The Matter of Violence in Baroque Painting 9789048543830

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The Matter of Violence in Baroque Painting

Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700 A forum for innovative research on the role of images and objects in the late medieval and early modern periods, Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700 publishes monographs and essay collections that combine rigorous investigation with critical inquiry to present new narratives on a wide range of topics, from traditional arts to seemingly ordinary things. Recognizing the fluidity of images, objects, and ideas, this series fosters cross-cultural as well as multi-disciplinary exploration. We consider proposals from across the spectrum of analytic approaches and methodologies. Series Editor Allison Levy is Digital Scholarship Editor at Brown University. She has authored or edited five books on early modern Italian visual and material culture.

The Matter of Violence in Baroque Painting

Bogdan Cornea

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Slaying Holofernes, 1614–1629, oil on canvas, 146.5 × 108 cm, Galleria degli Ufffzi, Florence. Image Credit: Gabinetto Fotografco delle Gallerie degli Ufffzi. Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 780 8 978 90 4854 383 0 e-isbn doi 10.5117/9789463727808 nur 685 © B. Cornea / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2023 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.



Table of Contents

Acknowledgments 7 List of Images An Introduction

9 13

1. Wound: On Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of Saint Ursula 29 2. Touch: On Giovanni Lanfranco’s Saint Peter Healing Saint Agatha 53 3. Skin: On Jusepe de Ribera’s Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew 73 4. Flesh: On Georges de La Tour’s Penitent Saint Jerome 97 5. Blood: On Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes 119 6. Death: On Francisco de Zurbarán’s The Martyrdom of Saint Serapion 141 Conclusion 161 General Bibliography

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Index 183

Acknowledgments It is a pleasure to reflect on the debts I have incurred over the years in seeing this book through to publication. I would like first to acknowledge the institutions that have offered me financial assistance during this long process. The dissertation stage was supported by the University of York’s Teaching Fellowship. I would also like to thank the Santander International Connections Award for funding my research trip to Spain. The later development of this project materialized some years ago while I was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Humanities Research Centre at the University of York. I feel privileged to have been supervised by Professor Helen Hills, who has been my teacher, mentor, and source of inspiration through the years. I owe my gratitude to Erika Gaffney, senior commissioning editor for early modern studies at Amsterdam University Press, for her advice and patience during this publication process. I also thank Allison Levy, series editor for visual and material culture, 1300–1700, Amsterdam University Press, for her support. I acknowledge the reports of the anonymous readers who offered helpful advice on my manuscript. This book could not have been written without the accommodating staffs at the following institutions where I carried out much of my research: The Rijksmuseum Research Library; the J.B. Morrell Library, the University of York; and the Warburg Institute, University of London. There are many friends who have been there for me through out the years. I especially wish to thank: Timea Lelik, Johnny Elisen, Joël Illidge, Huib Wurfbain, Marja Wurfbain-Moolenburgh, Julian Abelskamp, Robbert Tan, Paul Haenen, Dammie van Geest, Christopher Lowrey, Itay Sapir, Marije Osnabrugge, Maria-Anna Aristova, Arnetia van den Berg, and Agnez Fazakas. And, finally, I wish to thank my family: my uncle Buji, my aunt Vio, my cousin Uana, my brother Claudiu, my sister-in-law Oana, and my beautiful niece Sara. And last, but by all means not least, I want to thank my parents Angela and Ioan – this book is dedicated to you.



List of Images

Image 1. Image 2. Image 3.

Image 4.

Image 5.

Image 6.

Image 7.

Image 8. Image 9.

Jusepe de Ribera, Apollo Flaying Marsyas, 1637, oil on canvas, 202 × 255 cm, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels. Image Credit: Open Access.12 Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, 1610, oil on canvas, 143 × 180 cm, Palazzo ZevallosStigliano, Naples. Image Credit: Intesa Sanpaolo Collection.28 Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, 1610, oil on canvas, 143 × 180 cm, Palazzo ZevallosStigliano, Naples. Image Credit: Intesa Sanpaolo Collection. DETAIL.30 Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Judith Beheading Holofernes, 1598, oil on canvas, 145 × 195 cm, Palazzo Barberini, Rome. Image Credit: Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica, Roma (MiC) – Bibliotheca Hertziana, Istituto Max Planck per la storia dell’arte/Enrico Fontolan.45 Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Incredulity of Saint Thomas, 1602, Sanssouci Palace, Potsdam. Image Credit: Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg. Photographer: Hans Bach.46 Giovanni Lanfranco, Saint Peter Healing Saint Agatha, 1613–1614, Galleria Nazionale, Parma. Image Credit: Licenced by Ministerio dei Beni e Delle Attivita Culturali – Complesso Monumentale della Pilotta-Galleria Nationale di Parma.52 Giovanni Lanfranco, Saint Peter Healing Saint Agatha, 1613–1614, Galleria Nazionale, Parma. Image Credit: Licenced by Ministerio dei Beni e Delle Attivita Culturali – Complesso Monumentale della Pilotta-Galleria Nationale di Parma. DETAIL.58 Jusepe de Ribera, Apollo and Marsyas, 1637, Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, Naples. Image Credit: Direzione Regionale Musei della Campania.65 Jusepe de Ribera, The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew, 1644, Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona. Image Credit: Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona.72

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The Matter of Violence in Baroque Painting

Image 10.

