionally considered becoming to her sex, she depicts vivid scenes of men suffering, humiliated and demeaned? Aphra Behn (discussed by Karel Vanhaeserouck in Chapter 3) is a case in point. There is a performative edge to her prose that carries the potential to invoke the fantasies of humiliation that it describes, as in her account of the slaves in Oroonoko: They suffer’d not like Men who might find a Glory and Fortitude in Oppression; but like Dogs that lov’d the Whip and Bell, and fawn’d the more they were beaten … whether they work’d or not, whether they were faulty or meriting, they, promiscuously, the Innocent with the Guilty, suffer’d the infamous Whip, the sordid Stripes, from their fellow Slaves, till their Blood trickl’d from all Parts of their Body.97

In a novel replete with scenes of violence, including self-mutilation and the killing and disfiguring of a loved one, perhaps the most unsettling passage

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of all is Behn’s description of Oroonoko’s final execution after leading the failed slave rebellion: … the Executioner came, and first cut off his Members, and threw them into the Fire; after that, with an ill-favoured Knife, they cut his Ears, and his Nose, and burn’d them; he still Smoak’d on, as if nothing had touch’d him; then they hack’d off one of his Arms, and still he bore up, and held his Pipe; but at the cutting off the other Arm, his Head sunk, and his Pipe drop’d; and he gave up the Ghost, without a Groan, or a Reproach.98

One of the most problematic features of this disturbing passage is the question of who sees it and how it is to be seen. ‘Although the execution happens in public, it occurs outside the direct gaze of the narrator’, a young white woman who seems to represent the author herself as a young woman. As a result, ‘the scene’s ability to function as spectacle appears compromised’.99 At one level there is ‘little doubt that Behn wants her reader to sympathise with Oroonoko and his plight at the hands of European civilization’.100 At the same time, though, ‘After Oroonoko rebels against his subordinate position as slave and threatens hers as mistress’ the narrator ‘begins to depict him as volatile, excessive, and distances herself from him’.101 Her absence here – and when Oroonoko is whipped earlier on in the text – ‘repeats the phenomenon of recognition and disavowal: both decrying the cruelty of slavery while evading the onus of having to act against it’.102 Cynthia Richards argues that Behn engineers the absence of the narrator at crucial moments such as this in order to expose ‘the brutal illusion of her own power as narrator’.103 For all the associations of this scene with martyrdom and judicial torture, and despite its claim to being a true story (the author may have spent time in Surinam in her youth), Oroonoko is a fiction, and the eye that gazes on Oroonoko’s brutal death is a fictional eye – a doubly non-existent Other, as Behn emphasises by removing the narrator from the scene. The description of Oroonoko’s end is almost clinically sparse and yet conveys a horror that no emotional account could express. Behn is, as Richards says, ‘a sophisticated critic of torture’,104 and her account is ‘more brutally honest … than cruel’.105 At the same time, the interplay of gender and power relationships – complicated further by the impossibility within Behn’s society of a white woman openly admitting any attraction to a black man – creates deep and unresolved tensions. Oroonoko is ‘by far the most gallant, courageous, and handsome man of the novella’,106 and the narrator’s very proximity to him as a young white woman is an unspoken challenge to white hegemony. Oroonoko ‘lik’d the Company of us Women much above the Men’, while the women, in turn, spend their time ‘obliging him to love us very well’, and he is on particularly close terms with the narrator, his ‘Great Mistress’.107 His frank sexuality, his popularity with the women, the



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narrator’s mingled fear and admiration of him and his mingled reverence for and resentment of the narrator all seem calculated to create anxiety in Behn’s (white, male) readers. In this context, the very fact that the narrator is not among the spectators when Oroonoko is whipped, or when he is tortured and killed, adds to that anxiety. As for his whipping, she ‘had Authority and Interest enough … to have prevented it’ had she been present and, in what amounts to his epitaph, she laments his death as that of a ‘Great Man; worthy of a better Fate’.108 The implication is that, no matter how the white man tortures, brutalises and dismembers the black man, the black man somehow outmans him. Behn has a particular talent for creating anxiety in the male reader. In her poem ‘The Disappointment’ she gives an extraordinarily frank and explicit account of Lysander’s inability to achieve an erection, describing every detail of Cloris’s reaction: Than Cloris her fair Hand withdrew, Finding that God of her Desires Disarm’d of all his Awful Fires, And Cold as Flow’rs bath’d in the Morning-dew. Who can the Nymphs Confusion guess? The Blood forsook the hinder place, And strew’d with Blushes all her Face, Which both Disdain and Shame express; And from Lysander’s Arms she fled, Leaving him fainting on the Gloomy Bed.109

As Scarlet Bowen points out, her blush is ‘an indicator of both shame and an autoerotic orgasm’,110 and the narrator’s empathy with Cloris at the end of the poem creates a ‘succession of female lovers and artists who have achieved a kind of erotic and artistic plenitude that is unattainable by the male lover of the heroic romance tradition’.111 If Behn’s forte is to undermine male confidence and question assumptions of male superiority, then Mary Wroth’s is to illustrate the erotics of the female gaze. Her erotically charged Urania, the first prose romance in English to be written by a woman, has attracted considerable attention for its scenes of female bondage and torture in the Urania ‘apparently pandering to male voyeurism’.112 Considerably less attention has been paid to the transgressive female gaze in her work. The pages of the Urania abound not only with scenes of the torture and humiliation of women (the binding and whipping of Limena being the most notorious example);113 they also include scenes of suffering men, notably Polarchos, bound, imprisoned and mistreated at the hands of the Princess of Rhodes,114 and Selarinus, prisoner of the Queen of Epirus.115 These are wicked women, and they are duly punished for their cruelty, but the heroines of the story also, on occasion, treat men harshly. When Urania hears that a man has spoken ill of her beloved Parsilius she condemns him to death, but is eventually persuaded to ‘mitigate her furie …

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to publike whipping, submission, and recantation’, and ‘humbly on his knees to aske pardon’.116 Wroth’s heroines almost all take great delight in hunting, and the huntresses’ quarry (nearly always stags) is frequently described in highly graphic terms with veiled erotic implications.117 Among other scenes of extreme violence, Pamphilia and her friends witness a jousting contest which culminates in a beheading, and is described as ‘the cruellest, and yet delightfullest Combate (if in cruelty there can be delight) that Martiall men euer performed, or had beene seene by iudging eyes’.118 Wroth’s detailed and ubiquitous descriptions of every form of violence indicate that she is not merely complicit in the transgressive male gaze but relishes these scenes herself,119 exemplifying (and illustrating through her female protagonists) the way in which the woman’s authorial eye creates, potentially, a transgressive Other, harbouring a female gaze that takes as much pleasure in apprehending scenes of imagined cruelty as the masochistic reader takes in imagining such a gaze beholding his or her suffering. Conclusion As the conventions of the chivalric suitor’s ritual submission to the woman come to be flouted by narratives of women who enjoy and exploit his abasement there emerges a foolish figure who, instead of taking pragmatic steps to resolve the anxiety of the situation, finds satisfaction in sustaining the anxiety and relishes being beheld as the object of the woman’s scorn. At the same time, graphic depictions of spectacles of suffering by female writers reveal a feminine erotics that – at least partly – feeds on and exacerbates male anxiety. In early modern poetry, romance and satire we can find strands of a developing protomasochistic discourse located in the projection onto the female beholder of an imaginary Other, behind whose captivating gaze lies pleasure, not merely in the suffering of the beheld, but in his contractual complicity in staging his own suffering. Notes 1 Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Vol. 3: Analysis of the Sexual Impulse; Love and Pain; The Sexual Impulse in Women, 2nd edn (Philadelphia: F.A. Davis, 1920), p. 132. The references are to Pico della Mirandola, Disputationes … aduersus astrologiā diuinatricem [Arguments against astrological divination] (Bologna: 1496; repr. Lyons: Nicolaus de Benedictis and Jacobinus Suigus [1498?]), sig. h5r; and Johann Heinrich Meibom, De flagrorum usu in re veneria [On the use of whips in sexual circumstances] (Leyden: [s.n., 1639?]). 2 Gordon Williams, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature, vol. 1 (London: Athlone, 1994), pp. 513–16. 3 Roy F. Baumeister, Social Psychology and Human Sexuality: Essential Readings (Philadelphia and Hove: Psychology Press, 2001), p. 308.



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4 Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: eine Klinisch-Forensische Studie [Sexual Psychopathy: A Clinical/Forensic Study] (Stuttgart: Enke [1886] 1894), p. 11. 5 Felicity A. Nussbaum, The Brink of All We Hate: English Satires on Women, 1660–1750 (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1984), p. 51. Nussbaum puts it even more clearly in her comment on Rochester’s poetry; ‘to love a woman is to fear her power’ (p. 57). 6 Thomas Nashe, The Vnfortunate Traueller. Or, The Life of Iacke Wilton (London: T. Scarlet, 1594), sig. E3v, sig. G4r. 7 Theodor Reik, Masochism in Modern Man, trans. Margaret H. Beigel and Gertrud M. Kurth (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1947), repr. in Reik, Love and Lust: On the Psychoanalysis of Romantic and Sexual Emotions (Toronto: Farrar, Strauss and Co., 1957). 8 See Erin Felicia Labbie and Allie Terry-Fritsch, ‘Introduction: Beholding Violence’, in Labbie and Terry-Fritsch (eds), Beholding Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 1–14, for a detailed discussion of the implications of ‘beholding’ and its locus between the image and the gaze. 9 Miranda Sherwin, ‘Deconstructing the Male: Masochism, Female Spectatorship, and the Femme Fatale in Fatal Attraction, Body of Evidence, and Basic Instinct’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 35:4 (2008), 174–82: 178. 10 Jane Barker, Poetical Recreations Consisting of Original Poems, Songs, Odes, &c. with Several New Translations (London: Benjamin Crayle, 1688), p. 211, ‘A Pastoral, in Imitation of Virgil’s Second Euclogue’. 11 ‘O crudelis Alexi, nihil mea carmina curas? / nil nostri miserere? mori me denique cogis?’, Virgil, Euclogues, 2, ll. 6–7. 12 Carol Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 1649–1714: Politics, Community, and Linguistic Authority (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 174. 13 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (London: Richard Field, 1596), p. 281. Book 5, Cant. 8. Cf., for example, ‘Those faire eies which wrought my woe’ (Jorge de Montemayor, Diana, London: Edm[und] Bollifant, 1598, p. 3); the many men ‘wounded by the powerfull beams of [Marcela’s] beautifull eyes’ (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, The History of the Valorous and VVittyKnight-Errant, Don-Quixote, of the Mancha, trans. by Thomas Shelton (London: R. Hodgkinsonne, 1652), fol. 26v); and, in John Banks’s, The Destruction of Troy a Tragedy (London: A.G. and J.P, 1679), Achilles’ complaint to Polyxena: ‘There’s far more dread in cruel Beauty lies, / And all my Strength is weaker than thy Eyes’ (p. 56). 14 King James Bible, Matthew 6:22–3. 15 ‘My Mistres eyes are nothing like the Sunne’. William Shakespeare, Shakespeares Sonnets (London: G. Eld, 1609), sig. H4r. Sonnet 130. 16 Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedie (London: Edward Allde [1592]), sig. H4v. 17 Aston Cokain, A Chain of Golden Poems Embellished with Wit, Mirth, and Eloquence (London: W.G., 1658), p. 55. 18 Michael Drayton, Poems (London: [Valentine Simmes], 1605), sig. Bb8v. Sonnet 30, ‘To the Vestalls’. 19 Ibid.

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20 Edmund Spenser, Amoretti and Epithalamion ([London]: [P. Short]), 1595), sig. A5r–6v. Sonnets 7–10. 21 William Browne, Britannia’s Pastorals. The First Booke (London: John Haviland, 1625), p. 5. 22 Ibid., p. 12. 23 Ibid., p. 11. 24 Ibid., p. 20. 25 Ibid., p. 12. 26 Ibid., p. 16. 27 Reik, Masochism in Modern Man, pp. 240–1. 28 Ibid., pp. 244–5. 29 Danijela Kambasković-Sawers, ‘ “Never was I the Golden Cloud”: Ovidian Myth, Ambiguous Speaker and the Narrative in the Sonnet Sequences by Petrarch, Sidney and Spenser’, Renaissance Studies, 21:5 (2007), 637–61: 660. 30 John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, A Pastoral Dialogue Between Alexis and Strephon (London: for Benj. Billingsley, 1682), broadsheet. 31 Ibid. 32 Habington, William, Castara the Third Edition. Corrected and Augmented (London: T. Cotes, 1640), p. 42. 33 Anon., Coridon and Parthenia, the Languishing Shepherd Made Happy. Or, Faithful Love Rewarded (London: P. Brooksby [1675?]), broadsheet. 34 Reik, Masochism in Modern Man, pp. 206–7. 35 Filip Kovacevic, ‘Masochism in Political Behavior: A Lacanian Perspective’, International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, 8:1 (2011), 58–73: 69–70. 36 Reik, Masochism in Modern Man, p. 207. 37 ‘individuals with weakly developed imagination show no inclination to become masochists’, ibid. 38 Barker, Poetical Recreations, p. 218. Cf. Virgil, ‘invenies alium, si te hic fastidit’ (‘you will find another, if this one disdains you’), l. 73. 39 Hubert Languet, Vindiciæ contra tyrannos: a Defence of Liberty Against Tyrants (London: Matthew Simmons and Robert Ibbitson, 1648), p. 146. 40 François-Hédelin, abbé d’ Aubignac, The Whole Art of the Stage (London: printed for the author, 1684), p. 144. 41 Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron Containing an Hundred Pleasant Nouels, trans. John Florio (London: Isaac Iaggard, 1620), fol. 202r. 42 Matteo Bandello, Certaine Tragicall Discourses, Written out of Frenche and Latin, trans. from the French of Pierre Boiastuau and François de Belleforest by Geoffrey Fenton (London: Thomas Marshe, 1567), fol. 243r. Henceforth Fenton. 43 Ibid., fol. 243v. 44 Ibid., fol. 249r. 45 Robert Anderson Hall, Italian Stories – Novelle Italiane (New York: Bantam Books, 1961; repr. New York: Dover, 1989), pp. 46–7. 46 Sherwin, ‘Deconstructing the Male’, p. 178. 47 In the analysis which follows I will define the Italian, French and English texts as Bandello, Belleforest and Fenton, respectively, and use the different versions



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of the characters’ names (Filiberto / Philibert / Philiberto and Zilia / Zilie / Zilya) to disambiguate between the three versions of the story. 48 Gilles Deleuze, Sacher-Masoch: An Interpretation, trans. Jean McNeil (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), p. 20. 49 ‘Ella all’hora, auuinchiategle al collo le braccia, in bocco lo bascio, e basciato che l’hebbe, gli disse’, Matteo Bandello, La Terza Parte de le Novelle (Lucca: Vincentio Busdrago, 1554; London: S. Harding, 1740), Novella XVII, fols. 63r–68r, fol. 65r. 50 ‘tre anni intieri, non parliate mai con persona del mondo, huomo, ne femina’, ibid. 51 ‘indiscreto, senza ragione, e difficilissimo da esser integramente osservato’, ibid. 52 ‘elle l’embrassa, & baisa fort amoureusement’; ‘doublant baiser sur baiser auec tel plaisir, que son ame, cuida s’en-voler’, Matteo Bandello, Histoires tragiques extraictes des oeuvres italiennes de Bandel, vol. 1, trans. François de Belleforest (Paris, Prévost, 1559; repr. Anvers: Jean Waesberghe, 1567), fol. 204v. Henceforth Belleforest. 53 Fenton, fol. 243v. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid., fols. 243v–244r. 56 Belleforest, fol. 204v. 57 Fenton, fol. 246r. Fenton’s version is translated more or less verbatim from Belleforest, fol. 208v. 58 Fenton, fol. 226r. 59 Lorna Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 100. 60 Lorna Hutson, ‘Fortunate Travelers: Reading for the Plot in Sixteenth-Century England’, Representations, 41 (1993), 83–103: 99. 61 Roy M. Baumeister, Masochism and the Self (New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1989), p. 12. 62 Fenton, fol. 250v. 63 Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter, p. 100. 64 Fenton, fol. 250v. 65 ‘sentì il suo feruente amore … cangiarsi in desio di giusta vendetta’, Matteo Bandello, La Terza Parte de le Novelle (Lucca: Vincentio Busdrago, 1554; London: S. Harding, 1740), Novella XVII (fols. 63r–68r), fol. 67r. 66 ‘vna ricca Giouane che hereditaua alcune Castella’, ibid., fol. 68v. 67 Fenton, fol. 241r. In Belleforest this reads, ‘la grande confusion du sexe masculin’ (fols. 201v–202r). 68 Fenton, fol. 225v. 69 Ibid., fol. 229v. 70 Ibid., fol. 238v. 71 Moshe Barasch, Blindness: The History of a Mental Image in Western Thought (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 34. 72 John Donne, Poems (London: M[iles] F[lesher], 1633), p. 169, vero 199. 73 Robert Greene, Greenes, Groats-VVorth of Witte, Bought with a Million of Repentance (London: [J. Wolfe and J. Danter], 1592), sig. C3r. 74 Ibid., sig. C1r.

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75 John Crowne, Pandion and Amphigenia, or, The History of the Coy Lady of Thessalia Adorned with Sculptures (London: I.G., 1645), p. 124. 76 Philip Sidney, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (London: John Windet, 1590; ‘augmented and ended’ edition, London: John Windet, 1593). 77 Crowne, Pandion and Amphigenia, p. 99. 78 Ibid., p. 123. 79 Ibid., p. 279. 80 Ibid., p. 119. 81 Ibid., pp. 186–7. 82 Ibid., p. 97. 83 Robert H.F. Carver, ‘ “Transformed in Show”. The Rhetoric of Transvestism in Sidney’s Arcadia’, English Literary Renaissance, 28:3 (2008), 323–52: 324. 84 Crowne, Pandion and Amphigenia, p. 305. 85 Ibid., pp. 291–2. 86 Carver, ‘Transformed in Show’, 306. 87 Winifred Schleiner, ‘Cross-Dressing and Transvestism in Renaissance Romances’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 19:4 (1988), 605–19: 619. 88 Nashe, The Vnfortunate Traueller, sig. E3v. 89 Dorothy Jones, ‘An Example of Anti-Petrarchan Satire in Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller’, Yearbook of English Studies, 1 (1971), 48–54: 48. 90 Nashe, The Vnfortunate Traueller, sig. G4r. 91 Ibid., sig. E4r. 92 Ibid. 93 As Pilar Cuder Domínguez puts it in reference to Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry (1613), ‘the old social order of male, white privilege is under siege’. Pilar Cuder Domínguez, Stuart Women Playwrights, 1613–1713 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), p. 15. 94 Ben Jonson, The Silent Woman, a Comoedie. Acted by the Children of the Revels (London: William Stansby, 1620), sig. B2v. 95 Nussbaum, The Brink of All We Hate, p. 43. 96 Abraham Cowley, in Katherine Philips, Poems (London: Richard Marriott, 1664), sig. A2r. 97 Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, or, The Royal Slave: A True History (London: for Will. Canning, 1688), pp. 186–7. 98 Ibid., pp. 237–8. 99 Cynthia Richards, ‘Interrogating Oroonoko: Torture in a New World and a New Fiction of Power’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 25:4 (2013), 647–76: 649. 100 Arland Feldwick and Cary J. Nederman, ‘ “Religion Set the World at Odds”: Deism and the Climate of Religious Tolerance in the Works of Aphra Behn’, in John Christian Laursen and Cary J. Nederman (eds), Beyond the Persecuting Society: Religious Toleration Before the Enlightenment (Philadelphia, PA: 1998), pp. 197–215, p. 226. 101 Susan Z. Andrade, ‘White Skin, Black Masks: Colonialism and the Sexual Politics of Oroonoko’, Cultural Critique, 27 (1994), 189–214: 196–7. 102 Ibid., p. 200. 103 Richards, ‘Interrogating Oroonoko’, 675. 104 Ibid., 654. 105 Ibid., 656.



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106 Andrade, ‘White Skin, Black Masks’, 202. 107 Behn, Oroonoko, p. 143. 108 Ibid., p. 239. 109 Aphra Behn, Poems upon Several Occasions (London: For R. and J. Tonson, 1684), pp. 70–7. 110 Scarlet Bowen, ‘Queering the Sexual Impasse in Seventeenth-Century “Imperfect Enjoyment” Poetry’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 19:1 (2013), 31–56: 49. 111 Ibid., 50. 112 Janet Clare, ‘Transgressing Boundaries: Women’s Writing in the Renaissance and Reformation’, Renaissance Forum, 1:1 (1996), para. 41. Online resource, www.hull.ac.uk/renforum/v1no1/clare.htm, accessed 20 January 2017. 113 Mary Wroth, The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania (London: [Augustine Mathewes?], 1621), p. 68. 114 Ibid., Polarchos is imprisoned on p. 200 and set free on p. 294. 115 Ibid., pp. 255–60. 116 Ibid., p. 33. 117 See in particular Pamphilia’s killing of a stag, pp. 270–1. 118 Ibid., p. 63. 119 For a detailed discussion of the representation and spectacle of suffering in the Urania see John R. Yamamoto-Wilson, Pain, Pleasure and Perversity: Discourses of Suffering in Seventeenth-Century England (Ashgate, 2013), pp. 198–211.

6

Epicurean tastes: towards a French eighteenth-century criticism of the image of pain Tomas Macsotay

Pierre Subleyras’s painting of Charon Ferrying Souls (Figure 6.1) serves to introduce this chapter’s observations on the image of pain.1 The painting reads, initially, like an académie, a carefully painted study of a youth standing as model, heavy-handed on chiaroscuro yet delicate and lifelike in its depiction of flesh and drapery. Subleyras, a French painter active in Rome, has adopted a pose that suggests the action of ferrying, pushing sideways and downward on a wooden rod corresponding, we may assume, to a pole or paddle. The gaze, which is never returned, is drawn mainly to Charon’s youthful, fleshy nudity: a well-defined back musculature unified visually by a strong top-lit space, which creates a sweeping curve over the youth’s extended right arm, spine and right hip and calf, and where Subleyras underscored the figure’s strain, giving the rich incarnation in tones varying from pale embers to the soiled left foot-sole and the pink-tainted lower buttocks. It is only after an initial examination of this inviting incarnate that the eye sorts out what turns out to be a company of shades.2 Although placed in the foreground and brightly lit, a sweeping glance would easily mistake them for a rocky formation. They are immobile and inexpressive, clad from head to toe in heavy white sheets, a frightening tableau of veiled corpses. As we grapple with the diffuse imagery that subtends the main motifs of Charon and the shades, the picture becomes darker and more disconcerting. Apparition-like, two low-lying spots recreate a distant background, bringing into focus two standing shades on the left and, along the vertical axis, a scene of fire-lit smoke or vapour. The last semi-image is the most likely to haunt us. Before a darkly outlined gallows, a seemingly lifeless nude youth is suspended with his back on a wheel – a self-effacing spectre of hell, repeating in broad outlines Abraham van Diepenbeeck’s print in Michel de Marolles’s Temple des Muses from 1655, which also shows a sensuous youth bound to the wheel and plagued by demons (Figure 6.2).3 The invisible space behind Charon becomes increasingly ambiguous: rather than a vision of the waters



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6.1  Pierre Subleyras, Charon Ferrying Souls, c. 1735–40

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of the Styx, we are given an intimation of dry, burning land, glimpses that reveal a harrowing site of torture. The rod or paddle in Charon’s hands seems ever more to represent a weapon, pushing down despairing souls. Incidentally, it also visually bisects the image of the condemned youth that is seen at a distance, as if to direct us to the site of his groin and the source of his sin. The picture certainly makes us lose our bearings, not because it would heap horror on horror, but because its unfolding series of signposts of hell is so elegant, and so strangely counterbalanced by the softness, gentleness and mischievous eroticism of Charon. If this picture is horrifying and dramatic, it is drama by indirect means, using something as simple as a state of incertitude and suspension to evoke punishment, despair and unredeemable pain. Subleyras, then, familiarises us to a quality of painting where fear depends on a somewhat contradictory and treacherous formal architecture, and begs the question what intellectual or cultural borrowings made such a work possible in the early to mid-1700s. This chapter will consider whether Subleyras’s particular take on the body afflicted contains clues of a contesting and appropriation of familiar iconographies of hell. Subleyras’s graded manner of presenting his visual argument thus conjures up a certain strand of beholders, and the evidence presented here leads us to say that these beholders could retain a secular taste even if the afflicted body remained a preferred object for audiences driven by starkly religious feelings. Taking its cue from these preliminary observations, this chapter will broach the question of whether it might be appropriate to speak here of traces of a (neo-)Epicurean image criticism. This will not lead to questioning the narrow intellectual context of Subleyras’s French circle in Rome or his connections to the Crozat circle in Paris – a task that remains to be done – but to a wider interrogation of the image in French early to mid-eighteenth century writings that bear the traces of a materialist philosophy. What has so far been done to address an Epicurean reception of images – more intent on tackling the realms of pleasure than those of pain – will be set off against what has remained in the shades of our knowledge of these developments, particularly secularised responses to iconographies of religious affliction. Just as in the example mentioned here, caught in its own mediations of an image of hell, the Epicurean ‘moment’ in French art may have depended heavily on employing the religious experience of the image in ways that rephrased and derailed its original intent of spiritual edification, giving traditional subject matter a playful dispersal of meanings.4 In the first sections, focusing on the Parisian reception of Epicurean thought, the fuller context of an Epicurean oppositional stance to religion and its theory of the image and how we respond to it will be addressed. Then I will delve into JeanBaptiste Dubos’s 1719 Réflexions critiques to round off the investigation into Epicurean positions, by describing what may be called Dubos’s new, secular criticism of the image of pain. The remainder of the chapter draws on more specific responses to images, ranging from a print of Pausanias’s



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6.2  Cornelis Bloemaert and Matham after Abraham Van Diepenbeeck, Vision of Hell, 1655

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descriptions of the classical underworld, to the themes of pestilent calamity in Gabriel François Doyen’s painting of The Miracle of St Anthony’s Fire. The chapter is closed by Diderot’s commentary on the Coresus and Callirhoe, Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s portrayal of a pastoral scene that revolved around a sacrifice and a suicide, to reassemble an account of images and their effects on those viewing them in terms of an Epicurean criticism of religion. Epicurean proponents and opponents The Encyclopédie reserved for Diderot’s 1755 article on Epicuréisme one of its key disquisitions about ancient philosophical schools of thought.5 Diderot addresses the reader directly, but in the way he uses a first-person voice to claim the ideas presented as his own, the reader is made to feel he is engaging Epicurus in person. Such an amicable tone played down the perceived radicalism of ancient atomism, and perhaps also suggested the nexus in Ancien Régime polity of fashionable dinner circles, attendant habits of conversation and the share of the Epicurean freethinker in Parisian social life. Literary and speculative interest in Epicurus, Lucretius, Celsus, Pliny the younger, Diogenes Laërtius and Lucian had been shaped, after about a century of active dissemination in literary Salons, into a distinctive freethinking heritage. Diderot himself, arriving in Paris in the 1740s as a provincial writer, would have encountered it as a long-honoured part of the salonnier scene.6 Jared Holley has shown that Diderot did not directly interpret the Epicurean system, but that he relied on borrowings from Jakob Brucker’s Historia critica philosophiae and Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique.7 Yet it was obvious that Diderot was aware of the successful trajectory that Epicureanism had made to modern fashionable literary Salon culture.8 As Diderot remarks at the close of the article, none of the modern European nations had seen a larger following for Epicureanism than France, where it rallied support among writers and moralists (Diderot includes the likes of La Motte and the Count de la Rochefoucault, although questionably adding the playwright Molière), financiers and politicians, wayward military strategists (the Maréchal de Catinat), natural historians and philosophers (Gassendi, Voltaire). Diderot also pointed out the importance of French women to the revival of the Epicurean tradition, particularly in the seventeenth century, when their activities as writers and hostesses of literary-social circles turned them into Epicurus’s most influential modern proponents. They include among their numbers young Madame Scarron (before her transformation into the austere royal mistress Madame de Maintenon), Ninon de Lenclos, Countess Henriette Coligny de la Suze, the Countess d’Olonne, the Duchess de Bouillon Mancini and Hortense Mancini (Duchess Mazarin), Madame de Gourville, Marie-Madeleine, Countess de la Fayette,



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Antoinette du Ligier de la Garde Deshouillères, who get a mention in the Encyclopédie as having left an indelible stamp on the French sophisticated indulgence in ‘luxury, elegance, politeness, philosophy, the virtues, the letters, voluptuousness’.9 To Diderot, Epicurus is the only thinker capable of ‘reconciling his morals with that which he learned about the true happiness of man, and his precepts with the appetites (appétits) and needs of nature’.10 According to Diderot, whose Epicurean model was tinged perhaps by Bayle’s scepticism and his own penchant for stoic ideas, it is a common misconception that Epicureans celebrated aimless distraction and pleasure-seeking. Epicureanism defended the irrepressible human need for comfort (volupté), a sense of well-being that is achieved both by sensual and spiritual means. In the flux of volupté, pain and pleasure always intermingle. Volupté is a natural harbour, not for indulgent inaction, but for states of conscience animated by labour, virtue, and even sacrifice – as Diderot reminds us, even a suicide seeks a form of comfort, so that volupté is not to be thought of as the absence or omission of suffering.11 Cardinal Melchior de Polignac, who spent most of his career as a diplomat and collector of classical statuary, is the author of a much-read refutation of the doctrine of Lucretius, Epicurus’s best-known follower. Polignac’s L’ AntiLucrèce, a Latin poem left unfinished at the time of the cardinal’s death in 1742, sets out to deliver a defence of transcendence and fear of God from the materialism of Epicurus. It is with tangible sting that Diderot locates Polignac among the attendants of the Sceaux, a prominent philo-Epicurean Salon that had attracted the likes of Voltaire and Montesquieu, remarking that he was fond of ‘those attending it’. L’ Anti-Lucrèce, a plea for a besieged religious authority, was as much a product of the new familiarity with Epicurean ideas. Charles d’ Orléans (abbé) de Rothelin’s preface to the first edition of the poem (1745) succinctly identifies the areligious core conviction of epicurean ideas, namely their overall view of human action as based in part on a ‘blind instinct’: Telle est, dans ce système, la destinée de l’homme. Etre matériel & périssable, il sort des mains de la Nature, sans loix, sans maître, sans principe, sans devoirs, sans autre guide qu’un aveugle instinct [emphasis added]. Le plaisir est son bien suprême & sa dernière fin. Tranquille sur l’avenir, inaccessible aux remords, sacrifiant tout à son repos, il doit jouir du présent, braver la mort, & l’attendre avec une parfaite sécurité.12

Men follow no law beyond that of a relief: common human needs and appetites, rather than divine law, reign supreme. It was to this constant, and in part automated, unconscious quest for a sheltered existence that Epicurus/ Lucretius attributes the emergence of institutional religion. The source is fear: unable to accept the disorder of weather, floods, thunderbolts, wild beasts, warfare and cruelty, man is endlessly moved to feel anxiety about

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death. Its ruling class devised religion in order to put at rest this inextinguishable plight, and to replace blind fear by deceptive illusions of clarity, by revelations: Les hommes sont crédules, ils chérissent la vie: l’idée de l'anéantissement fait frémir leur amour-propre ; le bruit du tonnerre les intimide ; enfin, la vue des merveilles de l’univers leurs persuade qu’une cause invincible (sic) en fait jouer les ressorts. De telles dispositions furent mises à profit par les Législateurs, & sur ces fondements communs, dit Epicure, on vit le mensonge élever différents systèmes religieux.13

It was of course by grace of this assessment, and in particular the link between religion and self-procreating deception, that it was possible to confront wise volupté with the cult of images and the veneration of the Christian martyr’s suffering, those two ingrained forms of Catholic post-Tridentine religious expression. Epicurus proposed to explain morals from needs and ‘appetites’, and therefore to see any concept of moral order as historical and contingent. The understandable distress that haunts life as it is lived, in thrall to violence and dispossession, is in the long run the cause for priestcraft, divination and theology. Diderot, like Bayle, questioned fears that Epicureans’ atheism made them disrespectful of religious expression in any form. He underlined that Epicurus’s refusal to believe in the existence of a Godhead or of an immaterial soul preserving memories of life ‘beyond death’ made him, if anything, more understanding of popular religious emotion, which shaped the framework for the cult of idols, for superstition, myth and the conduct of priests. But religion remained a lie. A delusive rationale governed the insistent creation of worlds ‘beyond’ our own, as in fables of the realm of Hades and of the Elysian fields: Loin de nous donc la fable des enfers & de l’élisée, & tous ces récits mensongers dont la superstition effraye les méchans qu’elle ne trouve pas assez punis par leurs crimes mêmes, ou repaît les bons qui ne se trouvent pas assez récompensés par leur propre vertu.14

The Epicurean sage denounced the unreality of religious fictions (simulacres), particularly those of human-like gods and the afterlife. But it accepted the emergence of religiosity as a human fact. As Diderot put it, religion originated from consciousness of nature, matter, the void and a notion of place: ‘when one crosses over a place, one finds the idea of religion’.15 If able to return time and again to a stance of tranquillity or plenitude (ataraxia, bonheur), the philosopher understands that the unpredictable nature of ordinary experience, the absence of a divine will behind events, was a state of nature that the mind would need to turn into its shelter during the body’s life. The body’s altercations between pain and pleasure cannot be rooted out, but must be wisely embraced. We must also pay attention to the simulacres that haunt us, if not in a waking state, then in dreams:



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L’âme en général s’épanouit & s’ouvre au plaisir; elle se flétrit & se resserre à la peine. Vivre, c’est éprouver ces mouvements alternatifs … Si le corps tombe d’affaiblissement ou de fatigue, l’âme accablée ou distraite succombe au sommeil. L’état où elle est obsédée de simulacres errants qui la tourmentent ou qui l’amusent involontairement, est ce que nous appellerons l’insomnie ou le rêve, selon le degré de conscience qui lui reste de son état.16

These brief remarks outline the type of Parisian reception of Epicurean thought that will be further developed in this chapter as the thread that undergirded a new, secular criticism of the image. What is becoming clear through various studies of the onset of ‘middle genres’ in French eighteenthcentury painting17 is that France’s public, taking its cue from developments that started in the closing decades of the seventeenth century, had moved painting in the direction of gentle subject matter, simple and dreamy compositional form and light painterly execution. This was a painting serving tastes for the anecdotal, domesticated and light, its apparent discretion challenging the claims to higher significance of representations made for religious rite and monarchic splendour. The current contribution cannot engage in the thorny debate over whether an elite Epicurean subculture, operating through the social evenings at the Sceaux and beyond, was indeed subjacent to these developments in the direction of a secular art and decor now known as ‘rococo’.18 Its aim is instead to understand the Epicurean revival, along with the wider materialist bent in French thought, as enlivening the sensibility contemporary beholders brought to their understanding of an image of pain such as Subleyras’s Charon, described in the introduction.19 In terms of the types of images, I think too much emphasis has been placed on the hedonistic play that Thomas M. Kavanagh’s Enlightened Pleasures (2010), to mention an important recent study, has regarded as the historical expression in fine art of the return to Epicurus. Enlightened Pleasures offers a modest disquisition on painting (no more than one chapter), containing a valuable analysis of the structure of a piquant rococo register, with scenes made up of luscious fantasy settings and eye-caressing pastoral encounters between unbuttoned flirters, none of which engage the themes of pain that continued to occupy artists other than François Boucher.20 For its rather reductive understanding of the Epicurean in terms of a plain ‘culture of pleasure’, Enlightened Pleasures has drawn some critical remarks for neglecting the radicalism of the ideas, and some of this criticism may hold true for his argument about painting. For our purposes of reconstructing an image criticism it seems at the least necessary to underline that the eradication of suffering was not at the heart of Diderot’s understanding of volupté or bonheur.21 Others, notably Marc Fumaroli in his work on Jean-Antoine Watteau, have insisted on the importance of Epicurean ideas to the practice of life sketching and an interest in the almost imperceptible language of the body. Watteau’s work returns the viewer time and again to gentle fleeting emotions,

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to the subtle gesture or casual pose, turning the Epicurean fascination for a human nature suspended between states of joy and pain into a type of visual study of psychology.22 A willingness to foster an awareness of their own responses might have formed part of the identity of neo-Epicurean viewers. Dark and distressing images could be – and this will be discussed further with reference to Jean-Baptiste Dubos – as instructive in this sense as light, dreamy ones. Lucretius’s De rerum natura was, of course, responsible for important literary topoi of pain and its audiences: vertiginous spectacles of shipwrecks, pest-ridden towns, torture and damnation. This does not mean that such viewers were looking to create a type of painting suited to their tastes, and what becomes clear is that some overlap existed between the type of image attracting Epicurean commentary and a religiously inspired representation. It is necessary to underline that both Rothelin and Diderot were fully aware of the wide ethical repercussions of the ancient system, including its negative account of religion. Epicurean discourse in absolutist France must continue to be thought of, in spite of its obvious popularity, as an illicit discourse. As late as the 1770s, the Spanish Catholic priest Fernando de Ceballos wrote an alarmist pamphlet in which he attacked the followers of Epicurus as a sect of sodomites and mendacious freethinkers, one of many imminent threats to social order, and even if his point of view represented a form of orthodoxy that was itself increasingly unable to steer public or official opinion, it was a censorship well known to Encylopedists in France.23 Looking for answers to a culture of pleasure and luxury in the Epicurean Salon fails to take account of an important element of this renewal: its negative, acrimonious stance on key philosophical and ethical matters. Jared Holley, arguing against Kavanagh’s emphasis on the ‘culture of pleasure’, reminds us of the metaphysical and political radicality of eighteenth-century readings of Epicurean atomism, which ‘could … be understood politically as denying natural law, epistemologically as rejecting idealism, morally as denying any innate sociability or tendency to altruism, and metaphysically as denying Providence and the existence of the immaterial soul’.24 To these various negatives we may add the refusal of religious illusions, including those of imagery. A sense that the image cheats and manipulates its seduced or frightened audience, not entirely in disagreement with Kavanagh’s sense of dreamy fictive sensuality, is indeed a fitting way into Epicurean image theory, and one consistent with later discourses informed by ancient and modern materialism, from Enlightenment religious anthropology to Marxist discourse.25 Dubos: aesthetics as artificial distress Now we will turn to evidence that the image of pain did coincide with Epicurean concerns. A vastly influential thinker, widely read by critics of both



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visual arts and theatre, cannot be ignored in this context: Jean-Baptiste Dubos, known as Abbé Dubos. Dubos’s criticism of the image, like Diderot’s account of Epicurus, has not erased suffering from its purview, but on the contrary is thoroughly imbricated in it. At the same time, it has clearly eliminated the religious responses that representations of pain elicited. As a diplomatic envoy for the French crown to England and the Netherlands during the War of Spanish Succession, Dubos befriended John Locke and became an adept of Addison’s Spectator from its early years in the 1710s. His magnum opus, the Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture (1719), is commonly associated with this new Lockeanism that began to influence the Régence thinkers (Montesquieu and Voltaire were other noted anglophiles).26 The modernity of his empiricism went hand in hand with a neo-Epicurean language. A recurring theme is that of pleasure and affliction, one often ensuing from the other, much as Diderot defined the psychology of Epicuréisme as the shuttling of the mind between comfort (volupté) and distress. Painting and poetry, Dubos proposed, are not just a source of aesthetic emotion, but a reflex of our knowledge that happy moments lead to ‘journées tristes’. More poignantly, Dubos’s theory of the image has for its central plank an important argument about the psychological condition of the beholder: art can be the release valve for our attraction to bodily and mental mystery: Quand les passions réelles & véritables qui procurent à l’âme ses sensations les plus vives, ont des retours si fâcheux, parce que les momens heureux dont elles font jouir, sont suivis de journées tristes, l’art ne pourroit-il pas produire des objets qui excitassent en nous des passions artificielles capables de nous occuper dans le moment que nous le sentons et incapable de nous causer dans la suite des peines réelles et de afflictions véritables.27

The lightness of aesthetic pleasure comes from its ambivalence. It consists of passions artificielles, where consciousness elides pain by confronting fictional substitutes for it, not unlike a hide-and-seek game where a child elides an imagined punishing Other. Dubos’s psychology, built on his negative account of psychological well-being, fed into a theory of audience response. The theorist was appalled at the Aristotelian notion that viewers in the theatre suffered and enjoyed representations as if the events represented concerned them directly. Viewers to Dubos are always aware that what they see is a set-up, an illusion. Indeed, tears are shed more lavishly in the comfort of the knowledge that the representation is unreal.28 Turning more emphatically on the spectator’s emotions and consciousness meant that poetry and painting were seen to compete not just with one another but with the non-artificial spectacle of cruelty: criminal punishment, Roman gladiator games, medieval tournaments, Spanish bullfighting, and animal fights all participate in the aesthetic.29 Referencing with admiration the British ‘respect for humanity even in the worst villains’, Dubos remarks that even though the British oppose public executions, they are drawn to

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lethal animal fights and aggressive boxing. In sum, the attraction to cruelty is universal: ‘il est dans les spectacles les plus cuels une espèce d’attrait capable de faire aimer des peuples les plus humains’.30 On the one hand, spectators shun calamity, never confusing representation for reality, but, on the other, they are attracted to the thrill of the cliff. A paradox arises from Dubos’s theory: while danger is seen as a condition that modern life is equipped to remove or at least hold at bay, this danger does not altogether retreat from experience or the life of the mind. In what seems like an echo of Epicurean ideas, the Réflexions reminds us that even if it is so that we inhabit a world of suffering and death, thoughts of death can be comforting and even uplifting. Aesthetic contemplation is a form of artificial distress. Spectators procure for themselves substitute feelings – Dubos refers to copies des passions or passions artificielles – and accept the light injuries that their presence in the theatre during the performance of a tragedy can produce in them. Watching becomes an invasive, yet comforting (Diderot’s volupté is not far off) disruption of one’s bearings. It brings us to safe contemplation of the world of pain and suffering that one eschews in real experience. Although Dubos is widely portrayed as an early defender of the idea that the beholder’s pleasure is the only factor that makes an artwork succeed and that beholders are therefore autonomous agents in their viewing experience, it is often overlooked that Dubos took an interest in the inner structure and presentation of scenes. The act of beholding, according to this author, was preconditioned by the contents of representation. Because audiences respond to the pain and pleasure that preoccupies them, trees, skies and fields find little emotional echo. But once a countryside view is given over to experiences of happiness gained and lost, this situation changes. Dubos illustrates this phenomenon in a series of passages on a painting by Poussin, which he starts by commenting that adding figures to landscapes was a clever way of anchoring a spectator’s projections of pain and joy: Ils [Rubens and Poussin] y placent ordinairement des figures qui pensent, afin de nous donner lieu de penser: ils y mettent des hommes agités de passions, afin de réveiller les nôtres & de nous attacher par cette agitation [ … ] Qui n’a point entendu parler de cette fameuse contrée qu’on imagine avoir été durant un tems le séjour des habitants les plus heureux qu’aucune terre ait jamais portés? Hommes toujours occupés de leurs plaisirs, & qui ne connoissoient d’autre inquiétudes, ni d’autres malheurs que ceux qu’essuient dans les Romans, ces Bergers chimériques dont on veut nous faire envier la condition …31

Dubos’s attention turns at this point to Poussin’s painting of Et in Arcadia Ego, which shows a group of young shepherds and shepherdesses before gentle pastures and plains encountering a young girl’s sarcophagus. The young Arcadians read and comment among themselves about the inscription on the tomb, ‘I too live(d) in Arcadia’:



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Mais cette inscription si courte fait faire les plus sérieuses réflexions à deux jeunes garçons & à deux jeunes filles parées des guirlandes des fleurs, & qui paroissent avoir rencontré ce monument si triste en des lieux où l’on devine bien qu’ils ne cherchoient pas un objet affligeant … l’on ne voit plus sur leurs visages, à travers l’affliction qui s’en empare, que les restes d’une joie expirante. On s’imagine entendre les réflexions de ces jeunes personnes sur la mort qui n’épargne ni l’âge, ni la beauté, & contre laquelle les plus heureux climats n’ont point d’azile. On se figure ce qu’elles vont se dire de touchant, lorsqu’elles seront revenues de la première surprise, & l’on applique à soi-même & à ceux à qui l’on s’intéresse.32

Dubos’s description sets up a reflexive process of some complexity, triggered by a return of a negative sense of distress after a brief moment of seduction and delight. The travelling train of thought in which the painting immerses its beholder is carefully laid out by Dubos. Initially, the familiar tales of Arcadia, of which the canvas invokes a general reminiscence, hold the spectator’s interest, allowing him or her to identify with the young Arcadians who in Poussin’s scene linger around the sarcophagus. The viewer induces their particular passions artificielles, as Dubos would call them, as shares in lost illusions of everlasting youth and love. Then the viewer is set up for a further ‘surprise’: a disinvestment in the sensuous cultural memory of Arcadia itself. For the educated audience, who found solace in a land imagined to be spared the pain of real life, the implication of attentively watching Poussin’s scene is an understanding that any such retreat exists only in our imaginations. Dubos exemplifies a criticism of the image that respects Epicureanism’s sense of a self looking for comfort, yet returning time and again to the problems of death, loss and pain. Moreover, because it attends to the transitory nature of a beholder’s attitude before the image, it offers the first clue in understanding images of distress already playing on a secular, rather than a religious, set of responses. One might return, for example, to Subleyras’s Charon, which was highlighted earlier for its paradoxical sensationalism, cold dispassionateness and overall sense of derailed meanings. As argued earlier, the Charon is somehow operative on an uncertain area between a beholder’s immersion in the strong emotions that follow from the sight of the gallows and of corpses, and an ability to operate the image as a fictional given and to unspecified effect. It is never easy, in the visual realm, to presuppose an intentionality, and indeed one may characterise the visual in terms of this incapacity to hold a single idea through to the end. Was the Charon a memento mori, a doctrinal teaching on the salvation of the soul its central plank? Or did Subleyras play on the harrowing site itself – hell and the gallows a platform for sensorial effects in the studies of corpses and of the nude Charon? Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego, more clearly inscribed in the memento mori tradition, finds in Dubos an implacable analyst: his beholder can read the Arcadian scene elliptically, ‘as if’ it were true. Transferring this

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to the Charon, we can see the gallows travelling in the opposite direction: from anguish caused by thoughts of hell to comfort in the thought that what we see is just a sad site, or perhaps a real site we have imagined to be hell all along. Strangely enough, in both scenes the beholders affirm themselves by distancing their anguished identification with the settings. The latter are then dismantled, deflated. Once the scene of action is revealed to be sustained by human projections, these projections can be unmade, and more mundane things supplant them. In this secularised response, real suffering can gain new ground over the simulacra of heaven and hell. The Underworld, Golgotha, the gallows This short review of the Réflexions critiques serves to reconstruct an Epicurean method for viewing scenes of suffering. Dubos had something resembling a model viewer, and along with a predisposition to enjoy images, there was also in this viewer an inclination to feel attraction to death, loss and pain. Etienne-Maurice Falconet, a sculptor and theorist of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture belonging to the circles of the Encyclopédie, offers connections between Dubos’s model viewer and specific examples of a ‘love’ for religious iconographies of pain. Falconet, not directly attracted to Epicurean ideas, was nevertheless drawn to the arduous bodily and mental realities that hide behind the natural observation informing some great works of sculpture. An example is found in a passage from his 1760 article Sculpture in the Encyclopédie, where he offered that the strengths and movements of a dying athlete in Pierre Puget’s group of Milo of Crotona devoured by the lion was inspired by his observation of galley-slaves at Marseille (Figure 6.3).33 In the context of Dubos’s model beholder we should re-examine an essay Falconet wrote on a recent reconstruction of an ancient painting by Polygnotos in Delphi, Odysseus visiting the Underworld. The Polygnotos painting was the subject of a print from 1757 by Louis Joseph Le Lorrain (1715–59), which pieced together the original composition from descriptions in Pausanias. Falconet was taking issue with the banal appearance of the underworld in Le Lorrain’s print, which, according to the sculptor, came far closer to resembling the Elysian Fields than the world of the damned. In his usual polemic manner, he presented a confusing argument singling out many details, as in his discussion of the figure of Phaedra, where he set out to dissect the metaphoric image of the suicide. In the legend to Le Lorrain’s print Polygnotos’s Phaedra was described as: ‘ … élevée de terre et suspendue à la corde qu’elle tient des deux mains; [elle] semble se balancer dans les airs; c’est ainsi que le peintre a voulu couvrir le genre de mort dont on dit que la malheureuse Phèdre finit ses jours.’34 Phaedra would end her life by taking poison. In Racine’s portrayal she was the woman driven by incestuous love to cause the death of her step-son Hippolytus, so that by choosing to end her own life she came to carry a double



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mark of sinfulness. Polygnotos, for his part, chose the image of suicide by hanging as an allegory for suicide. This is what seemed to have caught Falconet’s attention, for Le Lorrain does not show Phaedra hanging, just holding the chord, inexplicably airborne. Falconet observed that the way Pausanias had described her figure as ‘suspended’ from a chain belongs to classical conventions for marking the suicide’s punishment beyond death: the split, unresolved mindset of a suicide’s shade in the underworld. To treat her as an allegory, airborne but not hanging, stopped short of the emblematic force and strong moral apprehension Polygnotos’s contemporaries felt, according to Falconet, towards suicide. Polygnotos had likely chosen a compelling image of her body suspended on a chord or chain, rocking back and forth in the wind, an emblem of the unresolved plight of the suicide after death: Je ne m’y arrête plus que pour dire un mot de l’ombre de Phèdre, qui est là suspendue à une chaîne qu’elle tient des deux mains … [les anciens] avoient imaginé l’oscillation pour représenter les suicides, parcequ’ils croyoient que l’âme de ces gens-là n’étoit jamais en repos dans les enfers: Aliae panduntur inanes suspensae ad ventos. Ainsi Ploygnote, délicat ou non, a peint une oscillation; ce qui n’indique pas le genre de mort. Phèdre se pendit: si elle se fût empoisonnée, noyée, ou poignardée, l’artiste eût représenté son ombre également suspendue & oscillante … La religion des Grecs, ou leurs loix, refusoient la sépulture aux suicides. On avoit la superstition de les représenter par de petites figures suspendues à des cords, & de les balancer en l’air. On croyoit qu’après cette cérémonie l'âme passoit le Styx, & les funérailles étoient censées faites.35

As a suicide, Pheadra features in prints of Odysseus in the underworld and the ‘palace of dreams’, as for instance in the aforementioned work by Diepenbeeck for the Temple des Muses (Figure 6.4). Such visual cues, even if they relate to pre-Christian precautions about the damning condition of the suicide, were therefore as adequate for the fearful religious imagination informing Diepenbeeck’s prints as they were for the circles of the Encyclopédie, with Falconet as their foremost ‘expert’ on fine art. Did anything change from one type of viewer to the next? One could say the ‘secular’ viewer was rehearsing, in this interest in the underworld, a process of disenchantment. It is rewarding to return to Dubos’s sweetly disillusioned viewer grieving over the loss of Arcadia in Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego. As an example of a ‘false simulacrum’, the underworld required the beholder to imagine herself as standing clearly outside of the frame and the subject matter – to evolve a distanced awareness that one is looking at a transparent ‘lie’. But as the site inhabited by phantoms of distress and pain, the underworld was also a ‘dream’, of interest as a sounding board for our inescapably conflicted condition of volupté. Calling to mind Diderot’s passage from Epicuréisme that the suicide too looks for comfort, it appears that anguish is part of the same emotional reservoir from which Dubos’s viewer could also draw in



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6.4  Cornélis Bloemaert and Matham after Abraham Van Diepenbeeck, Palais du sommeil, 1655

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order to enjoy the image. In recent years, the metaphor of oscillation has been recovered as a tenet of French materialist explorations into human physiology and psychology. James A. Steintrager has used it to describe Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s model of human consciousness, as evinced by the latter’s 1745 Ecole de la volupté or the 1748 L’homme machine. In La Mettrie’s atheist model, which discarded the immaterial soul, oscillation encapsulated the sensorial basis for our ‘thinking’ consciousness.36 Falconet and his friend Diderot knew his work. Not only had they frequented the Salon of Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach, famous for its atheism and radical materialism, but they also mentioned La Mettrie specifically in personal letters. In a letter from April 1766, Falconet admitted to Diderot that he had loved a passage on pride and glory in La Mettrie’s refutation of Seneca’s De Vita beata, although overall he found the materialist’s ideas ‘detestable’.37 Falconet read extensively, and Dubos is among the authors to influence him lastingly. The sculptor’s attempts to envision the representation of the shades in Polygnotos evoked for him a canvas he saw while in Antwerp, the famous Descent from the Cross by Peter Paul Rubens (Figure 6.5). To the sculptor, the picture was an eloquent evocation, not of some ennobled biblical narrative, but of an abject world of the gallows, as he makes clear by referring to the wheel and to ‘la Grève’, the renown Parisian square that faced the old City Hall, the last abode of criminals who were to die by public execution: je me borne à dire ici que sa fameuse descente de croix est un des plus effrayants tableaux que je connoisse, & peut-être celui qui, en me présentant ce que l’art a de plus expressif, m’a le plus fait horreur. L’idée d'un corps divin n’avoit pas pénétré l’artiste: son Christ mort est un vil supplicié qu’on détache du gibet; si on ne voyoit pas la croix, on penseroit que c’est même de la roue. Chaque fois que je verrois ce tableau, je croirois être à la Greve, quand on en ôte un malfaiteur d’après exécution.38

Falconet’s confident defamation of the painted image of Christ – reduced to a dead rogue – makes us experience a beholder set free, just as Dubos had wanted it. On the part of the spectator, the scene that would have had to inspire faith echoed instead a viewer thrown back onto his own world, reimagining the vexing, exhausting viewing experiences of broken criminal corpses. Dubos’s no less harrowing account of another Rubens piece, the now lost triptych for the high altar of the convent of the Récollets in Mechelen, had shown the way. The opening of Dubos’s description bluntly conveys the spectacle of the gallows: ‘[Rubens] n’a pas laissé d’en faire un objet d’horreur. Il s’est servi pour cela de la circonstance du supplice de ce reprouvé qu’on lit dans l’Évangélie: que pour hâter sa mort, on lui cassa les os.’39 To obtain a sense of the relentlessness of Dubos’s decision to regard the Crucifix as a scene of horror, and the fact that this taste for the plight of Rubens’s thieves was an outlier in art theoretical tradition, one can contrast

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6.5  Peter Paul Rubens, Descent from the Cross, 1612–1614

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it to the passage where Joshua Reynolds recollects the Mechelen triptych, which he described as a work by Van Dyck. In 1781, Reynolds published his account of it as part of his travel journal from the Low Countries. But there is no transgressive impulse to the way he mentioned the vision of the thieves in their broken states: ‘In the efforts which the thieves make to disengage themselves from the cross, he (Van Dyck) has successfully encountered the difficulty of the art; and the expression of grief and resignation in the Virgin is admirable.’40 Dubos was not happy to report on the emotion conveyed by the figures of Mary and the thieves. He took interest in every new disfigurement of their bodies: On voit par la meurtrissure de la jambe de ce malheureux, qu’un bourreau l’a déjà frappé d'une barre de fer qu'il tient à la main. L’impression d’un grand coup nous oblige à nous ramasser le corps par un mouvement violent & naturel. Le mauvais Larron s’est donc soulevé sur son gibet, & dans cet effort que la douleur lui a fait faire, il vient d’arracher la jambe qui a reçu le coup,41

After marvelling over the way in which the thief’s perforated foot, by the contracting action of the leg, has made a mess of ripped skin around the nail, he comes out admiring, in the very appearance of these atrocious facts, Rubens’s colour: ‘Rubens qui savoit si bien en imposer à l’oeuil par la magie de son clair-obscur, fait paroître le corps du Larron sortant du coin du tableau dans cet effort, & ce corps est encore la chair la plus vraie qu’ait peint ce grand Coloriste … .’ The astonishing directness with which Dubos engages the scene of torture serves well to illustrate that the viewer proposed in these texts can freely ‘opt out’ of the emotional loyalties to Christ’s suffering in the subject matter of crucifixion, to engage instead the scene of turmoil seen through the lens of no one in particular, or, perhaps, the executioner. Again, a fiction is being undone: an illusion unravelled. Diderot: behind miracles and sacrifices Diderot, as has been noted by a good number of scholars, must take the prize for his resolve to greet an imaginary of Christian supplice and martyrdom with the chilliest hedonistic pleasure.42 In his Salon of 1767, when describing a scene where a desperate father holds up his mortally ill and strongly afflicted toddler to the skies, he quipped his appreciation in short, pulsing phrases: ‘The child looks well in his slip. He is beautifully afflicted. He shouts nicely. His grimace may be said to be exaggerated’.43 There was for the philosophe no limit to his tolerance for squalid, miserable, cavernous images that came under his eyes. His resolve to examine every new serving of affliction as an unalienable part of a picture’s visual magic, to be enjoyed rather than feared, led him to write a number of



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accounts where distanced acknowledgement of the plight of the sufferer is driven to an almost subversive limit. The quoted passage on the suffering parent and child came from one of Diderot’s famous commentaries on paintings that hung in the Paris Salon: the scene came from Doyen’s painting of The Miracle of St Anthony’s Fire, which was exhibited in the Salon of 1767 (Figure 6.6).44 The scene, which fitted into a long post-Tridentine iconography of plague paintings,45 depicts the people of Paris, who have congregated at the gate of a hospital, desperately seeking relief from the illness of ergot poisoning, then known as ‘St Anthony’s fire’, which in the year 1129 scourged the city’s inhabitants. In the top right corner clouds fold back to reveal St Genevieve, patron saint of the village of Paris, as she meets the heavenward gaze of the supplicants below her, and intercedes on their behalf. Rather than depict a desolate cityscape with midsize figures – as had, for instance, Poussin in his 1630 Pest of Ashdod – Doyen gives only sparse glimpses of the locale behind a front stage that competes for attention with the image of the saint. The viewer has a privileged, close-up view of sufferers’ bodies, evocatively painted to show swollen knuckles, torn clothes, sickly flesh. Besides the group with the lifted toddler, Doyen portrayed a baby suckling on a deceased mother’s breast, a man succumbing to seizures and convulsions, and three cadavers.46 Just as Dubos had offered a description of the factual cruelty of the thief’s torture that somehow gave way to the ‘pleasures’ of the painter’s colouring, Diderot went in search of a principle of compositional and visual patterning that arranged the excesses of suffering into appealing imagery capable of exciting him as a beholder: There’s nothing intrinsically disgusting about cadavers, they appear frequently in paintings without offending vision. The word is repeated endlessly in poetry. Provided that the flesh remains firm, that the putrefied portions don’t fall apart, that it isn’t crawling with worms and retains its overall form, good taste in both these arts will find nothing objectionable in this image. This is not true of eyes ripped from their sockets. I’d close my own to avoid looking at eyeballs jerked about by the crow’s beak, bloody, putrid fibres partly attached to the cadaver’s eye sockets and partly suspended from the beak of a voracious bird [...] So there’s an art, inspired by good taste, in the distribution of images within a discourse and in the parsing of their effects, an art of fixing the imagination’s eye where one wants it to linger.47

Throughout his description, Diderot acknowledges the horror that these ‘disparate events’ induced among Salon audiences, some of whom were horrified and looked away. However, after meticulously describing these abject scenes (fifteen pages in the recent English edition), Diderot turned to the painter in gratitude: Where am I to expect scenes of horror, frightening images, if not in a battle, a famine, a plague, an epidemic? If you had asked the advice of these people with

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6.6  Gabriel-François Doyen, The Miracle of St Anthony’s Fire, 1767



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delicate, refined taste afraid of sensations that are too strong, you’d have painted over your frenzied man throwing himself from the hospital, and the stricken man tearing at his side at the floor of your platform: and I’d have set fire to the remainder of your composition … .48

In spite of this, Diderot has to fault the artist’s execution. Doyen, he says, was unable to find a convincing way of presenting the different fragments of suffering so that they might truly ignite a beholder’s imagination: ‘At first encounter this machine is grand, imposing; it calls out, captures our attention. It ought to inspire a mixture of pity and terror, but it inspires only terror, and this is the artist’s fault, for he was unequal to the depiction of the moving incidents he imagined.’49 Part of the problem, Diderot proposes, is the scene of the event, an entrance to a hospital, which works out as a messy scaffolding for the figures that populate it. As a result, the beholder has difficulty in reading the image, and the picture tends to fragment. Singular ‘disparate events’ on its stairs, on the platform and in the sewer, do not add up satisfactorily. However, Diderot’s charge that the public lingers on the horror, without feeling a surge of pity, employs an analysis of the image similar to Dubos’s analysis of Et in Arcadia Ego. The charge suggests that Doyen is insufficiently critical of the religious illusion of hell, along with its unmitigated profession of horror. Doyen’s work, painted to hang as the visual focus of a chapel over the transept of the church of St Roch, becomes in Diderot’s description, in a reversal of its post-Tridentine redemptive rationale, an object of aesthetic and artistic pleasure. Diderot’s complaint about the missing element of ‘pity’ is mischievous, for it ignores Genevieve’s redemptive comforts. However, by accusing Doyen of lingering on the terror, Diderot minimises the transaction of Christian spectatorship that Genevieve is fulfilling: to accept the hyperbole of hell in exchange for a promise of redemption. This is particularly manifest in the way Diderot downplayed St Genevieve’s act of intervention, and sidesteps the very theme of the miracle that has come to console the plagued Parisians. This, it seemed, was the actual block to pity. It was also the point of Diderot’s lengthy ekphrasis: to create a lasting schism between the top left half of the painting, given over to the redemptive St Genevieve, and which Diderot found boring and banal, from the sections in the centre and bottom of the composition. As in Dubos’s account of Et in Arcadia Ego, the site of terror, in conjunction with a myth of miraculous redemption, is to be exposed as illusory, to be superseded by a sense of comfort. To Diderot, that comfort comes in the very fact of affliction, absorbed in the virtues of a poetic-artistic resolution. An intrusive horizon of relief has been suggested by the written account, one of secularised aesthetic resignation to pain and death. It may be disheartening, but at least it confronts us honestly. One could, of course, cite Lucretius’s exordium to his De rerum natura, with its gripping description of death during the Pest at Athens, as a competing

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text for Diderot’s own anatomy of the supplices of Parisians.50 Where Lucretius was offering the reader an image of contagion and relentless death as an antidote to the illusory consolations of divine Providence, so Doyen’s altarpiece does not quite manage to make the miraculous story it tells make up for the suffering it shows. Two years earlier, Diderot had created, this time by means of his literary adaptation of Fragonard’s The High Priest Coresus sacrificing himself to save Callirhoe (Figure 6.7), a powerful, and now less veiled, neo-Epicurean attack on religious imagination by cataloguing the illusory reflexes that kept the masses malleable to the ambitions of the powerful and fanatical: ‘Par derrière nous il y avait des rois, des ministres, des prêtes, des docteurs, des apôtres, des prophètes, des théologiens, des politiques, des fripons, des charlatans, des artisans d’illusions et toute la troupe des marchandes d’espérances et de craintes.’51 Thus, Diderot parades a series of agents and operators of ‘hope and fear’ easy to amalgamate to his earlier Epicuréisme entry for the Encyclopédie. The tense nightmarish drama of Fragonard’s painting, with its scene of suicide for love, is cast in Diderot’s Salon of 1765 as a fiction that exists merely for its

6.7  Jean Honoré Fragonard, The High Priest Coresus sacrificing himself to save Callirhoe, 1765



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effect. The narrative behind Fragonard’s Coresus and Callirhoe is told in the seventh book of Pausanias’s Description of Greece.52 Coresus, a Calydonian high priest of Dionysus, presides over the yearly festivities in honour of the god. Men and women gathered inside the temple drink heavily and join a frightful, bacchanalian celebration. During the bacchanal, Coresus attempts to embrace the young girl Callhiroe, whom he has come to love desperately, but she rejects him. Dionysus, offended by Callirhoe’s prurience, unleashes an epidemic that devastates Calydon, and which is not to cease until, as Coresus understands from an oracle, Callhiroe or a substitute is sacrificed to the angry god. Coresus prepares the stage for Callirhoe’s sacrifice, but his love for the girl compels him to perforate his own heart rather than hers. This is the scene chosen by Fragonard for his painting from 1765. Diderot, ever resourceful in his fictionalised re-creation of paintings that hung at the Salon, invents a dialogue with Grimm, where he pretends that he had not even seen the canvas. Instead, he had experienced it in a dream. The dream, however, did not involve just the tragedy of Coresus and Callirhoe, but its origins in a larger scheme of deception. In Diderot’s dream, the tragedy exists not as a real event, but as a puppet show involving a screen, a set of ‘transparent, coloured’ dolls, and a set of ‘subaltern rascals’ (fripon subalterne). The dreamer sits in a cave, along with a host of other men and women, all shackled, and kept in sheepish submission, as they regard the shadows of the coloured dolls producing on the screen the fearful events of Coresus’s god-willed death. In his dream, Diderot is unable to resist a frenzy of emotions. These result from the moving events of the story of Coresus and Callirhoe, but also from what happens outside the frame: the moments where the hideous masters of illusion and ‘subaltern rascals’ reclaim mental control over the people in Plato’s cave. This tyrannical dominion works in and through the sacrificial sequence: ‘j’entends très distinctement le dieu ou peut-être le fripon subalterne qui était derrière la toile, dire: Qu'elle meure, ou qu'un autre meure pour elle.’53 Callirhoe’s sacrifice is an order with an uncertain origin, but with a very real effect: to instil in the shackled ‘hope and fear’ as a constant state of mind. Plato’s cave is a site where people fail to live in the comfort of aesthetic distance. Emotions inhabit real flesh. When the macabre Genius of Desperation appears behind the figure of Coresus, just as he buries the dagger in his own chest, he too screams, after which the people in the cave follow involuntarily: ‘un cri general perce et déchire l’air’.54 The very instant someone in the cave shuffled to move or turn around, it was the voices again screaming: … l’autre des charlatans que nous avions à dos se mettait à crier d’une voix forte et terrible: Garde-toi de tourner la tête; malheur à qui secouera sa chaîne ! respecte les éclisses … je vous dirai une autre fois ce qui arrivait à ceux qui méprisait le conseil de la voix, les périls qu’ils couraient, les persécutions qu’ils avaient à souffrir: ce sera pour quand nous ferons de la philosophie.

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Philosophy would have dwelled, as had Diderot’s Epicurus from his 1755 Encyclopédie entry, on the exploitation of people’s fears by the caste of priests, and the uses of illusions to keep in place overpowering reminders of pain and delight, seducing the masses to stumble through life in ignorance. Indeed, the clever ekphrasis seems like a demonstration of the Epicurean account of the stuff of dreams and delusions as ‘simulacres errants qui … tourmentent ou qui … amusent involontairement’. Fragonard’s suicidal story, and the moral warning contained in the Genius of Desperation turns, in Diderot’s conceit, into an exemplar of the misuse of sacrificial narratives to terrorise viewers. But not all was darkness: confusingly, the beholder is also seduced. Fragonard’s Coresus and Callirhoe was a history painting based on the pastoral genre, much as Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego. In Diderot’s adaptation it becomes the gambit of a much wider renegotiation. He resists the offer to imagine the sensuous pleasures of pastoral life, and offers instead transgressive eroticism in his confessed attraction to the beautiful youth Coresus and to an even more pleasing kneeling priest: ‘Que ce jeune acolyte était beau! Je ne sais si c’était sa modestie, sa jeunesse, sa douceur, sa noblesse qui m’intéressaient … ’55 Grimm later confirmed that Fragonard indeed had painted ‘ces jeunes acolytes, tout nobles, tout charmants, qu’ils étaient d’un sexe indécis, des espèces d’hermaphrodites’. In his most daring bout of sexual perversion of the theme of sacrifice, Diderot uses his dream to allow us to focus on the lascivious excesses that precede Coresus’s suicide, during the bacchanal. He paints a picture of incest from which he admits taking delight, flipping the sacrificial theme into sexual blasphemy: Tandis que ce prêtre sollicitait sa jeune inflexible, voilà que j’entends tout à coup, dans le fond des habitations, des cris, des ris, des hurlements, et que j’en vois sortir des pères, des mères, des femmes, des filles, des enfants. Les pères se précipitant sur leurs filles qui avaient perdu tout sentiment de pudeur; les mères sur leurs fils qui les méconnaissent; les enfants des différents sexes mêlés, confondus, se roulaient à terre; c’était un spectacle de joie extravagante, de licence effrénée, d’une ivresse et d’une fureur inconcevables. Ah! Si j’étais peintre! J’ai encore tous ces visages-là présents à mon esprit.56

Conclusion If the cited passages convey a thread of evidence about an Epicurean culture of the image, the first thing they reveal is that Epicureanism’s materialist warnings against fiction equipped some French freethinkers with the tools to circumscribe a new regime of beholding. How did the Epicurean beholder confront the image? It seems that the quest for sensuous comfort and Bonheur entered into it, but did not put boundaries on scope or ambition. In that sense, the ‘culture of pleasure’ is a reductive way of building



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an account about tastes and interests among French followers of Epicurus. Rather, the writers discussed here, some of whom were direct intermediaries in the spread of a materialist philosophical legacy, revelled in images of pain and death in ways that made them seek out and re-create a post-Tridentine Catholic imagination. Unlike perhaps a common believer, the Epicurean beholder was not passive. He or she made chains of imaginative inferences that could be triggered by the painter: the ‘where’, the scene of action, was pivotal to the work that the image could do. In Diderot’s account of the Coresus, Grimm exclaims that Fragonard had not quite faced the difficulty of painting the situation he had in mind. By casting his figures as ‘receiving the light from the back’, he was forced to leave the foreground in shadow or half-tints, ‘an effect of painting easier to dream than to produce’.57 Opting for unreliable sources of light, with dark, spirit-driven clouds and mysterious beams of light illuminating the afflicted, Doyen and Fragonard managed their composition, light and colour in the way of the theatre or the late baroque chapel interior (Figure 6.8). In the examples discussed here, Dubos, Diderot and Falconet revisited the classical underworld of Hades, itself an encyclopaedia of tales of non-redeemable pain, and went as far as the suicide, the execution site and the dungeon. A similar case might be made for the attention to the richly fleshed-out body: from the majestic academic nude in Subleyras’s Charon to the helpless men and women in the Doyen and the dreamily beautiful, ‘hermaphrodite’ temple attendants in the Fragonard. These painters may have been complicit Epicureans, either in their ideas or simply by foregrounding a self-conscious theatrical fictionality and a sensationalised body of suffering. It remains to be ascertained whether such displacements and mutual transactions between myth and miracle, between redemptive sacrifice and senseless torture, between sex and death, are evidence of something less contingent than the interventions of beholders educated in classical images and Epicurean anti-clericalism. Dubos’s Et in Arcadia Ego shows how Christian morality could transition into Epicurean volupté: a two-step entry into the painting allows us first to be reminded of the illusion of enduring youth, then to acquiesce in the uneasy knowledge of our mortality. As Dubos and Diderot accepted this possibility of secular enjoyment to turn the tables on religious redemption, they put forward an account that renders the sacrificial victim excessive and the site darkly fictional. Their model beholder, while prepared to dismiss religious motivation, nevertheless offers to enter into a relationship with the victim. This effect was achieved by deflating the otherness of martyrdom, by finding the mundane in images of a crucified Christ and by indulging in sensuous appetite at the margins of the scene of suffering. What is preserved in this play of obliqueness is the right to go, as a beholder, as far as you are prepared go in coming to terms with pain.

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6.8  Filippo Juvarra and Pierre Legros, Cappella Antamori, c. 1708–1710



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Notes 1 See on this painting Subleyras 1699–1749, exh. Cat. Paris, Musee du Luxembourg and Rome, Académie de France, 1987 (Paris: ERMN, 1987), cat. no. 11, pp. 162–3. 2 Other examples of Subleyras’s fondness for nudes and his creation of a niche for outright erotic scenes, in Subleyras 1699–1749, Le Faucon, cat. no. 26–7, pp. 186–8 ; La Courtisane Amoureuse, cat. no. 28–9, pp. 189–91 ; Le Bât, cat. no. 30, p. 192 ; Le Jument de compère Pierre, cat. no. 31, p. 193; Etude académique de femme nue vue en dos, cat. no. 59, pp. 231–3; or even La Madeleine aux pieds de Christ, chez Simon le Pharisien, cat. Nos 33–5, pp. 197–203, with Mary Magdalene kissing Christ’s feet. 3 See Michel de Marolles, Tableaux du temple des muses (Paris: A. de Sommaville, 1655). Abraham van Diepenbeeck was a disciple of Rubens. On the print series he produced for the Temple des Muses see W. MacAllister Johnson, ‘From Favereau’s Tableaux des vertus et des vices to Marolles’ Temple des muses. A conflict between the Franco-Flemish schools in the second quarter of the seventeenth century’, Gazette des beaux arts 110 (1968), 171–90; and Marie-Claire Chatelain, Ovide savant, Ovide galant: Ovide en France dans la seconde moitié du XVIIe siècle (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2008), pp. 239–61. 4 A thorough discussion of the post-Tridentine image and its links to rhetorics can be found in Marc Fumaroli, L’Ecole du silence: Le sentiment des images au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 2008). For a recent discussion of an understanding of images inside the Jesuit spiritual regime, see Ralph Dekoninck, Ad imaginem. Statuts, fonctions et usages de l’image dans la littérature spirituelle jésuite du xviie siècle (Geneva: Droz, 2005). 5 Anon. [Diderot], ‘Epicuréisme’, in Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Paris: Briasson, 1751–1780), vol. 5 (1755), pp. 779–85. On the system of Lucretius, see Marcel Conche, Lucrèce et l'Expérience (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2011). 6 The reception of Lucretius has received increasing attention from literary historians. Studies in this domain include Philip Hardie, Lucretian Receptions: History, the Sublime, Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Brooke Holmes and W.H. Shearin (eds), Dynamic Reading: Studies in the Reception of Epicureanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); James Warren (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism (Cambridge: Cambridge Companions to Philosophy, 2009); Catherine Wilson, Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity (Oxford: Clarendon, 2009); and Brad Inwood and Lloyd P. Gerson (eds), The Epicurus Reader. Selected Writings and Testimonia (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1994). 7 See Jared Holley, ‘Eighteenth-century Epicureanism and Rousseau on liberty’, History of European Ideas, 37:1 (2011): 81–4, 82. 8 On the success of Lucretius and Epicurean thought in Paris around 1700, see Natania Meeker, Voluptuous Philosophy: Literary Materialism in the French Enlightenment (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006). Jacqueline Hellegouarc’h and Marc Fumaroli, L’Esprit de la société: cercle et ‘Salons’ parisiens au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Garnier, 2010).

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9 ‘Epicuréisme’, in Encyclopédie, 5, p. 785. On Epicurean women and Diderot see Natania Meeker, ‘Sexing Epicurean Materialism in Diderot’, in Neven Leddy and Avi S. Lifschitz (eds), Epicurus in the Enlightenment (Oxford: Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 2009). pp. 85–104. 10 ‘ … le seul d’entre tous les Philosophes anciens qui ait sû concilier sa morale avec ce qu’il pouvoit prendre pour le vrai bonheur de l’homme, & ses préceptes avec les appétits & les besoins de la nature’. ‘Epicuréisme’, in Encyclopédie 5, p. 784. 11 ‘La peine est toujours un mal, la volupté toujours un bien: mais il n’est point de volupté pure.’ Ibid., p. 783. 12 Abbé de Rothelin, ‘Discours préliminaire’, in Cardinal de Polignac, L'AntiLucrèce, trans. (Brussels: François Foppens, 1772), p. xiii. 13 Cardinal de Polignac, L'Anti-Lucrèce (Brussels, 1772), p. xv. 14 ‘Epicuréisme’, in Encyclopédie 5, p. 782. 15 ‘La Nature considérée, abstraction faite de la matière, donne le vuide; le vuide occupé donne la notion du lieu; le lieu traversé donne l’idée de religion’. Ibid., p. 780. 16 Ibid., p. 782. 17 Notably, the ‘genre’ debate, which seeks to understand the emergence of ‘middle’ genres at the expense of history painting. See for recent arguments and an extensive bibliography the contributions in Christian Michel and Carl Magnusson (eds), Penser l’art dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle: théorie, critique, philosophie, histoire (Rome: Collection d’histoire de l’art de l’Académie de France à Rome, no.15, 2013). 18 The focus here is on certain examples of painting, as opposed to the architectural and ornamental branches of a European ‘rococo’, which should be understood as participating in developments in the sphere of religious and sovereign construction. The ornamental rococo participated in trends of fashion, yet remained also an important means for the articulation of religious life, particularly in Spain, Portugal and the Americas. See Gauvin A. Bailey, The Spiritual Rococo. Decor and Divinity from the Salons of Paris to the Missions of Patagonia (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). 19 My insistence on the share of the beholder draws on the important foundations laid by Michael Baxandall in arguing that beholders grew more self-conscious in their responses to the visual. See Michael Baxandall, ‘Pictures and Ideas: Chardin’s “A Lady Taking Tea” ’, in Baxandall, Patterns of Intention (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 74–104. 20 Thomas M. Kavanagh, Enlightened Pleasures. Eighteenth-century France and the New Epicureanism (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 71–93. 21 Kavanagh, Enlightened Pleasures, particularly pp. 83–93. For a critical account of Kavanagh’s book see Jared Holley, ‘Eighteenth-Century Epicureanism and Rousseau on Liberty’, History of European Ideas, 37 (2011), 81–4. Holley points out that debates over Epicureanism in the eighteenth century may have had only a cosmetic interest in historical Epicureanism, drawing instead on a set of preconceptions already typical of its seventeenth-century reception as a materialist philosophy. 22 See Marc Fumaroli, ‘Une amitié paradoxale: Antoine Watteau et le comte de Caylus’, Revue de l’art, 114:1 (1996), 34–47.



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23 Ceballos spoke of Epicurean deism rather than Epicureanism per se. See Fernando de Ceballos, La Falsa Filosofia o el Ateismo, deismo, materialismo y demas nuevas sectas convencidas de crimen de estado contra los Soberanos, y sus regalías, contra los Magistrados, y Potestades legítimas (Madrid: D. Antonio de Sancha, 1774). Ceballos’s conservative project was to aid the reader to detect these enemies of royal and ecclesiastical authority, along with their strategies of persuasion and philosophical sources of inspiration. 24 See Holley, ‘Eighteenth-century Epicureanism’, 82. 25 On the perceived relations between idolatrous culture and abusive castes of priests see, for instance, Caroline van Eck, Art, Agency and Living Presence. From the Animated Image to the Excessive Object (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2015), pp. 79–140; and Caroline van Eck, François Lemée et la statue de Louis XIV. Les origines des théories ethnographiques du fétichisme (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2013), pp. 41–56. 26 Jean-Baptiste Dubos, Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture, 3 vols (Paris: Jean Mariette, 1719). The classical study on Dubos is Enrico Fubini, Empirismo e classicismo: Saggio sul Dubos (Tourin: G. Giappichelli, 1965). See a recent discussion of Dubos’s account of the beholder in Oskar Bätschman, ‘Pygmalion als Betrachter: Die Rezeption von Plastik und Malerei in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts’, in Wolfgang Kemp (ed.), Der Betrachter ist im Bild: Kunstwissenschaft und Rezeptionsästhetik (Cologne: Dumont, 1992). 27 Dubos, Réflexions critiques, vol. 1, pp. 25–6. 28 Ibid., p. 27 ff. 29 Ibid., pp. 19–23. 30 Ibid., p. 21. 31 Ibid., pp. 54–5. 32 Ibid., p. 56. 33 Etienne-Maurice Falconet, ‘Réflexions sur la sculpture’, in Falconet, Œuvres complètes d’Etienne Falconet, contenant la traduction des livres de Pline, concernant la peinture et la sculpture, avec des notes; des observations sur diverses opinions de cet auteur, et différens ouvrages sur les arts dans l’antiquité et chez les peuples modernes (Paris, 1808; Geneva, 1970), vol. 2 (1808), pp. 1–46, p. 22. 34 Quoted from the legend to Second tableau. La descente d’Ulysse aux Enfers pour consulter l’âme de Tyresias, signed ‘Le Lorrain 1757’. Pausanias’s description is from Pausanias, Description of Greece, Book X, pp. 28–31. 35 Falconet, ‘Sur deux Peintures de Polygnote’, in Falconet, Œuvres complètes, vol. 2, pp. 103–35. The Polygnotos essay is from the 1770s, but takes up a discussion carried on in the letters he exchanged with Diderot in 1766. 36 James A. Steintrager, ‘Oscillate and Reflect: La Mettrie, Materialist Physiology, and the Revival of the Epicurean Canonic’, in Holmes and Shearin (eds), Dynamic Reading, pp. 162–99. 37 See Yves Benot, Diderot et Falconet. Le pour et le contre: correspondance polémique sur le respect de la postérité, Pline et les anciens auteurs qui ont parlé de peinture et de sculpture (Paris, 1958), pp. 167 and 286 (Falconet’s letter to Diderot, 10 April 1766). 38 Falconet, Œuvres complètes, vol. 2, pp. 103–35, p. 121. 39 Dubos, Réflexions critiques, section xxvi, ‘Que les sujets ne sont pas épuisés pour la Peinture. Exemples tirés des Tableaux de Crucifiement’, pp. 231–6, p. 233.

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40 See Joshua Reynolds, ‘A Journey to Holland and Flanders in the year 1781’, in Reynolds, The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Late President of the Royal Academy, 2 vols (London: T. Cadell, 1792), vol. 1, p. 19. 41 Dubos, Réflexions critiques, pp. 233–4. 42 The bibliography on Diderot’s aesthetics (of theatre, music, and the fine arts) is extensive. The most prominent surveys of Diderot’s development of a theory of painting and the aesthetic beholder are Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality. Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980), Hubertus Kohle, Ut Pictura Poesis non erit: Denis Diderots Kunstbegriff (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1989) and Jean Starobinski, Diderot dans l’espace des peintres, suivi de le sacrifice en rêve (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1991) and, most recently, Stephane Lojkine, L’Œil révolté. Les Salons de Diderot (Paris: Jacqueline Chambon, 2007). 43 Denis Diderot, Writings on Art: Salon of 1767, trans. John Goodman (London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 147. 44 See for a recent account of the Doyen painting under discussion, Stephan Lojkine, ‘Le prédicateur et le cadavre. Vien et Doyen côte à côte au Salon de 1767’, Cahiers de l’ Association internationale des  études françaises, 62 (May 2010), 151–72. Lojkine underscores the importance of the placement of the pair of canvases in two facing chapels on the transept walls at St Roch. In the 1750s St Roch had been refurbished under guidance of the architect Louis Boullée and the aforementioned Falconet, after the latter had won a competition in 1753 to conduct the renovation. This new interior, which has been for the most part destroyed, worked as a walk-through theatrical podium, with an enfilade of a chapel of the Virgin, a chapel of the communion and a chapel of the Calvary. St Roch was known to attract a mondain audience of writers, artists, some noblemen and members of the financial elite. Mme Geoffrin, Helvétius and Baron d’Holbach have tombs in its interior, while Diderot was interred in the chapel devoted to the Virgin. 45 See on post-Tridentine plague painting Christine M. Boeckl, Images of Plague and Pestilence: Iconography and Iconology (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2000), pp. 107–36. 46 Diderot, Writings on Art: Salon of 1767, pp. 142–57. 47 Ibid., pp. 150–1. 48 Ibid., p. 150. 49 Ibid., p. 145. 50 Lucretius, De rerum natura V, 1134–1286. 51 Denis Diderot, Salon de 1765 in Diderot, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Hermann, 1980), p. 254. 52 On the Corésus and Callirrhoé project, which includes four preserved cartoons and sketches at Angers, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Madrid, Academia de San Fernando, and New York (private collection) see Daniel Wildenstein, L'Oeuvre de Fragonard (Paris: 1960), p. 96; Dore Ashton, Fragonard in the Universe of Painting (Washington DC and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988), pp. 110–16; Mary D. Sheriff, Fragonard. Art and Eroticism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 32–3; Pierre Rosenberg, Fragonard (exhibition catalogue) (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1988), cat. no.



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104–5, pp. 210–19; and Jean-Pierre Couzin, Fragonard. Life and Work (New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1988), pp. 85–9. 53 Diderot, Salon de 1765, p. 257. 54 Ibid., p. 261. 55 Ibid., p. 259. 56 Ibid., p. 255. 57 Ibid., p. 262.

7

Wounding realities and ‘painful excitements’: real sympathy, the imitation of suffering and the visual arts after Burke’s sublime Aris Sarafianos

Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry (1757/59) is bustling with claims calculated to destabilise established views on taste.1 In particular, the focus of his theory of the sublime on physical pain threw the spotlight on various irregular experiences that changed the polite conformation of the fine arts. After years of scholarly neglect,2 David Bromwich has drawn attention to the shocking aspects of Burke’s book,3 especially his notion of ‘real sympathy’. Indeed, Burke’s espousal of an unvarnished exposure to real violence rather than fictive readjustments of it constituted a provocative redefinition of sympathy. This relocation of sympathy to a place that always comes as close as possible to a scene of pain also contributed to the appearance of a creepy new species of affects that revelled in cruelty. The first part of this chapter will investigate the genealogy of these sensations. That Burke tangled up such unorthodox affects as delectation in the suffering of others with the extreme tensions of a fully embodied viewer only accentuated the alarming originality of his propositions. There was, according to Burke’s fringe definition of well-being, an even greater danger to the body than any that might stem from pain; such dangers included acquiescence in life and health, sensory indolence and mild or pleasing sensations, notably those issuing from the contemplation of beauty.4 By contrast, Burke’s sublime was conceived as a kind of sensory workout that would provide the physical antidote to lazy habits of seeing prevailing in civil society. Burke’s theory of sympathy adhered to this radical principle. Still more importantly, such affective breakthroughs led to the reorganisation of the entire visual field, engendering ever higher expectations from visual objects – real or imitated. Burke’s painful reworking of ‘real sympathy’ led, therefore, to a drastic reduction of the distance between art and reality, or real and imitated suffering, while also opposing patrician attitudes that viewed art conjointly with morality and detached contemplation. Despite established anti-visual and anti-imitational interpretations of Burke’s sublime that treat



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Burke’s sympathy and imitation as antithetical drives,5 this chapter retrieves from the Enquiry a counter-tendency that explores powerful continuities between real sympathy and the reality of imitations in painting, theatre and other ‘affecting arts’. By blurring cherished distinctions between fiction and reality, Burke opposed the tendency of polite society to treat sensory reality and its exact imitation as almost incompatible with moral instruction, rational control and refinement of education. In its stead, Burke propelled into art criticism a new language of reality that did not only develop new calls for hardness, intensity, immediacy and plenitude of sensations but did so in close association with almost hurtful experiences of strong exertion. The second part of this chapter will show that this recourse to reality coincided with an emphatic resort to violent themes, not least involving hurtful bodies. Unsurprisingly, the Laocoon group and its anatomical veracity featured prominently in discussions of Burke’s theories, leading critics to conflicting approaches. Among them, the approach to the Laocoon developed in Charles Bell’s Essays on the Anatomy of Expression in Painting (1806) was central to the emergence of an organised new model of anatomical realism. In the vagaries of bodily pain and the plenitude of material details it revealed, Bell found a painful mode of spectatorship as well as a realist, new genre of anatomical criticism in full accord with Burke’s earlier guidelines. Bell’s sketches from Waterloo (1815) took this process even further, to an unprecedented imagery of extreme war surgery, ravaging injury, and, in Bell’s words, ‘painful excitement’. If, as already suggested, nineteenth-century realist painting exploited scenarios of shocking cruelty so as to confront the viewer with ‘a new and stupefyingly powerful experience of the “real” ’,6 then, as this chapter will demonstrate, it was the Enlightenment that had already set the process in motion, discovering in the surpluses of painful tension the thresholds of a new realism. Yet this new lust for pain was also prone to extremes of catastrophic injury that posed serious challenges to the premises of Burke’s sublime. The imagery of Bell’s Waterloo sketches is so disturbing that scholars have chosen to read them through the comfort of established schemes of interpretation, sometimes treating these powerless figures as powerful sources of the sublime, while, at other times, judging them to be so delighted with their gaping wounds as to present typical examples of the ‘Burkean labour’ inherent in the feeling of the sublime.7 This chapter spreads the sublimity of these pictures more broadly: first, it proposes that it is in the viewer of Bell’s pictures that the sublime occurs and not in the individuals represented; and, secondly, that the sublime takes place as the viewer swings across the competing experiences of pity and horror, powerlessness and the visual power of the abject body – the wounded, bleeding and inflamed body.