Image 11.

Image 12. Image 13.

Image 14. Image 15. Image 16.

Image 17.

Image 18. Image 19. Image 20.

Jusepe de Ribera, The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew, 1644, Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona. Image Credit: Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona. DETAIL.74 Jusepe de Ribera, The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew, 1634, oil on canvas, 104 × 113 cm, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Image Credit: Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.83 Georges de La Tour, Penitent Saint Jerome, 1630–1635, oil on canvas, 157 × 100 cm, Musée de Grenoble, Grenoble. Image Credit: Ville de Grenoble/Musée de Grenoble – J.L. Lacroix.96 Georges de La Tour, Penitent Saint Jerome, 1630–1635, oil on canvas, 157 × 100 cm, Musée de Grenoble, Grenoble. Image Credit: Ville de Grenoble/Musée de Grenoble – J.L. Lacroix. DETAIL.102 Titian Vecellio, Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, c. 1575, oil on canvas, 137 × 97 cm, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid. Image Credit: Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.107 Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, Saint Bartholomew, 1661, oil on canvas, 86.7 × 75.6 cm, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA. Image Credit: Open Content.111 Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Slaying Holofernes, 1614–1629, oil on canvas, 146.5 × 108 cm, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Image Credit: Gabinetto Fotografico delle Gallerie degli Uffizi.118 Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Slaying Holofernes, 1614–1629, oil on canvas, 146.5 × 108 cm, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Image Credit: Gabinetto Fotografico delle Gallerie degli Uffizi. DETAIL.130 Bernardo Cavallino, The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew, 1634, Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, Naples. Image Credit: Direzione Regionale Musei della Campania.131 Bernardo Cavallino, The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew, 1634, Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, Naples. Image Credit: Direzione Regionale Musei della Campania. DETAIL.132 Francisco de Zurbarán, The Martyrdom of Saint Serapion, 1628, oil on canvas, 120.2 × 104 cm, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford. Image Credit: Allen Phillips\Wadsworth Atheneum.140

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List of Images 

Image 21. Image 22. Image 23.

Francisco de Zurbarán, Christ on the Cross, 1627, oil on canvas, 290.3 × 165.5 cm, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. Image Credit: Robert A. Waller Memorial Fund.145 Francisco de Zurbarán, Veil of Veronica, c. 1630, oil on canvas, 107.3 × 79.4 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Image Credit: Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation, Houston.149 Francisco de Zurbarán, Saint Francis of Assisi According to Pope Nicholas V’s Vision, c. 1640, oil on canvas, 180.5 × 110.5 cm, Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona. Image Credit: Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona, 2022.153

Image 1. Jusepe de Ribera, Apollo Flaying Marsyas, 1637, oil on canvas, 202 × 255 cm, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels. Image Credit: Open Access.



An Introduction Abstract This introductory chapter maps the relation between violence, baroque painting, and materiality and sets forth the outlines and aims of the book. Materiality is taken as a central feature in the understanding of the art object – in particular, as a key factor in the production of violence by dislocating time, fragmenting surfaces, and transgressing representation. This approach emphasizes art’s ability to become, to be generative and transformative. The transformational and generative potential of art is best exemplified in its propensity for excess – understood here as baroque’s operative function. The relationship between violence and transformation is brought into focus in my interpretation of paintings as corporeal surfaces, meant to confront beholders with new and radical forms of violence. Keywords: baroque, violence, materiality, excess, corporeality, phenomenology

For nothing was simply one thing. – Virginia Woolf

A Work of Dissemblance, Most Difficult to Tell. It begins with a detail. The artist: Jusepe de Ribera; the painting: Apollo Flaying Marsyas (Image 1). At the centre of the canvas – a great billowing cloak, twisting and turning around the body of the young god.1 Apollo stands proudly and detached, his hand plunged deep within the body of the satyr, his fingers separating skin from living flesh. The satyr is shown tied to a tree trunk; his bearded face hangs low into the foreground, his mouth opened in a deafening scream of silence. The entire canvas succumbs to a tension of stretch flesh, smiling and failing, worn out at the edge – open mouth to open skin – there, before us. The cloak swirls around the pristine body of the ancient god like a protective metallic armour. Its subtle variations of reds and pinks are occasionally intermingled 1 For a history on the representation of Apollo and Marsyas in Western art, see: Wyss, The Myth of Apollo.