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Arguably, this power depended on new modes of representation marked by the massive proliferation of anatomical details, which, in turn, defined a kind of seeing well attuned with Burke’s notion of the sublime as a mode of sensory exertion. Detail was widely experienced in this period as an agent of the pain it described, affecting the viewer in ways that contemporaries repeatedly denounced as ‘hurtful’.8 Contrary to the tendency of received wisdom to associate the Enlightenment with contempt for particularities,9 it was the eighteenth century that transposed detail from the periphery to the centre of art practices, ushering in an appetite for highly particularised imitations, which is still celebrated as a staggering and exhilarating experience.10 Alongside traditional technologies of wonder, contemporaries were increasingly drawn to the shocking power of reality shows such as Philippe de Loutherbourg’s eidophusikon, as well as dioramas, panoramas and phantasmagorias of various sorts. This chapter suggests that Burke’s ‘painful’ sublime had already adumbrated the fastest and broadest route to this end, intertwining the profusion of particularity with prodigious excitements. To be sure, this turn to the sublime real was not simply a matter of choosing eye-popping subjects: it was above all a matter of qualities, styles, techniques and beholders. The period’s sensibility for hurtful figures was interwoven with a new drive for painful habits of seeing and equally painstaking transcriptions of living details. From the same standpoint, this realism should not be confused with the period’s burgeoning appetite for bizarre brands of illusionistic sensationalism, startling deceptions and other wonders.11 Although the realism in question is also a low trend that is unthinkable without the reality pleas of ‘common’ spectacles and commercial simulations, its proximity to the scene of pain defined a more aggressive and subversive variant. The fact that it was so meticulously invested in the body – its viewing mechanisms as well as its various modes of description – made it far more empathetic and resonant. Moreover, despite its plebeian aspects, such realism was placed in the interstices between disciplines, practices and classes; it had a mixed and dissonant plurality of audiences, and it was this volatility that allowed it to challenge all kinds of professional and social hierarchies of the old polite world. Ultimately, the most striking outcome of this realism relates to the modernised forms of humanity, which it proposed. Capitalising on Burke’s aggressive form of sympathy, Bell’s reality drive reached a strenuous and tortured definition of humanity, at once sensitive and animalistic, that provides models for reflexive – at once reflex-like and reflective – exposures to violence that continue to be as relevant as ever. Sympathy and imitation: from Addison’s politeness to Burke’s reality principle Burke’s section on sympathy contained a disconcerting image which obsessed contemporaries for decades. ‘Chuse a day on which to represent the most



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sublime and affecting tragedy we have’, pick the best actors, artists and stage technicians and when you have collected your audience, just at the moment when their minds are erect with expectation, let it be reported that a state criminal of high rank is on the point of being executed in the adjoining square; in a moment the emptiness of the theatre would demonstrate the comparative weakness of the imitative arts, and proclaim the triumph of real sympathy.12

Scholars have focused their attention on this last point, which is no more than the rehearsal of a tired natural theological argument about the higher power of the real thing over the relative weakness of visual imitations. The extract and the section to which it belongs, however, accomplish more than that: Burke’s fantasy of an impulsive crowd drawn towards the terror of a real execution was intended to reveal that ‘we are deeply affected’ by the ‘feelings of our fellow creatures in circumstances of real distress’13 and that this affection was a more vital matter than was usually acknowledged. Better still, the main thrust of Burke’s point is that the stronger the force of a given sensation, the higher its physical attraction and efficacy. In this context, the practical question of whether art would approximate the forcefulness of exposures to real experiences had to remain open, but the possibility and prospect of such an approximation was clearly neither unwelcome, nor logically excluded by Burke’s analysis. In the following paragraph that has been described as the ‘most controversial passage on aesthetics in the eighteenth century’, Burke explored further the strained and compelling nature of these extreme sensations.14 His example of the scaffold proved, he claimed, that ‘we have a degree of delight, and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and pains of others’.15 Worse, this disturbing delight in the suffering of others was actually a force of impulsive intensity and tortuous constitution: ‘There is no spectacle we so eagerly pursue, as that of some uncommon and grievous calamity’,16 and the delight we gain henceforth ‘is not an unmixed delight, but blended with no small uneasiness’.17 Moreover: in contrast to the sovereignty of reason and morality, sympathy was presented as ‘an instinct’ that is ‘antecedent to any reasoning’,18 ‘works us to its own purpose, without our concurrence’,19 and is produced by the ‘mechanical structure of our bodies’.20 The tensions involved in this attraction put considerable strain on Burke’s attempts to describe its exact operation: ‘We delight in seeing things, which so far from doing, our heartiest wishes would be to see redressed’, stressing how, in similar situations, we ‘feel for others’, ‘whilst we suffer ourselves’.21 Burke seems to be saying that knowledge of the sinister nature of things that command our delight cannot quell the urge to feel delighted; worse, far from motivating us to redress the painfulness of similar situations, the pain we feel actually intensifies our fixation on them. Thus, Burke drew attention to a species of powerful emotions whose internal contradictions intrigued contemporaries: Dubos had already exalted

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in those ‘sensible pleasures that resemble pain’ and the ‘deepest suffering’,22 although the personal emotional states he associated with these pleasures were more conventional than Burke’s. Further still, Burke’s decision to place this almost misanthropic delight in the suffering of others at the centre of his notion of sympathy was a genuinely unforeseeable move. This is all the more so, since this move was intended to expose the masked aggression and conceit innate in the values of pity or benevolence with which polite critics had enveloped such practices of socialised cruelty as public executions.23 From the same standpoint, Burke’s real sympathy threw into relief the role of a split and compulsive viewer, underlining the mechanisms of aggravated contradiction involved in his/her affective experience. The special power of these ambivalent situations was grasped by another famous contemporary who had studied carefully Burke’s Enquiry – the philosopher and art critic Denis Diderot.24 Significantly, Diderot raised the topic in connection to art, namely, as he advised artists on how to maximise the impact of their creations. ‘It’s when we feel attracted and violently repulsed at the same time that we feel most uncomfortable’ and, thus, most excited: it is, Diderot added, to this blend of violence and excitement that a truly successful work ought to aspire, and the Laocoon group was exactly one such case.25 In his landmark descriptions of Claude Joseph Vernet’s paintings in the Salon of 1767, Diderot would invoke another Burkean idea, approaching the misfortunes even of our best friends as a source of secret thrill. Diderot emphasised that such ‘compound sensations’ of cruelty and satisfaction may be ‘natural’ and ‘pervasive’, but he did not go anywhere near to arguing, as Burke did, that such phenomena were biological facts of nature surpassing moral or rational control. Diderot’s conservatism resurfaced in the way he opposed Burke’s plebeian calls for real sympathy, reinstating notions of aristocratic distance between beholder and object of violence as an absolute necessity for the production of delight.26 Generations of scholars had found in the domain of the imitative arts the perfect prototype of this necessary remove from reality. In particular, the treatment of art products as mere cases of fiction became in the hands of polite critics a presiding distancing tool. Unsurprisingly, then, Diderot agreed with commentators like Dubos,27 or Burke’s critics,28 or, even more famously, Samuel Johnson for whom ‘the delight of tragedy’ always ‘proceeds from our consciousness of fiction’ (and not by ‘real’ miseries and their inability to ‘please’).29 Given a cultivated viewer, the actual object is by no means more powerful than its fictive representation on the stage: reversing Burke’s argument, Diderot maintained that his point was proven by the fact that ‘the orchestra of the theatre is always full, while the places marked by real misery are empty’.30 Despite various theoretical disagreements, the crux of this conflict was social: Diderot conceded to Burke that ‘the people never tire of executions’, but he rushed to add that this is never so with ‘respectable



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people’ who revel in artistic representations of violence rather than in real instantiations of it.31 Painting confirmed Diderot’s insights. Whereas the reality of extreme sensations obliterates the beholder, painting restores the voluptuousness of atrocities: a calamity depicted on canvas never fails to attract the viewer’s joyful eyes.32 The distance of art ‘transubstantiates’ the shock of direct suffering into joy. Polite critics had already refined upon this venerated trope, raising the importance of the principles of safety and distance from actual events of distress as determining factors in the production of delight. Joseph Addison epitomised polite attitudes in this matter, underlining that the delight in the arts of representation – literary, visual or other – we might feel ‘when we look on hideous objects’ is utterly dependent on the fact that ‘we are in no danger of them’.33 Delight stems from the viewer’s sense of immunity in precarious situations. In fact, ‘the more frightful appearance they make, the greater is the pleasure we receive from the sense of our own safety’.34 Moreover, this grateful sensation is engendered by various types of distance from the source of the unease: these include physical distance – ‘looking on a precipice at a distance’ – or even sensory distance – the simple fact of seeing is ‘the most perfect and most delightful of all our senses’ precisely because it ‘converses with its objects at the greatest distance’.35 Burke’s theory of real sympathy was directed against such elite attitudes, treating them as spineless, insincere and morally questionable.36 In addition, he considered them responsible for vapid responses to artistic imitations: Burke scorned the polite perception of art as ‘no more than a fiction’, attacking its uninspiring purpose of providing emotional protection ‘from the evils which we see represented’.37 In accordance, he pressed the counter-argument that it is not ‘our immunity’38 but rather our immediate exposure to ‘acute pain’ that ‘produces our delight’ and hence the sublime.39 Tellingly, Burke insisted that this was true for ‘real or fictitious distresses’ alike, without thinking it necessary to distinguish between the two realms. And this duly takes the analysis back to the tensions discussed in the opening extract. Despite the scholarly consensus regarding Burke’s supposed bias against vision and painting, his book includes ample evidence that points in the opposite direction. Indeed, Burke often expressed the view that, given the appropriate modifications, certain scenes can affect us in painting as they ‘would have affected in the reality’. He also refused to accept the patrician idea that art is ‘a deceit and its representations no realities’, maintaining that the power of an artwork is comparable to that of an object in nature.40 He was equally adamant about the synergies between sympathy and imitation; they are both founded on the same principle of ‘substitution’ by which we ‘enter into the concerns of others’ and ‘we are moved as they are moved’.41 He added: ‘as sympathy makes us take a concern in whatever men feel, so this affection [imitation] prompts us to copy whatever they do’.42 On the basis of such continuities, there is nothing in Burke’s scheme to exclude, as has been

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suggested, the existence of ‘something like “sublime painting” ’,43 but, quite the opposite, there seems to be a great deal that suggests an inevitable drift toward it. Burke was thus compelled, even momentarily, to declare that ‘The nearer [an imitation] approaches the reality, and the further it removes us from all idea of fiction, the more perfect is its power.’44 Despite his justified reservations as to the technical feasibility of this desideratum, Burke’s theory was, arguably, better adapted to spur the arts on toward ever closer imitations of reality rather than a wholesale rejection of this possibility. In this sense there is something aspirational in Burke’s criticism of the weakness of painting compared to reality. More strikingly, by the 1780s, his criticism had already achieved its purpose, propelling artists to bridge the gap between the two realms. When the painter Thomas Gainsborough, who eagerly sought similar fusions of art and reality, considered a virtual storm enacted by de Loutherbourg’s eidophusikon as superior to a real-life one raging outside, he celebrated the same continuum between imitation, sublimity and power. Gainsborough’s cry to Loutherbourg – ‘our thunder’s best’ – expresses the same sublime impulse to amplify the affective impact of both reality and art.45 Indeed, power of expression and power of impact were the new ideals by which the value of art was measured; and this is ultimately the content of Burke’s invocation of reality, namely to serve the arts as a superior standard for the attainment of high-power effects. Unsurprisingly, therefore, at the centre of Burke’s attack on polite sympathy we find again the criticism he hurled against the languor and sluggishness of the beautiful as opposed to the sublime and its exertions: real scenes of pain were thus shunned by refined men because such persons were ‘far gone into indolence as not to endure any strong impression’.46 Addison and Dubos were again Burke’s targets – especially Addison’s notion that leisure and gentle reflection were the quintessential conditions of cultivated taste, which, by contrast, was threatened by the kind of painting that ‘bears hard upon us’ or ‘presses too close upon our senses’ to permit the necessary tranquillity of aesthetic contemplation.47 Hardness and closeness: there could not be a better example than Addison’s for the perceived harmfulness of those sensations implicated in Burke’s notion of the real: this is indeed a power concept modulated by distance reduction and pressure amplification, producing concreteness and proximity as its material and rhetorical collaterals. Moreover, nobody knew better than Burke and his opponents that sensations are social ideals and they come with a certain kind of life. Actually, different sensations belong to competing ways of being: demand for hardness, intensity and closeness of impact were closely associated with the habits of the ‘vulgar’, the plebs and the middling sorts; distance and softness of sensation with an aristocratic understanding of art. Far from undermining the power of the visual arts, Burke’s example of the scaffold was, therefore, intended to reinforce it, thus removing the last polite hindrance from a radical redefinition of art’s relations to reality. Yet Burke



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was also aware that politeness was increasingly in this period defining cultural improvement in terms of an individual’s ability to assume an intelligent and erudite attitude to fiction and artifice.48 Although he opposed the specific shape this call took, he accepted the necessity of assuming a sufficiently complex position on the matter, avoiding thus the accusation of being a ‘quack’ or a ‘charlatan’ of a critic.49 His keenness to underline that the ‘power’ of representation ‘never approaches to what it represents’ indicates as much.50 Undeniably, Burke’s Enquiry kept oscillating across contrary options, now despairing over the relative weakness of artificial imitations, then affirming their capacity to match the impact of the real world. Such a deliberate to and fro between nature and representation was part and parcel of the period’s enthrallment with hard imitations, playing a vital role in their theoretical defence against accusations of being unphilosophical. Besides, as John Brewer has recently noted, ‘the merits of the claim of distance reduction’ cannot be extended to imply any naive craving for ‘distance elimination’.51 Burke too never eliminated the difference between reality and representation, nature and artifice; together with Diderot,52 he used the disparity in order to set in motion a certain swing of perception as a means of re-energising the impact of both. The fact that Burke accomplished this move via themes and visual properties involving painful situations, took the whole process to a higher level. This binary of art and reality worked like a dynamo of ecstasy, seizing hold of the entire viewing body. ‘Back away, move in close, the illusion is the same’: thus Diderot expressed his exaltation vis-à-vis the magical ability of Chardin’s painting to afford ‘as much pleasure from close up’ where it disintegrates into art, ‘as from a distance’ where it coheres again into an illusion of reality.53 Such oscillations of artistic perception resemble vital motions of immediate opposition characteristic of fundamental functions of the body: in connection again to the special aesthetic effects of minute imitations, it has recently been emphasised how ‘moving in and stepping back is akin to breathing: we inhale detail, then step back/exhale to grapple with the whole’.54 As elsewhere shown, this alternating tempo of contractions and dilations – in sum, of bodily contractility in accelerated form – is found at the centre of Burke’s definition of the sublime as an aggravated state of bipolar oppositions designed to intensify art-related experiences.55 In the rapid alternation between art and reality, Burke and Diderot found a powerful device to dramatise their calls for amplified reality-effects, while, simultaneously, facilitating their pursuit of the optimal proximity between beholder and the world. Burke’s horrified critics Quite expectedly, the first reviewers of Burke’s book were repelled by the ‘cynical’ redefinition of sympathy and imitation it promoted. The Critical Review thus wondered in disbelief: ‘the very meaning of sympathy is

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fellow-feeling; how therefore can we suffer the miseries of others, and yet be happy ourselves?’ The reviewer’s answer was not surprising: ‘we cannot agree with the ingenious author, in believing that sympathy in the distresses of others, is attended with a degree of delight’.56 Worse, the critic was appalled by the way in which Burke transformed the noble notion of human sympathy into a bodily instinct that ‘excites in any person a sense of pleasure at seeing the sufferings of a fellow-creature’.57 By denying ‘the faintest idea of the sublime’ to spectacles of cruelty, Andrew Murphy of the Literary Magazine upheld the same civil rhetoric of compassion.58 Repulsed by Burke’s promotion of the realness of imitations, Murphy also reasserted the received imperative for clear distinctions between fiction and reality: the secret of pleasure in the imitative arts lay in that, on the one hand, the ‘imitation supposes no reality’ and that, on the other, ‘we can never lose the idea of imitation’ when confronted with its works.59 Fifty years later, the same protestations would return with an urgency exacerbated by the seismic political developments of the revolution in France. Richard Payne Knight, the leading British connoisseur and the period’s most devoted polemicist against Burke’s theories, concentrated his attacks on the same two dangerous aspects of the Enquiry: in fact, his assault demonstrated the clarity with which contemporaries understood the firmness of the bonds connecting Burke’s real sympathy with the painful reality of imitations it summoned. Further still, Knight’s Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste (1805) discerned the vital importance of the example of the scaffold in Burke’s argument.60 As a result, Knight scoffed at Burke’s views regarding the reflex attractions of suffering on similar occasions of execution: ‘men are not so perversely constituted by nature, as ever to feel delight in beholding the sufferings of those, who never injured them’.61 Though ceding that ‘even in civilized societies, a sort of prurient fondness for attending the real executions of criminals is often observable’,62 Knight would, like Diderot, seek a civil and moral explanation for this uncivil anomaly. He thus concluded that ‘suffering’, ‘adversity and distress’ are not pleasurable per se, but become so because they call upon the most dignified part of human nature – honour, courage, and ‘presence of mind’.63 Knight’s attack is supreme evidence that, by the turn of the century, Burke’s example of the scaffold had begun to spark a broad range of disturbing political associations: instead of intended feelings of sympathy, it conjured up raw scenes of revolutionary terror. Knight asserted that the ‘period of juridical slaughter and methodical murder’ in France provided the most spectacular refutation of Burke’s sympathetic use of the imagery of executions, revealing the treacherous and inhumane side of his ‘lust’ for violence.64 In contemporary France, Knight found ample confirmation of an argument frequently hurled against Burke’s notion of real sympathy – not least, as earlier mentioned, by Diderot himself: men had, during the era of French terror, ‘supped’ so ‘full with horrors’ and grown so ‘familiar with real



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distresses’ that, given the chance, they would swarm the theatre to enjoy any fictitious distress on offer.65 Moreover, to stress again the political stakes imbricated in this debate, Knight portrayed Burke’s real sympathy and its founding stone, the physicality of pain, as another stage in the odious road to sedition or, more aptly, ‘materialism’. For Knight, the fact that Burke raised ‘physical danger and pain’ into his prime means of the sublime, meant that ‘all the sentiments excited by it must, of consequence, be merely corporeal, organic, or nervous sensations’. Knight’s concluding remark ‘so far, his system is consistent in itself’ and ‘it leads directly to materialism’66 epitomises the fact that the close affinity of physical pain with hard materiality had been triggering charged political associations. In this counter-revolutionary period, materialism had become a byword for scientific and political radicalism, reinforcing Knight’s view that Burke’s defence of extreme suffering posed an existential threat to the public domain. Burke’s emphasis on pain tended to ‘level the highest with the lowest – the prince with the beggar, […] the philosopher with the idiot’; ultimately, ‘man with the brute’.67 Evidently, in Burke’s version of suffering and sympathy, polite men of the British ruling class saw the combined threat of democratisation and de-humanisation. In stark contrast to recent accounts, Knight also understood the obvious continuities between sympathy, imitation and reality established by Burke; and he was duly horrified by their grave implications for his class and its refined culture. By the close of this turbulent century, the thinness of the boundary separating sympathy with reality from sympathy with artistic imitations of it, had, in fact, become a matter of disturbance even to Burke.68 This did not discourage Knight from lambasting Burke’s earlier endeavour to close the gap between real and imitated distresses. And although he accepted that there is a certain ‘delight’ in seeing ‘others suffer’, which ‘certainly arises from sympathy’,69 he restricted this delight to visual or textual representations of pain rather than the real thing. Knight intended to reinstate the old topos of a mandatory safety gap between pictures, beholders and scenes of pain that Burke had sought to eradicate: ‘those sufferings, which we should most dread personally to endure, we delight to see exhibited or represented, though not actually endured by others’.70 He understood that among these genteel ideals most threatened by Burke’s model were civil interpretations of art as moral fiction or mild and remote spectacle. To restore the ‘nice sensibility’ and intellectual decency of the polite,71 Knight countered a disembodied theory of suffering that was now anchored in an artwork rather than in a real life example. From real sympathy to the reality of imitations: Laocoon’s ‘Anatomy of Suffering’ Knight’s argument against Burke’s theory of real sympathy made prominent use of a celebrated artwork involving another strangulation, the Laocoon

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group. The statue had been treated by centuries of art criticism as a sensational example of human reactions to severe exertion; its painfully meticulous anatomy had shocked contemporaries and stimulated different strategies of denial and containment, especially popular with neoclassical theorists.72 Continuing a tradition started by Winckelmann, Knight’s reaction falls squarely into this category. His choice of the Laocoon allowed him to perform a typical neoclassical manoeuvre, reconstructing the anatomical violence of the statue in order to disclaim it (Figure 7.1). With his eye fixed on Burke’s execution scene, Knight countered: It is not with the agonies of a man writhing in the pangs of death, that we sympathize, on beholding the celebrated group of the Laocoon and his sons; for such sympathies can only be painful and disgusting; but it is with the energy and fortitude of mind, which those agonies call into action and display: for,

7.1  Laocoon and his Sons, Vatican Museums, Vatican City



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though every feature and every muscle is convulsed, and every nerve contracted, yet the breast is expanded and the throat compressed to show that he suffers in silence73

The fact that Knight used an object from the fine arts to oppose Burke’s real-life example means that he grasped the menacing continuities Burke had established between real sympathy and the reality of imitations. Moreover, to Burke’s claim that painful spectacles are a source of delight Knight reinstated the genteel equivalence of pain with disgust, treating the Laocoon’s extreme anatomical agitation as a source of repulsion. In this way, Knight acknowledged the powerful yet undesirable ties between the expressiveness of a hurtful body in art, anatomical minuteness of form and viewer affliction. To destroy such connections, Knight called for the intervention of an array of disembodied devices including the mind, ‘mental energy’ or ‘mental power’ that provided the necessary means by which the objectionable implications of pain could be contained and controlled.74 It required a pioneering scholar of expression to overturn Knight’s advocacy of repression, and it is not a coincidence that this scholar was not just a rising star in surgery, neurology and anatomy but also an enthusiastic reader of Burke’s Enquiry. Sir Charles Bell’s Essays on the Anatomy of Expression in Painting (1806) left a remarkable legacy in nineteenth-century art theory and practice, but at the time of its first publication it was received as a subversive treatise that hurt Bell’s ambitions to become professor of anatomy at the Royal Academy of Arts during the notorious 1808 election.75 In the second edition of the book, Bell included a devastating critique of Knight’s idealised Laocoon, pitting against it a fully enfleshed and modernised image of the work. With Bell’s Laocoon, pain is not a vaguely psychological or emotional phenomenon hidden in the abstract realm of the human mind. It is now an anatomical phenomenon, localised in and woven with the fabric of the body. As a result of its material specificity, pain now emerges in the visual field with unprecedented rigour and concreteness. In fact, the degree of bodily pain and the level of anatomical visibility are tied together in cycles of ascending intensity. Accordingly, Bell’s book on expression is teeming with painstaking descriptions of human suffering.76 Bell espoused the sublimity of the living body in pain, and, against academic doctrine, he fought for the canonisation of such ‘harsh’ subjects as the many varieties of pain and death that ‘a historical painter must exhibit’.77 It was in this context that the Laocoon was brought up to provide an authoritative, i.e. antique and thus supreme, precedent of Bell’s anatomical realism (Figure 7.2). Proving, in addition, the inadequacy of establishment readings of this important work by rank connoisseurs such as Knight was a perfect way of strengthening further his argument. After a detailed analysis, Bell indeed denounced the idea that Laocoon’s raised chest, inflated throat, strained mouth and ‘suppressed voice’ proceeded, as Knight had suggested,

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7.2  Laocoon, illustration from Charles Bell, Essay on the Anatomy of Expression (London, 1806), page 112



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from a deliberate ‘effort of the mind to sustain his pain in dignified silence’.78 Far from attesting to Knight’s moral assumption that the figure’s body recorded its mental struggle against the vulgar expression of pain, Bell emphasised that the statue’s anatomical composition was rather a matter of ‘instinctive motions’ and raw physiological necessity, coordinating together ‘necessary parts of one action’.79 Just as, in the Dying Gladiator, it was ‘the nature of his sufferings’ that led to his precise ‘attitude’,80 so Bell’s Laocoon was also a factual record of extreme anatomical action under the utmost extremity of pain. Knight thus fell into the trap he laid when he chose to deploy his essentially anti-anatomical taste through a sloppy and unsystematic form of anatomy: by thus placing anatomical description at the centre of his art criticism, he exposed himself to the accusation that he was not sufficiently equipped to be a reliable critic. Turning to Knight, Bell wondered how persons so ‘ignorant’ of ‘the knowledge of anatomy’ and the most ‘common things in the structure of [their] own frame’, could dare ‘philosophize on such points’ concerning the meaning or value of human form in art.81 Bell’s intervention signals a tectonic change in the understanding of art and the ‘principles of criticism’ required for proper evaluation of past and present productions. A process of re-skilling and professionalisation of art and art criticism was clearly under way, and the biomedical sciences played a crucial role in this modernisation. Making good use of his anatomical vision, Bell marvelled at the immensity of new meanings – emotions, stories, knowledge and reflexes – waiting to be retrieved from the slightest rustling of the tiniest body part: what new ‘ideas’ indeed can thus ‘be conveyed by the convulsion of a feature and the contraction of a nerve!’82 When years later Hippolyte Taine praised the Laocoon’s ‘minute anatomy of suffering’ – the refined ‘finish’ of details, the ‘painful swelling of veins’ and their ‘atrocious reality’ – as the main source of a ‘new, sentimental and expressive’ mode of power in art, he was essentially drawing from Bell’s influential realism of vision and method.83 In a final tour de force of anatomical criticism, Bell also proposed a radical redefinition of the action and meaning of the celebrated Roman copy of a Hellenistic bronze, the Dying Gladiator (now known as the Dying Gaul).84 In doing so, he again had to disprove Knight’s misguided view that it was Homer’s moral superiority that accounted for his laudable tendency to describe so many deaths without ever making ‘a single Greek cry out on receiving a mortal wound’.85 For Bell, it was once more the material and physiological specificity of these injuries – the mortal blows sustained on the battlefield – that explained Homer’s mode of representation. Bell’s commentary recast Knight’s ignorance in biomedical science as terminal incompetence in matters of art criticism, but, more importantly, it also opened up a singular new realm of subject-matter, namely the visual and expressive aspects of rapid and devastating injury on the human body.86 Bell would soon get ample opportunity to study similar damages in the real: after the battle of Waterloo in 1815 he joined the British military to

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offer his services. In a series of watercolours made on the spot, Bell also depicted in detail the extreme injuries from cannon strikes and gunshots requiring aggressive surgical intervention. In these sketches, Bell recorded new affective engagements with war suffering, while developing methods of representation that took Burke’s sublime and related notions of the real towards uncharted territories. Pain beyond the sublime: Bell’s Waterloo Bell’s watercolours have been regarded as a significant breakthrough in medical illustration.87 For art history, in particular, they mark the first head-on documentation of war as an engine of brutal injury and death, executed almost a century before the advent of official war artists of the stature of John Singer Sargent or Henry Tonks.88 Bell’s sketches tackled mixed ambitions. On the one hand, he grasped that the corporeal effects of new technologies of killing in modern warfare presented lucrative opportunities for surgeons: cannon or gunshots generated new taxonomies of severe injury, whose effects defied existing treatments and called for drastic innovations. On the other hand, Bell knew that modern warfare defied traditional thresholds of pain and sensibility, creating new configurations of experience, sense perception and emotional trauma for patients and surgeons; such dramatic fissures in the distribution of the sensible would inevitably erode contemporary modes of visual representation, inducing new styles of depiction and viewing angles. Bell’s images record finely these serious changes in economies of affect and their visual implications, especially so as Bell was already well equipped to study such extreme sensations. In his book on expression, Bell had proposed various improvements to Burke’s taxonomy of affects,89 but endorsed his basic perception of pain as a vital stimulant. ‘Pain’, Bell emphasised, ‘is bodily’: it ‘is a positive nervous sensation, which excites to action’ and its ‘immediate effect’ is ‘to produce an energetic […] tension of the whole frame’.90 In his war sketches, nevertheless, Bell deals with situations of extreme pain that lie outside the tonic qualities of physical pain he espoused. As Bell found out during his war experiences, mortal strikes of excessive force frequently entail states of shock, ‘instinctive struggling’,91 even states of insensibility that suspend the feeling of pain itself: ‘If the pain be excessive he [the sufferer] becomes insensible, and the chest is affected by sudden spasms’.92 Catastrophic damage cancels the power of pain to rouse the body back into consciousness or vitality, generating instead worthless spasms and shocks.93 The originality of Bell’s sketches rests in the way that they place these atrocious afflictions at the centre of medical attention: they seem to explore the cut-off points in the operation of pain under conditions of severe bodily and brain trauma, hitherto unexplored.94 Drawings 4 and 16 take the visual appearance of convulsive states of shock as their chief object of study



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7.3  Charles Bell, drawing no. 4, Soldier Suffering from Head Wound (and Shock?), 1815

(Figure 7.3), while the majority of the drawings (including nos 1, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 or 14) record fatuousness, dullness or exhaustion from excessive pain (Figures 7.4 and 7.5). Such states mean that the individual depicted is overwhelmed and obliterated by excruciating pain: his mind finds it impossible to locate a space to exist outside pain, running out of every emotion or idea other than the riotous fact of hurt and its imploded vitality. Such states of corporeal shock cannot be subsumed to the expressive range of ordinary suffering. Worse, the notion that these figures somehow depict the ‘mental dignity and fortitude of mind’ with which they supposedly bear their acute sufferings is more aligned to Knight’s moral approach than to Bell’s physiological method, which was expressly hostile to it.95 The related assumption that, in accomplishing their expressive mission, the sketches have involved a variety of ‘distancing effects’, supposedly ‘derived from the aesthetics of the sublime’, circumvents Burke’s protestations against such patrician notions of the sublime,96 and, what is more, departs from the most original aspects built into Bell’s rereading of Burke’s theory. Above all else, Bell’s figures depict powerless victims that cannot, in any straightforward sense, feature as powerful objects of the sublime.97 Nor could they, in their present predicament of helplessness, exemplify what the subject of the sublime should look like, according to Burke’s guidelines.98 On

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7.4  Charles Bell, drawing no. 14, Soldier with Right Arm Missing, 1815

the one hand, Bell’s figures of extreme pain cannot be an object of painful excitement for the viewer because in their pitiful states – their ‘dull and fatuous expression … and the helpless condition to which [they] have been reduced by the effects of the wound’ (Figures 7.4, 7.5, 7.6) –99 they lack the intensity of ‘power’ to pose any serious threat, or, in Burke’s words, the ‘ability to hurt’ those present.100 On the other hand, Burke had also taken great care to underline that every subject in pain (i.e. every afflicted individual) is not necessarily a subject of the sublime. In this regard, Bell’s figures cannot possibly be delighting in their suffering because they are evidently



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7.5  Charles Bell, drawing no. 13, Soldier suffering from open chest wound, head and right arm bandaged, 1815

7.6  Charles Bell, Soldier suffering from a stomach wound to abdomen. Wounded at the battle of Waterloo, 1815

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7.7  Charles Bell, Soldier with missing arm, lying on his side, grasping a rope, inscribed ‘XIII, Waterloo …’, 11 August 1815

too ‘racked with pain’ – i.e. too exhausted or insensible – to afford that excess energy required to do so (Figure 7.7). Besides, Burke had stipulated that the kind of pain generative of the empowering effects of the sublime should never ‘press too nearly’ or pose a definite life-threat on a given individual.101 The affliction of Bell’s figures has crossed this boundary: pain has not only pressed too near, but it has pressed in and out of their bodies, ripped through the flesh and torn their limbs apart; pain is literally lodged into the body in the shape of gaping wounds, bullets and shrapnel. In Burke’s world of the sublime, these are inadmissible types of catastrophic pain that are diametrically opposed to the way in which he and Bell understood certain types of suffering as empowering. The force of these sketches thus rests in the unprecedented exploration of phenomena lying past the outer bounds of pain’s sublimity; namely, they inhabit a realm where pain, at the very peak of its amplitude, jettisons any sense of vitality and begins to generate its own uncontrollable excesses, blind spots and self-annulments. This is a representation of pain resting on the verge of its own extinction, pain that has plunged inside itself, imploding the very mechanisms that make it possible to act as a tonic reaction



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to something dangerous. This pain is too much to generate a subject of the sublime, but, paradoxically enough, it is also incapable of producing an object powerful enough to generate an overwhelming viewing experience – other than that of pity. This is certainly a place where Burke had not gone, whereas Bell’s originality lay precisely in grappling with these phenomena. This does not mean, however, that these sketches do not facilitate sublime encounters or that they do not contain distinct technologies that engender sublime connections with the viewer. In fact, they set up complex scenes and objects of affliction linked to the operations of real sympathy and presuppose witnesses (the artist, the surgeon, the beholder) whose involvement in the tortured excitement of war feeds their compulsion to reconstruct it in real imitations. In conformity with Burke’s prescriptions, the ‘shocking sights’ and extreme reality of Bell’s experience became the main mark and claim of sublimity in these sketches. But this reality and, all the more so, its material reproduction in art were far from straightforward matters. The reality and sublimity of wounds: revolutions in the economy of seeing Both in his personal correspondence and professional notes, Bell provided stimulating commentary on his sketches, making it clear that they were intended to capture his distressing hospital experience at Waterloo with a view to re-enacting it later for the benefit of friends and colleagues.102 The vocabulary with which Bell internalised the effects of the sensory violence is unmistakably sublime: his ‘sensations were very extraordinary’103 from the excessive ‘variety of suffering’104 and the ‘shocking sights of woe’ he encountered.105 As Bell clarified, the ‘absolute revolution [that] took place in my economy, body and soul’ involved the sublime’s two most distinct forces – great ‘bodily exertion’ and equally great ‘excitement’.106 Bell tied the two processes together in a feedback loop which replicated Burke’s definition of the sublime as an extreme state of bodily labour and embodied contradictions.107 ‘It was strange thing to feel my clothes stiff with blood, and my arms powerless with the exertion of using the knife’,108 but, still stranger, I would underline, to find oneself, in the midst of all this suffering, delighting at the sheer physical and affective energy of the occasion.109 To describe this contrarian state of labour and delight, Bell engineered the characteristically Burkean concept ‘painful excitement’.110 The spectacle of the injured caused Bell’s pain, which in turn propelled him to uncommon levels of bodily and emotional tension that he could not recognise without surprise and further excitement.111 The cycle of painful exertion and revitalising forms of excitement offered Bell the best tool for tackling the otherwise unbearable tensions of his surroundings. Undoubtedly, drawing was another successful instrument of survival simultaneously interrupting, and reproducing with unflinching fidelity Bell’s

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gruesome surgical labour.112 This reality-based approach to his watercolours matched Bell’s broader understanding of the way in which pictures work. Bell indeed argued that accurate reality effects are fundamental in maximising the intensity and efficiency of the viewing process. In continuation of Burke’s argument that the nearer art approaches the reality, the more striking the result would be, Bell insisted that artists and critics should strive for micro-exactness, precisely because people are hard-wired to detect and decode the slightest detail connected to acts of human expression. Fidelity to a real scene of pain maximises the impact of any given representation, making its expression and reception ‘horribly correct’. Like Burke’s real sympathy, Bell’s fidelity moves us in the unavoidable way of a reflex: if viewers ‘feel’ a given representation is ‘correct’, they will be moved despite knowing ‘nothing of the cause of their being moved’.113 As Bell added, the ‘rule’ for conveying to ‘the spectator the idea of human nature agitated by passion or suffering’ ‘is to learn [Nature’s] ways’.114 This is what makes ‘the appeal more strongly to the senses’ while any deviation from it is ‘sure to weaken’ the effect.115 Manifestly, Bell was capitalising upon a long-running tradition in anatomical criticism shaped under the Enquiry’s influence. When William Hunter, Professor of Anatomy at the RA, aired the idea that ‘the power of representing the human body as near as possible to the original reality’ is ‘essential’ to the ‘energy’ and ‘force’ of the work;116 or, inversely, that the slightest ‘defect’ would render pictures ‘lifeless and insipid’, he was repeating, to the dismay of elite painters in the RA, Burke’s propositions while heralding Bell’s refinements.117 Amplification of affect, energisation of the pictorial surface via a proliferation of gestures and details, and reduction – but not elimination – of the distance between form and content or pictures and viewers: this is the chain of radical ambitions that the terms ‘real’ and ‘reality’ came to encapsulate in art-related discussions. The almost obsessive recurrence of these words in Hunter’s lectures was part of the same paradigm shift with which Burke’s ideas of real sympathy and the reality of imitations were interlaced. Bell’s sketches accomplished the same realist mission, amplifying their effects in proportion to the thoroughness with which they describe the abject anatomy of the hurtful body. In Bell’s sketches this body is not, however, homogeneously treated: the depiction of the anatomy of the wounded is subject to laws of visual distribution that divide it into areas of variable irritation. The body and facial expressions of Bell’s figures are, in general, treated in a summary manner, omitting the multitude of anatomical particularities that, by contrast, cram and overflow the sites of their wounds. These are undoubtedly the most charged loci of the drawings. Medical historians have noted the sharpness and accuracy with which Bell recorded the bits of flesh left behind by the parts carried off by the strike, or the devices he used during his



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surgical operations.118 The meticulousness of the depiction, including the linear veins, the chromatic variation or the watercolour washes, conveys the moisture and vitality but also the liquidity – the stains and the drips – of the opened bleeding body. These sketches grasp the moment when the severity of the wound reduces these individuals to bare flesh. But ‘at the same time’ the sketches also reconstruct the visual heat of the wound in a way that captures the sublime forces of modern warfare and its catastrophic embodiment: these are now the primary conditions for the transformation of the pictures in question into superior scenes of violence and hence of the sublime. Against established expectations that treat scientific illustrations as affectless and detached, there is, in Bell’s scientific presentation of the wound, nothing cold or disengaged: in fact, the visual field and the act of seeing are revitalised, even inflamed by the supposedly frigid medical attention invested in them. Arguably, it is at this point, where extreme surgery and various other acute emotions occur, that a complex weave of interdisciplinary concerns – jointly medical, philosophical, psychological, and artistic – bursts into the visual field. Bell’s comment that he always thought artistic and medical concerns identical, finds here its fullest expression.119 As his other brother, George Joseph later claimed, such synergies between bodily suffering, disease and expression were the engines driving his discoveries in art as well as physiology.120 Bell’s watercolours are the products and images of this interdisciplinary contract; it is this mixed field of extra- and inter-professional registers that allowed these sketches to excel ‘in force and effect any professional paintings hitherto attempted’.121 The higher humanity of violence and the struggle for realism The aggressive perceptions of sympathy and pain germane to Burke’s sublime have been historically vulnerable to the accusation of being overly dehumanising. Bell’s sketches also exhibit human figures whose sense of subjectivity seems to be either suspended or expended due to the insufferable intensity of their pain. Those among his figures that adopt full frontal poses and direct visual contact seem to have no access to humanity other than supplicating the humanity of others: they have surrendered their ultimate hopes of existence to the eyes of another – the viewer, the painter and the surgeon (Figures 7.4 and 7.6). The rest of the figures seem to retreat to an indefinable space between the abyss of the hurt or the exhausted self and an equally abysmal or un-representable outside (Figures 7.3 and 7.5). It would appear that the only road to re-humanisation available to the sufferer and the beholder alike is the latter’s pity – a clearly unsatisfactory solution for a perceptive reader of Burke’s Enquiry like Bell. Burke had not just called into question pity’s conceit and false superiority; he had also exposed its frailty and

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ineffectiveness including it in the class of ‘lesser’ emotions that he associated with ‘weak’ or ‘feeble’ ‘virtues’ and ‘amiable’ images.122 But if pity was deemed by Burke an insufficient response to suffering, the humaneness of his notion of a delight in the suffering of others was far less plausible. Except for one final twist that highlights both the humanitarian component of this dark notion as well as the bipolar tempo of the sublime. Burke stressed the paradox: it was precisely because of this near sadistic delight in human suffering that men are drawn towards situations that they would have otherwise ignored.123 This problematic emotion now constitutes a sublime force of attraction that ‘hinders us from shunning such scenes of misery’,124 and, therefore, far from corroding or degrading human relations, it actually ‘strengthened the bond of sympathy’ to a degree ‘proportionable’ to its impulsiveness. From this standpoint, delight figures as an emotion far more powerful, coercive and humane than the ‘lesser’ passion of pity.125 Bell agreed. In fact, he returned to the same scene of violence with which Burke had advanced his idea of the humanising impact of real sympathy: Bell included in his book a spectacular description of a public execution in Turin, picked up from his brother’s diaries. The narrative underlines the now familiar double bind of attraction and repulsion characterising such extreme situations: ‘it was impossible to witness the condition of this unhappy wretch, without terror’, noted John Bell; ‘and yet,’ he continued, ‘as if impelled by some strange infatuation, it was equally impossible not to gaze upon an object so wild, so full of horror’.126 To illustrate the larger-than-life power of a real-life spectacle John Bell had recourse to the usual comparison with the theatre. Not only did he concur with Burke that ‘nothing ever exhibited on the stage can give the slightest conception’ of the spectacle in question,127 but he also took note of a paradox already highlighted by Burke when he insisted that the delight we feel in similar situations increases the empathetic pull between victim and beholder. As the description progressed, John Bell bonded emotionally with the sufferer, transforming the person he had already described as a ‘criminal’ into a more sympathetic creature, namely, an ‘unhappy wretch’ exploited, even brutalised by the priest who used him to ‘cause alarm to all that looked on him’.128 Unsurprisingly, Charles Bell sympathised with his brother’s reaction; he actually used it to confirm his view that the emotion of horror expedited a broad spectrum of jointly humanising, sublime and realist functions. He defined horror as the core content of real sympathy, emphasising the fact that ‘Horror is more full of sympathy with the suffering of others, than engaged with our own.’ Moreover, horror maintains the entirety of its empowering properties since it is a sublime emotion ‘full of energy’ and, what is more, its energy is rooted in the very fabric of life: under its sway, ‘the body is in the utmost tension, not unnerved, by fear’.129 Ultimately, Bell embraced the role of strained emotions in strengthening continuities between real sympathy and realness of imitation just as Burke had done before him:



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horror may be ‘peculiarly excited by the real danger or pain of another’, but, and this is the peculiarity of this emotion, men are also known to be ‘struck with horror even at the spectacle of artificial distress’ [added emphasis].130 Arguably such a stance had implications for the way in which Bell’s Waterloo sketches of suffering, sympathy and the sublime were composed and read. It is via the sublime force of intense affects that these images introduce a new sensibility for humanity and its discontents. This shift to the human qualities of violence introduced a charged and involved model of modern humanity; and this is further reflected in the dominant role these sketches reserve for the human viewer. If, as already stated, it is in the viewer of Bell’s pictures that the sublime occurs, then horror is a concept used by Bell to describe this precise shift away from the figure in the drawing and its presumed feelings. As much as these figures may be begging for pity, therefore, the presiding effect of the drawings in question resides in the viewers who are horrified – in turn, excited and traumatised, abused and gratified – by the abject powerlessness of war casualties and their wounds. The beholder transforms the utter powerlessness of the drawn figure into the powerful, indeed horrifying but also humanising experience transpiring through these sketches. Yet this is not a purely psychological issue. The sublime is predominantly a matter of viewing and reception, but once again this takes place at the point where viewers intersect and bond with organised sensory configurations, including real scenes as much as pictures. Such sensation delivery systems as Bell’s sketches come with their own material armature, and it is in this sense that their sublimity operated in and through pictorial techniques and stylistic choices. The final product, in this case, recreates a visual equivalent for what could be called the raw humanity of an injured body. Better still, the visual profusion of these bodies exemplifies the ability of trauma to obsess modern imagination by augmenting the gamut of sympathies and sensory attractions experienced in these cases. According to Bromwich, Burke’s analysis of sympathy tends to imply that ‘works of art multiply the occasions’ for that kind of ‘lively impression of pain’ that compels us to ‘unite ourselves to the greater part of mankind’, and, as the same author concluded, ‘in this rather strange sense, they humanize’.131 It is the argument here that Bell’s practice multiplied the occasions for this humanising kind of viewer affliction through the development of an appropriate style of representation that increased massively the number of particularities of each painful occasion separately. In other words, his contribution involved a historically specific form of a highly variegated, minute and physical realism of wounds, wounded bodies and shocked viewers, now afflicted by levels of pain that redrew the boundaries of existing aesthetic and moral frameworks. Yet the kind of dramatisation of war enacted in Bell’s watercolours was not reflected by parallel developments in official oil painting. In other

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realms, especially in theatre productions and related technologies of spectacle, Burke’s linkages between reality of imitation and intensity of affect/effect were successfully adopted.132 In the art world, genteel artists committed to the lofty pretensions of the fine arts resisted ambitious outsiders ready to explore vivid forms of illusion, making the progress of similar breakthroughs difficult.133 The sublime real This chapter investigated the new synergies built from the late eighteenth century onwards between the appetite for aggressive sensations and the growing call for the amplification of visual representation. Hurt and injury became the dominant principles of this new experience, cutting across the entire continuum of art: bodies in pain, painstaking styles of representation and hurtful habits of seeing were tied up in energy cycles that determined the bursting forth of a special kind of realism. The most important statement of this realism was a break with the quietness of academic abstraction and its painless modes of art production and art consumption – those ‘infinite varieties of harmless pleasures’, as another academician and polemicist against realism later put it.134 In this vein, it exacerbated social and sensory divisions between the increasingly vocal realm of coarse and untutored sensibilities and the various provinces of aristocratic culture.135 The rhetoric and pursuit of reality remained a central project in modernist art and theory: real lived experience supplied the model against which assorted avant-gardes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries measured their ability to provide comparably powerful and concrete stimulations. This power relied on a sublime mechanism, that of simultaneous contrasts, sudden disruptions, violent jolts and other equally strained excitements in the history of the avantgarde. The call for realism would hence remain a call for a disturbance of sensory habits and habitual ways of seeing. Realism, as this chapter has used the term, is always a relational and historically specific phenomenon that presupposes the existence of established matrices of sensation: it is from their ‘wounding’ that realism draws its force and definition. From the middle of the eighteenth century onwards, the sublime, and especially the hard materiality of pain and the extreme economies of sensory labour on which it was erected, fulfilled perfectly this relational dimension of realism. In this history which began in 1757, we have probed into the painful genealogies of modern realism. Long ago, Samuel Holt Monk made an accurate assessment of Burke’s book, unfairly neglected until recently: ‘In attempting’, he wrote in the 1930s, ‘to establish an aesthetic system on the “passions” and in relating it ultimately to bodily states, Burke takes a long step in the direction of realism.’136 This chapter demonstrates that this realism of method (Burke’s materialism and emphasis on sensory physiology) was tied up with a demand for realness in seeing and another call for realness in art. Linda



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Nochlin recently suggested that ‘the realist project’ in its wider historical sense should perhaps be better conceptualised ‘as a vertical continuum’, with ‘the sublime, whether Longinian or Burkean, at the top, the concrete, the contemporary, and the ordinary in the middle, and the abject or the grotesque at the bottom’: this chapter argues that Burke’s brand of the sublime is placed at the genealogical centre of realism, radiating out into the entire continuum of its historical variants identified by Nochlin.137 Well before the gallows of the French Revolution or the war hecatombs of the dead and maimed that followed, Burke’s ritual of organised violence – his staging of an urban execution – had already designated in art the moment of modernity’s arrival: suffering marked the historical roots for this passion of the real through painful excitements that continue to mark our current understandings of visual spectacles and art. It is almost at the end of this path that, not long ago, realism was defined by Michael Fried as an ‘affront to seeing – a stunning or, worse, a wounding of seeing’. If Fried thus imagined that ‘the definitive realist painting would be one that the viewer literally could not bear to look at’, Bell strove to show – with varying degrees of success, it is true – what this work might look like.138 Conjointly, he unpacked the humanitarian facets of critical exercises in violence – real or simulated – revealing empathetic qualities that are more urgent today than ever before. Notes 1 Edmund Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1759). 2 For the hostile reception of Burke’s theory of pain and physical method, see Aris Sarafianos, ‘Edmund Burke’s Physiological Aesthetics in Medico-Philosophical Circles and Art Criticism 1757–1824’, in Peter Jones and Martin Fitzpatrick (eds), The Reception of Edmund Burke in Europe (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017), pp. 207–27. 3 There are aspects of ‘primitive intensity’ installed in Burke’s sublime that border on ‘misanthropy’; see David Bromwich, ‘The Sublime Before Aesthetics and Politics’, Raritan – A Quarterly Review, 16:4 (1997), 30–51: 30 and 33–4; David Bromwich, The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: from the Sublime and Beautiful to the American Independence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), pp. 58–96. 4 See Aris Sarafianos, ‘Pain, Labor, and the Sublime: Medical Gymnastics and Burke’s Aesthetics’, Representations, 91 (Summer 2005), 58–83. 5 For such anti-visual and anti-pictorial approaches to the sublime, see, for example, J.W.T. Mitchell, ‘Eye and Ear: Edmund Burke and the Politics of Sensibility’, in Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 116–49, pp. 125–7 and 136–40; and Tom Huhn, Imitation and Society: The Persistence of Mimesis in the Aesthetics of Burke, Hogarth, and Kant (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2006), pp. 15–64.

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6 Michael Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: on Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1987), pp. 63–4, p. 64. 7 Philip Shaw, Suffering and Sentiment in Romantic Military Art (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 202–6. 8 Charles Bell, Essays on the Anatomy of Expression in Painting (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1806), p. vii. Sir Joshua Reynolds’s academic discourses lamented similar situations of ‘minute attention’ where ‘the eye is perplexed and fatigued, from not knowing where to rest’. Identical vocabulary was used by William Hogarth; see, respectively ‘Discourse VIII’, The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, vol. 1 (London: T. Cadell, 1798), p. 250 and William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, ed. Ronald Paulson (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 34–5. 9 Such views remain resilient; see Nina Rowe, ‘Notes from the Field: Detail’, The Art Bulletin, 94:4 (December 2012), 508; see also Johannes Endres, ‘Notes from the Field: Detail’, The Art Bulletin, 94:4 (December 2012), 494. 10 See, for example, Johanna Roche, ‘Notes from the Field: Detail’, The Art Bulletin, 94:4 (December 2012), 505–8. 11 Various studies have focused on the commercial development of technologies of deception in this period. See Matthew Craske, Art in Europe: 1700–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), esp. Chapter 3; Ann Bermingham (ed.), Sensation and Sensibility: Viewing Gainsborough’s (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2005); Ann Bermingham (ed.), ‘Technologies of Illusion: The Art of Special Effects in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 70:2 (2007); and Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 2001). 12 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas, pp. 76–7. 13 Ibid., pp. 72–3. 14 Bromwich, Intellectual Life, p. 68. 15 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas, p. 72. 16 Ibid., p. 74. 17 Ibid., p. 75. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., p. 75. 20 Ibid., p. 71. 21 Ibid., p. 79. 22 Quoted in Bromwich, Intellectual Life, p. 61. The eighteenth-century English translator chose in this case the word ‘affliction’ instead of ‘pain’; see Abbe Dubos, Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting and Music (London: John Nourse, 1763), p. xii. 23 Burke’s critique is particularly engaging in view of current deconstructionist analyses of the nature of the legal subject, punishment, debt and pain. Jacques Derrida has explained the use of pain infliction as debt repayment through the ‘voluptuous pleasure of causing the other to suffer, of doing harm for the pleasure of it’. Pain offers an enjoyment that reimburses the lender with ‘a feeling of well-being or greater well-being’. See Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty, vol. I, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014) and Judith Butler, ‘On Cruelty’, London Review of Books, 36:17 (17 July 2014), 31.



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24 Gita May, ‘Diderot and Burke: A Study in Aesthetic Affinity’, PMLA, 75:5 (December 1960), 527–39: 527–8. Michael Fried has also noted Diderot’s debts to an aesthetic of the sublime that draws on Burke’s innovations; see Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 123 and 124–32. 25 Diderot on Art: The Salon of 1765 and Notes on Painting, vol. I, ed. and trans. John Goodman (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 213–14. Diderot’s reading of the Dying Gladiator would again emphasise this violence-related fascination: the work ‘will touch you, move you, perhaps even make so violent an impression on you that you can neither look away nor stop looking at it’; ibid., p. 158. 26 Diderot on Art: The Salon of 1767, vol. II, ed. Goodman, pp. 100–4. 27 Dubos, Critical Reflections, pp. 21–8, p. 24. For another related take on the affinities between Diderot’s stance and Dubos’s writings, see Tomas Macsotay’s Chapter 6, ‘Epicurean Tastes: Towards A French Eighteenth-Century Criticism of the Image of Pain’. 28 Burke’s critics insisted that the pleasure in tragedy lay in the fact that ‘the tragic distress is not reality’; see n. 60. 29 Quoted in Bromwich, Intellectual Life, p. 66. 30 Diderot on Art: The Salon of 1767, vol. II, ed. Goodman, p. 102. 31 Ibid., p. 103. 32 Ibid., p. 100. 33 Spectator, 418 (30 June 1712), in Joseph Addison, The Works of the Right Honourable Joseph Addison, Esq., vol. 3 (London: Jacob Tonson, 1721), p. 509. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., pp. 510 and 486. 36 Diderot’s earlier commentary on sympathy bristles with this sense of false superiority and self-indulgent sentimentalism; Diderot on Art, vol. II, ed. Goodman, pp. 100–3. 37 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas, p. 71. 38 Ibid., pp. 77–8. 39 Ibid., pp. 78–9. 40 Ibid., p. 76. 41 Ibid., p. 70. 42 Ibid., p. 79. 43 Mitchell, ‘Eye and Ear’, pp. 126–7. See also Huhn, Imitation and Society, p. 11. 44 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas, p. 76. 45 Iain Mc Calman, ‘Magic, Spectacle, and the Art of de Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon’, in Bermingham, Sensation and Sensibility, p. 182. 46 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas, p. 74. 47 Addison, The Works of the Right Honourable Joseph Addison, p. 510. 48 Craske, Art in Europe, p. 148. 49 Ibid., pp. 192–217. 50 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas, p. 76. 51 John Brewer, ‘Reenactment and Neo-Realism’, in Iain McCalman, and Paul A. Pickering ( eds), Historical Re-enactment: From Realism to the Affective Turn (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 79–89, pp. 83–4.

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52 For Diderot, art could at best be an approximation of nature, aiming at that ‘grand magic that consists in approaching nature very close’ or a little closer (‘un peu pres’) but never so close as taking its place. 53 Diderot on Art, vol. I, ed. Goodman, p. 64. 54 Roche, ‘Notes from the Field’, pp. 506–7. 55 See author’s ‘The Contractility of Burke’s Sublime and Heterodoxies in Medicine and Art’, JHI, 69:1 (2008), 23–48. 56 The Critical Review, 3 (April 1757), 361–74: 362. 57 Ibid. 58 Literary Magazine, 2 (1757), 183–9: 184–5. Murphy selected examples of cruelty that were meant to trivialise his opponent’s list: to Burke’s fantasy of London on fire, Murphy opposed the more tainted imagery of ‘Nero setting fire to Rome, [or] queen Mary burning hereticks at Smithfield’. And to Burke’s example of the scaffold, Murphy opposed ‘the gallows’ or famous cases of torture such as ‘the iron bed of Damien’ and the ‘brodequin of Ravillac’. 59 Ibid., 185. 60 Richard Payne Knight, An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste (London: T. Payne, Mews Gate, 1805), pp. 313–407. 61 Ibid., p. 322; see also p. 313. 62 Ibid., p. 322. 63 Ibid., p. 323. See also pp. 324–5. 64 Ibid., p. 316. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid., pp. 372–3. 67 Ibid., p. 89. Knight’s assault on Burke’s physiological materialism summed up contemporary confrontations over the public meanings and political roles of science, medicine or chemistry. For Burke’s role in the conservative backlash, see Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 150–87. 68 The revolutionary half-century that followed the Enquiry’s publication had made Burke increasingly uneasy about the possible associations of his aesthetic analysis of violence. See Bromwich, Intellectual Life, p. 96. 69 Knight, Analytical Inquiry, p. 313. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid., pp. 62, 88 and 348. 72 For Laocoon’s early reception, see Margarete Bieber, Laocoon: The Influence of the Group Since Its Rediscovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942); Simon Richter, Laocoon’s Body and the Aesthetics of Pain (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992). 73 Knight, Analytical Inquiry, pp. 333–4. 74 Knight adopted Winckelmann’s interpretation of the Laocoon as an ideal epitome of contained feeling. See Johann Joachim Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity, trans. Harry Francis Malgrave, intr. Alex Potts (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute Publications, 2006), p. 203 and pp. 213–314. 75 For Bell’s highly controversial candidacy, see The Examiner, 42 (16 October 1808), 670; The Examiner, 46 (13 November 1808), 730–1; The Examiner, 50 (11 December 1808), 794–5; The Examiner, 104 (24 December 1809), 827.



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76 Bell, Essays on the Anatomy of Expression (1806), pp. 107–45. 77 Ibid., pp. 38, 118, 128 and 176. 78 Bell, Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression (1877), p. 173. According to Bell, the Laocoon simply did not have ‘the power to push his breath out in the very moment of the great exertion of his arms to untwist the serpent’, pp. 174–5. Bell’s book underwent several revisions in 1824 and again in 1844. The 1877 reprint of the third revision of the book published under the title Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression as Connected to the Fine Arts (London, George Bell and Sons) is quoted here, except when otherwise stated. 79 Ibid., p. 175. 80 Ibid., p. 176. 81 Ibid., pp. 173–4. 82 Ibid., p. 174. 83 H. Taine, Italy: Rome and Naples (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1874), p. 130 and Bieber, Laocoon, p. 18. 84 Sir Charles Bell, The Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression: as Connected with the Fine Arts, 5th edn (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1865), pp. 195–7. 85 Ibid., p. 193. 86 Knight, Analytical Inquiry, p. 334, quoted in Bell, Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression, pp. 173–4, p. 174; ibid., p. 176. 87 Peter Stanley, For Fear of Pain: British Surgery, 1790–1850 (New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), p. 120. 88 Shaw, Suffering and Sentiment, p. 183. 89 See Bell, Essays on the Anatomy of Expression (1806), pp. 142–4. 90 Bell underlined the ‘energy of the whole frame’ which ‘is produced by suffering, and from the consciousness of its place or source’; ibid., p. 144. 91 Subsequent editions pay more attention to this category of excess pain; Bell, Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression, p. 178. 92 Ibid., p. 144. 93 Ibid. For the vital importance of pain in Bell, see ibid., p. 149 and pp. 179–80. 94 Ibid., p. 144. 95 Shaw, Suffering and Sentiment, p. 201; see also p. 204. Further testament to the misunderstanding expressed in this view is that Philip Shaw based his argument on an obvious misattribution to Bell of Knight’s passage on the Laocoon which Bell quotes in his book only in order to denounce it as a prime example of ignorance. Contrast with Bell, Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression, pp. 173–4. 96 Shaw, Suffering and Sentiment, p. 200. 97 For a similar suggestion, see ibid., p. 202. 98 Ibid., pp. 202–6. 99 T. Longmore, Description of a Series of Watercolour Drawings Executed by the Late Sir Charles Bell Illustrative of Wounds Received at the Battle of Waterloo (London: [Netley], [1866]), p. 7. 100 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas, p. 112. 101 When we ‘are exposed to any imminent danger of our lives’, then pain or fear ‘are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible’. See Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas, pp. 60, 74, 79. I am not invoking this famous phrase in the same way that other scholars have used it to

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highlight the supposed distancing effects that Burke embraced. I have elsewhere shown that the threshold on which Burke placed this undesirable proximity tends to be much closer to pain than is usually acknowledged; see n. 4. 102 Bell thought that only visual evidence embraced by his watercolours – and not written descriptions – could convey the ‘excess of sentiment’ characterising his experience; see Letters of Sir Charles Bell, ed. George Joseph Bell (London: John Murray, 1870), pp. 242–3. 103 Ibid., p. 247 104 Ibid., pp. 248 and 247. 105 Ibid., p. 229. 106 Ibid., pp. 230 and 246. 107 See n. 55. 108 Letters, ed. Bell, p. 247. 109 Bell marvelled at this disjuncture between the efficiency of his surgical labour and the painful adversity of the circumstances in which this labour took place: again and again, his ‘heart-rending’ and ‘intolerable’ experiences are interwoven with accounts of punishing yet accurate work ‘continued incessantly’ for days (ibid.). 110 Ibid., p. 246. 111 Ibid., p. 247. 112 Ibid., p. 248. 113 Bell, Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression, pp. 178–9. 114 Ibid., p. 175. 115 Ibid. 116 Martin Kemp, ‘The Text of William Hunter’s Lectures to the Royal Academy of Arts, 1769–1772’ in Kemp, William Hunter at the Royal Academy of Arts (Glasgow: University of Glasgow Press, 1975), pp. 40–1 and 43–4. For the hostility caused by Hunter’s realism among the academicians, see Kemp, ‘True to Their Natures: Sir Joshua Reynolds and Dr William Hunter at the Royal Academy of Arts’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London (January 1992), 77–88: 79–81. 117 ‘Text of Hunter’s Lectures’, p. 44. 118 These details allow specialists today to retrieve the fatal pathological conditions from which these patients suffered – fevers, inflammations, shocks or spasms, meningeal irritation, etc.; see Michael Crumplin and Peter Starling, A Surgical Artist at War: The Paintings and Sketches of Sir Charles Bell, 1809–1815 (Edinburgh: The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, 2005), p. 54. 119 Charles Bell, Essays on the Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression, 2nd edn (London: John Murray, 1824), pp. xiv–xv. 120 Bell, Essays on the Anatomy of Expression (1865), pp. v–vi. 121 Letters, ed. Bell, p. 232; publisher’s footnote. 122 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas, p. 307. 123 Ibid., p. 74. 124 Ibid. 125 Ibid., p. 307. 126 Bell, Essays on the Anatomy of Expression (1865), p. 167. 127 Ibid.



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128 Ibid., pp. 167–8. 129 Ibid., p. 169. 130 Ibid. 131 Bromwich, Intellectual Life, p. 69. 132 By the 1780s, ‘the age of reality re-enactment had emphatically arrived.’ For the significant overlaps between theatrical and other technologies of simulation with visual realism in art, see Iain McCalman, ‘Loutherbourg’s Simulations: Reenactment and Realism in Late-Georgian Britain’ in McCalman and Pickering, Historical Re-enactment, pp. 200–17, p. 202, pp. 204–10. 133 The fact that illusionism was making serious inroads into the sphere of elevated taste aggravated rather than transcended divisions between high and low culture: early nineteenth-century high classicism with its dogged anti-illusionism and linear abstraction was part of the same backlash in the elite art world; see Craske, Art in Europe, pp. 214–17. See also McCalman, ‘Simulations’, p. 211. 134 William Powel Frith, ‘ “Realism” versus “Sloppiness” ’, The Magazine of Art (1869), 6–9: 7. 135 McCalman, ‘Simulations’, p. 208. 136 Samuel Holt Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1935), p. 92. 137 Linda Nochlin, Bathers, Bodies, Beauty: The Visceral Eye (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 199–200. 138 Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration, pp. 64–5.

8

Forced witnessing of pain and horror in the context of colonial and religious massacres: the case of the Irish Rebellion, 1641–53 Nicolás Kwiatkowski1

Before and during historical massacres perpetrated in early modern times, victims usually appeared in a situation of extreme frailty, brought on by their social and political condition, but also by the cultural actions of the perpetrators. At the same time, the strong position of the killers generally allowed them to ascribe despicable characteristics and alleged menacing deeds or intentions to their victims, sometimes to the point of animalising or demonising them or even depriving them of their humanity. This chapter discusses several forms of witnessing horror, pain and torture in the context of religious and colonial massacres. Visual and textual evidence indicates that perpetrators used the forced witnessing of torment as a device to inflict additional terror upon their victims. Interestingly, these terrible instances of torment turned into spectacle occurred on both sides of the religious divide: they were thoroughly narrated, depicted and denounced. Although the existence of independent sources for the same episodes points to the reality of those events, exaggeration and propaganda were clearly present in many accounts. But survivors giving testimony about those deeds, as well as writers, engravers and painters representing them, considered the spectacle of torture so horrific that it became a sign of the perpetrators’ perversion. In some cases, this led to compassion and to a general rejection of untamed violence; in others, it was used to justify violent retaliation. Revolt in Ireland Between 1550 and 1700, the social and cultural life of Ireland changed completely. At the beginning of the period, the country was an autonomous region ruled by warlords on the periphery of Europe. By the end of the process, Ireland had become the first colony of a growing empire. This transformation entailed the violent reformulation of the society,



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government, religion, language and culture of the island, replicating English standards. Although five great wars were crucial to the period,2 the supposedly peaceful years between them were also characterised by continued colonisation and violence, while the religious divide internationalised the conflict.3 But the confrontation of Confederate Catholics and English forces between 1641 and 1653 was exceptional, both due to the intensity of violence and because of the social and demographic consequences that ensued. There were many written and visual accounts of the conflict, and historiography has generally considered it central and exceptional in Irish history.4 A thorough synthesis of the Irish rebellion and its causes is beyond the scope of this text, but some references are in order.5 The uprising was originally planned as a swift coup d’état to take place in October 1641. Hugh Oge MacMahon, Conor Maguire, Phelim O’Neill and Rory O’Moore would lead Irish armies to take over Dublin, Derry and other cities. They were successful in the North but were defeated in Dublin, and a long rebellion ensued. The Lords Justices immediately characterised the rebellion as ‘a most disloyal and detestable conspiracy intended by some evil affected Irish Papists’, aimed at ‘a general massacre of all English and Protestant inhabitants’.6 Charles Coote and William St Leger commanded a Protestant army that attempted to supress the rebellion: its brutality pushed many Catholics to join the uprising. Attacks against Protestants and their property spread, despite the efforts of the leaders of the rebellion, O’Neill among them, to control the situation.7 The movement became bloody: thousands of colonists were displaced and murdered in Ulster and Munster. Approximately six thousand Protestants died during the first three months.8 The English pamphlets immediately exaggerated those figures. Thousands of deaths were reported every week, and, in 1646, a semi-official account by Sir John Temple estimated that two hundred thousand Protestants had been killed – in spite of the fact that the population of colonists was around 125,000 at the beginning of the uprising.9 Near the end of the conflict, in 1649–50, Oliver Cromwell led a fullscale invasion, during which New Model Army troops devastated large parts of the country and plundered Drogheda and Wexford.10 After the reconquest of the island, Protestant hegemony was enforced in the hard terms imposed by Cromwell. Those who had taken part in the rebellion were executed, while the Confederate leaders had their property confiscated. Those whose participation was not clear were deported to Connaught, where they were assigned smaller areas of inferior land. Up to fifty thousand war prisoners were immediately expelled to the West Indies: ‘to Barbados someone’ became a synonym for ‘to deport someone’.11 Population figures are a testimony to the scale of the destruction: 2,100,000 people lived in Ireland in 1641, by 1672 there were only 1,700,000 inhabitants.12

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The impact of the rebellion on England, Wales and Scotland was immediate.13 Four days after the beginning of the uprising, Secretary of State Nicholas wrote in London that ‘the alarm of Popish plots amaze and fright the people here more than anything’.14 This reaction was rooted in a longstanding cultural tradition that identified the Irish as a barbaric people, compounded since the Dutch Revolt, the French Wars of Religion and the Thirty Years’ War by fears of foreign Catholics.15 Such remarks also had a propagandist nature. It is obviously impossible to speak of a ‘public sphere’ for this period.16 However, on rare occasions, the circulation of printed news could shape popular political attitudes, for or against a specific issue.17 We know, for instance, that printed material circulated from London to the provinces and was read aloud, increasing its reach and audience.18 The ideas, reactions and fears of these people were at least partially constructed by what they read and heard. On 29 November 1641, The heads of several proceedings in this present Parliament gave an early account of the first stages of the rebellion. A few weeks later, a flood of newsbooks, pamphlets, books and engravings narrated the massacre of ‘innocent Protestant settlers’ perpetrated by ‘bloodthirsty Irish Catholics’. The original sources for these gruesome (and exaggerated) accounts were the 1641 Depositions:19 witnesses’ testimonies that documented material destruction, military activity and the crimes allegedly committed by the Irish insurgents, including assault, rape and murder. Weekly account, for instance, lamented that the sort of violence perpetrated in Ireland was such that it seemed that the rebels had ‘contracted with the Devil for the tradition and monopoly of sin’.20 The identification of the Irish as followers of the devil, proof of which was to be found in the treatment of Protestants, is as frequent in English sources as the idea that the settlers were ‘dogs, heretics, demons, sons of demons’ was in Irish ones.21 References to the infernal nature of the Irish were frequently followed by accusations of barbarism and inhumanity in pamphlets and newsbooks.22 The ‘barbarity of Irish cruelty’ was also present in depositions by witnesses and survivors.23 Later books wondered: ‘Was there ever such barbarism among the heathen?’24 For English authors like James Cranford, Irish Catholics were responsible for: cruelties and tortures exceeding all parallel, unheard of among Pagans, Turks or Barbarians, except you would enter into the confines of Hell itself to see the devils, those engineers of cruelty, acting of their parts.25

The demonisation of the Irish was, perhaps, one of the necessary conditions for Parliament to deprive them of the protection of the rules of war in December 1645: any rebel captured was to be executed.26 Then, it came as no surprise when Oliver Cromwell warned the Irish: ‘Your covenant, if you



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understood it, is with death and hell’.27 The violence of the reconquest of the island was thus justified. The supposed infernal and barbaric nature of the Irish rebels was stressed by the connection of the tormented Protestants with martyred innocents.28 Sir John Temple, for instance, compared ‘the late effusion of so much innocent English blood’ with the ‘horrid, despiteful and execrable manner’ of the Irish.29 He then introduced ‘A brief collection of some other horrid inhuman cruelties, which I find were used in the murdering of many poor innocent souls’.30 According to Kathleen Noonan, Temple’s ideas and exaggerations regarding the Irish rebellion found a wide audience in England during the second half of the seventeenth century because contemporary historians quoted his book31 and, more significantly, as a consequence of its reproduction in new Protestant martyrologies.32 It should be mentioned that the original meaning of the term ‘martyr’ in Greek (μάρτυρ) is precisely ‘witness’. It was later used to define those believers called to witness for their faith, on account of which they endure suffering. Therefore, from the very beginning, there was a close association of suffering, bodily torments, religious belief and witnessing.33 In this context, the documents underscore the tormented bodies and the forced viewing of the events. An anonymous pamphlet from 1641 described Irish actions in Armagh with vocabulary that could equally be applied to the iconography of the massacre of the Holy Innocents: ‘deflowering Women, and dragging them up and down the streets, and cruelly murdering them, and thrusting their speers through their little infants before their eyes, and carrying them up and down on pike points, in great reproach’.34 James Cranford made consistent use of this type of reference. After stating ‘Witness our Books of Martyrs those chronicles of blood’,35 the metaphor becomes visual, and several engravings represent Irish atrocities through a synthesis of images familiar from martyrological accounts. The illustration of the murder of Mr Blandry, for instance, shows the minister’s body hanging as he is being skinned, while his wife is forced to watch. This fact is stressed by the caption: ‘Mr Blandry Minister hanged, after pulled his flesh from his bones in his wife’s sight’.36 Another engraving depicts how Mr Davenant’s family was tortured before their murder (Figure 8.1): They found Master Davenant, sitting by a fire with his wife and children, two young daughters, they immediately seized upon him and his wife and bound them both fast in their chairs. [They slew the children] in the sight of their parents and after roasted them upon spits before their faces, such barbarous cruelty was never known. With great patience they were compelled, poor souls, to behold that cruelty which they could not help, after they stripped his wife, forcing her most uncivilly and unmercifully before his face, and afterward cut her throat, the distressed gentleman being overpressed with the lamentable sight of the death of his wife and children, strived and struggled in his chair where he was bound, and held, hoping they would have killed him, choosing rather

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8.1  James Cranford, The Tears of Ireland. Wherein is lively presented as in a map a list of the unheard of cruelties and perfidious treacheries of blood thirsty Jesuits and the Popish Faction (London: 1642), p. 41



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to die any death than to live any longer. So when they had made an end of his wife and children in this barbarous manner, they untied him and stripped him, and afterwards murdered him when he had confessed to them where his money was.37

The forced witnessing of atrocities was repeatedly narrated, both in the depositions and in books based on them. But the horrendous character of the scenes was deepened by the contrast between the terror imposed on the victims and the enjoyment derived from the ‘spectacle’ by the perpetrators: ‘the bloody beholders relating such things with boasting and great rejoicing’.38 Radical violence in a wider European context Physical torment, hurtful bodies and witnessing were central features of English representations of the Irish rebellion. Martyrdom, barbarism and hell were crucial to the depiction of both victims and perpetrators. Although these facts may seem exceptional features of this particular conflict, a comparison with other colonial and religious contemporary clashes shows, on the other hand, that those elements were generally present, perhaps even to the point that they became fundamental to the construction of moral judgements and ideology. These common devices and sensibilities in early modern Europe were hinted at in documents referring to the Irish uprising. James Cranford, for instance, compared Protestants’ fate during the rebellion to that of the Waldensians, the Huguenots during the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre, the martyrs of Mary I of England and the victims of the Inquisition; the Papacy was of course accountable for all these crimes.39 One could wonder whether this was mainly a religious rant or the consequence of a widespread set of strategies and devices active in the description of torture and untamed violence, beyond religious boundaries. Between 1565 and 1567, Pieter Bruegel painted a Massacre of the Holy Innocents, of which nowadays exist a number of versions, including one at Windsor Castle (Figure 0.2) and another displayed at the Sibiu Museum, Romania, which is particularly relevant to the case being made here. The biblical narration of the martyrdom of the children of Bethlehem is set in a small town in the Low Countries, sacked by riders wearing Spanish uniforms.40 Many villagers are forced to watch as women and children are attacked by the foreign soldiers. In France, the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of August 1572 was immediately narrated by the Huguenots as a scene of martyrdom, and the defenestration of Gaspard de Coligny was soon included in Simon Goulart’s martyrology.41 The French also referred to those facts as ‘the hunt of good men’ or ‘a people hunt’, while the English echoed the metaphor in their chronicles of the event.42 Years later, pamphlets printed in England denounced the Irish for transforming churches into slaughterhouses.43 Catholics also

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adopted the hunt as a theme when attempting to highlight the victims’ innocence and their tormentors’ ferocity: Father Quinn, a Jesuit, wrote that the Cromwellian army was hunting priests ‘with more fury’ than when chasing wild beasts.44 An important fact should be pointed out here: the figures of speech that described the killings, together with the emphasis on torment and the relevance of witnesses, were not exclusively used by Protestants. In 1587, Richard Verstegan published his Theatrum Crudelitatum Haereticorum in Antwerp. The book narrates and depicts the horrible tortures Catholic martyrs suffered at the hands of Protestants in England, France and Germany. For example, referring to ‘French cruelties’, the author tells the story of a priest who was cut open and forced to eat his own genitalia only for the perpetrators to be able to see the digestive process.45 Similarly, while describing the persecution of Catholics in England, Verstegan reports that a victim was forced to watch the treatment applied to one of his fellows, which became a ‘spectacle’ before his own torment (Figure 8.2).46 According to David Freedberg, the engravings and texts in Verstegan’s book helped prepare the contemporary sensibility for the martyrdom scenes painted by Hieronymus Francken: the depiction of contemporary religious cruelty as martyrdom reinforced the representation of historical martyrdom.47 Other textual and visual examples seem to prove this point. In some of them, witnessing is key. Giovan Battista Marino’s poem La strage degli innocenti, posthumously published in Naples in 1632, denounces the fact that Herod watched the massacre of the Holy Innocents from his palace.48 In Federico Barocci’s Martirio di San Vitale, women are forced to witness the tormented body of the martyr. Domenichino’s Martyrdom of St Agnes shows both women and children in the same situation.49 In the Germany of the Thirty Years’ War, after the siege and destruction of Magdeburg, in 1631, a commentator stated that ‘it is an enormous and sad tyranny, impossible to describe, unknown even among the heathens and the Turks’.50 In a contemporary engraving, the city was described as a raped maiden, who demanded that the King of Sweden witness her torture: Turn your face to me / behold my burnt hair / Behold the singed brow that once was as ivory / […] White and pure was once my body. / Now sword and flame have violated it utterly. / Here ’tis half-burnt / here run through / Here a mutilated limb / here a weal and bruise / ’Tis a wonder the pain does not make me cry out constantly.51

Interestingly, the Thirty Years’ War became one of the examples used to compare the atrocities perpetrated during the Irish Rebellion and the English Civil War.52 However, the most compelling and wide-ranging similarities appear in representations of the conquest of Latin America, particularly in Bartolomé de las Casas’ work. The revealing combination of martyrdom and hell, as



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8.2  Anonymous, Le Miroir de la Cruelle & horrible Tyrannie Espagnole perpétrée au Pays Bas par le Tyran Duc de Albe (Amsterdam, 1620), p. 51

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well as the centrality of torment and observation, are fundamental aspects in this resemblance. Las Casas’ Brevísima relación sobre la destrucción de las Indias, written in 1542, had already been translated into English in 1583. Moreover, its European popularity was unparalleled since an illustrated edition had been printed in Theodor de Bry’s workshop in 1598.53 The links between the victimisation of the Americans by Spaniards in the New World and the torments inflicted upon Protestants by Catholics in the Old World seemed obvious for several contemporaries. The 1620 French edition of Las Casas’ work, prepared by John Everhardts Cloppenburg in Amsterdam, was entitled Le Miroir de la Tyrannie Espagnole.54 It included a translation of Las Casas’ text, a reproduction of the engravings prepared by De Bry for his edition and a second volume narrating the ‘tyrannies’ perpetrated by the Duke of Alba and his troops in the Low Countries. This book, illustrated by nineteen images,55 included an extra engraving devoted to the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and the murder of Gaspard de Coligny. In these sets of images we find the torment of victims’ bodies, the forced witnessing of tortures and enjoyment derived by perpetrators from the spectacle.56 (Figure 8.3) There was of course an earlier tradition associating American and European religious massacres. In 1566, Le Challeux57 described the Spanish attack against the French colony in Florida employing a rhetoric already used in Europe to narrate the Wars of Religion. In a way, the Leyenda negra had arrived in France (and in England, through translation) even before Las Casas’ work was known.58 Despite that, the impact of the Lascasian narration was quickly felt in Northern Europe, frequently in relation to the conflict between Catholics and Protestants. In 1584, Richard Hakluyt freely adapted parts of the Dominican’s report and highlighted the Spaniards’ Catholicism and the Indians’ martyrdom.59 Moreover, De Bry’s illustrations of the Brevísima also made their way to England. The first English illustrated edition of the work was published in London in 1656. The title, chosen by editor John Phillips, echoed James Cranford’s book about the Irish rebellion, The Tears of the Indians.60 It became evident that there was a further continuity of the ‘infernal’ cruelties perpetrated by Catholics in Europe and America and, consequently, a unity of ‘innocent Americans’ with ‘innocent Protestants’, similar to that suggested in Cloppenburg’s edition. The links between American massacres and European conflicts were explicit in Phillips’ preface: Bloody and Popish Nation of the Spaniards, whose Superstitions have exceeded those of Canaan, and whose Abominations have excelled those of Ahab, who split the Blood of innocent Naboth to obtain his Vineyard. … Pardon me, Great Sir, if next my zeal to Heaven, the loud Cry of so many bloody Massacres, far surpassing the Popish Cruelties in Ireland.61

Just as Las Casas continually emphasises the importance of his role as witness of the massacres, Phillips states: ‘had you been eyewitnesses of the



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8.3  Richard Verstegan, Theatrum Crudelitatum Haereticorum nostri temporis (Antwerp: 1587), p. 53

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transcending massacres here related … your compassion must of necessity have turned into astonishment’.62 The frontispiece of this edition, engraved by Richard Gaywood, was inspired by De Bry’s work and divided into four compartments. Torture, martyrdom and witnessing are central in all of them.63 The image on the top right is particularly revealing: while hanging ‘American martyrs’ are being burnt, a soldier is about to crush a baby against a wall. Not only was this also present on page 10 of De Bry’s edition of Las Casas, but James Cranford chose a similar setting to illustrate that the Irish, ‘having ravished virgins and wives, take their children and bash their brains against the walls in sight of their weeping parents’.64 Witnessing brutality and testimony Evidently, similar aesthetic and rhetorical devices were used by early modern Europeans across the religious divide to represent atrocities in a similar way. This may indicate that Werner Weisbach’s old hypothesis regarding the centrality of cruelty, horror and consternation for the Baroque as CounterReformation art (and sometimes propaganda) could perhaps be extended and updated to include several examples of Protestant expression as well.65 At the same time, those intricate representations entailed several manners of witnessing. Firstly, witnesses in the traditional sense observed an event and were later able to report on it, to give testimony. They might have risked becoming victims themselves: many of the Irish deponents were survivors, while Bartolomé de las Casas was not. Secondly, there are victims who were forced to observe other victims’ torture and death, prior to their own. Thirdly, some of the perpetrators witnessed the acts of others as a joyful spectacle, an attitude generally condemned by contemporary representations. It is obvious that the readers of books and pamphlets, as well as the beholders of engravings and paintings, cannot be considered witnesses due to their indirect relationship to the events. Paul Ricoeur has keenly noted the differences between witnessing and testimony: the latter designates the act of relating what one has seen or heard, not the perception of the event itself, but its narration, which, in turn, becomes a tool for making a judgement (be it legal, historical or moral). The French author considers that the risk of becoming a martyr is inherent to witnessing: ‘The witness is a man who is identified with the just cause which the crowd and the great hate and who, for this cause, risks his life’. The nature of the commitment of the witness in testimony determines the fundamental difference between true and false witnessing.66 These distinctions also indicate the limits of representation. As Giorgio Agamben has pointed out when referring to contemporary genocide, the ‘complete witnesses’, who suffered the event through their death, cannot bear witness to it, and thus the value of testimony lies in what it lacks.67 There are obvious differences between twentieth-century genocide and seventeenth-century massacre.



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Perhaps one of the similarities is that fragmentary witnessing and testimony could provide the basis for a partial restoration of the victims’ destroyed subjectivity and for a starting point of a sense of empathy towards them.68 In addition, the fact that the victims’ torments, the forced witnessing of atrocity and its joyous contemplation were highlighted as particularly barbaric demands clarification, particularly in a time when the display of the ‘tortured body’ was a sign of power.69 There is a clear tension between massive attendance at the spectacle of the scaffold, on the one hand, and outraged condemnation of torments (and of compelled/delighted witnessing of them) in the context of massacres, on the other. The most obvious explanation for this is that the tortured bodies displayed are those of victims and not those of people accused of a crime. Moreover, the victims’ innocence was stressed by their identification with martyrs. Consequently, textual and visual representations of torture as spectacle led to the condemnation of the fact, not to the reinforcement of a system of terror surrounding the criminal’s body on display. The witnessing of atrocity was not inscribed in a legal ceremonial, either, but it stemmed from the collapse of accepted rules regarding violence. Hence, the spectacle of torture became horrific and was represented both as one of the torments of those who would soon become victims and as a sign of the perpetrators’ perversion. However, there might be similarities between the bodies tortured and displayed on the scaffold and those slaughtered in massacres. One of them is the fact that both became a sign of power. According to Foucault, the public executions ‘ought to show only the terrorizing power of the prince, [but] there was a whole aspect of the carnival, in which rules were inverted, authority mocked and criminals transformed into heroes’.70 The carnivalesque is absent in the representation of torture and death in the midst of massacres, but there is an inversion: the dehumanisation of the victims is reversed and the legitimacy of the perpetrators’ power is challenged. The description of a group of others, religious in most of the cases discussed here, as radically different and inferior to the point of inhumanity has been considered one of the cultural preconditions to a massacre: their corrupting influence was interpreted as a call for violent purification of the community.71 The type of witnessing performed by the perpetrators furthered this degrading pattern. The victims’ forced witnessing and the survivors’ testimony, in contrast, produced the recognition of the victims’ suffering and was one of the bases for compassion: it reversed the dehumanising effect of atrocity and restored the victims’ humanity. The visual and textual strategies used to represent tormented bodies in the context of massacres fostered empathy towards the victims and the rejection of massacring practices. The condemnation of torments inflicted upon ‘innocents’ by ‘infernal’ or ‘barbarian’ perpetrators occasionally pointed to a general rejection of untamed violence. The centrality of the hurt body and the eye-witnessing of its destruction contributed to that reaction. Certain arguments that would later be used

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in debates on tolerance can be found in these texts and images.72 However, it is also true that a frequent consequence of these constructions was that those responsible for such cruelties were deemed beyond moral rescue: they could be dealt with only by ‘fire and sword’.73 Paradoxically, in many cases, the denunciation of brutality seems to have been a precondition for more brutality. Notes 1 I would like to thank Roxana Basso, Gabriela Leighton, Tomas Macsotay, Cornelius van der Haven and José E. Burucúa for several suggestions that allowed me to improve this text. 2 For a useful synthesis, see David Edwards, Padraig Lenihan and Clodagh Tait, ‘Early Modern Ireland. A History of Violence’, in Edwards, Lenihan and Tait (eds), Age of Atrocity. Violence and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007), pp. 9–33. 3 The Pope lent his support to the Confederate Catholics in 1642–49: only in 1642 did Urban VIII provide them with the equivalent of £7,000, while in 1643 Philip IV from Spain contributed 4,500 pounds. Padraig Lenihan, Confederate Catholics at war (1641–49) (Cork: Cork University Press, 2001), pp. 43 and 65. 4 On this corpus, see Nicholas Canny, ‘The 1641 Depositions: a Source for Cultural History’, History Ireland, I:4 (1993), 52–5; J.M. Read, ‘Atrocity Propaganda and the Irish Rebellion’, Public Opinion Quarterly, 2 (1938), 229–44; David O’Hara, English Newsbooks and Irish Rebellion, 1641–1649 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2006); T.C. Barnard, ‘The Uses of 23 October 1641 and Irish Protestant Celebrations’, English Historical Review, 106 (1991), 889–920; B. Walker, Dancing to History’s Tune: History, Myth, and Politics in Ireland (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1996); L.W. McBride, Reading Irish Histories: Texts, Contexts, and Memory in Modern Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003). 5 On this, see Jane Ohlmeyer and John Kenyon (eds), The Civil Wars. A Military History of England, Scotland and Ireland 1638–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Micheal Ó Siochrú, God’s Executioner – Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland (London: Faber & Faber, 2008); Edwards, Lenihan and Tait (eds), Age of Atrocity; Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 6 Richard Bellings, ‘History of the Confederation and War in Ireland, c. 1670’, in J.T. Gilbert, History of the Affairs of Ireland (Dublin: Irish Archaeological and Celtic Society, 1879), p. 9. The Lord Justice of Ireland was an ancient senior position in the governance of Ireland: one or several simultaneous office-holders in the Kingdom who, in the absence of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, fulfilled the social and political duties as head of the Irish executive. 7 O’Neill ‘strove to contain the rascal multitude from those frequent savage actions of stripping and killing which were after perpetrated and gave their enterprise an odious character as well in the opinion of their countrymen as of strangers’ but ‘the floodgate of rapine, once being laid open, the meaner sort of people was not to be contained’. Richard Bellings, Fragmentum historicum.



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History of the Confederation and War in Ireland (1670), pp. 14–15, quoted by Canny, Making Ireland British, p. 480. 8 R. Clifton, ‘ “An Indiscriminate Blackness”? Massacre, Counter-Massacre, and Ethnic Cleansing in Ireland, 1640–1660’, in Mark Levene and Penny Roberts (eds), The Massacre in History (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999), p. 110. 9 John Temple, The Irish Rebellion (London: 1646). The Puritan Hugh Peters wrote about ‘a million [people] massacred by the Papists’ (Peters, A true relation of the passages of God’s providence in a voyage for Ireland, London: 1642), p. 22. 10 In Drogheda, 3,500 people were killed (800 of whom were civilians), while 1,500 died in Wexford (300 civilians). J. McElligott, ‘Cromwell, Drogheda, and the Abuse of Irish History’, Irish Studies Review, VI:1 (2001), 109–32. 11 For the confiscations, see K.S. Bottigheimer, English Money and Irish Land (Oxford: 1971), Chapter 5. For the deportations to the West Indies, Ohlmeyer and Kenyon, The Civil Wars, p. 136. 12 T.W. Woody, A New History of Ireland (Oxford: 1976), III, p. 389. 13 K. Lindley, ‘The Impact of the 1641 Rebellion upon England and Wales (1641–5)’, Irish Historical Studies, XVIII (1972), 143–76. 14 Quoted in J.L. Malcolm, Caesar’s Due: Loyalty and King Charles (London: Royal Historical Society, 1983), p. 16. According to Richard Baxter, ‘the terrible massacres in Ireland and the threatening of the rebels to invade England were the chief reasons why the nation moved to a state of war’. Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae (London: T. Parkhurst, 1696), pp. 29–33. 15 For Holland, see George Gascoigne, The Spoyle of Antwerpe (London: 1576). For the Thirty Years’ War, A Short Relation of the Departure of the High and Mightie Prince Frederick King Elect of Bohemia (Dort: 1619), and Philip Vincent, The Lamentations of Germany: Wherein, as in a Glasse, We May Behold her Miserable Condition, and Reade the Woefull Effects of Sinne (London: J. Rothwell, 1638). 16 ‘In its clash with the arcane and bureaucratic practices of the absolutist state, the emergent bourgeoisie gradually replaced a public sphere in which the ruler’s power was merely represented before the people with a sphere in which state authority was publicly monitored through informed and critical discourse by the people.’ Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), p. xi. 17 B. Dooley and S. Baron (eds), The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 18ff. 18 Joad Raymond, The invention of the Newspaper. English Newsbooks, 1641–1649 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 244–54. 19 Trinity College Dublin, MSS 809–841 (TCD). 20 The Weekly Account, 13 (30 November 1643), 3. 21 George Craichton, TCD, MS 832, 154v; Nicholas Simpson, TCD, MS 834, 184r. 22 A letter to the Parliament, reproduced in several pamphlets, requested ‘help for those who languish with their throats exposed to the sword of the barbaric Irish enemies’, A continuation of the diurnall of passages in Parliament, 7 (28 February 1642), p. 52. One example of the pamphlet titles, among many: A new remonstrance from Ireland. Declaring the barbarous cruelty and inhumanity of

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the Irish rebels against the Protestants there. Also an exact discovery of the manners and behaviour of the Irish renegadoes here in England, with infallible notes whereby they may be known and distinguished, together with the places they usually frequent and many other things remarkable (London: [printed for George Tomlinson], 1642). Added emphasis. 23 For example, on 29 June 1641, John Mountgomery, from Clounish in Monaghan, stated: ‘the rebels murdered of his knowledge at the least fourscore Protestants and committed a number of other wicked barbarous and notorious robberies and actions, and by their own relation robbed, stripped naked, killed and drowned 45 of the Scots at one time’. TCD, MS 839, f. 65. Added emphasis. 24 James Cranford, The Tears of Ireland. Wherein is lively presented as in a map a list of the unheard of cruelties and perfidious treacheries of blood thirsty Jesuits and the Popish Faction (London: 1642), p. 46. 25 Cranford, The Tears of Ireland, p. 67. For another example, see Temple, The Irish Rebellion, p. 79: ‘The people being now set at liberty and prepossessed by their priests with a belief that it was lawful for them to rise up and destroy all the Protestants, who, they told them, were worse than dogs, that they were devils and served the devil, assuring them the killings of such was meritorious act and a rare preservative against the pains of purgatory’ . 26 Micheál Ó Siochrú, ‘Atrocity, Codes of Conduct and the Irish in the British Civil Wars 1641–1653’, Past and Present, 195 (May 2007), 55–86. 27 Declaration of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland for the Undeceiving of Deluded and Seduced People … , in Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, ed. C.S. Lomas (London: 1904), vol. II, p. 7. 28 This was also present in the depositions. For example, Ellen Matchett, 3 September 1642, TCD, MS 836, 59 r. 29 Temple, The Irish Rebellion, p. 5. 30 Ibid., p. 86. 31 Toby Barbard, ‘ “Parlour Entertainment in an Evening”: Histories of the 1640s’, in Micheál O Siochrú (ed.), Kingdoms in Crisis: Ireland in the 1640s (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001), pp. 22–6. 32 Kathleen Noonan, ‘ “Martyrs in Flames”: Sir John Temple and the Conception of the Irish in English Martyrologies’, Albion, 36:2 (2004), 223–55. 33 On this, see H.A.M. Hoppenbrouwers, Recherches sur la terminologie du martyre de Tertaullien a Lactance (Nijmegen: Dekker & van de Vegt, 1961) and M. Lamberigts and P. Van Deun (eds), Martyrium in Multidisciplinary Perspective (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1995). 34 Bloody newes from Ireland (London: 1641), title-page. Added emphasis. This event is also reproduced by Cranford in text and image (see the engraving in Cranford, The Tears, p. 75). 35 Cranford, The Tears, p. 23. 36 Ibid., p. 37. 37 Ibid., p. 41. Added emphasis. 38 Henry Jones, A remonstrance of diverse remarkable passages concerning the church and kingdom of Ireland … , London, Printed for Godfrey Emerson and William Bladen, and are to be sold at the sign of the Swan in Little Britain, 1642. Another example in Cranford, The Tears, p. 28. Added emphasis.



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39 James Cranford, The Tears, Preface, n/p. ‘It is credibly related that in the space of eight hundred years he [the Pope] has been the death of twelve millions, one alone Pope Julius the Second is seven years of his papacy destroyed 200.000 Christians. … How bloody were the persecutions raised against the Waldensians, in which there was no mercy showed to any age, sex, condition, their rage extended itself to the destruction of the brutish beasts and senseless trees? … Bartholomeis slaughter will be forever infamous in France, where by a prodigious treason and unparalleled cruelty the rivers did run with the blood of Huguenots. England has still in fresh remembrance Queen Mary’s fires. Italy, Spain & C. do yet groan under the merciless inquisition’. 40 Stanley Ferber, ‘Peter Bruegel and the Duke of Alba’, Renaissance News, 19:3 (Autumn, 1966), 205–19. 41 Simon Goulart, Memóires de l’Estat de France sous Charles IX (Geneva: 1578), pp. 272–4. 42 See for instance A narration briefly containing the history of the French massacre, especially that horrible one at Paris, which happened in the year 1572. … (London [printed by Thomas Snodham], 1618), p. 1. ‘In so great a number of ancient and modern writers, I do wonder there has been none, that as yet has particularly set forth that cruel butchery of good men made in the kingdom of France in the year 1572 on Bartholomew’s day …’ 43 For example, A brief declaration of the barbarous and inhumane dealings … , p. 6. ‘What shall we say of the ravishing of women before their own husbands faces, yea some green women lying in child bed, burning churches lately built at the great expenses of the English down to the ground, making other churches slaughterhouses and other mass houses, pulling down the king’s arms and defacing them’. Cranford, Tears of Ireland, pp. 23 and 38; and Temple, Irish Rebellion, pp. 84 and 86, also used this simile. 44 Father Quinn, Jesuit, ‘The State and Condition of the Catholics in Ireland from the year 1652’, available in full in John Lynch, Cambrensis everus: the history of ancient Ireland vindicated: the religion, laws and civilization of her people exhibited in the lives and actions of her kings, princes, saints, bishops, bards, and other learned men (Dublin: Celtic Society, 1848–1852 [1662]): ‘the Cromwellians often discover it, and then the wild beast was never hunted with more fury, nor tracked with more pertinacity, through mountains, woods and bogs, than the priest. At present, it is a common saying among the misbelievers “I am going to hunt the priests”.’ 45 Richard Verstegan, Theatrum Crudelitatum Haereticorum nostri temporis (Antwerp: 1587), pp. 48–9. Verstegan’s words are: ‘ut viderunt quo modo ea digereret’. 46 In the author’s words, ‘Catholicis iam supplicio destinatis, preces sanctae, meditationesque interrumpuntur, rapiuntur ad immanissimae tyrannidis, quae in socios eorum exercetur, spectaculum’. Verstegan, Theatrum Crudelitatum, pp. 82–3. 47 Freedberg adds the Martyrologium Romanum, updated by Baronio in 1586, and Antonio Gallonio’s Trattato de gli instrumenti di martirio (Rome: 1591) as possible sources for Francken. David Freedberg, ‘The Representation of Martyrdoms during the Early Counter-Reformation in Antwerp’, Burlington Magazine, 118: 876 (March 1976), 128–38.

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48 ‘Dal sublime Palagio Erode mira / Della Strage crudel l’orrida scena’. Giovan Battista Marino, La strage degli innocenti (Naples: 1632), Argomento, libro III. 49 Federico Barocci’s Martirio di San Vitale (Milan, Brera, 1593); Domenichino’s Martyrdom of St Agnes (c. 1619–25, Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale). 50 ‘Gewisser und eigentlicher Bericht von dem erbärmlichen und erschröcklichen Zustande, so sich den 12 May, dieses instehendes 1631. Jahrs, mit der Stadt Magdeburg begebn, wie alda in die 6000. Fewerstädte, beneben in die achtzig oder neunzig Tausent Menschen, gantz erbärmlich und erschröcklich umb ihr Leben kommen sein … Gedruckt zu Zerbst, Bey Zacharias Dörffern, im 1631’, quoted in Werner Lahne, Magdeburgs Zerstörung in der zeitgenossischen Publizistik (Magdeburg: Magdeburger Geschochtsvereins, 1931), p. 110. 51 Anon., ‘Ein Gespräch der Königl: Mayest zu Schweden und der Magdeburgischen Jungfrawen so anietzo auß begnadung des Neptuni eine Wasser Nymphe’, n.p, n.d., c. 1631. See Ulinka Rublack, ‘Wench and Maiden: Women, War and the Pictorial Function of the Feminine in German Cities in the Early Modern Period’, History Workshop Journal, 44 (Autumn 1997), 1–21. 52 See Geoff Mortimer, Eyewitness Accounts of the Thirty Years War, 1618–48 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), especially Chapter 14. 53 See Anna Greve, Die Konstruktion Amerikas. Bilderpolitik in den Grands Voyages aus der Werkstatt de Bry (Cologne: Böhlau, 2004), and José Emilio Burucúa and Nicolás Kwiatkowski, ‘El Padre Las Casas, De Bry y la represen­ tación de las masacres americanas’, Eadem utraque Europa, 10–11 (July 2011), 147–80. 54 Le Miroir de la Tyrannie Espagnole: Perpétrée aux Indes Occidentales … (Amsterdam [Gheruckt by Jan Evertsz], 1620). 55 Le Miroir de la Cruelle & horrible Tyrannie Espagnole pérpetrée au Pays Bas par le Tyran Duc de Albe. 56 See Le Miroir de la Tyrannie Espagnole: pérpetrée aux Indes Occidentales … , p. 14 and Le Miroir de la Cruelle & horrible Tyrannie Espagnole pérpetrée au Pays Bas, p. 51. 57 Le Challeux, Discours de l’histoire de la Floride, contenant la trahison des Espagnols, contre les subiets du Roy (Dieppe: 1566). According to the author, the Spaniards, ‘more savage than animals’, persecuted the French and executed a ‘fury they had conceived against our nation’ and ‘cut the throats of men, healthy and ill, in front of women and children. It is impossible to conceive a massacre comparable to this one in cruelty and barbarism’. 58 This is Jonathan Hart’s hypothesis in Representing the New World (New York: Palgrave, 2001). 59 Richard Hakluyt, Discourse on Western Planting (London: 1584), p. 52. 60 The Tears of the Indians: Being an Historical and true Account of the Cruel Massacres and Slaughters of above Twenty Millions of innocent People; Committed by the Spaniards in the Islands of Hispaniola, Cuba, Jamaica & C. Written in Spanish by Casaus, an Eye-witness of those things (London, [Printed by J.C. for Nath. Brook, at the Angel in Cornhill], 1656). 61 Ibid., A3. 62 Ibid., B2. 63 E. Shaskan Bumas, ‘The Cannibal Butcher Shop: Protestant Uses of las Casas’s Brevísima relación in Europe and the American Colonies’, Early American



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Literature, 35:2 (2000), 107–36. According to Shaskan Bumas, Catholics are, in Phillips’s formulation, worse than infidels and no longer Christians. 64 Cranford, The Tears, p. 57. Rubens’s 1611 Massacre of the Holy Innocents (oil on panel, Art Gallery of Ontario) uses the same device. Added emphasis. 65 Werner Weisbach, Der Barock als Kunst der Gegenreformation (Berlin: Cassirer, 1921), especially Chapter II. 66 Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Hermeneutics of Testimony’, in Essays on Biblical Interpretation, ed. and Introduction by Lewis S. Mudge (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980, pp. 119–53). The quote was taken from p. 130. Also, for Ricoeur, there is a similarity between religious and profane testimony: the confession of faith is only possible with a historic element, ‘It is not possible to testify for a meaning without testifying that something has happened which signifies this meaning’ (p. 133). 67 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz. The Witness and Archive (New York: Zone Books, 1999), especially p. 39. 68 See Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992); and Dominick LaCapra, ‘Holocaust Testimonies: Attending to the Victim’s Voice’, in LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), pp. 86–113. 69 The locus classicus is of course Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punishment (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), Part I. 70 Foucault, Discipline and Punishment, p. 61. 71 See, in general, Jacques Semelin, Purifier et détruire. Usages politiques des massacres et génocides (Paris: Seuil, 2005). Specifically for the period, Luc Racault, Hatred in Print. Catholic Propaganda and Protestant Identity During the French Wars of Religion (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002); D. Crouzet, Les guerriers e Dieu. La violence au temps des troubles de religion (vers 1525–vers 1610) (Paris: Champ Vallon, 1990). 72 Mathilde Bernard, ‘ “Carnage affreux” et “cruauté execrable”: poétique du récit de massacre à la Renaissance’, Shakespeare en devenir, Les Cahiers de La Licorne, 5, ‘Rhétorique de la violence à la Renaissance’ (November 2011), http:// shakespeare.edel.univ-poitiers.fr/index.php?id=541. 73 ‘We have hitherto where we came against the rebels, their adherents, relievers and abettors, proceeded with fire and sword the soldiers not sparing the women and sometimes not the children … to revenge the blood of those British and Protestants that was innocently and without provocation spilled’. Ms. of the Duke of Ormond, Historical Mss Commission new series, ii (1903), p. 63, 1642, quoted by Lenihan, Confederate Catholics, p. 49.

Part III

Institutions

9

Theatrical torture versus dramatic cruelty: subjection through representation or praxis1 Frans-Willem Korsten

In the context of the abundant distribution of representations of violence in the seventeenth century, there is one curious ‘dark spot’: representations of maritime forms of punishment in the Dutch Republic are extremely hard to find. This is, indeed, curious in the light of the scale and importance of the maritime world, the frequency with which punishment was used in it, and the vast corpus in different media on violence and punishment. Instead of considering this as a historical accident, this chapter will read the absence of representations of maritime punishment as meaningful in relation to a distinction between the violentiae theatrum, on the one hand, and a dramatic application of violence, on the other. The pain inflicted on the crew of ships in the seventeenth century was not shown to a large, public audience, in a theatrical sense. Its point was more that it be done, dramatically, in the enclosed space of a ship community. Although the case may seem particular, it has more general implications for a distinction between various modes of societal subjection that follow a different generic logic (theatrical – dramatic) and that are in turn related to what can be called a logic of torture and a logic of cruelty. The pivot of the argument here is a close reading of a painting by Lieve Verschuier, which will be read as depicting theatrically a peculiar case of keelhauling while offering, simultaneously, a dramatic reference to the lynching of the brothers De Witt in 1672 (Figure 9.1). Reading the two together demands an alternation between a theatrical display that in its representative repetition follows a logic of torture and a dramatic confrontation that in its instantaneity and practicality follows a logic of cruelty. In this context one caveat is called for. The concept of cruelty is dealt with intensely in a study by John R. Yamamoto-Wilson, entitled Pain,Pleasure and Perversity.2 Yamamoto-Wilson’s treatment of the issue draws upon Daniel Baraz’s detection of a shift between the medieval and early modern senses of cruelty, which for Baraz is ‘the shift away from the medieval ethical system that emphasized intentions to one that focused on actions’. This is to say it

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9.1  Lieve Verschuier, The Keelhauling of the Ship’s Doctor of Admiral Jan van Nes, between 1660 and 1686

came to matter less why people had acted cruelly, whereas it came to matter more how, and to what extent, they had acted cruelly.3 Yet, as YamamotoWilson rightly argues, the sixteenth century is again different in this regard from the seventeenth. Suffering was defined in terms of its punitive or redemptive potential within the frame of causality or motivation. It always had to make sense. In contrast, cruelty was a perversion of justice or of human nature itself. Still, however distinct cruelty was from suffering, the former could be seen only in light of the latter.4 Cruelty should always be seen, that is, within some sort of theological or moralistic frame. In contrast with this view the term ‘cruelty’ can be employed in a different, positive sense, as distinct from perversion, and in opposition to the notion of torture. In this respect practices of punishment in maritime law can hardly be defined as merely ‘harsh’. They were cruel. One of the simplest and relatively more frequent forms of punishment, for instance, was to pierce a man’s hand by a knife and pin it to the mast. The person punished was the only one who could draw it out. This was certainly cruel (although the knife was small and did not pierce the hand through the bones). Yet the punishment would have become torture only if the person were to be pinned to the mast again after having freed himself. Having drawn himself free, his punishment was complete. Gilles Deleuze, defining cruelty, distinguished between torture and cruelty by linking the former to a culturally and legally framed system of guilt and the latter to an ecological system of combat. In following



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Deleuze’s cue, the argument in this chapter is historically anchored, and it connects not only to the practical way in which order on ships had to be maintained but also to the praxis of seventeenth-century state formation and the role of subjects and subjection in that formation. The different forms of punishment at stake, whether in a theatrical or a dramatic scene, imply modes of subjection that relate to pivotal debates in the seventeenth century that were deeply coloured theologically as can be witnessed in what Leibniz, in his response to Descartes and Bayle, coined as ‘theodicy’. It concerned the question of God’s justice in his use of evil. Since Descartes initiated the debate on the vexing issue of evil in a universe ruled by a perfect Being, one central issue in the debate had become ‘reasonability’.5 Since the perfect Being equated with reason since Aquinas, the key question was not so much whether a sovereign God could use evil at will, but whether such use could be understandable or, indeed, reasonable. This in turn was essential when sovereigns or states wanted to base themselves, or their system of justice, in whatever kind of way, on this supreme Being. Here the debate on theodicy connected to debates on the reasonability of state organisation and the execution of justice. One pivot that connected both debates was necessary ‘evil’ in the shape of inflicted pain; pain that was consciously, instrumentally inflicted on subjects by state authorities. For instance, in the years after the Synod of Dordt, in 1618, torture was still used in the Dutch Republic to make people confess crimes, but also in the context of religious strife to punish people for what they believed in, as happened, for instance, to a number of Arminians. Since Arminians were considered at some point to be evil in a theological sense, the fact that they were tortured could be read in the context of theodicy, as if torture were the equivalent of God’s using evil in order to punish sinners. In the sense that they were considered to be a threat to the state, however, the torture of heretics or apostates or atheists should be read in the context of the state’s legitimate use of torture. In both cases the question was whether the logic of torture could be accepted per se, or whether it would somehow have to be reasonable. Could it be ‘civilised’ or ‘moderated’, as for instance Daniel Jonctys wanted it, or should it be rejected entirely and by principle, as Johannes Grevius suggested? The analysis of torture here is indebted to two studies that were published on this issue in the same year (1986) but that differ in discipline, aim and scope: Edward Peters’ historical study on torture, simply entitled Torture, and Elaine Scarry’s conceptual study on torture entitled The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World.6 The latter argued, in a distinct sense trans-historically, that there is a principal split between the world of the torturer and the world of the one tortured. In contrast, the first, briefly put, argued that torture is aimed at reuniting the two in one world. In this Peters was following a specific historical trajectory, from Roman law to seventeenth-century practices of torture. The analysis of the issue in this

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chapter proposes a historical pivot that connects the two. Whereas in the Middle Ages torture was aimed at bringing torturer and tortured together in one world, the split between state and God that started to materialise in the seventeenth century also implied a radical separation of torturer and tortured. This separation led, on the one hand, to forms of torture that were aimed at the un-making of a world. On the other hand, the separation facilitated, in practice, a logic of cruelty that was aimed at the unavoidably painful, political choice between two (or perhaps more) incompatible worlds. One world: Job, Christian subjection and the logic of torture The issue of the legitimacy and acceptability of torture was a distinctly uneasy one in the context of the history of Christianity and its institutionalisation. The resulting embarrassment could not be expressed explicitly. It could and can be traced, though, in what happened to the biblical figure of Job, or more specifically, in his moving from a socio-cultural centre to a less dominant or even tangential position in the socio-cultural domain. The biblical figure of Job was one of the most important socio-cultural heroes in the Middle Ages, at times even the biggest hero, but after big flares of attention in the sixteenth century, his dominance and importance diminished in the course of the seventeenth. Compared to his shining presence in the Middle Ages and sixteenth century, Job grew nigh invisible towards the eighteenth century and would resurface only in the context of symbolism, for instance in the powerful work of William Blake in the early nineteenth century, to then become an icon, ironically, of the vexed artist.7 Job would resurface yet again in Western twentieth-century literature and philosophy in the context of, not surprisingly, the reconsideration of philosophy’s relation to theology, and vice versa. For now, however, the question is: Why did Job ‘fade out’ in the course of the late seventeenth century? One of the most paradigmatic figures of suffering in the Middle Ages, Job, in the sixteenth century, became as well a paradigm of justice. In turn, he grew more and more problematic in the seventeenth century. As the ideological paradigm of a body in pain, Job embodied a distinctly Christian mode of subjection: an acceptance of suffering, even when going through torture, in light of God’s ultimate justice. In this context it is telling that while Job was less and less at the centre of public or artistic consideration in the seventeenth century, the dual figure of Abraham and Isaac became more and more popular. The moment of the arrest of Isaac’s sacrifice became a particularly favourite subject of artistic treatment throughout Europe, including in the Republic. In contrast with Job’s story, the story of Abraham and Isaac begged the question whether one would have to subject oneself, to whom, for what reason and what would be just about it. It provoked a discussion, at least, on why God would first order Abraham to sacrifice his favourite child and then stop him from completing the act.



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Whereas Job is one of the most hotly debated characters, particularly in the Christian tradition, the story of Abraham and Isaac belongs to the most hotly debated incidents, particularly in the Jewish tradition. Certainly, the case of Job (a Gentile to most Jewish commentators) is also discussed in the Jewish tradition, notably so by Maimonides in the third book of his twelthcentury Guide for the Perplexed, in which the issue of theodicy has already become pivotal. In Christianity, in contrast, Job was often seen as a prefiguration of Christ, and by implication the New Testament. Consequently, Job is taken up in the course of the Middle Ages and the early modern period by the most important religious and humanist thinkers: from Jerome to Gregory the Great’s massive Moralia in Iob at the end of the sixth century, then from Aquinas to Luther, Calvin and Beza, and, as for the humanists, by Coornhert, for instance. Calvin, for one, gave no fewer than 159 sermons on Job in the years 1554–55.8 All in all Job throughout remained an icon of stoic fortitude, patience and humility, the exempla patientiae, an icon of purification through suffering, or in the Reformation the paradigmatic human figure of God’s incomprehensibility and sovereign power. One could call him the paradigm of Christian subjection, in subjecting himself to the one and only world that is possible: a world ruled by God. When Job is taken up in the sixteenth century in the contrasting works of Coornhert and Calvin or De Bèze, the complexity of his case does not find a simple meeting point in the element of patience, or more specifically, in the ability to suffer without complaint (in Dutch: ‘lijdzaamheid’). Let’s consider the radical divergence in Coornhert’s and Calvin’s dealings with Job: the first sees him as the hero of the story and the latter as the object of another subject in that he is first and foremost proof of God’s sovereign goodness. Yet the connecting theme is subjection, either because one chooses to accept one’s subjection or because this is the only thing to do when one’s fate depends on an unknowable, omnipotent, sovereign and, depending on the case, merciful God.9 In the seventeenth century the issues embodied by Job do not disappear but are no longer debated. Instead they are reiterated as a commonplace, as in Vondel’s phrase: ‘Are you beset by misery and disaster, be patient like Job’.10 Or, when in 1620 a picture book on the heroes of the Old Testament with poems by Vondel is published, Job is used as a warning to those who commit the sin of complaining about God’s sovereign actions. That said, Vondel would not want to miss the opportunity to sketch Job’s hurt body in detail. No longer is the latter clothed in purple silk, so the text states, but instead he is covered: … with a cloak rich in scabs of sores Embroidered with pimples, crowned with a hat Of scabies, whose headscarf is nothing but puss and filthy blood. A pot shred will serve him as staff and scepter With which he opens up the sores, licked

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With his consent by his household dog, that, looking for profit, Longs for the delicacies in Job’s covered skin.11

Thus, we get a clear picture of his misery. Reassuringly, consequently, we will learn that Job will not truly suffer, or his body will not be in pain really, because of his unwavering trust in God. In general, the message of this story to the audience is: We accept the evil from one who blessed us in the good Naked we came into the light, naked we fare in the dust Who lent it to us, took His, the Lord be thanked and praised.12

This all fits in nicely, so it seems, with commonplace sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ideas. Yet the passage obviously fails to mention the big problem of theodicy. God gave us the good, to be sure, but did he not also give us evil? Moreover, he gave evil to himself, for in the story of Job God appears to respond to the tantalising whisperings of the devil. As is so often the case with Vondel, there are disturbing elements in the text that hint at this problem. First of all there is the motto in which Job speaks and tells us (the text is taken from Job 6:2–3): ‘If one could weigh my complaints, and would put all my suffering taken together in a scale, it would be heavier than the sand at the sea.’13 This brings us back to the original character of Job, who does complain and who is suffering beyond reasonable measure. The image of the scale unquestionably alludes to the element of justice, as something that is in balance or that should be corrected and balanced. Moreover, when Job is called ‘martyr’ in line 25, the question is, of course, whether he is causing pain to himself or whether he is pained by an unjust power. And there is another word that points to the issue of theodicy, in line 30, where a rack is mentioned. The line is part of a couple of verses that are so vexingly complex that they deserve quoting (vv. 29–32): His friends and family resolutely seated next to him also to comfort, A rack provided this man’s unwrinkled conscience, That, richly comforted in God by the practice of much good, Was welcomed by a joyous company of virtues: …14

The second line is awkward, for read in context or read on its own the subject of the verb changes. The first line suggests that the family and friends, despite the comfort they offer, are the subject in ‘providing’ (‘strecken’) Job’s conscience with a rack, with all their comments and remarks. Yet if line 30 is read on its own the subject of the verb is ‘rack’, and then ‘strecken’ is associatively linked to the ‘unwrinckled’, as if Job’s conscience were stretched by a rack (as in: ‘A rack stretched this man’s unwrinkled conscience’). All in all there is the poetic repetition of ‘comfort’ linking the comfort of the family with God’s, as a reward for the many good things that Job has done. Yet God, as we have seen a little earlier, is both the one who can give human beings the good and who has the sovereign power to take it back, operating



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like a rack to torture an innocent man. The complexity that encircles the word ‘rack’ is a telling sign: a sign of disturbance. As for torture, Job may be the first literary example we have of its principles. As Ariel Gluklich explains in Sacred Pain: Hurting the Body for the Sake of the Soul (2001), the torture performed by the inquisition was not a matter of arbitrary, extended or prolonged modes of hurting a victim. Torture had to follow strict procedural rules.15 There was a script, several scripts in fact, that defined what was to be done, when, how, and to what effect. This resonates with what God and the devil come up with when the devil suggests that Job believes only because he is not hurt. God and the devil then agree upon the fact that Job has to be vexed first by gradually taking away all that is dear to him. When this does not work, they scale up the intensity of torture and start to hurt Job’s body. In the context of the inquisition, so Glucklich states, the aim was not to make the victim, or in this case Job, say what the torturer wanted him to say. As long as the victims of the inquisition asked what they had to admit, the torturer would go on since the victim apparently had not discovered yet what was to be admitted. The one tortured had to reach the phase in which he realised what he had done wrong, the phase in which he wanted, willed, to admit what the torturer was looking for. This is what Peters defined as the torture and the tortured becoming part of one world and what Glucklich defined as a basic form of ‘dispositional guilt’. And indeed, Job is first indignant; he complains; he asks what he has to do to stop the unbearable suffering. But this is only in order to get to the phase in which his will is to embrace the torture and torturer, in order to believe that whatever God contrives is ‘just’, and that God, therefore or by implication, is just. The point, evidently, is that he is not to be made subject: he has to embrace his subjection in declaring himself forever guilty, as a human being. The example of Job may serve to illustrate the point made by Deleuze that in the Christian tradition guilt and torture are two sides of the same coin. There were more and more voices, in the course of the sixteenth and especially the seventeenth century, that found this coincidence questionable. Torture and its questionable logic One of the first explicit treatises against torture was written or conceived in the Amsterdam prison by Johannes Grevius, who was convicted because of his Remonstrant radicalism in 1620 and was treated harshly when entering lifelong imprisonment. He escaped from jail, however, in 1621, and fled to Germany, where his Latin text, Tribunal reformatum, was published in Hamburg in 1624 (two years after Grevius’s death). In it Grevius principally argued against torture.16 His treatise was translated into Dutch, in 1651, by the Rotterdam-based doctor Daniel Jonctys as De pyn-bank wedersproken en bematigt (Argument against the rack and in favour of its temperate usage)

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and was later praised by Bayle. These texts and responses are testimony to the growing seventeenth-century sentiment that patiently bearing with seemingly unjust treatment at the hands of some sort of sovereign power was unacceptable. It is as John R. Yamamoto-Wilson notes: ‘During the last two decades of the seventeenth century it became almost a commonplace to reject the Stoic attitude towards pain, while at the same time discussion of pain and suffering intensified, becoming more varied, more profound, and more prolific than during the first eight decades of the century put together.’17 In my reading, it is no coincidence that Job’s disappearance from the centre happened at a time when a more justifiable and reasonable alternative to torture appeared, especially in the Republic, thanks to, amongst other developments, the pioneering role of the Amsterdam prison system. According to law historian John Langbein, the battle against torture was not so much won by the passionate pleas for its abolishment but through crucial changes in the operation of the juridical system, one of them being the possibility of punishing people differently, for instance by imprisonment in the newly developed prisons.18 In the context of state formation some central questions were why or when, or on what condition one would have to subject oneself and to what kind of power; whether these powers could act arbitrarily; or what were the possible and reasonable modes of correction, not just of the ones subjected but also of authorities. In this context, the discussion on pain and suffering intensified. All the opponents of torture had a major battle to wage since torture had been institutionalised with the centralised codification of law throughout Europe due to the fusion of previously existing forms of law with Roman law, a process that was fuelled in first instance by the Roman Catholic Church.19 Consequently, in the Christian frame of mind the protest against torture had to lead to principal problems. Christianity was itself the spiritual heir to what it first had opposed: imperial Rome. The revival of Roman law from the twelth century onwards had strengthened the political strand in this heritage when the Pope had declared himself to be the political inheritor of imperial power. As for torture, it was part and parcel of Roman law, and then re-institutionalised in the course of the Middle Ages and the early modern period by means of Roman law with the aim of subjecting people to centralised power. In this context, it is important to avoid what Edward Peters called ‘the myth of the inquisition’ and to remember that the inquisition did not introduce the horrors of torture.20 On the contrary, it was an attempt to regulate torture, to avoid illegal forms of torture on all levels of society and to bind torture by means of procedure. When Grevius argued that to Christians torture was untenable for whatever reason, he was clearly appealing to a universal form of Christianity that was not the direct heir to imperial Rome or to one that was not institutionalised politically. Moreover, as may be clear as well, and perhaps more



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principally, he had to avoid mentioning Job in order to avoid the nasty issue of why God would want to vex his subjects. With torture, a Roman lawgrounded politics and jurisdiction based on the master of a dominium fused effortlessly with the Christian institutional politics and jurisdiction of the Catholic Church based on the master/father of a house that ruled as if it were an imperial power.21 The issue of theodicy, as a consequence, was not an abstract one or a strictly moral or even theological one. It was related to the way justice was dealt with in society. Especially in the context of the religious strife that characterised the sixteenth century, the inquisition, and by implication torture, had become a central point of concern, and a great topic for propaganda. Ironically, within a relatively short time, the Protestant parties who had depicted themselves first as the innocent victims of an unjust system found themselves on the other side, with the case of Michael Servetus in 1553 as a turning point.22 And in the Dutch Republic, after the Synod of Dordt, in 1618, Counter-Remonstrants were all too eager to use torture in their purification of the state, at a time when central authority was lacking, and torture, almost by implication, was less regulated. In effect, for some time, torture was given almost free rein as the 1627 case of painter and freethinker Johannes Torrentius illustrates. He was tortured abysmally on the basis of fabricated allegations produced by the vicars Henricus Geesteranus and Dyonisius Spranckhuysen.23 The issue need not surprise us since, within the frame of Christianity, torture followed a logic that had been made familiar through such stories as that of Job. It was a logic, moreover, that was intrinsically linked to the establishment of the Church, be it Catholic or Protestant, as the safeguard of societal order and as the dominant vehicle of subjection. Within this order the logic of torture functioned both dramatically and theatrically but with a crucial split. In its being enacted in isolated spaces that were not visible to a general audience, torture was clearly dramatic. The distinction between audience and actors was almost non-existent. All the actors in play were taken up in the action. Yet this dramatic and in a way un-representable situation was in the end framed theatrically since the entire scene was aimed at being brought into the light on a representational stage. What had happened needed to be brought forward and to be shown through representation in order to serve the aim of general subjection. In this context it is telling that Job had to be humiliated publicly, that what happened to him had to be seen, not in the confines and privacy of his house, but out on the street, showing his pain and suffering. Job’s case helps us to see how the logic of torture relates, generically, to theatre. What would be an alternative? The answer to that question depended on the distinction between two types of ‘father’, one of which would not be against violence; on the contrary, he would have to use it, but in using it he would be following a different logic, namely one of Deleuzian cruelty.

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Theatrical torture versus dramatic cruelty Different forms of fatherly authority

In contrast with Job’s gradual disappearance, we witness a growing popularity of the theme of Abraham and Isaac in the seventeenth century, of a father being ordered to kill his son, by God, and being stopped at the very moment of his action. The story of Abraham and Isaac can be seen to work through an entanglement of two modes of political rule and subjection, one of which was defined so clearly by Foucault, namely, the one in which a sovereign power has to be obeyed as a master/father at all times and whatever the consequences. The other one, in which a ruler is asked as a father-like but now caring authority to respect his subjects and to set out on a proper course, was already the primary point of concern for medieval political theorists and their heirs in the sixteenth century. In this context it is telling that the entire story of Abraham and Isaac hinges upon their travelling, following a course that can be interrupted dramatically at any given moment. In fact the story depends on two ‘what-ifs’. The first question that is provoked by the story is: What if Abraham had not obeyed God’s order to sacrifice his most beloved son? The second ‘what-if’ that forms the story’s pivot is: What if the angel had not stopped Abraham? Would the latter, as a father, have killed his child nevertheless? Both questions do not so much concern Abraham’s status as the sovereign master of a household but his status as a father-figure who has to care for the ones entrusted to him and who should be able, in that context, to correct his course. The two ‘what-ifs’ are condensed in an etching by Rembrandt from1636 entitled ‘Father Abraham playing with his son’, which is, as Peter van der Coelen mentioned, the title of the etching in the 1679 inventory of printseller Clement de Jonghe’s estate (Figure 9.2). Joseph M. Jordan, nevertheless, reinterpreted the etching as ‘Jacob caressing Benjamin’, and he supports this contention in saying that ‘… the same group of figures occur in a drawing, now kept in the Albertina. This drawing clearly depicts Jacob holding Benjamin lovingly as he listens to Joseph describing his dream.’ The drawing concerned is ‘Joseph tells his dreams to Jacob’, dated 1642.24 I see no reason to change the title given to an etching in a catalogue, no more than ten years after Rembrandt’s death, merely because of the resemblance with another work that was made six years later.25 Besides, the theme of Abraham’s (not-) sacrificing Isaac was one of the more intensely studied by Rembrandt, in etchings, sketches and paintings, and this one is a gem because it shows the story’s ambiguities and implications in so charged a manner. The title of the etching, ‘Father Abraham playing with his son’, is remarkable first of all for the explicit ‘Father’. To an audience that was thoroughly familiar with the story this is almost an absurd ‘extra’. Unless, of course, the very fatherly-ness of Abraham is at stake in this etching. Then, instead of really playing with his son, Abraham is more concerned with intensely



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9.2  Rembrandt, ‘Abraham caresses Isaac’ (‘Jacob caresses Benjamin’), 1635–39

addressing the viewer as a father. Yet that very address brings in the other meaning of ‘play’, as when Abraham is not playing with Isaac but with the latter’s life. Consequently, he is intensely asking other subjects what they think of him and his possible act. In relation to this issue, the most fascinating detail of this etching, especially in the context of the themes of torture

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and cruelty, is the forefinger of Abraham’s hand under Isaac’s chin, or perhaps better, at his throat. The movement of both caressing and cutting is suggested strongly by the position of what is a button but also looks like a loose finger, as what Žižek would call an ‘organ without body’.26 Due to the position of the loose finger, the hand is not tranquil, in a position of caressing, but rather resembles the hand of someone holding a knife, suggesting a cutting movement to the left. The caressing hand in the narrative’s present is at the same time the hand cutting the throat in a narrative prolepsis, then. Read in this way the father figure of Abraham comes to embody a duality that had become decisive for state authorities as well, in their responsibility to care for their subjects but also to take lives when necessary. Yet, obviously, this is precisely the question central to the Abraham–Isaac story, where the question of necessity is perverted. In this context, in this etching, Abraham is shown here not so much theatrically but dramatically, drawing the viewer actively into an action that is as yet only an act of pondering. As the authoritative father figure, his course is not predetermined and set, but instead a matter of dramatic confrontation that invites the audience to take part in the consideration of what would be the proper thing to do. This suggests a kind of authority other than the one of the master of the house who is allowed to torture his subjects at will. By implication it involves another mode of subjection. Or perhaps better, the story plays out the very distinction at stake: God asking Abraham to sacrifice his son for no necessary reason follows much the same logic of torture that was in play in Job’s story. He is a master-figure. Abraham, in obeying and setting out to kill his son, even against his will, is being tortured but is not a torturer. He would have acted cruelly in killing his son, certainly, not as master, however, but as a serving father. The comparison of the state with a house or household, and by consequence the comparison of the ruler of the state with a master/father, was one powerful metaphor that has determined debates and thoughts on state justice since antiquity. Robert Filmer would be a paradigmatic case in point, who in Patriarcha (written around 1630 but published only in 1680) had argued that under the rule of a father-king, subjects have no option other than to subject themselves obediently.27 In the Republic another metaphor became more and more important in the course of the seventeenth century, however, one that brought forward a comparison between the state and a ship, a metaphor introduced by Plato in Book VI of the Republic. The ruler of the state would thus be compared to a captain, one who would be in the service of yet another power, which would not just be a sovereign God. In Printed Pandemonium: Popular Print and Politics in the Netherlands 1650–1672, Michel Reinders explains the connotations of the ship of state in the Dutch context in light of the tension between absolute authority, on



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the one hand, in terms of the master, that is, and, on the other hand, rule by means of interdependence, which could well accord with a metaphorical father-captain. Those supporting the latter option would of course give a distinct meaning to the metaphor of ‘the ship of state’. In this metaphorical ship: Regents steered the ship and set the course, but the citizens were the passengers, and whatever the regents did affected the entire ship. If the course was good, the passengers obeyed without a problem, but if the captains steered the vessel towards disaster, the passengers would not sit and wait. If a ship was in danger, the lieutenants and the common sailors were entitled to change course and correct the captain. Apparently … citizens had little trouble understanding the impending doom for which their ship of state was heading in 1672.28

On the face of it the metaphor all sounds nicely reasonable, just as it did with Plato and his enlightened captain of the ship. Yet it is not a matter of detail, obviously, how a captain should be ‘corrected’ by his crew when he believed himself to be on the right course, or for that matter how the captain was allowed to correct his crew and passengers when he believed them to be wrong. The element of correction may be of help here to make a bit sharper the distinction between the two modes of subjection in play. One cannot say, for instance, that Job is being corrected. In the Christian tradition at least, he was never wrong in the first place. Or he is so only in his protest against God (as a result of which he was also considered by some in the context of anti-theodicy). In his case the issue was one of subjection simple, through torture. The experiment that had started with the Amsterdam prison or rasp house, however, aimed at avoiding torture as mode of subjection by implanting correction as subjection. Tellingly the rasp house was led by a ‘father’, who was superior to a ‘master of discipline’.29 Equally telling is the fact that one of the greatest admirals of the seventeenth century, Michiel de Ruyter, was lovingly called ‘bestevaer’ or grandfather. He was not the master of a house, then, but apparently supposed to take care and rule as a father. Such a figure could surely not be a torturer. Whereas the master-father of a household was the evident power to be obeyed, the father-captain of a ship had to be a figure that was obeyed on the basis of his authority, that is, when he was adequately in charge. Moreover, he was not allowed to torture anyone. The implications of the metaphor ‘the ship of state’ were considerable, therefore, in the context of how states dealt with justice. This brings us back to the question posed at the beginning of the chapter. Dutch historian and leading expert on the maritime world of the Dutch Republic, Roland Prud’homme van Reine, noted that ‘From the 17th century itself we have only a very small number of representations of the execution of maritime punishment.’30 Why was it not represented? Why was it not on theatrical display?

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As said, in a society in which the maritime world was part of everyday life it is surely strange that, while print and visual media were abundantly present and the general audience was fascinated by bodies in pain, a fairly obvious domain of social life in which bodies were being hurt was not ‘in the picture’. There are enough reproductions, for instance, that depict how people were punished in the so-called rasp houses. One obvious reason for the relative absence of representations of maritime punishment could be that companies like the East Indian Company (VOC) and the West Indian Company (WIC) were eager not to make it even more unattractive to work on ships. Yet it is precisely the comparison with the rasp house that is informative. Perhaps the punishment on ships was not aimed simply at subjection for political or societal reasons but aimed at survival. In the context of survival, the powerful metaphor of the state as a ship gets a distinct connotation, especially in situations when the ship of state is in danger or when the state cannot even be considered, metaphorically speaking, to be a fully materialised ‘ship’. The metaphor of the ship of state is in play in a painting by Lieve Verschuier from around 1678 that had the following title in a catalogue from 1801: ‘The execution of the surgeon on the ship of J. van Nes, who had given poison to the Admiral, on the river Meuse near Rotterdam’ (‘De executie van den chirurgijn op ‘t schip van J.van Nes, over ‘t ingeeven van vergif aan zijn Admiraal op de Maas voor Rotterdam’, catalogue Roos, 1801). The mentioned Jan Jansse van Nes was the brother of Lieutenant-admiral Aert Jansse van Nes, both from Rotterdam. Jan van Nes had been a vice-admiral of the United Provinces from 1673 onwards. His flagship had been the Virgin of Dordrecht. Because the painting is so peculiar as a rare example of maritime punishment, it has been studied extensively by Prud’homme van Reine. I would like to follow his convincing analysis and then expand on it.31 The catalogue’s title was explained in the nineteenth century with the story that the surgeon was not really put to death but simply punished by keel hauling because Admiral Van Nes had forgiven him. Prud’homme van Reine drily remarks that this seems highly unlikely since nothing is known about this event from any kind of source, whereas it would have been a major offence in the maritime world.32 It was a world, moreover, in which anything that occurred on ships that was of relevance or importance was documented. Furthermore, there are several aspects to the work that do not fit the title given to it. First of all, the ship at the centre of the spectacle, with the man hanging and waiting to be thrown into the water, is too small to be an admiral’s ship. It carries only twenty cannons instead of the average sixty. Then, its stern or spiegel (poop) carries a fictional emblem, with two orange lions, which would be odd were it really the admiral’s ship of Van



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Nes. Then there is the ship to the left, which is a type of ship that was used by the States General or one of the Provinces, a so-called Statenjacht, literally a ‘ship of state’. It is lying here next to a metaphorical ship of state, one that is literally a warship. As for the two ships of state, the literal and the figural one, it is telling that the painting shows an abundant use of the colour orange. All the elements in the painting that do not simply fit but appear to cohere under the colour ‘orange’ bring Prud’homme van Reine to the question of who might have ordered the piece. It would have been a supporter of the House of Orange, perhaps also someone responsible for applying justice on ships, such as a so-called ‘advocaat-fiscaal’. It would also have to have been someone wealthy since this was a large and expensive painting. And it would have to be someone involved in issues of the ‘ship of state’. The very ship of state had been ruled in previous years, from 1651 to 1672, by the regents of the states, with the leaders of the states-oriented party being the two brothers De Witt, Johan and Cornelis. What has been defined later as the ‘First stadholderless era’ was called at the time the period of ‘true freedom’ (‘Ware vrijheid’) by the dominant political figure of his time, Johan de Witt, Grand Pensionary of the States of Holland. It was defined as such not because people were free in the modern sense of the word but because the regents were free from any other dominating power, such as the stadholder’s. This, of course, did not mean that the stadholder had simply disappeared. When Johan de Witt and his companions had de facto abolished the hereditary function of stadholder and De Witt had to defend this position in the States General in 1654, he was much helped by the fact that the son of the deceased stadholder William II was only four years old.33 By 1666 the young William III had become a political player of importance, however, one who had considerable, popular and elite support. In contrast, Johan de Witt had lost much popularity. In this context and adding everything up, Prud’homme van Reine suggests that the man commissioning the Verschuier-painting could only have been Johan Kievit, who had fled to England in 1666 because of the so-called Buatcomplot against Johan de Witt, in which Kievit had taken part. In England, he had become a favourite of Charles II, who made him baronet. In 1672 he returned gloriously on a Statenjacht, welcomed by a large Rotterdam crowd. A little later he and his brother-in-law, Admiral Cornelis Tromp, would witness in The Hague the very thing that they probably had helped organise: the lynching of the brothers De Witt followed by the public dissection of their bodies. Prud’homme van Reine suggests that the morally flexible Kievit used his new position, after the removal of the brothers and the return to power of William III, to enrich himself. The painting could have been ordered to decorate the fancy mansion that he had built in 1678. The painting thus involves condensing the glorious return of Kievit on a Statenjacht, the administration of maritime law and the lynching of the

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brothers De Witt as the improper captains of the ship of state into a single spectacle. The painting is theatrical, as a consequence. It is so formally, in the sense that it re-stages something, namely a glorious return, and it is theatrical in content, showing a hanging or a lynching with an audience surrounding the ‘stage’. Accordingly, the painting fits a more general picture of a society that, institutionally speaking, was organised theatrically. This is to say that here we have clear distinction between the audience and the actors, or between viewers and that what was being shown. There was a stage that was at the basis of the actor–audience split and a clear frame that functioned to put things into perspective. In a sense the audience was being subjected, here, on the level of representation to what was essentially visual display. On the other hand, the painting’s theme is also an application of punishment on a ship, something that in general should be understood dramatically. That is to say that the audience was as much an actor taking part in the action. There was a podium that marked off a specific space as distinct from its everyday usage: a normal mast had become a place of punishment. Instead of the scene being defined by a theatrical frame one had better speak of a different level of dramatic intensity, here. All the actors involved would not so much be subjected on the level of representation but in practice, on the level of performativity, of enactment. In this light, on the level of the diegesis, the painting would work differently. It would bring us back to a dramatic moment, which in this case would either be the dramatic moment of someone being hanged on a ship or the dramatic moment of the brothers De Witt being lynched. To that order, however, the theatrical frame of the painting, the frame of representation, would have to be ruptured. And such a rupturing element is there, not mentioned by Prud’homme van Reine, and easy to miss, but once noticed more than simply ‘disturbing’. There are nineteen flags depicted, predominantly the national tricolour, and there is one pennant, also the national tricolour, flying centre stage. Directly underneath it the convicted man is hanging. The peculiar thing, now, is that all eleven flags to the left are pointing towards the left, as if the wind were coming from the right, whereas all eight flags to the right of the pennant and the hanging man are pointing to the right, as if the wind were coming from the left. Any painter even tangentially familiar with circumstances on Dutch waters would recognise that such a situation would be impossible in reality. Of course, winds can be turbulent, but then all flags should have been pointing in several directions. As it is now, it is as if the wind were blowing from the centre of the painting, a centre that consists in the white sky behind, the flying pennant above, and the lonely figure of the convicted, hanging man. The artificiality of this ‘wind’ from the centre is distinct, but not theatrical. It concerns something that is in effect not representable since the thing to be represented does not exist. Representing it nevertheless, the



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painting produces, dramatically, something new, thus capturing the true nature of a dramatic moment in that something unpredictable is being actualised. Taking this dramatic centre as our point of departure, the painting works differently, in its reference to the – for some traumatic and to others joyous – political event of the lynching of the brothers De Witt: an event in which people were not watching a framed ‘play’ but were taking things to another level in becoming actors in the very thing they enacted. Theatrically speaking, in terms of public visibility, the hanging figure in the painting would be a criminal who was convicted according to maritime law and whose punishment was turned into a collective spectacle. Dramatically speaking, the hanging man is an icon for the mutilated bodies of the brothers who were torn apart and left behind in the centre of The Hague, not as the focal point of a spectacle but as silent witnesses to a dramatic event. In fact, if we compare the body of the one hanging here, in solitude, with the painting by Jan de Baen of the naked and torn bodies of the De Witts, the bodies ‘rhyme’: they are visually similar. Considered in this way, the painting works with both the theatrical logic of torture and the dramatic logic of cruelty. As a re-presentation the painting is a remarkable celebration ordered by a conspirator who keeps boasting, with hindsight, about the success of his attempts to murder the political leaders of the country. In its very theatrical repetition the painting follows a logic of torture, as if the same thing has to be done again and again in order to destroy or unmake, as Elaine Scarry argued, a world, namely the political, republican world of the De Witts. Such torture is a distinct farewell to the torture dealt with by Edward Peters, as when torture was meant to make the world of the torturer and the tortured fuse. No such fusion is possible or called for, politically speaking. The painting serves as the repetition of an imprint of a destroyed world that needs to be destroyed time and again in order to subject. At the same time there is the un-hinging element of the flags that destroy the repetitive frame because they are being flown from a centre that defies representation. What happened to the brothers De Witt is being defined through it dramatically, as the un-representable moment in which politics was changed and a state redefined. Read as such, it would be a cruel picture, certainly, but not more cruel, one could argue, than the handling of justice on ships. It would relate neither to the fusion between two worlds nor to the making or unmaking of ‘the’ world. In fact it would relate to the political issue of the coexistence of, and the necessary choice between, different worlds.34 Combat and the dramatic logic of cruelty If Verschuier’s painting had to be considered within the frame of one world, it could have been an example of what was called at the time a laetum

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spectaculum, a pleasant spectacle, that made those who were saved enjoy what happened to the damned. The phrase of the pleasant spectacle was derived from Aquinas’s answer to Quaestio 94 of the supplement of the third part of the Summa Theologica. There, Aquinas argued that the blessed had every reason to rejoice in God’s will according to which the damned should eternally suffer.35 Yet if Kievit was the one ordering the painting, he was surely happy that the brothers De Witt had been eliminated, but not in the context of the one world in which the saved should be separated from the damned. At stake was combat, a political confrontation with winners and losers. In that context the painting could be read as a specimen of the violentiae theatrum: it showed in a theatrical way a public execution and as such repeated it. At the same time the painting brought us to an unrepresentable, dramatic moment. Such a moment would not and could not follow the logic of torture. It would have to follow the logic of cruelty in the sense described in the introduction. In his study into the origin of evil, from 1710, officially entitled Essais de Théodicée sur la bonté de dieu, la liberte de l’homme et l’origine du mal, Leibniz would make the famous distinction between mental, physical and metaphysical evil. Since the first indicated sin, the second pain and suffering from natural causes, only the latter would have to make sense. Leibniz’s philosophical attempt was distinct, here, but in the end connected to the juridico-political attempts to assess man-made suffering as somehow justifiable. Yet there was much violence and suffering in the seventeenth century that simply escaped the theological-moralistic frame. The punishment executed on ships would be a good case in point. One would have to re-experience personally, perhaps, what it meant to enter a ship with around 300 persons, mostly unknown to one another, crammed in small, uncomfortable and filthy spaces, out on their own, isolated for about four to six months, going through violent storms and hot endless days without wind, suffering from thirst and hunger at times, to know how cruelty was not justified first and foremost by theological underpinnings, but was a matter of praxis. In the context of historical reality it is telling that the lengthy voyages were often compared to a stay in prison, as Aernout van Overbeke, who set out on a ship sailing to the Dutch East Indies, testifies. This is how he described his first impression of his lodgings: On the 13th I spent most of my time reflecting on worldly business, and gave the Cabine a thorough look, just as much as those friends who enter the Rasp house for the first time, seriously examine the place where they will be home for a long time.36

The comparison between ship and rasp house returns extensively in lines 435–41, where Overbeke mentions that he often heard the comparison between an East Indies voyage and the rasp house, and where he expresses



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with relief that he is at least the ‘Father’ of it, which refers to the function of the one ruling the Amsterdam rasp house, who was called ‘father’, and suggesting that those in control should be ‘father-like’ (as argued earlier). In general, according to the editors of Overbeke’s diary, Barend-Van Haeften and Gelderblom, serving as a sailor on a VOC ship was considered to be a shameful occupation, as a result of which lots of foreign sailors were recruited or bought. They were kept under control by means of a strict judicial system that responded with cruelty to criminal offences. These were forms of cruelty in punishment that were not perverse, though, in the sense of acting against human nature, and they were far from being forms of torture. Considered in terms of everyday reality and practice, the logic followed on ships was not one of theological guilt but much more one of a Deleuzian combat. And the same held for the way in which the brothers De Witt were killed. The collective response to the murder of the brothers De Witt was historically framed by a public debate, the so-called ‘Wittenoorlog’, or ‘War of the Witts’ almost a century later, in 1757. The debate between republicans and Orangists found an anchor point in Joachim Oudaen’s famous Brothermurder in the Hague or Mad Joy; a tragedy (Haagsche broeder-moord of dolle blydschap; treurspel) from 1673. Oudaen himself had been in The Hague on the day of the murder, and in the play, based on the report of another eye witness, the murder and public dissection and display of the bodies are described in detail, in the last act, for the eyes of father and sister De Witt. The theatrical representation and ekphrasis proved to be rhetorically effective, in offering the repetition of a complaint, as a counterpoint to the Verschuier painting in which the lynching was re-enacted. In fact Oudaen’s theatrical reconsideration would come to dominate the historical representation of the case. This interpretation was not only influential in the War of the Witts, a century later, but has been dominant up to the present, as is expressed in a recent study by Prud’homme van Reine, who calls the event of the lynching ‘the blackest page’ in the Golden Age.37 Still, the very same study excellently shows how the murder of the brothers De Witt was a straightforward matter of state formation. Perhaps due to Oudaen’s theatrical frame, we appear to miss or downplay, as the previously mentioned study by Michel Reinders has made clear, many other responses that are far from concerned with the injustice of what happened. A good case in point would be Jan Zoet’s ‘d’Ydele vlugt vertoont in de schielikke dood van Kornelis en Jan de Wit’ (‘The vain escape shown in the quick death of Kornelis and Jan de Witt’).38 More generally, many considered what had happened to be just. It is not surprising, then, that William III was able to silence the matter. The murder was not investigated, and the suspects were not persecuted. William III advised the states to let the matter rest, and a general amnesty was the result. This outcome is understandable when we

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take seriously a tellingly analytical, anonymous street song that circulated alongside the gruesome tragedy of Oudaen. ‘De verhemelde geest’ (‘The ghost that went to heaven’) lauded Buat, who had been accused of high treason and had been executed under the brothers De Witt. The song of praise is followed by ‘Seven questions with regard to the two Witts’s death / executed to save the land from having its last breath’ (‘Seven vragen aengaende de twee Witten haer doodt / Geschiet om ‘t Landt te redden uyt sijn groote noot’). These questions may serve to show how the different forms of logic – the theatrical and the dramatic – could be operative at the same time: one involving theologically underpinned guilt and torture and the other practically, cruelly performed combat. This is how the questions unfold – and note that this is not an exact translation throughout, rather one that wants to capture the powerful dynamic of a densely rhyming song: 1. Why did a Musquet kill the brother de Witt? Because they had changed church liturgy by writ 2. Why were they tied up with pieces of fuse? Because of the eternal Edict that was their ruse 3. Why were they not tied up with rope, by chance? Because they wanted to murder the prince of Orange 4. Why their members dispersed to all sides without fuss? Because their way of ruling had been thus 5. Why were their hearts cut out of their bodies? To investigate their deep hypocrisies 6. Why were they put op high on a scaffold? To show everybody the justice of God 7. Why were they, by verdict not declared free? Killing Buat and Van de Graef by verdict was their idea.39

There are two different modes of addressing the issue in play here. Overall, the questions and answers are undeniably straightforward and realistic. Everything is mentioned for what it is. Yet the justification of the dramatic cruelty at stake differs from the theologically framed theatrical one that comes into play only with question 6. All the other questions and answers are not theatrical in nature. They concern the way in which the De Witts were killed, why they were tied up with one material and not the other, why their members had been scattered, how their bodies had been ‘given’ to the public: all practical matters. They were dealt with cruelly, so this text explains, but this was cruelty in response, neither perverse nor unjust. One could read this song as propaganda, of course. Still, there is something else at work as well. The political combat at stake was intrinsic to the Republic, between the stadholders of Orange and those who favoured the political dominance of the states. Both parties tried to frame and justify their position theatrically. That said, there was no escaping dramatic moments in which political choices determined the course of history and the realisation of different worlds. In this context Deleuze’s definition of cruelty is



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relevant, a notion he brought in to counter the idea that there could be justice without it. As James Williams explained it, Deleuze’s ‘counter-view is that difference as chaos is necessary and compels acts of determination to a necessary cruelty. His precise understanding of cruelty is, then, the generation of emotion and change as things are determined in relation to an indifferent background.’40 The Deleuzian point, here, is that any system of justice not based on God’s sovereign back-up, with its logic of torture, cannot be free of violence and pain. It needs to be based on the cruelty of combat. Such combat is distinctly different from the atrocities that took place throughout Europe in the fierce conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is also distinctly different from the pain inflicted upon martyrs, whether by others or themselves. It should be understood in light of the chaotic issue of state-building, and, consequently, in light of the form of justice realised by a state and in it, for even when in calm waters, a state is never beyond chaos. The original chaos is simply territorialised. Ideally, then, in the state’s territorialised domain there has to be a balance of terror, as lawyer Robert Cover once defined it: a balance between criminal acts of violence and the state’s. It could be a balance without a transcendent ground, one based on cruelty, but understandable, reasonable and justifiable nevertheless. Addendum 1 ‘Maer met een mantel rijck van rooven en van zeeren / En puysten geborduurt, gemytert met een hoed / Van schurft, wiens lamper is slechts etter, en vuyl bloed.  / De potscherf hem een staf en scepter wil verstrecken: / Waer mede hy open klouwt de zweeren, die hy lecken / Laet van zijns huyshonds tongh, die op haer voordeel uyt / Snackt na de leckerny van Hiobs bedragen huyt.’ Joost van den Vondel, De Helden Godes des Ouwden Verbonds/ Met kunstige beeldenissen vertoont, en poeetelijck verklaert, Voor Dirck Pietersz. Boeckverkooper op’t Water / inde witte Persse / recht over de Korenmerckt. ANNO 1620. Joost van den Vondel, WB 303 ev. This passage can be found at WB, p. 385, vv. 6–12. Addendum 2 ‘Wy dulden ‘t quaed van hem die zegende ons in ‘t goede: / Naeckt rezen wy in ‘t licht: naeckt varen wy in ‘t stof: / Die ‘t leende nam ons ‘t zijn: den Heer zy danck en lof.’ (WB, p. 385, vv. 26–8) Addendum 3 ‘Wanneermen myn jammer woege, en mijn lyden te zamen in een schale leyde, zoo zoude het zwaerder zijn dan het zand aen de zee.’

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‘Zijn maeghschap oock tot troost vast neffens hem gezeten, / Een pijnbanck streckte schier ‘s mans ongekreuckt geweten, / Dat rijck in God getroost door ‘t veel gepleeghde goed / Een blijde schare quam van deughden te gemoet:’ (WB, p. 385, vv. 29–32) Addendum 4 ‘Joseph telling his dreams to Jacob’, 1642; Vienna Albertina Addendum 5 ‘Den 13. lagh ick meest te speculeren over alle wereltlijcke saecken, en bekeeck de gantsche Kajuyt wel naeuw’ even eens als die vrienden die eerst in ‘t Rasphuys komen, de plaets wel …’ Aernout van Overbeke, Buyten gaets. Twee burleske reisbrieven van Aernout van Overbeke (ed. Marijke Barend-van Haeften & Arie Jan Gelderblom). Verloren, Hilversum 1998, l. 9–13. p. 41. Addendum 6 ‘1. Waerom zijn beyde de Witten gesnuevelt door ‘t Musquet, / Om datse verandert hebben het kercke gebedt, 2. Waerom wierdense met eynde van Lonte gebonden? / Om datse het eeuwigh Edict hebben uytgevonden. 3. Waerom sijnse niet gebonden met touwen? / Om datse de Prins van Orange vermoorden wouwen. 4. Waerom sijn haer Leden soo over al verdeelt? / Om datse over al soo het heerschap hebben gespeelt. 5. Waerom sijn haer de Herten uyt het Lijf gesneden? / Om ‘t ondersoecken haer diepe geveynsdigheden. 6. Waerom sijnse verhoogt op het Schavot? / Om yder te thoonen ‘t rechtveerdigh oordeel van Godt. 7. Waerom sijnse volgens Sententie met vry gegeven? / Om dat Buat en van de Graef by Sententie deê benemen ‘t leven.’ Notes 1 This article benefited greatly from comments by Helmer Helmers, Marrigje Paij­ mans, Marijn van Dijk and the editors. Responsibility for errors remains mine. 2 John R. Yamamoto-Wilson, Pain, Pleasure and Perversity: Discourses of Suffering in Seventeenth Century England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). 3 Daniel Baraz, Medieval Cruelty: Changing Perceptions, Late Antiquity to Early Modern Period (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 179; quoted in Yamamoto-Wilson, Pain, Pleasure and Perversity, p. 117. 4 Yamamoto-Wilson, Pain, Pleasure and Perversity, p. 113. 5 Descartes, in the sixth meditation that was part of his Meditations on First Philosophy. R. Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, in The Philosophical



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Writings of Descartes, vol. 2. Trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D. Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 6 Edward Peters, Torture (London: Basil Blackwell, 1986) and Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). The two were already read together in 1986 by none other than Peter Singer; see www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1986/feb/27/unspeakable-acts/, accessed 19 January 2017. 7 On Blake’s fascination with Job, see Harold Bloom, Neil Heims and Heather Dubnick (eds), William Blake, Bloom’s Biocritiques (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 2005), or W.T. Mitchell on Blake’s idiosyncratic use of the story: W.T. Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978). 8 On this see Susan Scheiner, Where Shall Wisdom be found? Calvin’s Exegesis of Job from Medieval and Modern Perspectives (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 9 See Jurgen Pieters, ‘Coornhert en Calvijn over Job: de lijdzaamheid van de redelijke mens versus de almacht van de afwezige God’, in Jaap Gruppelaar and Jürgen Pieters (eds), ‘Un certain Holandois’: Coornhert en de vragen van zijn tijd (Hilversum: Verloren, 2014), pp. 55–74. 10 In the original: ‘Drucken u ellende en ramspoed, zijt geduldig als Hiob’; Joost van den Vondel, De werken van Vondel: Volledige en geïllustreerde tekstuitgave in tien delen, ed. J.F.M. Sterck, H.W.E. Moller, C.G.N. de Vooys, C.R. de Klerk (Amsterdam, 1927–37), p. 759. 11 For the original see addendum 1 at the end of this chapter. De Helden Godes des Ouwden Verbonds/ Met kunstige beeldenissen vertoont, en poeetelijck ver­ klaert, Voor Dirck Pietersz. Boeckverkooper op’t Water / inde witte Persse / recht over de Korenmerckt. ANNO 1620 (WB 303 ev.). This passage can be found at WB, p. 385, vv. 6–12 (translation by the author). 12 See addendum 2. 13 See addendum 3. 14 See addendum 4. 15 On this see also Lisa Silverman, Tortured Subjects: Pain, Truth and the Body in Early Modern France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 16 Jan Pieter de Bie and Jakob Loosjes, Biographisch woordenboek van protestantsche godgeleerden in Nederland. Deel 3. (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1919–31); Johannus Grevius, Tribunal Reformatum, in quo sanioris et tutioris justitiae via judici Christiano in processu criminali commonstratur, rejecta et fugata tortura, cujus iniquitatem, multiplicem fallaciam, atque illicitum inter christianos usum libera et necessaria dissertatione aperuit Joannes Grevius Cli­ vensis, quam captivus scripsit in ergastulo Amsterodamensi (Hamburg, 1624). 17 Yamamoto-Wilson, Pain,Pleasure and Perversity, p. 32. 18 On this see John H. Langbein, Torture and the Law of Proof: Europe and England in the Ancien Régime (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012 [1976]). 19 On this see Peters, Torture, pp. 18–74. 20 On this see Edward Peters, Inquisition (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989), or more recent Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), or better still, Benzion Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain (New York: New York Review Books, 2001).

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21 On this see my ‘Tyranny, torture, slavedom: Rome, the public and dominium in some Dutch baroque tragedies’, in Jan Bloemendal and Nigel Smith, Politics and Aesthetics in European Baroque Tragedy (Leiden: Brill, 2016), pp. 43–74. 22 Peters, Inquisition, pp. 155–88. Servetus or Miguel Serveto y Reves is perhaps not well known to an Anglo-Saxon audience, but in the Latin world, he is prominent. On this see: www.miguelservet.org/servetus/web.php, accessed 19 January 2017, or in chronological order: Ronald H. Bainton, Michel Servet: hérétique et martyr (1553–1953) (Geneva: Droz, 1953); Vincent Schmid, Michel Servet: du bûcher à la liberté de conscience (Paris: Editions de Paris, 2008); Juan Naya and Marian Hillar (eds), Michael Servetus, Heartfelt: Proceedings of the International Servetus Congress, Barcelona, 20–21 October 2006 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2011). On Calvin’s role in the matter, and the general context of this struggle, see Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith. Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 15–72; or Alister E. McGrath, Johannes Calvijn. Verlicht hervormer of vormgever van een orthodox keurslijf? (Baarn: Tirion, 1995), pp. 140–7. 23 On Torrentius’ life, his work and this case, see Wim Cerutti, Haarlems-Amsterdamse duivelskunstenaar. De schilder en vrijdenker Johannes Torrentius (1588– 1644) (Haarlem: Uitgeverij Loutje, 2014). The report of the torturers’ heavy work on Torrentius can be found at www.amorc.nl/over-amorc/geschiedenis/ johannes-torrentius, accessed 19 January 2017. 24 See addendum 4. 25 Peter van der Coelen, Patriarchs, Angels & Prophets: The Old Testament in Netherlandish Printmaking from Lucas Van Leyden to Rembrandt (Leiden: Primavera, 1996), p. 97. 26 On this see Slavoj Žižek, Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences (London: Routledge, 2003). 27 Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, reprinted 2000). 28 Michel Reinders, Printed Pandemonium: Popular Print and Politics in the Netherlands 1650–1672 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), p. 201. 29 Peter Spierenburg, The Prison Experience: Disciplinary Institutions and their Inmates in Early Modern Europe (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), p. 108. 30 Roland Prud’homme van Reine, ‘ ‘t Paerlen op de kroon der Gallerij. De schilderijen van de zeventiende-eeuwse zeeofficierenfamilie Van Nes in het Rijksmuseum’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum, 43:2 (1995), 96–112: 109 31 Prud’homme van Reine, ‘ ‘t Paerlen op de kroon der Gallerij’. 32 Prud’homme van Reine, ‘ ‘t Paerlen op de kroon der Gallerij’, p. 108. 33 On the brothers, see Luc Panhuysen, Ware vrijheid: de levens van Johan en Cornelis de Witt (Amsterdam: Atlas-Contact, 2015), and on the key text in which the abolition of the function of the stadholder was propagated, see S. ter Braake, Manifest van de ware vrijheid: de deductie van Johan de Witt uit 1654 (Arnhem: Sonsbeek Publishers, 2009). 34 H. Perry Chapman, ‘Propagandist Prints, Reaffirming Paintings – Art and Community during the Twelve Years’ Truce’, in Arthur K. Wheelock and Adele F.



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Seeff (eds), The Public and Private in Dutch Culture of the Golden Age (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Press, 2000), pp. 43–63. 35 On this see Yamamoto-Wilson, Pain,Pleasure and Perversity, pp. 155–6. 36 See addendum 5. Aernout van Overbeke, Buyten gaets. Twee burleske reisbrieven van Aernout van Overbeke, eds Marijke Barend-van Haeften and Arie Jan Gelderblom (Verloren: Hilversum, 1998), vol. l, pp. 9–13 and 41. 37 Ronald Prud’homme van Reine, Moordenaars van Jan de Witt: de zwartste bladzijde van de Gouden Eeuw (Amsterdam: Arbeiderspers, 2013). 38 On this see Rudolf Cordes, Jan Zoet, Amsterdammer 1609–1674: leven en werk van een kleurrijk schrijver (Hilversum: Verloren, 2008), pp. 581–8. 39 See addendum 6; for the original see De verhemelde geest van den doorluchtigen Oranje-martelaer Henry de Fleury, 1672, www.dbnl.org/tekst/_ver015verh01_ 01/_ver015verh01_01_0002.php, accessed 19 January 2017. 40 James Williams, ‘Introduction’; Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: A Critical Introduction and Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), p. 63.

10

Palermo’s past public executions and their lingering memory1 Maria Pia Di Bella

Law in Europe developed firmly within a religious framework. The law’s dependence on that framework, which can still be traced, has permeated European culture in all its visible and invisible aspects. Its religiously derived character is nowhere more apparent than in its use and representation of torments – as we shall see from the early modern Sicilian example examined in this chapter – and in the handling of the people charged and convicted of crimes by the judiciary, which oscillated between punishment and the promise of redemption, and in the results that the judiciary obtained.2 Torture, torments and supplice3 all played specific roles in this legal history, a history embedded in a Christian framework. From 1541 to 1820, the persons sentenced to death in Palermo (Sicily) by the secular courts were handed to a company whose task was to comfort them, morally and spiritually, during the three days and three nights before their execution, and also during the long processions that took them from the prison to the scaffold. The ‘health of the condemned souls’ was entrusted to the Company of the Santissimo Crocifisso, better known as the Bianchi (the White Ones) because they habitually wore white robes along with white hoods.4 The mandate of the hundred members of the Bianchi Company – mainly aristocrats, some of them not only hailing from the noblest Sicilian families but also holding the highest offices in the state – established a firm relationship between the exercise of justice and redemption, for they made the link between them seem inseparable through the staging of the executions as a ‘spectacle’ in the streets of Palermo. To fully understand the importance of these performances, we must consider the famous Acts of Faith organised by the ecclesiastical tribunal for the suppression of heresy, better known as the Inquisition or Holy Office (Il Tribunale permanente del S. Officio della Inquisizione), in which impenitent ‘heretics’ were burned at the stake. This tribunal acted against five categories of persons: infidels (Jews or Muslims), heretics, black magicians or sorcerers,



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blasphemers and opponents of the Holy Office. Its mandate was extremely broad, for it could imprison (in its own prisons), torture, bring to trial, judge and sentence (in its own courts). But it could not execute its own death sentences. For this reason, during the Acts of Faith, it delivered to the secular magistracy the impenitent ones condemned to death, and the sentence was executed on the spot. From 1513 to 1782, 234 Sicilians were burned alive, and the majority of these 234 impenitent persons were considered heretics. Throughout this chapter, victims of the Inquisition will be referred to as ‘heretics’ and the prisoners prepared by the Bianchi for their execution as ‘convicts’. The reason for this distinction is that the treatment received by the persons judged as ‘heretics’ by the Inquisition and those confined in prison after having been judged by a secular court differed. This terminology does not imply that the ‘convicts’ sentenced by the Sicilian justice were all guilty in contemporary terms, since many of them were severely punished for minor offences and on rather shaky evidence. The itinerary of the convict The itinerary of the convict, from the moment of his arrest to his execution, illustrates the inextricable link between punishment and redemption. Three main phases confronted the convict once seized: during the first, he was treated brutally by the judicial administration, kept in dirty and uncomfortable prisons, often in cells rented out by greedy owners who maximised their profit by obliging the prisoners to pay a daily rent and by appointing crooks as guardians. The accused was rarely aware of the charges against him, seldom had a conversation with a lawyer, and was usually abandoned to the common cells to await sentence. It was only through judicial torture that he had a contact – a physical one – with the machinery of the law. During interrogations under torture, he was pressed to confess by relating events and, most of all, by naming accomplices, whether real or imaginary. Once the date of execution was settled, the condemned person entered a second stage, a secret phase of instruction on ‘how to die a good Christian death’.5 This phase lasted three days and three nights, usually spent in the chapel of a Palermitan prison (Castellamare or Vicaria), under the supervision of four Bianchi (two brothers: a chapel chief and a ‘secular novice’, and two priests of the Company: a confessor and a novice). During this liminal phase, the convict was enchained and carried from the prison to the chapel by two other Bianchi. As soon as he entered the chapel, his status changed and from that moment on he was referred to as the afflitto (the afflicted one). First, he was informed by the chapel chief (Capo di Cappella) of the place, day and hour of his execution. Afterwards, he was led in front of the picture of ‘Our Lady of Sorrows’ and the statue of the Ecce Homo, whose hands he had to kiss. There followed an inquiry on his person, the circumstances of his imprisonment and his feelings about it. Afterwards, the chapel chief

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started the Christian teaching on the first theme of meditation. Before leaving him alone for the night in his cell (dammuso), the Bianchi embraced and kissed his feet, a sign of humility. For any material or spiritual comfort, he could call the Bianchi brothers, who slept in an adjacent room. During the next three days, the afflitto was escorted by the Bianchi to the oratory of the chapel to follow their Christian teaching, organised around seven themes of meditation to which he had to listen with a lighted candle in his hands.6 At each of his entrances or exits, he had to kiss the hands of the Ecce Homo statue. He had to confess several times, assist at many masses and receive two communions. Through a rehearsal – called the ‘ladder exercise’ (esercizio della scala) – that he had to practise at least four times with the chapel chief, he was briefed on all acts and utterances that he would have to perform after leaving the prison and before climbing the scaffold. If he requested it, the last night he was taken to the confessor to dictate a ‘discharge of conscience’ (discarico di coscienza) that enabled him to die without any sin of false accusation on his conscience. The last day, the day of the execution, he had to take leave of the two Bianchi novices who had assisted him during those three days and to kiss the hangman’s feet who, in the meantime, had arrived to remove his iron chains. The final phase now began for the afflitto, consisting of a public performance of a brave death. This public performance was meant to pave the way for the salvation of his soul in the afterlife. It began with his leaving the prison chapel, blindfolded, to proceed to the central Piano della Marina (the habitual place of execution for crimes committed outside Palermo) escorted by the chapel chief and the confessor, followed by all the members of the Bianchi company, who carried lighted candles in their hands and recited litanies or chanted the Miserere or De profundis. During the procession, the only words he was allowed to utter were Ora pro me, ‘Pray for me’, which he had to repeat after every litany chanted by the Bianchi. Having arrived at the place of execution, the procession halted. The afflitto knelt in front of the Bianchi priest to receive absolution. The priest asked whether he wished to die like a Christian. The afflitto answered in the affirmative. The priest then began to recite the Apostle’s Creed and, at the words passus et sepultum est, the hangman put the rope around the afflitto’s neck. At the end of the prayer, the afflitto kissed the hangman’s feet and also one of the steps that he had to climb in order to reach the gallows, before the hangman launched him into the air.7 Brief sketch of the history of the convicts’ tormented bodies While the members of the white-cloaked Bianchi company always presented to the spectators the same image of themselves, the convicts, on the contrary, were presented and treated in different ways during the procession that took them from the prison chapel to the gallows. From 1541 to 1820, the Bianchi



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assisted 2,127 afflitti, of whom forty were women.8 Forty-nine of those 2,127, being aristocrats, were decapitated. Three of these aristocrats were women; most of the rest, as commoners, were hanged. Between 1566 and 1646 one hundred and nine men were sentenced for the crime of nefandum9 (homosexuality), as were two others, one in 1782, another in 1816. These men were first executed (by decapitation, hanging or strangulation), then their corpses were either taken to the Piano di San Erasmo (where the Acts of Faith organised by the Inquisition usually took place), where they were burned and their ashes scattered, or they were burned on the spot, generally in Piano della Marina. It is important to underline that only the corpses of men sentenced for nefandum were burned and had their ashes scattered, evidence that homosexuality was considered as the worst of all crimes after heresy, for heretics were burned at the stake alive. Homosexuality, for example, which particularly offended the government, was apparently rife: Charles V persuaded himself that it caused the frequent earthquakes that plagued Sicily, and Philip II thought of sending a special officer from Spain with greater powers than the Viceroy to take drastic emergency actions. Comprehensive orders were published describing in extravagant details various categories of homosexual practice and the requisite scale of penalties. A person who could afford 15,000 scudi might possibly buy himself off from the most serious of these, but the tariff was higher than for murder. The worst offenders, or at least those unable to pay, were liable to be burnt as an example, and a special piazza in Palermo was set apart for punishing these most offensive of all sinners and criminals. The chief hangman in Palermo, who had carried out some of these executions for homosexuality, was himself executed for the same offence in 1608.10

Class played an important role in the mode of execution – decapitation or hanging – and the crime for which one was being put to death determined the treatment that the body would undergo before and after execution. For example, class considerations prevented the aristocrat, unlike the commoner, from being tormented before his death. Though the sources are extremely discreet on the treatment the aristocrats’ bodies underwent before execution – we barely know whether they were executed with or without pomp – we may assume that their bodies went untouched before execution. After execution, the aristocrat’s body regained all its status and was usually brought in procession by the Bianchi to a church in order to be buried in the family vault. Women’s bodies were treated in a milder way before execution. Only one of the forty who were executed was subjected to the rack during the procession that took her from prison to the gallows, where she was strangled – instead of being either decapitated or hanged – though she was afterwards quartered. Such was the exceptional treatment meted out to Thofania D’Adamo in 1633 for poisoning her husband and several other people.11 After execution, women’s bodies were treated according to the same class

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distinction: burial in the church if an aristocrat, burial in the public graveyard (at best) if a commoner. It is on the commoner’s body, before and after execution, that the members of the Royal Court displayed their imagination. Based on the 2,127 sentenced persons assisted by the Bianchi from 1541 to 1820, we can briefly sketch the history of these tormented bodies, drawing a first line of demarcation in 1646. In fact, the period from 1541 to 1646 was certainly the most cruel for the bodies of the sentenced, especially commoners, and more especially homosexuals. Thieves, highwaymen, bandits and murderers were usually carried to the gallows on a tumbrel so as to allow the executioner to either rack them with hot pincers, cut off their right hands or burn their feet; they could also be tied to a horse’s tail in order to be drawn or quartered either alive or semi-alive. After execution, their bodies were usually separated from the heads and cut into four, each of the four parts being sent for display to a place where the persons concerned were known for their deeds. The head was left to rot at the Sperone, east of Palermo, in order to alert arriving travellers to the dangers that awaited them should they transgress the law. In 1642 we note the last amputation of the right hand performed on a living human being; from then on hands were cut off only from corpses and only corpses were quartered. In 1646 we also note the last execution of a homosexual for over a hundred years: two homosexuals were sentenced, one – Vincenzo D’Oddo – thought to be the ‘agent’, the other – Paolo Ciotti – the ‘patient’.12 Both were handed to the Bianchi and carried to the chapel, which for the occasion was separated into two sectors in order to prevent the two men from having sexual intercourse. In the meantime, the ‘patient’ was pardoned and the Bianchi were requested to lead the procession to the scaffold without letting the ‘agent’ know that only he was going to die.13 Burying was the normal procedure for those corpses that were neither quartered nor burned, neither left to rot in a public square nor at the Sperone. Before 1795, corpses to be buried were carried by the Bianchi on their shoulders to the cemetery of San Bartolomeo, and after that date to the cemetery near the Admiral Bridge (Cimitero del Ponte dell’Ammiraglio) and the church of the Madonna del Fiume. The redemption of the convict through torments As we have seen, during the first phase of a convict’s contact with the judicial system, the judiciary kept aloof from the imprisoned convict, who nevertheless felt, on his body, its severe methods of extortion. Under torture he often lied, denouncing friends as well as foes, to relieve himself from pain, and his body, as we know, was kept in chains. During the second, liminal phase, the religious and psychological preparations were meant to indicate to the sentenced person the quality of the spiritual rewards awaiting him after death. The promise of redemption freed his soul and thus allowed him to ‘discharge his conscience’ voluntarily in front of the Bianchi. It is therefore



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only during the third phase that justice fully presented itself as redemption in public, in those collective, consensual spectacles in which everyone seemed to have a definite role to play: (a) the judicial authorities, by indicating the streets through which the sentenced person must be carried in procession, the type of torments he must endure, the exact location in which he had to undergo them, the type of execution that awaited him – decapitation or hanging – and the fate his corpse would meet; (b) the Bianchi, by presenting to the public an afflitto ready to accept his fate and to die bravely, fully converted to Christian dogma, thanks to their teaching and thanks to the rehearsals that took place in the chapel during those three liminal days; (c) the sentenced person himself, by fulfilling the role shaped for him through dying the way martyrs did;14 and, last but not least (d) the audience, to whom this spectacle was addressed, by showing evident signs of compassion. Since the resurrection of the body was expected by all Sicilians, other social groups, fearing that some of the sentenced persons in the care of the Bianchi would still die recalcitrant or, worse, impenitent, created their own confraternities dedicated to taking care of the soul of the sentenced person, by praying for its safe exit from the world and for its salvation. We will briefly mention three of these confraternities that promoted activities thought to be lacking in the Bianchi mission: the ‘Congregation of the Agonising’ (Venerabile congregazione degli agonizzanti),15 constituted in 1614 by doctors and lawyers (see below for the way in which it was constituted), the ‘Confraternity of the Souls of Purgatory’ (Arciconfraternita delle anime del purgatorio), more commonly known as the Miseremini and constituted in 1599 by a tertiary of the Minor Observants, Leonardo Galici, for artisans or bourgeois, to the exclusion of nobles and lawyers;16 and the ‘Confraternity of Saint Mary of All Graces’ (Confraternita di S. Maria di tutte le Grazie detta del Sabato), constituted in 1602 by artisans.17 The first of these prayed for the ‘dying souls’ (agonizzanti) of the sentenced during the three days and nights they spent in the chapel with the Bianchi; the second one celebrated masses daily, from dawn till noon, for the liberation of the souls in purgatory, while the third received in 1795 the charge to collect the corpses of the executed and bury them in the cemetery beside the church of the Madonna del Fiume, on the east side of Palermo. It is in this church – still known today as the Chiesa delle Anime dei Corpi Decollati (Church of the Souls of the Beheaded Bodies) – that a cult dedicated to the souls of the beheaded bodies of the executed persons emerged. It is worth mentioning that the professional differentiation characteristic of the guilds was reflected within the confraternities that comforted the condemned, for only the aristocratic Bianchi were entitled to integrate the sentenced person into their community, to speak to him and touch his living body. The confraternities of the lower-ranking professions could only pray for his soul or bury his dead body. On the other hand, the body of the sentenced person, the necessary visual link between justice and redemption, was obliterated from the official

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discourse, though its manipulation was at the core of the spectacles offered in the streets of Palermo to a vast audience, reminding everyone of the martyrs’ and, most of all, of Jesus’s sufferings. In fact, from the twelfth century, devotion to the Passion of Christ became widespread in Europe, giving rise to numerous other devotions: devotion to His flagellation, His wounds, His blood effusion, His falls, to the stairs He climbed, to when He halted, etc.18 This devotion to the Passion of Christ also led to the idea of creating the shrines dedicated to the ‘way of the cross’ (via crucis), which became fairly widespread in the fifteenth century. It was practised by the faithful in pious imitation of the pilgrims who travelled to the Holy Land in the early centuries of Christianity to visit the places hallowed by Christ’s sufferings.19 The fourteen chosen illustrations of the sufferings of Christ on his way to Calvary – the number of stations a believer must perform – were impressed in every Christian’s mind,20 including those who ordered and prepared the execution as well as those who witnessed it. Another powerful reminder of Jesus’s supplice were – and still are – the Easter Week processions, organised in Palermo, as elsewhere, by different guilds or congregations.21 It is, therefore, by means of these different visual representations that the condemned Sicilian was assimilated to Jesus, for the suffering and the torments he endured were perceived as comparable to those of Jesus, allowing him to join in the human nature of Christ. As we have seen, the biblical references gave the people of Palermo a foundation that legitimised their actions, thus contributing to an expansion in the number of confraternities, for each one was supposed to cover one of the canonical moments in which the soul of the sentenced person went through its own ‘passion’. Since Christ’s sufferings – endured in order to save humanity as a whole – were constantly present in the Christians’ conscience, the whole social spectrum of Palermo participated in saving each sentenced soul, either by material help or by prayers, in order to send it, in the worst of cases, to purgatory. Thus, the redemption of the sentenced person became the collective concern of all members of the urban community. The different phases of separation and reunification of the sentenced convict’s body and soul illustrate how punishment is linked to the promise of redemption. From the thirteenth century on, the process of subjecting the criminal’s body to judicial torture is described by the judges as a ‘martyrium’. Thus, at an early stage, they established the image of the sentenced convict as a martyr.22 Punishment was considered to be a condition for redemption since the body of the convict undergoing supplice bore witness (martyrium), in front of the community and in front of God, to the fact that his soul was saved from hell. It was by allowing the sentenced person to save his soul in public spectacles – contrary to what happened during the Acts of Faith staged by the Inquisition, as we will see below – that justice proudly underlined its fundamental link with punishment as redemption. In Sicily, for part of the community at least, this link succeeded in blurring the boundaries between



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justice and redemption, giving rise to the popular sanctification of the sentenced persons’ souls. The final act of the conciliatory performance took place at the church of the Madonna del Fiume. As seen, from 1795 on, the corpses of the executed were buried in the church’s cemetery and the church itself became known as the Chiesa delle Anime dei Corpi Decollati (Church of the Souls of the

10.1  Engraving from La pia opera delle anime dei corpi decollate

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Beheaded Bodies). The devout went to the burial plots of the beheaded bodies to recite orations and offer rosaries, then entered the church to wait for the souls’ responses to their requests, either in the small chapel or by putting their ear to the so-called memorial stone.23 A royal decree put an end to the institution of the Bianchi in 1820, but the popular religious cult continued and still goes on to this day. Methods of extortion through judicial torture We now turn to historical source materials to illustrate the role of judicial torture in the handling of offenders. The main source referred to here is the discharges of conscience (discarichi di coscienza).24 A discharge of conscience was an oral confession dictated by an afflitto on the night before his execution to the Bianchi confessor who wrote it down in the presence of the Bianchi brothers. The afflitto then signed the confession, as did all the Bianchi. A copy of the discharge was usually sent to the court that judged and sentenced the prisoner as well as to the Inquisition tribunal. From 1567 to 1805, out of the 2,127 afflitti assisted by the Bianchi, approximately 405 asked to dictate a discharge of conscience. To date, seventy-six discharges, about 19 per cent of the total, have been found. Since the crime for which the prisoner was sentenced is mentioned in these discharges, we know that forty-one out of the seventy-six were sentenced for homicide; twenty for theft; nine for banditry; two for homosexuality (nefandum); two as counterfeiters (falsari); one for lèse-majesté and one – the only woman among these seventy-six – for infanticide. Perusing the content of these discharges, we notice that forty relate the judicial torture undergone and that thirty-three afflitti ‘named names’ (chiamato) while tortured, which means they have given the names of innocents or strangers as accomplices. Six more do not mention torture but admit to having ‘named names’, which suggests that they were indeed tortured. Eight confess to crimes that, during trial, they had attributed to others. The reasons the sentenced persons give for ‘naming names’ are: fear of torture (18), pain (14), or enmity felt towards the persons named (19). But let us first examine the official aim of judicial torture in order to grasp the specificity of the Bianchi treatment in the chapel. Until the middle of the thirteenth century, the Church accepted ordeals25 – which were meant to provoke the judgement of God – as did the common people, who saw in ordeals, oaths and judicial combats the judgements of God, for it was believed that only God was able to reveal the innocence of an accused person whose hand had withstood burning from a hot iron, or pronounce the guilt of one who did not float when subjected to the water ordeal.26 After the middle of the thirteenth century, the principle of Inquisitio27 was formally introduced in Canon Law. As Langbein says, ‘henceforth, humans were going to replace God in deciding guilt or innocence, humans called judges’.28 From



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then on, the revelation of truth lay in the hands of the judge and, in the name of truth, judicial torture gained a secure place in ecclesiastical inquisitorial procedure.29 Since truth hides not only in facts but also in people, who have to be pressured physically and morally to enunciate it, judicial torture became an essential mechanism to establish the truth during trials.30 Until the nineteenth century, judicial torture thus remained a part of juridical culture and practice in continental Europe, except in Great Britain.31 Thus, judicial torture was used not only to establish the guilt of the accused person, but served also to extort from him or her denunciations of third persons which might then serve to justify the torture of those denounced. Not only torture, but also priestly confession was used to establish sufficient suspicion against third persons to allow their torture in turn. This system, which produced extorted avowals and religious confessions as legitimations for further torture, elicited further denunciations in turn, and set in train a process that brought an ever-growing number of suspects before the courts and into the torture chambers. This process was masterfully conducted by the Inquisition. This process, the model of suspicion/denunciation/persecution, is well illustrated in the discharge dictated by Andrea Matranga on Saint Valentine’s Day of the year 1650, in which he relates in detail the phases of the torture he had been subjected to. In the first phase, we find Matranga refusing to collaborate with the judicial power. He says:32 … being in the torments of torture and having withstood half an hour of succaro33 and in succession a strappado,34 he was taken down until his feet touched the floor and his arms fell abruptly. His body, due to the strappado position, had become totally cold. He was once more requested to tell the truth, but he answered he had nothing to say.35

His first answer is not considered to be appropriate, so he continues: … as a reply, justice ordered him to be pulled up again, and they started to pull him up and, having lifted him about four meters high, and having renewed his torments with greater pain, which he could not bear any longer, he asked to be taken down in order to confess everything.36

In the third phase we find the victim collaborating with his torturers, as we do in many other historical examples that are by now classics, such as the Milanese trial against the untori37 that Alessandro Manzoni denounced so emphatically in his Storia della colonna infame (1842). As Matranga says in his discharge: … with his own mouth he confessed to having killed, with his own hands and with a gun, Don Vincenzo Crancato. Justice interrogates him again, asking him to say who made him carry out such a murder. He answered – fearing to be once more pulled up in order to be tortured, and fearing to suffer new, greater

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torments – that he was ordered and commanded by one called Giuseppe Zasa to kill the said Crancato.38

An ultimate effort to escape Hell But before God’s court established by the Bianchi, the sentenced Matranga finally states the truth, the one that his torturers never obtained and could never have obtained, ‘the pure truth’ that he would be unable to hide in the afterworld: The pure truth being that he, Andrea Matranga, killed the said Crancato of his own will without being commanded or ordered by others. But all happened because of certain disagreements that took place, days ago, between Matranga and Crancato and recently, for jealousy of a certain woman, friend of Andrea. Never did the said Giuseppe Zasa order him [to undertake] the said homicide, nor did he ever talk to him, nor did he make a deal with him, nor did he make others deal with him or talk to him about the said homicide of the said Crancato.39

In the model of suspicion/denunciation/persecution, under judicial torture the convict was pushed to denounce innocent friends or foes in order to be relieved from pain, and the judges accepted this testimony as fact. Under the Bianchi model, by contrast, during the liminal phase in the chapel the convict, speaking the truth, restored the fama (good reputation) of innocent friends or foes through his discharge of conscience. We can measure the originality of the Bianchi model by the veracity they granted to the convict’s discharge of conscience, labelled ‘pure truth’, in contrast to what he had testified under torture. Another important and complementary point will underline the originality of the Bianchi: the discharges of conscience they wrote down were not denunciations by the condemned sent by their confessors to Inquisition judges in order to report on other people’s sins (contrary to what Adriano Prosperi says for the rest of Italy).40 In fact, in their Capitoli Cappella the Bianchi clearly recommend two things.41 One is to restore the fama of the innocent person from whom it had been taken away: And, first of all, the Fratelli Confortanti are warned that they must pay attention to two things. The first is when the Condemned have to recant, if ever … they had, either for enmity, fear of torments, love of money and profit, or for any other reason, named innocent persons as accomplices, authors, supporters, or executors of crimes performed by them, or of other crimes. If such a circumstance is encountered, it is necessary for the offender to restore the fama (good reputation) of the person he removed it from, to discharge his Conscience, and to make the truth clear, in order not to allow the Innocent to be charged on his account or to undergo punishment.42



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The second recommendation is never to write down, in the discharge itself, anything or any offense that could be of prejudice to anyone, even if guilty, since it is the sentenced person’s conscience that is at stake: Do not write down things that tend to be of prejudice, and to the direct or indirect offense of any one, since the obligation and intention of the Company is none but the discharge of the condemned’s (afflitto) conscience.43

The message is very clear and must have been clearly understood by the sentenced person: no names, no accusations, no mention of any known crimes, for the only concern of the Bianchi is the health of the conscience (salute). If, under torture, one or several innocent persons were slandered (infamati), then in the discharge their fama should be restored. In the chapel phase, the Bianchi clearly establish the supremacy of religion over the judiciary, and the inversions they continually produced are relevant to our topic. Sentenced persons were individually trained to be responsible, in front of God, for the ‘pure truth’; while in front of men, they were requested to keep their mouths shut (pious omertà) and never utter any guilty person’s name nor stain any innocent’s fama.44 If we look at the forty-six discharges of conscience that refer to judicial torture or naming names, we can say that the Sicilian Bianchi produced a counter-model against three practices: against the distorted confessions obtained through torture in the judicial system; against Inquisition norms enforced by priests obliging those claiming to be of the faith to repeat their private confessions before Inquisition judges, thus bringing to light unknown deeds and implicated persons; and, third, against the normal daily practice of lying or cheating, or worse, slandering, in order to boast or hide reprehensible actions so as to escape penalty. In their counter-model, the Bianchi insisted that the sentenced person should restore the fama of those whom he had denounced before or during torture by speaking, once and for all, the ‘pure truth’. Under no circumstance should he name, during his discharge, people who had committed crimes or felonies. This counter-model highlights the importance of the forum internum,45 a divine court before which the conscience is left to defend its past deeds and make up for the bad ones, in an ultimate effort to escape Hell during the afterlife. The scandal of ‘impenitence’ The psychological preparation that the Bianchi undertook to induce sentenced persons to accept the ‘separation of soul from body’ with religious detachment seemed to work well. We do come across some recalcitrant prisoners, but they too were usually driven into a ‘state of virtue’ with the presentation of the Ecce Homo of the Gancia Church, which was transported on such occasions from the Gancia to the chapel in which the afflitti were

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held. Antonino Catinella, a famous bandit called Salta le viti, was ‘calmed down’ in 1706 thanks to this statue.46 The transgressive figure in this collective consensual participation was, of course, the impenitent. In the Bianchi material it is difficult to identify more than one real case of impenitence, but the reaction to impenitence was very quick and radical. The first public case labelled as impenitence – though formally it was not one – occurred in 1614, when Francesco Anello insulted an officer while at the gallows, instead of accepting the religious consolation offered by the Bianchi.47 Some citizens were so moved by the event that they decided to set up a confraternity, the ‘Congregation of the Agonisings’ to pray to God in aid of the sentenced souls, during the three days the sentenced one habitually passed in the chapel. There was a collective concern for the fate of the impenitent soul. This concern is also evident in the Acts of Faith organised by the Inquisition, in which impenitent heretics were usually burned. On Sunday 17 March 1658, Fra Diego La Matina, an Augustinian monk, heretic and assassin of the Inquisitor Monsignor Juan Lopez de Cisneros, was brought forth to his execution. Here is the report of the event–one of the most famous Sicilian Acts of Faith – as narrated by Girolamo Matranga, a member of the Inquisition: Last came Fra Diego La Matina, the Monster of our age, wearing a mitre blackened with tar, chained to a chair with iron shackles. The Brothers at his side implored his repentance. The people hurled accusations and exhorted him to recant. Fra Diego grew ever more spiteful, multiplying his curse, so they gagged him. The multitude listened to the recital of his [sacrilege] and misdeeds, His vestments were torn off, one by one. The sentence was read aloud: death by burning, ashes to the winds. At the sight of the pyre, Fra Diego betrayed no sign of fear. He was winched up onto the stack of wood still shackled to his chair. [He] finally said, ‘I will renounce my beliefs and surrender to the Church, but only if you grant me corporeal life’. [When they] answered that the sentence was irreversible, Diego cried, ‘Then God is unjust!’48

The religious framework in the handling of executions If we compare the public performances staged by the Inquisition and by the Bianchi, the first two things that strike us are that the heretic confronts and is confronted by the people around him, and their reciprocal gaze is important in this confrontation, while the convict, blindfolded, is offered to the gaze of others but cannot reciprocate, becoming thus the ‘victim’ in this sacrificial act. Second, the heretic is described as having an ‘indomitable will’ that issues ‘continual threats of violence and assault’ that ‘everybody fears’ while the convict replies to the chapel chief or to the confessor using only the ritual formulae that he was taught.



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These two radically different ways of presenting the culprits may be due to the fact that one (the heretic) is ‘impenitent’ while the other (the convict) is ‘saved’ for the afterlife. This is the reason why the heretic has to see the stake, which should provoke ‘fear or horror’; while the second, being totally ready and willing to die, has to remain focused on the aura of repentance brought forth by the Bianchi in the chapel, in order to expire in a pious way. As for their utterances, one will scandalise the public, while the second will move the assembled crowd by simple repetitions of the words used by all when praying, usually ‘Ora pro nobis’. In this comparison of the heretic and the convict, it is difficult to determine whether the public knew the important difference between them: one was fighting for his ideas in an ultimate effort not to give them up, even at the cost of his life, while the second was paying for a deed that he had been condemned for and that was judged reprehensible to the point of costing his life. Thus, if both the heretic and the convict went through torture before, during or after their trial, at the moment of their execution they clearly go their separate ways. Torments are given to the convict only to signify to all those who witness his supplice that the judicial authorities keep control over the sentenced person’s body, transforming him into both witness (martyr) and proof that he has paid for his sins and is ready for redemption. His body, whether entirely or in its parts,49 has to remain visible until burial, so that it can be reconstituted for his resurrection.50 On the other hand, the heretic – burned at the stake, his ashes blown in the wind – has no afterlife. In his case the use of torments would be useless, since neither redemption nor resurrection is envisaged for him. As seen, the corpses of the men sentenced for the crime of nefandum (homosexuality) were also burned and their ashes scattered. These two different personal choices – heresy and homosexuality – were visibly equated in the Sicilian society of that time. The religious framework plays an important role in the handling of executions, creating typologies that the public may have been unaware of.51 The familiar, reassuring vision of a convict fully accepting his fate as he goes to the gallows impels the spectators to urge the impenitent heretic to recant. On 6 April 1724, in another famous Act of Faith staged by the Inquisition, Sister Geltruda Maria (Filippa Cordovana) and Fra Romualdo (Ignazio Barberi), both almost sixty years old, were burned at the stake. The description we have of the event52 stresses its impact on the crowd and the way the crowd tries over and over again to convince the two impenitents to let themselves be ‘illuminated by divine grace’ (illuminati dalla divina grazia), for the faithful believed that by undergoing a supplice the guilty ones had a chance of escaping Hell. Indeed, the vociferous Sicilian crowd illustrates its confidence in the rightness of their own cultural norms when defied by opponents: The Fathers begged everyone to implore Divine Clemency of the Queen of Heaven, and whipped themselves publicly. The entire Populace wept loudly. Only Fra Romualdo remained unyielding.

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10.2  Francesco Cichè, ‘Seconda promessa’, print no. 46, with a representation of the auto-de-fe celebrated in Palermo, 6 April 1724

… The cart bearing Suor Geltruda entered, and the closer [she] came to the pyre, the greater the zeal of the Theologians to reduce her to penitence, but [she] spoke not except to say she was innocent, and unjust the Tribunal. Then Fra Romualdo’s cart entered. As he stepped down, noblemen, clergy, and those of every condition threw themselves at his feet, begging him to repent. But they were all speaking to a deaf man, who gave no sign of repentance or feeling. Suor Geltruda was tied to the stake with her arms behind her. The ministers made their last assault on the heart of the Obstinate Woman. It is impossible to describe how they strained for her conversion, but their energy finally flagged. So first they burned her hair, to give her a taste of the fire, but she showed more concern for her locks than her soul. Next they set alight her cloak of pitch, but as she insisted in her obstinacy, they lit the pyre and she plunged down into the fire … her spirit expired, passing from a temporal fire into the eternal one. [Romualdo] was forced to watch the fate of Geltruda. But [all] admonition failed, so the Executioner tied him to the stake and set fire to his cloak of pitch. He struggled violently and blew on the flames as though to extinguish them; the fire scorched his face, but [he] gave no sign of repentance. He fought to free himself as the flames rose, but soon plunged face down into the bonfire, and from those flames his soul passed on to the atrocity of eternal hellfire.



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The prayers, tears, and mortifications of the crowd were incessant. Many offered devotions, vowing to perform mortifications, fasting, and whippings. Cloistered women offered up their lives to purchase the souls of the Deceived Ones. [A lay woman] offered up her own baby. But because [Geltruda and Romulado] chose the flames over repentance, everyone venerated the unfathomable judgment of God and acclaimed the Triumph of Faith over Impiety, crying out: ‘Long Live the Holy Faith’. Many who had not confessed for years vomited their sins at the feet of Confessors with heartfelt penitence, reconciled with the God they had offended.53

The Church of the Souls of the Beheaded Bodies The Inquisition in Sicily ended in 1782, and, unfortunately, all its papers were burned in Piazza Marina in front of its seat, the imposing Palazzo Steri. Almost forty years later, the Company of the Santissimo Crocifisso was also dissolved and henceforth only priests were allowed to attend to the religious care of the condemned. The death penalty was abolished in Italy in 1889, within a few decades of its reunification, but reintroduced by Benito Mussolini in 1926, and then abolished again in 1947 (1994 for the military penal code). With the abolition of the death penalty, the processions in the streets of Palermo also came to an end. One of the last descriptions of a Palermitan execution (16 September 1815), done by the Admiral William Henry Smyth, an English naval officer, hydrographer, astronomer and numismatist, stresses the fact that: At the instant of the malefactor’s expiration, the spectators retreated a step or two with a rustling noise, as if in prayer for the departed spirit; and their whole behaviour on that occasion was so humane and compassionate, notwithstanding the depravity of the offender, as to exhibit a striking contrast to their indifference respecting assassination.54

Despite the abolition of the death penalty and the fact that such processions ceased to be held in Palermo, the religious cult at the Church of the Souls of the Beheaded Bodies continued and goes on to this day. The attraction this church exercised on the public was first highlighted by the well-known Sicilian folklorist Giuseppe Pitrè in his book Usi e Costumi, Credenze e Pregiudizi del Popolo Siciliano (1870–1913).55 In the same period in which he was writing, even foreign scholars, for example E.S. Hartland, became aware of its importance, and wrote about it.56 The church itself was restored between 1857 and 1865 and, it seems, a second time after November 188157 following the flooding of the Oreto River, which destroyed the documents kept in the church and washed away the remains in the mass graves. One of the reasons for the enduring popular interest in this church is that the heads of the condemned58 were usually suspended in a kind of masonry pyramid and placed on a bridge very close

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to the church – the Ponte delle Teste Mozze (Bridge of the Severed Heads) – as a warning to would-be wrongdoers. But we could also interpret this enduring interest of the public for these numerous executions not only as a way to pardon the condemned but also as a way to doubt that all of them were really guilty. We could see the Church of the Souls of the Beheaded Bodies as a kind of ‘popular memorial’ to which the ‘spectator who retreated a step or two’ during the Palermitan executions went in order to pray for those innocent souls, possibly presuming that many of these souls were innocent. A further reason for the lasting interest in this church is the aura surrounding it on account of certain historical events that occurred nearby. The most important of these is the battle that took place next to another bridge near the church on the Oreto River – the Ponte dell’Ammiraglio – between Garibaldi’s troops and the Bourbon troops of the Kingdom of the

10.3  The cippo set up in Palermo on Corso dei Mille, corner Piazza Decollati [Ponte delle teste mozze (Bridge of the Severed Heads)]



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10.4  The same cippo adorned with candles

Two Sicilies (27 May 1860). An engraved plaque has been mounted on the central arcade of the bridge to honour the event. And a cippo (commemorative memorial stone) was set up between the Church of the Souls of the Beheaded Bodies and the Bridge of the Severed Heads recalling the names of the eleven carbonari59 shot at the Piano della Consolazione on 26 October 1831, the six shot on 28 January 1850 in the Piazza della Fiera Vecchia, and the thirteen shot in the square now called Piazza XIII Vittime, on 14 April 1860.60 In 1955, the façade of the church was rebuilt and the church itself raised to the status of ‘parish’ church with the name of Maria Santissima del Carmelo ai Decollati.61 Today one can observe the enduring interest Palermitani have for the church and the cult surrounding it in the many web pages filled with

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information devoted to them. The data in these web pages62 are often redundant, since they are mainly extracted from Pitrè’s Usi e Costumi, but recent photographs have been added along with individual comments and historical facts that clearly demonstrate the popular interest that this church still arouses. This interest can also be seen in numerous other related activities, for example, the organisation of Sunday tours in the quarter where the church is located.63 But things are changing. Perhaps the Church of the Souls of the Beheaded Bodies in Palermo will one day cease to arouse the ‘humane and compassionate feelings’ that William Henry Smyth reported observing, especially now that a new bridge – il Ponte Bailey, inaugurated on 14 November 201464 – is replacing the old Ponte delle Teste Mozze to allow the new tramway line No. 1 to speed passengers from the Roccella neighbourhood to the Central Station.65 Notes 1 I am most grateful to Thomas Haskell Simpson for assistance in editing this chapter. A first version of this chapter was published with the title ‘Les performances de rédemption palermitaines lors des exécutions publiques’, in Lucien Faggion and Christophe Regina (eds), La Violence. Regards croisés sur une réalité plurielle (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2010), pp. 129–54. 2 According to Robert Muchembled, Le Temps des supplices. De l’obéissance sous les rois absolus, XVe–XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Armand Colin, 1992), the sixteenth century was the period in which the exercise of justice was handled in Europe in the most brutal manner, for obedience to absolute, monarchic rule had been becoming the norm since 1375. Sicily had been under Spanish rule and administration, and the brutality that befell Europe was also felt in this province of the Hapsburg Empire, peripheral since the discovery of new commercial routes to the Indies or to the New World. 3 It is necessary to define the use of the terms ‘torture’, ‘torments’ and ‘supplice’. For the terms ‘torture’ and ‘torment’, I follow John H. Langbein’s Torture and the Law of Proof (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977) that uses ‘torture’ only in association with the word ‘judicial’ (thus, ‘judicial torture’). Torture for Langbein is physical pain applied by judges during private interrogations before and during trials to extort information, usually called ‘truths’, from the prisoner. Langbein uses ‘torments’ for all private and public torments inflicted on prisoners that are not meant to extract information but to inflict pain. I also use the term ‘supplice’, a word now rare in English but which came into use in the sixteenth century via the Latin ‘supplicium’, meaning a ‘religious sacrifice celebrated in the occasion of an execution to avenge the blood shed’. I make these distinctions on the basis of the seventy-six discharges of conscience I examined in Maria Pia Di Bella, La Pura verità. Discarichi di coscienza intesi dai Bianchi (Palermo, 1541–1820) (Palermo: Sellerio Editore, 1999), in which prisoners used



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the word ‘torments’ twenty-seven times, the word ‘torture’ fourteen times, but never the word ‘supplice’, this being used only by Francesco Maria Emmanuele et Gaetani [marchese di] Villabianca, ‘Cronostoria degli atti di giustizia che si sono eseguiti in Palermo si di mannaja che di forca sulle persone che rei di morte che han subito col conforto prestato loro a ben morire nella cappella della Compagnia de’ Bianchi cavatone il ruolo da’ libri di cancelleria di detta compagnia dal manoscritto che ne tiene il Paroco Lopez e da’ nostri altres Diari Palermitani Villabianca con principio in storia dal 1641 sino ai correnti tempi’, 1798, Opuscoli Palermitani, tomes XL et XLI, Biblioteca Comunale, Ms Qq E 116–17 ); Gioacchino Di Marzo, Biblioteca Storica e letteraria di Sicilia ossia Raccolta di opere inedite o rare di scrittori siciliani dal secolo XVI al XIX (Palermo: Luigi Pedone Lauriel, 1869), 28 vols; and Antonino Cutrera, Cronologia dei giustiziati di Palermo 1541–1819 (Palermo: Scuola Tip. ‘Boccone del povero’, 1917). Also, the prisoners sometimes associated the two words ‘torments’ and ‘torture’, such as ‘in the torments of torture’ or ‘in the torments of the strappado’ [see n. 31 for the meaning of strappado]. All this points to the observation that prisoners themselves drew a distinction between ‘torments’ and ‘torture’, and that spectators were the ones who mainly used the word ‘supplice’. In this chapter I use ‘torture’ for judicial torture, ‘torments’ for all inflictions of pain given to the prisoner with no intention of extracting information, and ‘supplice’ to express the point of view of spectators moved by the inflictions of pain and the brave behaviour of the sentenced ones, which reminded them of the martyrs or of Christ’s Passion. For the use of the terms ‘torture’ and ‘supplices’, see also Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). 4 The Bianchi Company was created in Palermo in 1541. It is historically linked to the Company of Santa Maria della Croce al Tempio, created in Florence in 1347. See Samuel Y. Edgerton Jr, Pictures and Punishment. Art and Criminal Prosecution during the Florentine Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); Adriano Prosperi, ‘Il Sangue e l’anima. Ricerche sulle Compagnie di giustizia in Italia’, Quaderni storici, 51 (1982), 959–99. In 1488, a group of expatriate Florentine aristocrats subsequently created a new company in Rome, the Arciconfraternita di San Giovanni Decollato (see Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment and Prosperi, ‘Il Sangue’) and later on in Naples (1519) the Compagnia di Santa Maria Sucurre Miseris. From Naples, Padre fra Pietro Paolo Caporella came to Palermo (1541) in order to convince the Viceroy, Don Ferrante Gonzaga, of the necessity to ‘comfort people sentenced to death by justice’ (Di Bella, La Pura verità, pp. 195–6). 5 Vincenzo Parisi, barone di Torre Bianca, Direttorio per l’esercizi del conforto della Cappella della Compagnia delli Bianchi di questa città di Palermo. 4th printing. (Palermo: Reale Stamperia, 1787). 6 The seven themes of meditation were the Creation of Man, Sin, Death, Communion, Judgment, Hell and Paradise. 7 See Adriano Prosperi, Delitto e perdono. La Pena di morte nell’orizzonte mentale dell’Europa cristiana, XIV–XVIII secolo (Turin: Einaudi, 2013), for an updated version of the ‘justice’s spectacle’, pp. 353–78.

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8 Cutrera, Cronologia dei giustiziati di Palermo 1541–1819. 9 Jacques Chiffoleau, ‘Dire l’indicible. Remarques sur la catégorie du nefandum du XII° au XV° siècle’, Annales ESC (March–April 1990), 289–324. 10 Denis Mack Smith, A History of Sicily. Medieval Sicily 800–1713 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969), p. 167. In 1608, Rocco Febo – the chief hangman in Palermo – was first hanged, then burned, in Piano della Marina. And ‘by the 1590s, … even higher officials of the Holy Office could no longer be protected from the royal courts if they were themselves accused of homosexuality’, p. 168. 11 See Giovanna Fiume, La Vecchia dell’aceto. Un processo per veneficio nella Palermo di fine Settecento (Palermo: Gelka, 1990), for an account of the famous trial of the poisoner Giovanna Bonanno, executed in Palermo 30 July 1789. 12 The word ‘patient’ comes from the Middle English pacient, from Anglo-French, from Latin patient, patiens, from present participle of pati to suffer; perhaps akin to Greek pēma suffering. First known use: fourteenth century. Its synonyms are: forbearing, long-suffering, stoic (or stoical), tolerant, uncomplaining (Merriam-Webster, www.merriam-webster.com, 27 December 2014). 13 Di Bella, La Pura verità, pp. 74–9. 14 Glen W. Bowersock, Martyrdom and Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 15 Antonino Mongitore, ‘Chiesa della Madonna degli Agonizzanti’, in Mongitore, Storia sacra delle Chiese di Palermo, vol. III (Biblioteca Comunale, Ms Qq E 9, XVIII°), pp. 366–72; see also the more recent Francesco Lo Piccolo, ‘Per la storia della congregazione e della chiesa di Maria SS degli Agonizzanti in Palermo’, Atti della Accademia di Scienze Lettere e Arti di Palermo (1994–95), 1–44. 16 G. Daddi, San Matteo vecchio e nuovo. Le due chiese (1088–1633) e l’unione del Miseremini (Palermo: St. Tip. Giuseppe Di Giorgi, 1916). 17 M.C. Di Natale (ed.), Le Confraternite dell’Arcidiocesi di Palermo. Storia e arte (Palermo: Edi Oftes, 1993), pp. 306, 327. 18 Michel-Jean Picard, ‘Croix (chemin de)’, Dictionnaire de spiritualité ascétique et mystique. Doctrine et histoire (Paris: Beauchesnes, 1953), t. II, pp. 2578–6. 19 B. Brown, ‘Way of the Cross’, New Catholic Encyclopedia (San Francisco: Mac Graw Hill Book Company, 1967), vol. XIV, p. 832. 20 The Franciscans were the main organisers behind all these initiatives. At the end of the fifteenth century, they also had the idea of constructing a ‘New Jerusalem’ – the Sacromonte – a kind of Grévin Wax museum representing the key moments of Jesus’s life with life-sized mannequins. Sacrimonti can still be found in North Italy; the best known is in Varallo. See Alessandro Nova, “ ‘Popular” Art in Renaissance Italy: Early Response to the Holy Mountain at Varallo’, in C. Farago (ed.), Reframing the Renaissance. Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America 1450–1650 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 113–26, 319–21. 21 Hans Belting, The Image and Its Public in the Middle Ages: Form and Function of Early Paintings of the Passion [Das Bild und sein Publikum in Mittelalter: Form und Funktion früher Bildtafeln der Passion, 1981], trans. Mark Bartusis and Raymond Meyer (New Rochelle, NY: Aristide D. Caratzas Publisher, 1990).



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22 Piero Fiorelli, La Tortura giudiziaria nel diritto comune, 2 vols. (Milano: Giuffrè, 1953), p. 85 n. 7; p. 94 n. 32; pp. 183–4; p. 203 n. 73; p. 249 n. 36; p. 264 n. 43. 23 See Giuseppe Pitrè, Usi e Costumi Credenze e Pregiudizi del Popolo Siciliano, 1870–1913, 4 vols (Bologna: Forni Editore, 1980), vol. IV, pp. 4–25. 24 Di Bella, La Pura verità. 25 An ordeal may be defined as a method for deciding a suspected person’s guilt or innocence by subjecting him to a physical test, such as plunging his hand into boiling water. His forbearance or quick recovery was taken as a divine acquittal. 26 Langbein, Torture and the Law of Proof, p. 6; see also Edward Peters, Torture (London: Blackwell, 1986), p. 42. 27 Inquisitio: search, investigation, judicial or official inquiring. 28 Langbein, Torture and the Law of Proof, p. 6. 29 Peters, Torture, p. 65. 30 Baber Johansen, ‘Vérité et torture: ius commune et droit musulman entre le Xe et le XIIIe siècle’, in Françoise Héritier (ed.), De la violence (Paris: Editions Odile Jacob, 1996), pp. 142–3 ; see also Yan Thomas, ‘ “Arracher la vérité”. La Majesté et l’Inquisition (Ier–IVe siècles après J.-C.)’, in R. Jacob (ed.), Le Juge et le jugement dans les traditions juridiques européennes. Études d’histoire comparée (Paris : Librairie Générale de Droit et de Jurisprudence, 1996), pp. 15–41. 31 Peters, Torture, p. 59. 32 The discharges of conscience were transcribed by the Bianchi in the third person. 33 Succaro: ‘torture’ in Sicilian. 34 Strappado: during judicial torture, the prisoner was elevated one or two feet above the ground by a rope hung from a wheel. The prisoner’s hands were tied behind his back and, from time to time, he was suddenly dropped to the ground. 35 Di Bella, La Pura verità, p. 82. 36 Ibid. 37 In Milan, in June 1630, Guglielmo Piazza was seen by two women rubbing his hand against a wall while walking in a street. The fear of the plague was so strong in Milan after 1576 that Piazza was immediately accused of spreading a mortal unguent in order to spread the pestilence in the city. Imprisoned, tortured, questioned and summoned to reveal the truth, Piazza accused the barber Mora of having given him the unguent. The two men were sentenced to death and executed on the first of August. A column, called la colonna infame (the infamous column), was raised on the place of execution to stigmatise their deeds in the collective memory. In 1778, this same column was dismantled. For a thorough rendition of the trial, see Alessandro Manzoni, Storia della colonna infame, con una nota di Leonardo Sciascia (Palermo: Sellerio Editore, 1981); also Giuseppe Farinelli and Ermanno Paccagnini (eds), Processo agli untori, Milano 1630: cronaca e atti giudiziari in edizione integrale (Milano: Garzanti, 1988). 38 Di Bella, La Pura verità, p. 82. 39 Ibid. 40 Adriano Prosperi, Tribunali della coscienza: Inquisitori, confessori, missionari (Turin: Einaudi, 1996), p. 479.

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41 The Capitoli cappella was a book written and regularly updated by the Compagnia dei Bianchi containing the regulations to be followed in the prison chapel. Here, I refer to the 1652 and 1766 editions [Capitoli della Compagnia de’ Bianchi da osservarsi nella Cappella de’ Condannati a Morte. Riformati nell’anno 1652 (Ms XVIII, in-4°, Biblioteca Comunale, Qq D 177), and Capitoli disposti per il buon regolamento della Cappella de’ Condannati della Compagnia de’ Bianchi della Città di Palermo, nell’anno 1766. Nel governo de’ Signori Gaetano Cottone Principe di Castelnuovo Governatore (Ms, Archivio Storico Comunale, IV A 63)]. 42 Di Bella, La Pura verità, p. 190. 43 Ibid., p. 187. 44 In an article first published in Prometeo, 1999, no. 68, 98–104, and reproduced in Maria Pia Di Bella, Dire ou taire en Sicile (Paris: Le Félin, 2008), pp. 61–74, I suggest that the idea and practice of omertà in Sicily may have been born among the Bianchi in the form of a ‘pious omertà’. 45 For further discussion on forum internum, see Paolo Prodi, Una Storia della giustizia: dal pluralismo dei fori al moderno dualismo tra coscienza e diritto (Bologna: Mulino, 2000); see also Baber Johansen, ‘Vom Wort- zum Indizienbeweis: die Anerkennung der richterlichen Folter in islamischen Rechtsdoktrinen des 13. und 14. Jahrhunderts’, Ius commune, 28, 1–46, and his ‘Vérité et torture’, pp. 123–68. 46 The episode of the bandit Catinella can be read in F.M.E. and G. Villabianca, Opuscoli Palermitani, vol. XL, pp. 296–9, that Cutrera, Cronologia dei giustiziati di Palermo 1541–1819, reproduces on pp. 238–9. Giuseppe Pitrè inserts, among his Canti popolari siciliani, 2 vols (Palermo, 1870–1913 [reprint: Bologna, Forni Editore, 1979] ) a song written to glorify this bandit, titled ‘Salta-le-viti’, vol. II, pp. 131–4. 47 Mongitore, ‘Chiesa della Madonna degli Agonizzanti’, pp. 366–72. 48 The narrative of Girolamo Matranga (1658) was translated by Ian Thomson in Leonardo Sciascia’s Death of an Inquisitor and other Stories (Manchester: Carcanet, 1990), pp. 50–65. I generally followed Thomson’s translation of Matranga with minor changes. I would like to thank Thomas Haskell Simpson for summarising the paragraphs in question. 49 Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption. Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991). 50 Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). 51 See Maria Pia Di Bella, Essai sur les supplices. L’état de victime (Paris: Hermann Editeurs, 2011) for the contemporary use of the word ‘victim’. 52 An extremely detailed account of the event can be found in L’Atto Pubblico di Fede Solennemente Celebrato Nella Città di Palermo à 6 Aprile 1724 dal Tribunale del S. Uffizio di Sicilia, Dedicato Alla Maestà C. C. di Carlo VI Imperadore e III. Re di Sicilia. Descritto Dal D. D. Antonino Mongitore Canonico della Cattedrale Metropolitana Chiesa della stessa Città, Consultore e Qualiflcatore di detto S. Uffizio. In Palermo M.DCC.XXIV [1724]. Nella Regia Stamperia d’Agostino, ed Antonio Epiro, Familiari, ed Impressori del medesimo Tribunale. Con licenza de’ Superiori (available as an ebook, Progetto Manuzio,



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www.liberliber.it/mediateca/libri/m/mongitore/l_atto_pubblico_di_fede_ solennemente_celebrato_nella_cit_etc/pdf/l_atto_p.pdf). 53 I would like to thank Thomas Haskell Simpson for translating and summarising these paragraphs from Chapter 16 of Mongitore’s Atto Pubblico di Fede. 54 See William Henry Smyth’s Memoir Description of the Resources, Inhabitants, and Hydrography of Sicily and its Islands interspersed with antiquarian and other notices (London: John Murray, 1824), pp. 80–1. 55 Pitrè, Usi e Costumi Credenze e Pregiudizi del Popolo Siciliano, pp. 4–25. 56 E.S. Hartland, ‘The Cult of Executed Criminals at Palermo’, Folk-Lore. A Quarterly Review of Myth, Tradition, Institution and Custom, vol. XXI (1910), 168–79. 57 Pitrè, Usi e Costumi Credenze e Pregiudizi del Popolo Siciliano, p. 10, mentions that the church was restored from 1857 to 1865, but does not mention any work done in November 1881. 58 Following execution, a commoner’s corpse was often separated from its head. References to the ‘beheaded bodies’ souls’ are made to the bodies of commoners, not to those of aristocrats, who were buried elsewhere, generally in the family vault. The prayer to the beheaded bodies’ souls also includes persons who were assassinated or drowned. 59 The carbonari were members of a secret political society with liberal republican aims, originating in South Italy about 1811 and particularly engaged in the struggle for Italian unification (Reverso). 60 See ‘Spedizione dei Mille 1860/1861-Palermo-Campagna di Sicilia-Località rese memorabili da fatti di guerra’, in grifasi-sicilia.com/palermostoriadeimille; www. grifasi-sicilia.com/storiadeimilleprimapagina.html, accessed 23 January 2017; M.I. Finley, Denis Mack Smith and Christopher Duggan, A History of Sicily (London: Chatto & Windus, 1986); Lucy Riall, Sicily and the Unification of Italy: Liberal Policy and Local Power, 1859–1866 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); and G.M. Trevelyan, Garibaldi and the making of Italy (London: Longmans, 1911). 61 See Leda Melluso, ‘Quando i palermitani perdevano la testa’, La Repubblica, 30 May 2002, http://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2002/ 05/30/quando-palermitani-perdevano-la-testa.html, accessed 22 January 2017. The address of the church is: via Decollati 2/C, 90135 Palermo. 62 The majority of the serious and important websites on Palermo dedicate part of their site to the Church of the Souls of the Beheaded Bodies and the cult that still goes on around it. The best web pages are listed below, with their authors given in brackets: palermonascosta.blogspot.com/2011/08/anime-decollatee-un-cippodimenticato [Paolo Fabio Ceraulo, and Federico Ferlito]; palermonascosta.blogpost.com/2011/10/fuochi-serasmo-ma-non-dartificio [Paolo Fabio Ceraulo]; ottocentosiciliano.weebly.com/18chiesa-armi-decollati.html#.VG5COxyaIpc [Carlo Mannino]; grifasi-sicilia.com/palermostoriadeimille [Angelo Grifasi]; balarm.it/articoli/le-anime-sante-dei-corpi-decollati.asp#.U-QQrxyaK4A [Lucio Forte];

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amopalermo.com [Gabriele]; palermodintorni.blogspot.com/2014/06/chiesa-di-maria-ss-del-carmelo-gia; palermoviva.it/le-anime-dei-decollati [Maria Floriti]; vacanzesiciliane.net/storie-di-sicilia-i-decollati-del-fiume-oreto-palermo [Martina Callari]; unipa.it/monumentodocumento/web/html/archivio/studi/sabato/congreg. html, all accessed 10 November 2014. 63 See the blogspot palermonascosta.blogspot.com/2013/10/una-domenica-mattinatra-ponti-e- mulini [Paolo Fabio Ceraulo]. 64 See mobilitapalermo.org/mobpa/tag/ponte-bailey, accessed 15 November 2014. 65 ‘Lavori per il tram a Palermo, spunta un antico ponte’, Giornale di Sicilia, 19 August 2014.

11

The economics of pain: pain in Dutch stock trade discourses and practices, 1600–1750 Inger Leemans

In 1720, the first international stock exchange crisis hit the financial markets of Paris, London and the Dutch Republic. The ‘mass hysteria’ seems to have fascinated, bewildered and outraged the public. Hundreds of pamphlets, theatre plays and allegories were printed, translated and distributed across the countries involved in the South Sea Bubble, the Mississippi scheme, or wind trade, as the crisis would be referred to in England, France and the Netherlands, respectively. The engravings made in these hectic months show us a violent world of finance, a hubbub of greedy buyers, who in their uncontrollable desire to acquire riches stamp on each other’s feet and get into each other’s hair.1 The violence in the images is striking, while the accompanying texts try to convince the reading public, often satirically, sometimes with empathy, of the pain the traders must have felt when losing their capital. While scholars researching pain sometimes think about pain in terms of ‘economics’ – in terms of balancing or managing pain, or mental health care costs – little attention has been given to pain in economic theory and practice.2 Cultural histories of pain analyse the phenomenon in the context and terms of science, religion, politics, law, language, literature, arts, etc., but they seem to have little interest in the way pain might have functioned in the realm of commerce and trade, nor how economic discourses might have informed discourses on pain.3 This chapter will explore the role pain played in stock trade discourses in the early modern Dutch Republic. Did stock trade always hurt as much as it did in 1720, or were extreme violence and pain dependent upon speculation and financial crises? Did Dutch policymakers try to regulate bourse practices in order to avoid pain? If stock trade hurt, where did it hurt: throughout the body, in certain limbs or veins, or specifically in the soul? What roles were attributed to pain in the early modern economy? To find answers to these questions, we cannot rely on economic treatises: up until

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the eighteenth century, they were still rare, especially (and maybe surprisingly so) in the Dutch Republic.4 We do, however, have a rich collection of visual material, poems, theatre plays and other literary texts about the Amsterdam stock exchange and stock trade to help us trace the pain spots of stock trading. Doux commerce – cold capitalism As Western Europe embraced the ideal of the Homo oeconomicus, with rational interest as the driving force of economic processes, passionate behaviour seemed to contradict economic processes and progress.5 To liberals and neoliberals capitalism was the rational system where merchants following their interest in a free trade environment would always make the best choices. Marxists and socialists, on the other hand, labelled capitalism a cold system: a money-based system that deprived people of their happiness and affections towards their trade. The result was comparable: a separation of economics from affects or emotions. In recent years economics seems to have taken an affective turn. Economists have started to point out that our hypermodern, hyper-capitalistic lives are hyperemotional. A new field of ‘emotionomics’ is on the rise, researching how ‘animal spirits’ drive economic processes, while emotions are being commodified.6 If we take this affective turn in economics as a starting point for historical analysis, we might also become more interested in violence and pain as formative elements in the history of trade practices and discourses. Obviously this line of research has been pursued by scholars of colonial history, slave trade, and mercantilism, as well as those who research the growing awareness of the darker sides of ‘la doux commerce’ in the early modern period.7 This painful history of trade, however, is sometimes hard to connect with domestic discourses of commerce. The Amsterdam Stock Exchange will be presented here as an example. From its foundation in 1611, the Amsterdam bourse was a major point of interest for merchants, Dutch citizens, tourists, poets, artists and publishers. Although their interests could diverge, they all seemed to agree on the peacefulness of this commercial hub. Its orderliness would become a trademark of the Amsterdam stock exchange, celebrated and repeated in many pictures, in odes and descriptions. Absence of violence and pain is guaranteed. Engravers and poets take as their theme the fact that the Amsterdam stock exchange is the heart of world trade. Commerce is analysed in terms of bodily fluids and health. The Dutch poet Vondel describes the flux of international traders as surges of blood coursing from and to the stock exchange.8 All this traffic is performed in supreme harmony, the images and texts suggest. Trade is depicted as a matter of human transactions, a game of supply and demand, to which the viewer can gain a close connection. In a famous bourse painting by Emanuel de Witte, we are invited to take part in an active but clearly



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11.1  Anonymous engraving, ‘Desperate traders in the exchange of Amsterdam / The Wind traders are paid with wind, if the last will still hang’, 1720

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also very peaceful trade. The faces of the traders are serene, controlled. They keep a proper distance during their transactions. Violent trade in Antwerp The Dutch engravers and poets could and did build on an established tradition of bourse depictions, mainly of the Antwerp exchange. Just as in Amsterdam, the Antwerp exchange from its foundation in 1531 had been depicted as a serene and orderly location for trade. Although the inner square is crowded, and trade is perceived as a dynamic interaction among people, and although we can clearly see that some merchants came to the bourse armed, the commercial and social exchanges on the bourse floor seem to be quiet and peaceful. However, research conducted in the archives may easily contradict this idyllic fiction. The Antwerp city records show that the bourse must have been a rather violent place indeed. The city records are filled with ordinances and bylaws to regulate the violence between traders or to ban other violent or disorderly behaviour. Children played games of chance at the stock exchange

11.2  Anonymous engraving, ‘Apollo’s sentence over the bubbles’, 1720



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and had fights about them. Carvings were made in the walls, and various parts of the building were damaged. Knives and swords were kept loose in their scabbards and repeatedly the municipal authorities threatened to sever hands or fingers in order to prevent fights. The traders seem to have been in mortal danger in and around the stock exchange. A short list of violent conflicts between Flemish and international traders populating the stock exchange can be indicative: 1540, 3 November 1542, 17 October 1543, 9 February 1551, 1 December 1561, 21 March 1562, 8 April

Attempt on the life of Louis Mendes, Portuguese, at the Exchange, by Louis Fernandes and his minions. Conflicts among traders at the Exchange On leaving the Stock Exchange, Simon Turchi is attacked and wounded. Murder of Leonarda Ronco, trader of Cremona, on leaving the Exchange, by Mario Antonio Bonsignori. Murderous fights at the Exchange, between Bartholomew Charravelesco, Genoese, and Bernardo Buxio, Milanese. Addition to police regulations of the Exchange, to wit: prohibition of short sticks or other weapons under caps or capes.9

The list goes on like this. From the 1570s on, new violence was introduced as the Antwerp exchange became the sad stage of the Spanish Fury, the French Fury, fires and inquisition executions. According to an early history of the stock exchange, around 1600, the Antwerp bourse was: a daily wrestling ground, where many people settle their differences or revenge their wrongs instead of trading, and for that reason, most of the traders only came to the Exchange armed with sticks and knives, and had themselves followed by their servants or hired vagrants, who had to wait for them in the streets leading to the Exchange; These people even entered the floor of the Exchange and then terrible fights broke out.10

Amsterdam order? From this perspective, it is entirely understandable that the Amsterdam exchange, which opened its doors in 1611, would try to avoid similar painful incidents. Right from the beginning, there were strict rules regarding what hours the stock exchange could be open. After that time no traders could enter; violators would be punished with a fine. A stock exchange servant was officially installed to levy these fines, and when necessary even demand the clothing of the perpetrator as collateral. In a corner of the exchange, the police had its offices, and there was even a cell in the building to lock up those unwilling to submit.11 The Amsterdam city board had their own private chamber on the first floor of the exchange, so by looking down they could

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11.3  Anonymous engraving, ‘Greed attempts to overtake Fortune’, 1720

keep an eye on trade practices and engage in them themselves. At the end of trading hours, the traders had to leave the premises and were even prohibited from staying in the neighbourhood of the stock exchange and conducting unregulated street trade.12 Historians point out that the relative peace of the Amsterdam exchange may have been assured not only by discipline and punishment, but also by strict economic regulation.13 This was of special importance for stock trade: a newcomer on the exchange floor. From the very establishment of stock trading in 1602, when the Dutch East India Company (VOC) started to issue stocks, a lively trade in securities developed. Around 1640 stock trade practice had evolved into what Lodewijk Petram has called the very first modern securities market. This market was characterised by a constant push and pull between financial innovation and regulation. On various occasions, the Amsterdam authorities tried to prevent speculative trade. Also, merchants self-regulated by founding trading clubs with controlled membership. These clubs often traded stock outside of the bourse, in coffee shops, cafes, or on the Dam square.14 Petram stresses that this ‘outside’ stock trade was just as



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orderly as the stock trade performed on the bourse. The overheating of the passions was prevented through a well-functioning ‘moral economic system’ of balancing risk, trust and honour, which prevented merchants from doing damage to their wallets, status or feelings. Historians therefore seem to agree with the early modern Dutch self-image of trade as an orderly, peaceful and well-balanced system of risk, morals and profit.15 Crisis A bigger contrast with the cultural representation of stock trade in the 1720s is hardly conceivable. Suddenly, the quiet stock exchanges and other trade locations have become the field of uncontrolled violence and severe suffering. Bodies of traders tumble on top of each other, traders are fighting with fists and swords, mobs are crushing people at sales points of stocks and bonds. Blood, sweat and tears splash from the pages of The Great Mirror of Folly (1720), a collection of prints, broadsides, poems and theatre plays composed as commentary upon the speculative stock trade. How can we explain this sudden transition and was it really this sudden?

11.4  Bernard Picart, ‘Monument to posterity in remembrance of the incredible folly of the year 1720’, 1720

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The specifics of these crises will not be elaborated on here. Since the three different countries concerned (France, England, the Netherlands) were each involved in the bubble trade for different reasons, the crises followed different paces and had different results in these three countries. In general, France and England tried to solve their state budget problems (both governments had large debts) by using overseas trade companies to sell bonds and trading stocks for shares in the state debt. In France, the mastermind behind this plan was John Law, a Scottish adventurer and a financial wizard, who initially offered his services to the English government. They turned him down, but the French crown warmly welcomed him. Law promised all potential stock buyers an enormous profit, accruing from the surplus made in the trade with the Americas. At first the system worked and the price of the ‘actions’ (as the bonds were called) skyrocketed. In London, the directors of the South Sea Company used the same trick, by hyping their company’s profits. Soon new companies were founded that also marketed shares in their projected profits. The projects of these companies became increasingly unreliable. In the Dutch Republic a company was founded to dig a canal from Utrecht to the Zuiderzee, in order to create an international harbour in Utrecht, in competition with Amsterdam. No spade was ever put in the ground, and after a while nobody cared: what counted was the fact that stocks were up.16 Most of the trading in these shares was not conducted at the stock exchanges, but at coffee houses, or in the streets. The most famous coffee house was in Paris (which did not yet have an official stock exchange) in the Rue de Quincampoix (French Wall Street). In Amsterdam, one of the few Dutch cities where it was prohibited for a trader to sell shares he did not actually own, the trade was conducted on the Dam square or at a Kalverstraat coffee house also called Quincampoix. In the summer, all the bubbles burst, the stocks fell, and the companies were bankrupted or just vanished, as did the traders, who fled to other countries, or to sanctuaries such as Vianen and Culemborg in order to avoid paying their debts.17 Apart from the disaster for the ruined traders, the financial consequences, however, do not seem to have been that ruinous for all groups involved. In the Netherlands, in particular, the number of bankruptcies was insignificant.18 But interestingly, it was in this country that intellectually the bubble seems to have had the greatest impact. The relatively mild crisis in the Dutch Republic caused an impressive cultural outburst. Examining the Dutch pamphlet bubble, it becomes clear that most of the texts and images are ‘doing pain’, to borrow a concept of Joanna Bourke.19 Pain is an essential category through which the commentators tried to analyse the specifics of the speculative trade in stocks and bonds. According to the commentators, speculative stock trade hurt on nearly all possible levels of the human mind and body, while causing pain to the trading community, the Dutch households and in the end to the nation as a whole.



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11.5  Anonymous engraving, ‘Harlequin as a shareholder’, 1720

The different levels on which pain is used in stock trade discourses will be analysed here. Historians analysing the South Sea Bubble pamphlets have stressed the satirical aspect of these texts and images. They are read as public comments, designed by non-traders, to mock the ‘madness of crowds’, discrediting paper trade in general as a foolish whim. However, we should be aware of

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the fact that the pamphlets seem to display various layers of meaning and could have functioned differently for different groups of readers. Some of the pamphlets seem to take stock trade seriously, trying to analyse why a branch of trade that had functioned well for over a century suddenly seemed to completely malfunction. How could merchants and the public distinguish between ‘normal’ stock trade and the speculative trade in actions of the year 1720? Mercury in distress: the stock trade community as a noisy killer-bee hive Authors found one answer to this question in the dynamics of trade and in the level of pain trade could inflict. Speed is used as a criterion to distinguish between good and bad trade. A pamphlet writer points out that famous trading centres such as Venice were not built in a day. They had ‘laboured for years before they became famous, and time and fortune had assisted them’.20 Amsterdam also owes her flowering to a slow process of growth, starting with Alva’s tyranny and the Fall of Antwerp. Therefore, good trade is slow trade. Good commerce has ‘essential foundations’. In 1720, the pace of trade had increased so much that traders lost control over their bodies, constantly crashing into each other. The engravings of the crisis do not depict simply the trade in actions (‘acties’), but the act of trading is also full of action. Flocks of stockbrokers swarm around, with each broker trying to be the first to get to a good deal, ignoring possible physical injuries to themselves and others. In their urge for profit, they push, shake, punch or trample each other: ‘De drift tot de Actiekost waar groot,/ Men dringt en trapt elkander dood’.21 Individuals lose control as the crowd seems to grow into a living, frightful and dangerous animal. The orderly beehive has turned into a swarm of killer bees, driven by desirhe for profit: Een derde meende na gedachten Veel winst te hebben, maer och arm Hy ziet ontsnapt den Byenzwarm, En wort in plaets van honig likken Door felle angels, die hem prikken22

The dramatic possibilities of unruly crowds certainly have fascinated Dutch engravers and authors. The wind trade inspired playwrights to innovative stagings. The bustle of the exchange floor could be vividly depicted on the stage. Fast and furious dialogues followed each other quickly. The cacophony of voices must have supplied the stage with a very topical, modern feature. The Dutch play Windhandel by Gysbert Tijssens begins in medias res with a speculation dialogue that must have sounded completely esoteric to the average audience member. Tijssens devotes several acts to the theatrical exploitation of stock trade. His stage becomes the coffee house where traders



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11.6  Anonymous engraving, ‘Allegory on the black bankruptcies as a result of the wind trade in the Amsterdam exchange’ / ‘In remembrance of the fickle wonder year 1763’

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outbid each other, screaming, seemingly possessed, in pursuit of the best deals. With short intervals, the characters follow each other, through bid, counterbid, to a volatile deal. The stock trader’s lingo is thrown about, while stock traders bid against each other like market vendors. ‘Edam! Dordrecht! Hoorn! Enkhuizen!’, ‘The South! The West! Barbados!’ This polyphony is enhanced by the fact that many different groups enter into the trade: men and women, ladies and maids, Jews and Walloons.23 The wildly agitated crowd hurts through sound and movements: ‘men raasd, men schreeuwd, men dringt / Om Acties, dat de menschen smooren, / Hier bruid de een den aâr om d’ooren.’24 Thus, the exchange has turned into a biblical scene. The flock of international merchants has created a new tower of Babel, with equal confusion as a result: … in ‘t midden van een dwaasen hoop; Die, als verwoede menschen raasen, en op malkanders beursen aasen. Ey ziet de Waal, de Staart. Hebreeuw, en Breemer Hans; Hoor welk geschreeuw, dat hier veel Nederlandsche Snaaken op ‘t groot Europisch loophos maaken, ‘t Is of men Babels toorenbouwd, door al de Taal van jong en oud …25

The violence and noise of the new speculative trade are personified in the person of Bombario: a new kind of harlequin with a hump that can be used as a desk to sign actions on. His name is derived from ‘bombare’ (cannon shots), and indicates both noise and turmoil. That the dangerous and painful new dynamics of action trade were perceived as a threat to the international merchant community and to the economy at large is depicted through the image of Mercury. In various images Mercury is in distress, depressed, subjugated or even trampled upon. He prays to the Gods of Parnassus: O goode van Parnas hebt met my ramp medoogen Gy weet myn smert en pyn my droefheit angst en druk Vertroost my droeve geest en geest my weer geluk Van zuyvere koopmanschap die nu zoo leit vertrede.26

Who hurts? Households and nations in pain In the Speculation plays the unruly and hurtful character of speculative trade is also dramatised by staging quiet and stable Dutch households that are invaded and destabilised by stock trade. In Quincampoix, a play by Pieter Langendijk, housewife Beatris complaints to her brother-in-law Eelhart that her husband Bonaventura wakes up in the middle of the night, crying ‘West’



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11.7  Anonymous engraving, ‘Rise and Fall of the Shareholders’ [‘Op- en Ondergang van de Actionisten’], 1720

or ‘Medemblik’ or ‘Edam!’ (Dutch cities that had founded new companies that had issued stocks). During the day, her peaceful household is rudely disturbed when her husband comes tramping in, followed by Jewish brokers, shouting like market vendors (‘The West, the West!’) and overrunning Bonaventura. The doctor will not come to heal Bonaventura’s broken bones, because the doctor also has entered the speculative trade.27 Speculative stock trade is found to be hurtful to the household, leaving injuries that cannot be healed. Stock trade also hurts on a higher level: the nation. In the plays and pamphlets, speculative trade is perceived as a national disaster, a cancer or plague ailing the nation, caused by an international epidemic: ‘de pest der Koopmanschap in Gysbregts Stadt ontstooken, / Door Fransche en Britsche lucht, en heillooze Eigenbaat’ (The plague of trade, ignited in Amsterdam by French and British air and self-interest).28 In the allegory Nederland in Gekheid (The Netherlands in Madness), hack writer Jacob Clyburg puts the

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Speculation in an historical overview of disasters suffered by the still youthful Maid of the Netherlands. The disasters that Clyburg sums up have a distinctly political colouring: the Maid of the Netherlands was already pestered by the Fall of Amsterdam under Gijsbrecht van Aemstel, then the executions of Egmont and Hoorne under the Duke of Alva’s tyranny, and the beheading of Van Oldenbarnevelt, ‘like a martyr on the horrible scaffold’, by ‘the princely head of state, transported into madness’. So the ‘cancer’ of the stock exchange is placed in a long series of violent attacks on the nation. Sick bodies We now have indicated three domains that had been hurt by stock trade: Speculation is depicted as a disease hurting the nation, as a violent invasion of the stable Dutch household, or as an injury to the merchant community, which transformed itself into a swarm of reckless and violent killer bees. In addition, pain is also ‘done’ at the level of the individual merchant. On this level, the domain of medicine functions as a dominant frame. Taking up the role of medical doctors, writers and engravers perform a thorough examination of all the physical and psychological ailments that plague stock traders. What does speculative trade do to the body? It creates gas. Merchants blow up as a result of the intake of idle winds: Al waard gy ook tot barstens toe Van eid’le Winden opgeblazen Dat gy al heigend, mat en moe, Niet deed dan roepen, schreeuwen, razen, Van pyn in darmen, maag en buik …29

This windy condition also leads the merchants to defecate heaps of paper. Sometimes they vomit stocks. Their bodies are obviously not equipped to take in that many stocks. Writers further explore the possible threats of paper to the body. Merchants burn their fingers on ‘hot’ stocks: Dees droevige Actionist, … voelt met groote smert zyn handen, Door ‘t branden van de Acties branden.30

Speculation thus hurts the intestines, the digestive system, the limbs and the fingers. Most of these illnesses are caused by the excessive urge for unreliable and possibly harmful assets. These burning desires, these wants of the mind, are viewed as needs of the body. A trader’s greediness is depicted as gluttony, which results in nausea and vomiting (of stocks). So finally, the merchants suffer from sincere headaches as a result of hangovers, or of all the worries that ail them. In the end, it is the head that seems to hurt most. Merchants’ heads can hurt because they are pulling out their hair in agony and grief, but they mostly hurt because Speculation is seen as a disease of the mind, a



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11.8  Anonymous engraving, ‘Mississipi, the land of gold famed for the wind trade’, 1720

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11.9  Anonymous engraving, ‘Battle between the Feasting Bubble Lords and the Coming Hardship’, 1720

temporarily madness. Traders in actions have been hit in the head by windmills: ‘grypvogel pikt / Myn herssen-vat, ter dood verschrikt. / De molen gaf me een zwaare slag’.31 How to cure a disease? The pain of healing How can such madness or illness be cured? The solution is simple: by hurting the patient. Many pamphlets depict merchants who hang themselves, simply die or run away from their financial disaster, e.g. by seeking shelter in the ‘safe’ cities Vianen and Culemborg. This course of action, however, is not perceived as the only or the best method of getting rid of the problems and improving trade practices. Many other cures are offered, which suggests that some authors were sympathetic to stock trade in general, as they wanted to



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shield it from possible harmful excesses. On the level of the individual merchant and his sick body and mind cures are suggested that seem extremely painful, but therefore might be effective, or just as ridiculous as the disease itself. Among the latter type of cures we have ‘keisnijden’, the extremely hurtful operation that cuts out the stone of foolishness from the head of the unfortunate trader. The motif of the stonecutter already had a long and respectful tradition, with artists like Pieter Bruegel and Hieronymus Bosch satirising the impossibility of curing madness through imaginary treatments. South Sea Bubble engravers revisit the theme to mock the traders and to emphasise the impossibility of curing the sincerely sick of mind. The other strategy for healing the sick might seem to be even crueller and more painful, but in the end, turns out to be a more promising cure than cutting out stones. Many pamphlets refer to criminal justice as a cure for the sick merchants. Merchants are put on the scaffold, tortured and hanged, or try to hang themselves. One of the most striking examples of this violent punishment is the famous, and probably only original, English engraving on the Speculation crisis: Emblematical Print of the South Sea, designed by William Hogarth and engraved by Thomas Cook.32 Taking over the theme of the construction of a monument for the folly of trade from Bernard Picart’s A Monument Dedicated to Posterity, Hogarth depicts a monument ‘erected in memory of the destruction of the city by the South Sea in 1720’. In this grim satirical image a winged devil with a scythe throws chunks of Fortune’s body to a greedy crowd, while Trade lies dead in the corner. The world seems to be upside down: Honour and Honesty are seen as crimes that are publicly punished by Self-interest and Villainy: flogged and broken on the wheel. Various religions have been seduced into play and have stopped caring for the community. The engraving thus uses images of public torture to stress that stock trade is a torment to honest commerce. In Dutch pamphlets similar interpretations are offered, for instance by depicting Mercury as tortured or subjugated, or by letting the allegorical character ‘The Netherlands’ cry out: ‘ô Actiehandel, die my pijnigt als een beul’ [o stock trade that pains me like a hangman].33 However, often it is not Mercury, Holland or Honest Trade, but the trader who is punished. The traditional reading of these violent images focuses on the distressed public that expresses its disgust and calls for justice. Merchants who hang themselves or jump out of the window get only what was coming to them. Justice and order are restored as the merchant community is purged of these excesses. Torture is justice, visited upon the stockbrokers by a public of outsiders. While this reading might be true, the images also seem to suggest another interpretation of all the suffering depicted. This reading pays more attention to the compassion invoked by all the graphic depictions of harsh punishment, panic, distress and physical suffering. As Joanna Bourke and Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen state in their histories of pain and compassion, one of the most

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11.10  Anonymous engraving, ‘The stonecutter of 1720 / Many have the stone in their head / because people believe in wind’

dominant domains for ‘doing pain’ in the early modern era was religion. Early modern pain discourses often see pain as an instrument for evoking compassion and creating communities of suffering. Catholics and Protestants strengthen their communities by sharing their spiritual ailments and by a repetition of physical suffering, for instance through the graphic depictions of martyrdom.34 Pain was not seen as an exogenous force, something that needs to be fought and overcome. Suffering was regarded as meaningful for the spirit of the individual and for the community at large. ‘The belief that bonds of sociability are strengthened through suffering was commonplace’ states Bourke as she describes how communication of pain could help forge communities of sympathy. ‘The idea that pain fulfilled a positive spiritual function in the lives of individuals and humanity’ prevailed. ‘Pain was restorative, not destructive.’35 With this context in mind, the violent punishments in the South Sea Bubble engravings reveal yet another layer: a layer in which compassion is evoked for the sufferers, and trade is not purged from stock jobbery, but brokers are again welcomed by the community. The constant moans and



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11.11  Anonymous engraving, ‘The greedy world, 1720 / Reflexion on the greedy world, from the outset rise and fall of the stock market’

laments of the traders are not only funny; they also try to evoke a sense of shared suffering: Stock traders, do not be disheartened! Since you are of your goods disburdened, Of all your money, name and honour. You’ll find some other means of succour.36

Traders are in it together, and although most of the authors of the pamphlets seem to be outsiders, they do perceive the trade community as part of Dutch society, and they are therefore determined to heal this sickness. They beg heaven for restoration of the trade community: O, Heaven grant that in these parts No further misadventure starts, That Noble Trade once more can flourish, Such is every Batavian’s wish.37

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The pamphlets try to offer solace to the damaged traders. In Mirror of Reason the allegorical figure of reason stops a stockbroker in despair from stabbing himself in the heart. Reason stresses that the merchant is just a victim, and helps the poor fellow by shielding him from further danger and violence.38 Other pamphlet authors offer medicine for the traders overcome by speculation sickness, for instance in the form of an amnesia potion, that will help traders forget all their pains: My friends, don’t take me for a fool! These stocks, craftily gilded by the cruel Master Law, will in effect Now be the noose around our necks.39

Confusion de confusions Taking the various elements of pain conceptualisation in wind trade pamphlets into account, we can conclude that pain is perceived as an important element in understanding stock trade practices. Sometimes pain is seen as an exogenous force, while the very presence of pain is analysed as an indication of stock trade taking a turn in the wrong direction. The difference between good and bad trade is measured along the lines of hurting. Speculation is depicted as a violation of the individual merchant, the household, the economy or the nation. However, on another level pain also becomes instrumental in the healing process. Communities of suffering are shaped. Pamphlets try to evoke compassion with the sufferers, prevent them from further hurting themselves and help them to learn from this painful episode or to leave it all behind. In the end, order is restored and Dutch merchants can again help to strengthen the nation with their stock trade practices. Does this mean that pain should be absent from stock trade? Not at all. Stock trade treatises from before and after the 1720s see pain as an inherent element of stock trade: traders experience pleasure in financial gains, but will always hurt from losses, both financially and morally, as major losses have negative effects on their honour, their mood, self-image and their social status. Stock trade practice concerns taking risks, trying to balance financial gains with personal pains. Stock trade should therefore be analysed as an affective economy, an economy in which pain plays an important role. The idea that pain is central to the affective economy of stock trade is also put forward by Confusion de Confusiones, the very first study on the stock trade, written in 1688 by the Portuguese-Jewish author Joseph de la Vega, a citizen of Amsterdam and someone with intimate knowledge of the Amsterdam stock market and bourse behaviour. This Spanish tract is written in the format of a dialogue between a trader, a philosopher and a speculator. Together they analyse the dynamics of the trade in actions. The dialogists pay ample attention to the operation of the passions and of pain in trade



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11.12  Anonymous engraving, ‘The world is a theatre, each plays his part and gets his due, 1720

processes. Pain appears to be an essential fact in early modern stock trade. Firstly, because of the push and pull of gains and losses: while each successful trade will give joy to one trader, it will hurt others because they have been unable to make the same trade, or because they made less profit from their goods than expected. But pain is not just a necessary evil; it is also a criterion for the dynamics of the trade. A good trader is receptive to pain. He uses his pain scale to measure the dynamics of trade and the possible gains and losses ahead. Here,

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De la Vega makes a comparison with ‘The Sybarites’ who in his opinion would have made horrible stock traders ‘because they are so used to all kinds of weather and the discomfort of all seasons, that, instead of waking them, the roosters hinder them, seeing someone digging makes them tired.’ Without the ability to feel pain, you cannot assess the situation and cannot react adequately.40 A good trader is also a master of his pain. He controls it and uses it as his tool. He should not be afraid of it: ‘The hedgehog, afraid of pain, holds back from giving birth, and when its innards burst, it has to endure the pain of death because it wanted to avoid the pain of giving birth. It is better to complain of pain than to be a corpse.’41 But it can be very dangerous to show the pain one endures: Another champion enters the fray with the desire to stand firm: he doubts what course to choose to get a profit, he bites his nails, out of sheer nervousness he rubs the skin off his fingers, he walks around four times giving four

11.13  Emblematic print on the South Sea Bubble by Thomas Cook, 1800, after a design of William Hogarth



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monologues, he presses his hand to his jaw as if he has a toothache, he scratches his forehead and accompanies this pantomime with a mysterious cough as if that could win him his triumph.42

Disaster ensues. The book emphasises how important it is that your colleagues cannot see the pain in your face. A good stock trader can resist the pain and act as if it does not hurt him. One of the vital tests in stock trade is waiting for the fatal blow. At the Amsterdam stock exchange, options and futures were traded. Sometimes, a trader could see his loss coming long before he had to redeem a promised purchase. At such a moment, it is important to fight against the pain. There are those who, on the day of reckoning, walk around so proudly as if their shroud were festive garb and the trading floor were a bridal suite, but since their heart and their face are brass, it is not surprising that their heart is not hurting and their face feels no shame, while their creditors are worse off than Tantalus, for they see the fruit, i.e. their happiness, and they cannot grasp it, even though it does not evade them.43

But here also, there is a limit. The stock trader should not break all thresholds of pain because that may be his downfall. Then, he becomes like the dog whelk: a snail with a hard, sharp tongue, which it introduces into the shell of other animals, who then wound it grievously to defend themselves. But to prevent losing its prey, it does not pull back its tongue, notwithstanding torturous pains. Ultimately, it becomes swollen from exertion and the snail is no longer able to pull it back. It dies from stubbornness and desire.44 I suppose De la Vega would have used the example of this small animal to analyse what went wrong in 1720: too many traders crossing their pain limits. Conclusion Research in the city archives and in stock trade treatises like Confusion de Confusiones teaches us that we should not ask why stock trade suddenly started to hurt around 1720, for it always did hurt – despite all the serene depictions of the stock exchanges. The question might be whether in speculation crises, traders lost their skills to be sensitive to pain and manage it correctly, thus hurting themselves, other traders, their households and the nation as a whole. We might have better hospitals in the twenty-first century, and cutting out stones should not be so hurtful any more, but we have not found a solution to this question yet. The answer could be found by researching finance in terms of affective economies, as a balancing of financial, moral, social and emotional gains and losses. We should historicise the ideology of the Homo oeconomicus, deconstruct early modern self-images of rational and orderly trade, and pay more attention to the painful and highly emotional aspects of the history of capitalism. Thus, we can highlight the inherent tension between the often painful

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11.14  Anonymous engraving, ‘Disastrous consequences of the stock trade, 1720. The spirit of the resurrected Heraclitus screams over the laughing stock of Democritus’

dynamics of the bourse floor and the disciplining strategies of the institutions of stock trade. Bringing economics to the history of pain not only helps to understand how pain is ‘done’ in the economic realm and in the context of stock exchanges, it also may help to analyse ‘economies of pain’ in terms of balancing pain with gains and losses, on the level of the individual as well as on the level of institutions or nations. The stock trade illustrations that present painful scenes to critique the practice and sensitivities of trade offer us a fine-grained analysis of the dynamics of pain on the level of the individual, the community, the institution of the bourse and the nation.



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Notes 1 Most of these pamphlets were collected in Het groote tafereel der dwaasheid. S.l., s.a.,1720. A recent publication on the South Sea Bubble and the ‘cultural bubble’ that followed, is W.N. Goetzmann, Catherine Labio and K. Geert Rouwenhorst (eds), The Great Mirror of Folly: Finance, Culture, and the Crash of 1720 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). 2 The most famous example of the concept of the ‘economics of pain’ stems from Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917), in Freud, On Metapsychology (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984). 3 Moscoso states ‘We could distinguish five broad spheres in which physical suffering acquired a certain visual pre-eminence in early modern Europe: the realm of punishment, the theological context, military activity, anatomical representation, and the practice of medicine.’ J. Moscoso, Pain: A Cultural History (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 19. J. Bourke, The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 4 Although the Dutch Republic is praised as ‘the first modern economy’, it did not develop a sizeable, internationally acclaimed school of economic theory. J. van Daal and A. Heertje (eds), Economic Thought in the Netherlands, 1650–1950 (Aldershot: Avebury Publishers, 1992). A counter example is K. Davids, ‘Economic Discourse in Europe between Scholasticism and Mandeville: Convergence, Divergence and the Case of the Dutch Republic’, in H. Busche (ed.), Departure for Modern Europe. A Handbook of Early Modern Philosophy, 1400–1700 (Hamburg: Meiner Felix Verlag, 2011), pp. 80–95. 5 A.O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). 6 Eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2007); Ute Frevert, ‘Gefühle und Kapitalismus’, in Gunilla Budde (ed.), Kapitalismus: historische Annäherungen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), pp. 50–72; George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Schiller, Animal Spirits. How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why it Matters for Global Capitalism (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009); William Nicholson, The Romantic Economist (London: Short Books, 2013); Dan Hill, Emotionomics: Leveraging Emotions for Business Success (London and Philadelphia: Kogan Page, 2008). 7 On the discourse on Doux Commerce and its darker sides see A.F. Terjanian, Commerce and its Discontents in Eighteenth-Century French Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 8 J. van den Vondel, Inwydinge van ‘t Stadhuis t’Amsterdam, ed. S. Albrecht (Muiderberg: Dick Coutinho, 1982), p. 82. 9 This information is derived from the Antwerp Gebodboeken (Book of Ordinances) and documents of the Privilegekamer (PK 2206, 2224, 2227) in the Antwerp City Archives. An index of the Gebodboeken was published in the Antwerpsch Archievenblad, first volume 1864, pp. 120–464. See on merchants, immigrants and crime: An M. Kint, ‘The Community of Commerce: Social Relations in Sixteenth-Century Antwerp’, Dissertation, Columbia University, 1996. Kint traces an overall rise in crime prosecution during the sixteenth century but a relative decline in crimes against persons in relation to crimes against property.

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10 ‘Anno 1600 was de beurs byna dagelyks een worstelperk, in het welk menige lieden, in plaets van handelszaken af te doen, hunne byzondere geschillen kwamen beslegten of eenig geleden ongelijk te wreken, weshalve de meeste kooplieden niet dan gestokt en gestaft naar de Beurs kwmaen, en zich tot meerder veiligheid deden volgen door hunne dienaren of door uitgehuurde landloopers, die hen in de straten naar de beurs leidende moesten afwachten; zelfs kwam dit volk soms op de beurs geloopen, en dan werd er tusschen twee partyen verschrikkelijk gevochten’ HSS privilegekamer PK 2206, anonymous Manuscript ‘Een kleine geschiedenis van de beurs’ (‘A Short History of the Exchange’). Gebodboek B, anno 1542, 17 October, fol. 4o. also lists that although it was forbidden to ‘injurieiren, obloqueren, invaderen, slaen, smyten, oft stooten’, many merchants and other people were ‘dreygene te slagene, te wuetsene, te invaderene ende oblatrarene gelyck noch op ghisteren gebeurt is’. 11 A general overview of stock trade history and the Antwerp and Amsterdam bourses can be found in Geert de Clerq, Ter beurze: geschiedenis van de aandelenhandel in België, 1300–1990 (Bruges: Van de Wiele, 1992). For a detailed description of the Amsterdam exchange, see P. Scheltema, De Beurs van Amsterdam (Amsterdam, 1846). For a more in-depth discussion of stock trade from a financial historical point of view: L. Petram, ‘The World’s First Stock Exchange: How the Amsterdam Market for Dutch East India Company Shares became a Modern Securities Market, 1602–1700’, Dissertation, University of Amsterdam, 2011. See also L. Petram, De Bakermat van de Beurs: Hoe in zeventiende-eeuws Amsterdam de moderne aandelenhandel ontstond (Amsterdam: Atlas, 2011). 12 Similar regulations were issued at the London Royal Exchange. R.C. Michie, The London Stock Exchange. A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 35. 13 Petram, ‘The World’s First Stock Exchange’. 14 Ibid. 15 This is also underlined in J.P.B. Jonker and O.C. Gelderblom, ‘Mirroring Different Follies, the Character of the 1720 Speculation in the Dutch Republic’, in W.N. Goetzmann, K.G. Rouwenhorst, C. Labio and T. Young (eds), ‘The Great Mirror of Folly’: Finance, Culture, and the Crash of 1720 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), pp. 121–40. 16 Many (speculative) books have been written about the ‘madness of crowds’. Recent studies that provide insightful perspectives are Malcolm Balen, A Very English Deceit: The Secret History of the South Sea Bubble and the First Great Financial Scandal (London: HarperCollins, 2002); Richard Dale, The First Crash: Lessons from the South Sea Bubble (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Larry Neal, The Rise of Financial Capitalism: International Capital Markets in the Age of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). For the Dutch situation: C.H. Slechte, ‘Een noodlottig jaar voor veel zotte en wijze’: de Rotterdamse windhandel van 1720 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982). 17 Slechte, ‘Een noodlottig jaar voor veel zotte en wijze’. 18 Jonker and Gelderblom, ‘Mirroring Different Follies’. 19 Bourke, ‘Introduction’, The Story of Pain. 20 Jacob Clyburg, Nederland in Gekheit: Staat en Zinnespel; op de Wind Negotie (S.l.: printed for the author, 1720).



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21 ‘De Verwarde Actionisten Torenbouw tot Babel’, Groote Tafereel, p. 32. 22 ‘Hebzucht probeert Fortuna in te halen’ (1720) (‘De Begeerlykheyt zoekt de Fortuin t’Achterhalen of voor by te Loopen’), Groote Tafereel, p. 58. 23 ‘Het dolhuis der actionisten. Farce’, Groote Tafereel, pp. 28–32. 24 ‘De Regte Afbeelding der Wind Negotie Gehouden in de Straat van Quinquempoix tot Parys’, Groote Tafereel, p. 17. 25 ‘De Wind Koopers met Wind Betaald, of de laaste zal blyven hangen’, Groote Tafereel, p. 7. 26 ‘De Laggende Law, De Treurende Actionist met de Smekende Mercurius’, Groote Tafereel, p. 54. 27 ‘Ze skei nou uit de kunst, hum is een heer ma foi!/ Ze ed duzend Louis d’or kewon in Quincampoix’. Langendijk, ‘Quincampoix’, Groote Tafereel, Part B, p. 19. 28 ‘Op de Pest der Windt-Negotie. Klinkdigt’, Groote Tafereel, vol. III. 29 ‘Bronwater of geneesmiddel voor de zieke Actionisten’, Het groote tafereel, p. 48. 30 ‘Uytslag der Wind Negotie’, Het groote tafereel, p. 14. 31 ‘De Verslagen Actionist in de stoel met rinkels’, Het groote tafereel, p. 21. 32 [London]: Published by Longman, Hurst, Rees & Orme, August 1, 1809. Original print: 1721. 33 Clyburg, Nederland in Gekheit. 34 Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen, Pain and Compassion in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2012). 35 Bourke, The Story of Pain, pp. 48–9, 129–30. 36 ‘Ach vrinden wil niet met my foppen, / Dewyl dat gy aan die Aktie stroppen / Van Meester Law heel fraai verguld, / Met my in ‘t kort ligt hangen zult’. ‘De Windverkopers of Windvangers, die door wind, verliezen Geld en Goed: bederven Vrouw en Kind’, Het groote tafereel, p. 5. 37 ‘O Hemel dat ons land vooral / Bevryd zy voor een verder val / En de Eed’le Koopmanschap doch hier / Herbloeye smeekt de Batavier’. ‘De Kermis-kraam, van de Actie-knaapen, Schaft vreugde, en droesheid, onder ‘t Kaapen’, Het groote tafereel, p. 12. 38 Jacobus Schijnvoet, Spiegel der Reden voor de wanhopende Actionist. Prent 34 in de serie. RP-P-OB-83.553 39 ‘Neen Actiehandelaars, schept moed! / Schoon dat gy zyt ontbloot van schyven, / Van eer, van naam, van geld, en goed, / Gy zult uw droefheid ligt verdryven’. Pieter van den Berge, Bronwater als geneesmiddel voor de zieke Actionisten, 1720. RP-P-OB-83.565 40 Joseph de la Vega, Confusion de confusiones. Ed. and introduction M.F.J. Smith, trans. G.J. Geers (Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1939), p. 202. 41 Ibid., p. 137. 42 Ibid., p. 99. 43 Ibid., p. 72. 44 Ibid., pp. 249–50.

Epilogue1 Javier Moscoso

The history of pain could not be written if the set of experiences we usually label ‘pain’ were simply identical to what neurologists call ‘nociception’. The distinction is not new. Charles Sherrington, a scientist of the early twentieth century, defined pain as ‘the psychical adjunct of a protective reflex’.2 We touch something hot and our brain triggers a reflex action that causes our hand to withdraw from the object and thus protect us from injury. This conceptualisation of pain has many similarities with the image provided by the French philosopher René Descartes in the mid-seventeenth century. From Sherrington’s point of view, however, this protective reflex component was not really or entirely what deserved to be named ‘pain’. From his perspective, this latter experience also involved what he called the ‘psychical adjunct’: the sensory and perceptual part that sometimes came along with the protective reflex and sometimes was present even without any visible lesion. If we understood pain as the neural processes that deal with protective reflexes – that is, if we understood pain as simply nociception – then, of course, the history of pain would be only a chapter of a wider ‘natural history’, related to the evolutionary formation of the nervous system. Once we agree, however, that pain is not just a reflex; once we assume that what we call pain is also a mental and emotional act – a sensory-perceptual process – then ‘how we match pain and nociception is very much a question of personal values well beyond the realm of science, at least until we know a lot more about the working of the brain’.3 This last citation comes from Fernando Cervero, former President of the International Association for the Study of Pain, who also adds: ‘Although nociception is easily approached with the scientific method, understanding human pain is, at present, beyond that method’s capabilities’. This book, for which I have had the honour to write this epilogue, explores a similar tension between the hurt body, as an immediate object of vision, and the hurtful body, understood as a much more intriguing, invisible



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and elusive experience. I would like to argue that the unresolved tension between the visualisation of violence and the experience of pain affects not only our understanding of human suffering and the more or less sophisticated way in which we may consider its cultural modulations or its natural settings. The elusive relationship between violence and suffering, between representation and object, between the victim and the beholder, also concerns our practice of history. Once accepted that the experience of pain is mediated by cultural and emotional elements, once agreed that pain is not simply an elementary sensation, there remain two important issues. On the one hand, what is at stake is how experience has been embodied, visualised or performed, how the local and cultural variations of human suffering actually work. On the other, the entrance of cultural history into the realm of harmful experiences has also produced a critical reflection on historical methods: a reconfiguration of the ways in which we could understand not just pain, but (its) history. By calling into question Cartesian dualism, histories of pain have cast aside many dichotomies: nature versus culture, reality versus construction, and subjectivity versus objectivity. But if the history of pain is not (only) a history of medical or philosophical theories; nor is it (only) a history of clinical or political practices related to its representation, its infliction or its care, the question should be: if the story of pain is history, what is this history about? Could it not be a boundless sense in which all emotional suffering would be part of this history? Could we not end up with the truism that all history is but history of pain? One way of solving these tensions has been to unravel the persuasive procedures that have historically been used to make sense of the experience of harm. By exploring the rhetorical tools employed to express, and experience, nociception as ‘pain’, historiography has moved from the seminal work of Elaine Scarry, based on philosophy of language, towards more anthropological sources of inspiration. This transition from the biomedical (or Cartesian) model of pain to the bio-cultural model of pain was always related to a shift in our conception of history. Despite their multiple variations, there must be a historical-anthropological presupposition from which we could explore the tensions between experiences and stories, between the harmful body and the harmed body, between a history of experiences and a history of their cultural configurations. Though these ideas have plenty of examples, pain studies, as they have flourished since the 1980s, provide a very good indication of this transformation of cultural experiences into historical knowledge. From poetics to politics From the point of view of its cultural dimension, pain is simply a drama. Underneath its different variations, suffering retains a dynamic structure that includes a moment of rupture that demands reparation. Those in pain inhabit a liminal space, an indeterminate region in which they wander between crisis

302 Epilogue and reconciliation. Those who suffer usually consider their pain as a transitory state that sooner or later should either cease or be remedied. This liminality of pain – a concept borrowed from the anthropology of experience – constitutes a recurring theme in the history of human suffering. The harmful body lives among shadows, between the human, the inhuman and the superhuman, between consciousness and unconsciousness. Sometimes the border is physical. On many occasions, however, liminality is merely symbolic: it affects witnesses rather than victims; it concerns those who watch, and who should not situate themselves too far from or too close to the stage of violence. As a drama, pain mobilises all the elements of theatrical representation. Pain performances have their actors, plots, stages, costumes and audiences. The theatricality of pain, either through performances, beholders or institutions, configures the over-learned emotional habits in which human suffering is both experienced and expressed. Representation, imitation, sympathy, trust, testimony, correspondence, coherence, narrativity, or reiteration are some of the rhetorical forms that enable the cultural configuration of pain.4 As this volume comes to suggest, the history of affection and affected bodies, of sexual masochism, but also of epicurean representations of pain, among many others, would all be incomprehensible without this tension between the unified form of experience we call pain and its cultural manifestations. Following in part the work of Austin, the historian William M. Reddy proposed a framework for thinking emotions that also had important consequences for the way in which many other subjective experiences could be accounted for. His proposal had at least two important advantages. First, it established a historical, explanatory dimension, which made the relationship between emotional regimes and emotional sufferings the quintessence of historical dynamics. Secondly, his seminal book on the navigation of feeling also allowed him to address the problem of political and moral judgement regarding the suffering of others.5 If what individuals ‘feel and think is overwhelmingly a product of socially organized modes of action and talk’, as anthropologist Michelle Z. Rosaldo wrote in 1984, then we should clarify how much influence we attribute to culture in shaping this experience and how that influence could be explained in historical dynamics. Reddy was a pioneer when it came to observing the limits of culturalism in the history of experience and the need to establish some guiding principle beyond the belief in a unique (biological) nature. Both problems are clearly present in any history of pain. On the one hand, the cultural history of cruelty does not equal the cultural history of the wounded body. Quite the contrary: representation rests very often on a gap between the field of physical injury and the emotional reaction we would expect it to trigger. In other words, the hurt body does not always seem to be in pain or subjected to a ruthless subjugation. The relation between the history of violence and pain history look askance, for in the same way that we know that there is nociception



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without pain, we have also come to understand that there is violence without awareness of pain. More importantly, pain also demands an observer and cannot exist without a regimen of beholding. From a purely descriptive point of view, the history of pain has always been embedded in more or less explicit forms of political awareness.6 It was mainly through the promise of a new social agreement between those affected differently by fortune; it was mainly through the understanding that what we call ‘consciousness’ is nothing more than the internalisation of social sympathy, that historians began to address the regimen of visibility or invisibility of the pain of others. From the Enlightenment, this category included not only close relatives or country-fellows, but also the destitute, the mad, the poor, the distant foreigner, children and to certain extent, animals. Despite its multiple variations, what we will find in the seminal works of Elaine Scarry, David B. Morris, Marcia Meldrum, or Rosalyne Rey, among many others, has been the drive to recover the experience of the vanquished, to listen to their words, to pay attention to their expressions, to sympathise with their ailments or to properly understand their miseries. What many of these historians did has been the side-effect or the correlation of what military surgeons or anaesthesiologists and neurologists did in the 1940s: extending the humanitarian gaze, taking the testimonies of patients at face value, calling into question not just the bio-mechanical model of pain, but also the bio-mechanical understanding of history. Pain and history The work of Reinhart Koselleck on the changing relationship between history and experience contains very valuable insights for all those interested in the historical forms of subjectivity.7 Since the relation between narrativity and experience changes historically, he argues, any inquiry into the history of historiography should be accompanied by a study of the different layers of experiences. And conversely, any historical inquiry into the cultural forms of experience should take into consideration their relationship with the methodological tools that made them possible. On the one hand, the historical epistemology of experience, the study of the harmful body, to employ the expression used by the editors of this volume, should take into account the historical forms of its conceptualisation, including the visual representation of violence. On the other hand, any cultural analysis of pain representations should also consider the layers of experience. Koselleck’s discussion is based on two different assumptions: first, history is, and remains, a science of experience. Secondly, experience is, and cannot be anything else than, historical. From this point of view, the genealogy of culture, which analyses the cultural forms of pain as symptoms of the body, remains merely the counterpoint to the (historical) epistemology of experience. In the first case, cultural materialisations are understood as expressions of our affects. In the

304 Epilogue second, the challenge consists in untangling the historical forms that configure the experience of harm. Koselleck draws a parallel between three forms of experience, from the most personal, unique, or what he calls ‘primal experience’, to the most collective and generic. In between, experiences are shared, expressed or repressed, remembered or forgotten, within what the historian Barbara Rosenwein has named emotional communities. For each of these layers, he identifies three different ways of writing history: the recording, the continuing and the rewriting. From the point of view of the history of pain, the difficulty has always been how to account for the first, most basic, form of experience, the kind of experience that seems inapprehensible and isolated. There are legions of historians and philosophers who have made this difficulty the great object of their intellectual endeavour, either to deny the communal characteristics of subjective experiences or, on the contrary, to vindicate some form of cultural construction. The text by Koselleck gives us the possibility to approach primal experiences by exploring their conditions of possibility. We may not be able to ‘feel the pain of past generations’, as Jonathan Sawday points out in Chapter 4, perhaps not even through the medium of metaphors or images, but we may still account for the material and immaterial circumstances that make that correlation possible. The difficulty lies no longer in how we can access private experiences, but how those experiences have been transformed into various means of historical representation. As Wilhelm Dilthey had done before him or as Michel Foucault would do later, we should begin by understanding that not all experience will be given the opportunity to become cultural or socially significant. In a very short piece about Nietzsche’s philosophy of history, the historian Foucault defended a form of genealogy from which we could locate the singularity of events, discern them vaguely where they were less expected, and find them in what seems to lack a history, like sentiments, emotions or instincts. Rephrasing a few texts included in Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, Foucault asked: ‘Do we believe in the universality of feelings? For all of them … have their own story’8. This genealogy, this form of writing history from ‘small truths without appearance’ was, in his view, far away from the metaphysical deployment of ideal significations and endless theologies. Genealogy, in his view, not only called into question the history of the origin but, more importantly, the origin of history, the manner by which a singular experience, even a trivial experience ‘without appearance of truth’, including a painful experience, could be turned into a story. In the case of Koselleck, the most trivial experience always results from a surprise, and contains only two elements: ‘before’ and ‘now’. Only the temporal structures, and that means the structures inherent in the context of events or in any case demonstrable in them, can adequately order the historical space of experience as a separate domain of research. Without this lack of continuity that divides the flow of life, there will not be significant



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experiences. And without them, no biography or history is possible. Since experiences can only be accumulated because they are repeatable, there must then exist long-term formal structures in history that would allow the repeated accumulation of experience. History is only able to recognise what continually changes, and what is new, if it has access to the conventions within which lasting structures are concealed. These too must be discovered and investigated if historical experience is to be transformed into historical science. In a sense, then, primal experiences are at the origin of both what we are and what we report. But this is not really so, since the reporting of primal experiences can only be achieved through a rupture in more general communal experiences, including those kinds of experiences that can only be accessed through professional historiographical tools and institutions. Pain may be felt in solitude, but it is never a solitary evil. The psychological adjunct to nociception, the kind of performances that we call pain, requires, as this book comes to suggest, beholders and institutions. The study of the hurt(ful) body of the past does not refer to an elusive entity, but to the historical forms of its constituency. When it comes to the study of pain, the real difficulty does not lie in how we can reach the most intriguing and hidden howls of the self. On the contrary, what is really intriguing is how an experience, a primal experience, became a story. Notes 1 This epilogue was written while I was Lurcy Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago. In addition, it has been carried out within the framework of the research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness: ‘Subjective and Objective Elements in the Cultural History of Wellbeing: 1750–1950’ (FFI2013-46361). 2 Quoted by Fernando Cervero, Understanding Pain (London: MIT Press, 2012), p. 1. 3 Ibid., p. 4. 4 Confronting the problem of suffering at a distance, the philosopher Luc Boltanski made reference to the topics of denunciation and resignation as general forms of collective response in the face of the spectacle of violence. See Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering. Morality, Media and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), Part II, ‘The Topics of Suffering’. See also Javier Moscoso, Pain: A Cultural History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 5 William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 6 See E. Gonzalez-Polledo and J. Tarr (eds), Painscapes: Framing Pain Communication (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming). 7 Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Transformation of Experience and Methodological Change. A Historical-Antropological Essay’, in Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 45–83. 8 M. Foucault, ‘Nietzsche. La généalogie et l’histoire’ (Valencia: Pretexos, 1997), p. 12.

Index

Note: ‘n.’ after a page reference indicates the number of a note or notes on that page. Notes are only referenced in the index when they contain additional information not given in the main body of the text. Page numbers in italic refer to published volumes, works of art and notions in foreign languages. Abraham (Old Testament) 226–7, 232–4 Acts of Faith, Atto Pubblico di Fede 18, 248–9, 251, 254, 260 Addison, Joseph 147, 172, 175–6 afflitto 249–51, 253, 256 Agamben, Giorgio 212 Alba, Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, Duke of 7, 210, 282, 286 Amsterdam 17–18, 51–5, 60, 210, 229–30, 235, 241, 273–96 Anello, Francesco 260 Angoulême 1 Antwerp 154, 208, 276–7, 282 Aquinas, Thomas 225, 227, 240 Arcadia 126, 148–9, 152 Arciconfraternita di San Giovanni Decollato 267n.4 aristocrats 174, 194, 248, 251, 267n.4, 271n.58 Aristophanes 121 Aristotle 26, 67, 104, 116 Arminians 225 Augustine, Saint 99 Austin, John Langshaw 302 Babel 284 Bandello, Matteo Certaine Tragicall Discourses 117, 122–5, 128, 134n.42–4&47, 135n.49–52&65 bandit Catinella 260, 270 Baraz, Daniel 223 Barberi, Ignazio (Fra Romualdo) 261 Barend-Van Haeften, Marijke 241

Barker, Jane Poetical Recreations 117–18, 121–2, 128 Barlaeus, Casparus 55 Barocci, Federico 208 Basil of Seleucia 50, 52, 61 Baumeister, Roy F. Social Psychology and Human Sexuality 115, 132n.3, 135n.61 Bayle, Pierre 142–4, 225, 230 beheaded bodies’ souls 271n.58 beheading 36, 132, 251, 253, 256, 271n.58, 286 Behn, Aphra Oroonoko 117, 129–31 Bell, Charles Essays on the Anatomy of Expression in Painting (1806) 171, 181–2 Essays on the Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression (1824) 17 Belleforest, François de, French translator of Bandello 122–3, 125, 128, 134n.47, Belting, Hans 268n.21 Benjamin, Walter 73n.55 Beza/De Bèze, Théodore 227 Bianchi Company, the 248–53, 256, 258–61, 267n.4, 270n.44 Blake, William 226, 245n.7 Boccaccio, Giovanni The Decameron 122, 134 Bodin, Jean Théâtre de la nature universelle 79 Boltanski, Luc 305n.4 Bonanno, Giovanna 268n.11 Bonheur 144–5, 162

Index Bonsignori, Mario Antonio 277 Bosch, Hieronymus 289 Boucher, François 145 Bourke, Joanna 100, 280, 289–90 Bouts, Dirk 2 Bowersock, Glen W. 268n.14 Brewer, John 177 Bridge of the Severed Heads 264–5 Bromwich, David 170, 193 Brown, B. 268n.19 Browne, William Britannia’s Pastorals 117, 119 Bruegel, Pieter Massacre of the Innocents 6–7, 9, 207, 289 Burke, Edmund 9, 13, 19, 170–81, 184–6, 188–95 Butler, Judith 13, 117 Buxio, Bernardo 277 Bynum, Caroline Walker 270n.49–50 Cabral, Pedro Alvares 86 Calvin, John 227 Cameron, James Titanic 74 Cão, Diogo 87 Cape of Good Hope 74–5, 79 Capitoli cappella 258, 270n.41 Carbonari 265, 271n.59 Casas, Chiapas Bartolome de las 81–2 Castellamare (prison) 249 Catinella, Antonino 260, 270n.46 Cats, Jacob Trou-ringh 15, 66 Ceballos, Fernando de La Falsa Filosofia o el Ateismo (1774) 146, 167n.23 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de Don-Quixote, of the Mancha 133n.13 Cervero, Fernando 300 chapel chief 249–50, 260 Chaplain, Samuel de 86 Charles II 237 Charravelesco, Bartholomew 277 Chiesa delle Madonna degli Agonizzanti (Palermo) 268n.15, 270n.47 Chiesa della Madonna del Fiume/Chiesa delle Anime dei Corpi Decollati (Church of the Souls of the Beheaded Bodies) 252–3, 255–6, 263–6, 268 Chiffoleau, Jacques 268n.9 Christ, Jesus 16, 26, 35, 37, 39, 41–2, 50, 52, 63, 87, 110, 154, 254 Christ’s Passion 101, 110, 154, 156, 163, 254, 267n.3 Chronique du Guinée 77 Ciotti, Paolo 252 Cippo 264–5 Cloppenburg, John Everhardts 210

307

Clyburg, Jacob 285–6 Cokain, Aston Poems 117–18 Colonna infame, La (The infamous column) 257, 269n.37 Compagnia del Santissimo Crocifisso (Bianchi) 248–53, 256, 258–61, 263 Compagnia di Santa Maria della Croce al Tempio 267n.4 Compagnia di Santa Maria Sucurre Miseris 267n.4 Confraternity Arciconfraternita delle anime del purgatorio (commonly known as Miseremini) 253 Confraternity S. Maria di tutte le Grazie detta del Sabato 253 Confraternity Venerabile congregazione degli agonizzanti 253 Connaught 203 Conrad, Joseph Heart of Darkness 85 Cook, Thomas 289, 294 Coornhert, Dirck Volkertsz 227 Cordovana, Filippa (Sister Geltruda Maria) 261 Counter-Remonstrants 231 Cover, Robert 243 Cranford, James 204–7, 210, 212 Croix, Nicolas Chrétien des Amon et Thamar 74 Les portuguais infortunés 15, 74–9, 81, 83–5, 87–91 Cromwell, Oliver 203–4 Crowne, John Pandion and Amphigenia 117, 126–7 Culemborg 280, 288 Cutrera, Antonino 267n.3, 268n.8, 270n.46 Daddi, G. 268n.16 da Gama, Vasco 74 de Baen, Jan 239 de Bry, Theodor 210, 212 decapitation 36, 132, 251, 253, 256, 271n.58, 286 see also beheading de Cisneros, Juan Lopez 260 de Coligny, Gaspard 207, 210 de Jonghe, Clement 232 de la Mettrie, Julien Offray Ecole de la volupté 154 L’homme machine 154 de las Casas, Bartolomé 81–2, 208, 210, 212 de la Vega, Joseph 292, 294–5 Deleuze, Gilles 135n.48, 224–5, 229, 242–3 de Marolles, Michel Temple des Muses (1655) 138, 152 demeaning, of self 119, 124, 129 see also humiliation

308 Index de Montaigne, Michel de 84, 87, 100–1, 104, 111 Essais des cannibales 87 de Polignac, Melchior de L’Anti-Lucrèce (1745) 143 Derrida, Jacques 196n.23 Descartes, René 225, 300 des Croix, Nicolas Chrétien 15, 74–6, 79–88, 90 de Witt, brothers 223, 237–42 de Witt, Cornelis 237 de Witt, Johan 237 d’Holbach, Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron 154 Di Bella, Maria Pia 266n.3, 267n.4, 268n.13, 269n.24,35&38, 270n.42,44&51 Diderot, Denis 13, 142–7, 154, 156–62, 174–8 ‘Epicuréisme’ (Encylopédie) 142, 147, 152, 160 Di Marzo, Gioacchino Biblioteca Storica e letteraria di Sicilia ossia Raccolta di opere inedite o rare di 267n.3 Di Natale, M.C. 268n.17 discharge of conscience 250, 256, 258 D’Oddo, Vincenzo 252 Domenichino (Domenico Zampieri, known as) 208 Donne, John Poems 125, 135n.72 Dordrecht 284 Dordt, Synod of 225, 231 Doué-la-Fontaine 14, 28, 32, 44 Doyen, Gabriel François The Miracle of St Anthony’s Fire 142, 157–8 drama, Elizabethan and Jacobean 27, 101–2 drama, Greek 101 Drayton, Michael Poems 117–18, 133n.18 Drogheda 203 Dubos, Jean-Baptiste Réflexions critiques (1719) 140, 146–54, 156–7, 159, 163, 173, 176 Duggan, Christopher 271n.60 Dürer, Albrecht 98, 105–6 Dutch Republic 49, 223, 225, 231, 235, 273–96 Ecce Homo 249–50, 259 Edam 284–5 Edgerton, Samuel Y., Jr. 267n.4 Egmont, Lamoraal van Gavere, duke of 286 Elkins, James 10 Ellis, Havelock Psychology of Sex 115 Enkhuizen 284 Epicurus 142–7, 162–3

Erasmus of Formia, Saint 2 exercises, Ignatian spiritual 30–1, 40–1, 44–5, 110 Faith, Acts of 18, 248–9, 251, 254, 260 Falconet, Etienne-Maurice 16, 150–2, 154, 163 Fama 258–9 fanaticism 123, 160 Farinelli, Giuseppe 269n.37 Febo, Rocco 268n.10 Fenton, Geoffrey 122–5, 128, 135n.57 Fernandes, Louis 277 Filmer, Robert 234 Finley, M.I. 271n.60 Fiorelli, Piero 269n.22 Fiume, Giovanna 268n.11 Flagellation 115, 254 forum internum 259, 270n.45 Foucault, Michel 9, 11–12, 18, 213, 232, 267n.3, 304 Foxe, John Actes and Monuments 120 Fragonard, Jean-Honoré The High Priest Coresus sacrificing himself to save Callirhoe 142, 160–2 Franciscans 268n.20 Francken, Hieronymus 208 Frederick-Henry (Prince of Orange) 242 Fried, Michael 195, 197n.24 Fumaroli, Marc 145 Furetière, Antoine Dictionnaire universel 78 Gainsborough, Thomas 176 Galici, Leonardo 253 Garibaldi 264 Geesteranus, Henricus 231 Gelderblom, Arie 241 Géricault, Théodore Le Radeau de la Méduse 74 Giornale di Sicilia 272n.65 Gladiator, Dying (sculpture) 183, 197n.25 Glissant, Edouard Poetics of Relation 89 Glucklich, Ariel 229 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo 15, 76, 90 Gonzalez-Polledo 305n.6 Goulart, Simon 207 Greene, Robert Groats-VVorth of Witte 125 Gregory the Great 227 Grêve (Paris) 154 Grevius, Johannes 225, 229–30 Guez de Balzac, Jean-Louis 57–8 Habington, William Castara 117 Hakluyt, Richard 210

Index Hamburg 229 hanging, death by 152, 251, 253 Hartland, E.S. 263, 271n.56 Heinsius, Daniel De tragica constitutione 10, 67 Herodes infanticide 15, 57–9, 63 Hermes 108 Herod 6–7, 49–50, 52–7, 59, 208 Hogarth, William 289, 294 Holy Office (or Inquisition) 18, 207, 229–31, 248–9, 251, 254, 256–61, 263, 268n.10, 277 Homer 125, 183 homosexuality 117, 127, 251–2, 256, 261 Hooft, Pieter Corneliszoon 55 Hoorn 284 Horne, Filips van Montmorency, duke of 286 humiliation 8, 16, 27, 117, 119, 122, 128–9, 131, 231 see also demeaning Hunter, William 190 imitatio Christi 16, 110 impenitence 259–60 impenitents 18, 248–9, 253, 259–61 infamati 259 Inquisitio 256, 269n.27 Inquisition (or Holy Office) 18, 207, 229–31, 248–9, 251, 254, 256–61, 263, 268n.10, 277 Isaac (Old Testament) 226–7, 232–4 Ixion 108 Jacob (Old Testament) 232–3 Jerusalem, New 268n.20 Job (Old Testament) 226–32, 234–5 Johansen, Baber 270n.45 Johnson, Samuel 103–5, 174 Dictionary of the English Language 103 History of Rasselas 103 Preface to Shakespeare 104–5 Jonctys, Daniel 225, 229 Jonson, Ben The Silent Woman 129 Jordan, Joseph M. 232 Joseph (Old Testament) 232 Julius, N.H. Leçon sur les prisons 12 Kievit, Johan 237, 240 Knight, Richard Payne Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste (1805) 178–83 Koerner, Joseph Leo 105 Koselleck, Reinhart 303–4 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von Psychopathia Sexualis 115

309

Kyd, Thomas Spanish Tragedie 118 Lacan, Jacques 9, 121 ladder exercise (esercizio della scala) 250 La Matina, Fra Diego 260 Langbein, John H. 112n.6, 230, 256, 266n.3, 269n.26&28 Langendijk, Pieter 284 Laocoon and his sons (sculpture) 171, 174, 179–81 La Vecchia dell’aceto 268n.11 Law, John 280 Leibniz, Gottfried 225, 240 Léry, Jean de Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil 87 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 10 Lestringant, Frank 3 Levinas, Emmanuel Ethics and Infinity 13 Limena, torture of 131 Locke, John 103–4, 147 Essay Concerning Human Understanding 103–4 London 102, 204, 210, 273, 280 Lo Piccolo, Francesco 268n.15 Lorrain, Louis Joseph Le 150, 152 Loutherbourg, Philippe de eidophusikon 172, 176 Lucretius De rerum natura 146, 159 Lusitania 75 Luther, Martin 227 Mack Smith, Denis 268n.10, 271n.60 Madonna del Fiume 252–3, 255 Magdeburg 208 Maimonides 227 Manzoni, Alessandro 257, 269n.37 Marin, Louis 15 Marino, Giovan Battista 208 martyrium 254 Matranga, Andrea 257–8 Matranga, Girolamo 260, 270n.48 Matthew (Gospel) 15, 49–50 Mayhew, Jenny 99–100 McGill Pain Index/Questionnaire 106–8 Medemblik 285 meditation, seven themes 250, 267n.6 Melluso, Leda 271n.61 Melzack, Ron 106 memento mori 149 Mendes, Louis 277 Mirandola, Pico della Disputationes … aduersus astrologi 115, 132n.1 Miseremini 253 Mississipi 287

310 Index Mongitore, Antonino 268n.15, 270n.47 Monk, Samuel Holt 194 Montemayor, Jorge de Diana 133n.13 More cruel, le (anonymous) 76 Moscoso, Javier 10–13 Mostart, Daniël 50, 55–7, 59–60 Muchembled, Robert 266n.2 Murphy, Andrew 178, 198n.58 Mussolini, Benito 263 Nashe, Thomas The Vnfortunate Traueller 117, 127–8, 133n.6, 136n.88–90 Nefandum 251, 256, 261 neurons (mirror) 108–9, 114n.33 Nietzsche, Frederich 65, 304 Nochlin, Linda 195 Nova, Alessandro 268n.20 Orange, House of 237 Oudaen, Joachim 241–2 Our Lady of Sorrows 249 Paccagnini, Ermanno 269n.37 Padre fra Pietro Paolo Caporella 267n.4 Palermo 248, 250–4, 262–4, 266 Paris 28, 42, 140, 142, 157, 273, 280 Parisi, Vincenzo, barone di Torre Bianca Direttorio per l’esercizi del conforto della Cappella della Compagnia 267n.5 Peters, Edward 269n.26, 29&31 Petram, Lodewijk 278 Phillips, John 210 Piano della Marina 250–1 Piano di Sant’Erasmo 251 Piazza, Guglielmo 269n.37 Picard, Michel-Jean 268n.18 pious omertà 259, 270n.44 Pitrè, Giuseppe 263, 266, 269n.23, 270n.46, 271n.55&57 Plato 161, 234–5 Polygnotos Odysseus visiting the Underworld 150, 152, 154 Ponte dell’Ammiraglio 252, 264 Ponte delle Teste Mozze 264, 266 Pope, Alexander Essay on Man 111 Port Edward, Natal (South Africa) 74 Porter, Roy 11 Poussin, Nicolas Et in Arcadia Ego 148–9, 152, 159, 162–3 Pest of Ashdod 157 prayer to the ‘Beheaded bodies’ souls’ 271n.58 Prodi, Paolo 270n.45 Prosperi, Adriano 258, 267n.4&7, 269n.40 Prud’homme van Reine, Roland 235–8, 241

Puget, Pierre Milo of Croton 150–1 pure truth (La pura verità) 258–9 Reddy, William M. 302 Reik, Theodor Masochism in Modern Man 117, 119–20, 124 Reinders, Michel 234, 241 Rembrandt van Rijn 232–3 Requemora-Gros, Sylvia 78 Restoration (Great Britain) 102 Rey, Rosalyne 303 Reynolds, Joshua 156 Riall, Lucy 271n.60 Richelieu, Duke of 62 Ricoeur, Paul 212 Rome 138, 140, 230 Ronco, Leonarda 277 Rosaldo, Michelle Z. 302 Rosenwein, Barbara 304 Rothelin, Charles d’ Orléans (abbé) de 143, 146 Rotterdam 229, 236–7 Rouen 28, 34, 78 Rousseau, G.S. 11 Rubens, Peter Paul 15–16, 59–64, 148 Descent from the Cross (Antwerp) 154–5 Massacre of the Innocents (Munich) 61 Massacre of the Innocents (Toronto) 59 Scene of Crucifixion (convent of the Récollets, Mechelen) 154 Ruyter, Michiel de 235 Sacromonte, Varallo 268n.20 sadism 115 Samson and Delilah (Old Testament) 121 San Matteo vecchio e nuovo. Le due chiese (1088–1633) e l’unione del Miseremini 268n.16 Santa Maria Santissima del Carmelo ai Decollati 265 Sawday, Jonathan 11, 16, 115, 304 Scarry, Elaine 225, 239, 301, 303 Sciascia, Leonardo 269n.37, 270n.48 Semino, Elena 110 Sepulveda, Ginés de 81 Serlio, Sebastiano 60, 62 Shakespeare, William Hamlet 99 King Lear 16, 101–5, 107–8, 110 sonnets 118 Sherrington, Charles 300 Sicily 17–18, 248, 251, 254, 263, 266n.2, 270n.44 Sidney, Philip (The Countess of) Pembrokes Arcadia 117, 126, 134n.29, 136n.76 Simpson, Thomas Haskell 266n.1, 270n.48, 271n.53

Index simulacres 144–5, 162 slavery 12, 15, 75–7, 84, 86–8, 90, 130, 274 Smith, Adam 97, 101, 111–12 Smyth, William Henry 263, 266, 271n.54 Spedizione dei Mille 1860/1861 271n.60 Sperone 252 Spielmann, Guy 77 Spivey, Nigel 6–7 Spenser, Edmund, Amoretti and Epithalamion 119 The Faerie Queene 133n.13 Spranckhuysen, Dionysius 231 Spranger, Bartholomeus 116 Stafford, Barbara 10 staging suffering 32, 44, 132 see also theatricality of masochism Statenjacht (ship) 237 States General 237 Storia della colonna infame 257, 269n.37 strappado 257, 267n.3, 269n.34 Subleyras, Pierre Charon Ferrying Souls 138–40, 145, 149, 163 succaro (torture) 257, 269n.33 sympathy, real (Burke) 19, 170–1, 173–5, 178–9, 181, 189–90, 192 Taine, Hippolyte 183 Tarr, J. 305n.6 Tate, Nahum 102 Temple, John 203, 205 theatricality of masochism 117 see also staging suffering Thevet, André Les singularités de la France antarctique 87 Thomas, Yan 269n.30 Thomson, Ian 270n.48 Tijssens, Gysbert 282 Torgerson, Warren 106 Torrentius, Johannes 231 torture 1, 3, 7, 11, 18, 32, 34–40, 85, 117–18, 130–1, 140, 146, 156–7, 163, 172, 189, 202, 204–5, 207–8, 210, 212–13, 223–6, 229–31, 233–5, 239–43, 248–9, 252, 254, 256–9, 261, 289 Trevelyan, G.M. 271n.60 Tromp, Cornelis 237 truth, pure 258–9 Turchi, Simon 277 United East Indian Company 236, 241, 278 see also VOC United Provinces 236 United States of America, demographic distribution of pain in 97–9 Valladodid 75 van Aemstel, Gijsbrecht 286

311

van Campen, Jacob 51 van den Vondel, Joost 15, 50–5, 57–60, 227–8, 243, 274 Faëton 58 Gijsbrecht van Aemstel 15, 50 van der Coelen 232 van Diepenbeeck, Abraham 138, 141, 152–3 van Dijkhuizen, Jan Frans 110, 289 van Nes, Aert Jansse 236 van Nes, Jan Jansse 224, 236 van Oldenbarnevelt, Johan 286 van Overbeke, Aernout 240–1 van Valckenborch, Lucas Massacre of the Innocents 6–9 Venerabile congregazione degli agonizzanti 253 Venice 282 Vernet, Claude Joseph 174 Verschuier, Lieve 223–4, 236–7, 239, 241 Verstegan, Richard, Theatrum Crudelitatum 208–9 Via crucis 254 Vianen 280, 288 Vicaria 249 Viceroy, Don Ferrante Gonzaga 267n.4 Vickers, Brian 101 Villabianca, Francesco Maria Emmanuele et Gaetani 267n.3, 270n.46 Virgil, Euclogues 118–19, 121, 128, 134n.38 Virgin of Dordrecht (ship) 236 VOC (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie) 236, 241, 278 volupté 143–5, 147–8, 152, 154, 163 Vos, Jan 55 voyeurism 75, 131 Waterloo, Battle of 17, 171, 183–4, 187–9, 193 Weisbach, Werner 212 WIC (West Indische Compagnie) 236 Wexford 203 William II of Orange 237 William III of Orange 237, 241 Williams, James 243 Wilmot, John A Pastoral Dialogue 120, 134n.30 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 180 Witte, Emanuel de 274 Wroth, Mary, Urania 117, 131–2 Yamamoto-Wilson, John R. 223–4, 230 Zeus 108 Žižek, Slavoj 246n.26 Zoet, Jan 241 Zurara, Gomes Eanes de Chronique du Guinée 77