Cornea, B., The Matter of Violence in Baroque Painting. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463727808_intro

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The Matter of Violence in Baroque Painting

with thin threads of white paint, all applied in swift touches of the brush; from this, a complex material relationship emerges that gives the surface its haptic quality: frothy and moist, fluid and tender like the open tissue of living flesh. The lower edge of Apollo’s cloak falls into close proximity with Marsyas’s wound. One can see it as a critical moment of confrontation, for the cloak and the wound draw towards each other, only to highlight the difference between the two. If the wound renders a correct anatomical interior – polished and detached – the materiality of the cloak achieves the potentiality of a trembling tissue of openly flayed skin. Its trailing texture evokes most strongly Ovid’s description of Marsyas’s torment, where ‘his skin is torn off his whole body; … his naked muscles become visible; a convulsive movement trembles the veins, lacking their covering of skin.’ The materiality of the cloak becomes something akin to an internal rupture, a distressing zone that impinges on the representational order of the painting. It becomes what Georges Didi-Huberman called a pan – namely, a pictorial moment that ‘interrupts ostensibly the continuity of the picture’s representational system.’2 Inspired by Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the notion of the pan appears in a well-known passage where the writer Bergotte examines a yellow patch of paint in Vermeer’s canvas View of Delft (1660–1661). In a moment of heightened intensity, Bergotte fixes his gaze on the patch of yellow and obsessively repeats the phrase ‘petit pan de mur jaune’ – the encounter yielding a devastating effect on the fictional writer who ostensibly dies in front of the canvas. Didi-Huberman writes ‘the yellow in the painting by Vermeer, as color, is a whack, a distressing zone of paint, of paint considered as “precious” and traumatic material cause.’3 Didi-Huberman emphasizes the pan’s phenomenology, and its capacity to disrupt and unsettle the spectator by appealing to Roland Barthes’s punctum.4 By drawing on the phenomenology of Barthes’s punctum, as ‘that accident which pricks me,’ Didi-Huberman describes the effect of the pan as more ‘intense for me, panicked, vertiginous.’5 Like the punctum, the pan is haptic, a rupture in the picture plane that punctures and pierces the spectator. In Ribera’s painting, the materiality of Apollo’s cloak attains the phenomenological specificity of the pan. It becomes in the economy of the painting something like an opened wound whose carnality layers the figurative wound of the satyr with the phenomenological wounding of the painting. Thus freed from its restricted mimetic function as a mere theatrical prop, the materiality of the cloak achieves its full potentiality to become a flayed surface, thrust within the body of the painting. With every crease and every fold, 2 Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images, p. 266. 3 Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images, p. 17. 4 Barthes, Camera Lucinda, p. 27. 5 Didi-Huberman, La peinture incarnée, pp. 44, 47–49.

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An Introduc tion 

a movement is enacted, yet one that does not gently glide across the surface of the painting, but abruptly carves into its body to manifest its violence and vulnerability. *** Reception. Gabriel Paleotti writes in his Il discorso intorno alle immagini sacre e profane (1582): To hear the narration of the martyrdom of a saint, the zeal and constancy of a virgin, the passion of Christ, are things that touch on the true; but to see with vivid colours of the martyred saint, the struggling Virgin, and Christ nailed, it is true that devotion swells and deeply strikes the viscera; and who does not recognize this is made of wood or of marble.6

Paleotti is careful to point out that the matter from which images are made is intimately connected with their visceral impact. For he recognizes the potential of matter to affect beholders spiritually as well as corporeally, bestowing upon matter the potential to produce fierce affects that penetrate the senses and violate the deep recesses of the body. As Paleotti goes on to write: ‘If spoken or read words have the ability to transmute our senses, with how much more violence do depicted figures penetrate us and inspire pity.… [T]here is no stronger and more efficacious instrument than images made from life which violate our incautious senses.’7 Contemporaneous sources often introduced baroque paintings in terms of corporeal violence – the impasto, for instance, was interpreted as a technique that contributes to the extreme violence of the subject depicted; in the most extreme of situations, however, paintings could also be seen to cause terror, bodily harm, and even trauma. Jean-Baptiste Mercier Dupaty observed in his Lettres sur l’Italie, en 1785 that Ribera’s paintings ‘strike with terror, and astonish the eye.’8 While in 1675, Palomino describes Ribera’s depiction of Ixion ‘in a state of such an extreme pain 6 ‘Il sentire narrare il martirio d’un santo, il zelo e costanza d’una vergine, la passione dello stesso Cristo, sono cose che toccano dentro di vero; ma l’esserci con vivi colori qua posto sotto gli occhi il santo martirizzato, colà la vergine combattuta e nell’altro lato Cristo inchiodato, egli è pur vero che tanto accresce la divozione e compunge le viscere, che chi non lo conosce è di legno o di marmo.’ Paleotti, ‘Discorso intorno,’ pp. 171–172. 7 ‘Onde, se tanta eff icacia hanno le parole, che si odono o leggono, di tramutare i sensi nostri, con molta maggiore violenza penetreranno dentro di noi quelle figure, dalle quali si vedrà spirare pietà…. Essendo donque la imaginativa nostra così atta a ricevere tali impressioni, non è dubbio non ci essere istrumento più forte o più efficace a ciò delle imagini fatte al vivo, che quasi violentano i sensi incauti.’ Paleotti, ‘Discorso intorno,’ pp. 228–230. 8 Dupaty, Lettres sur l’Italie, p. 189.

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… that he keeps his fingers clenched in the struggle of his torment.’9 This painting was in the home of Jacoba van Uffelen, the wife of the famous Dutch collector Lucas van Uffelen who was in Amsterdam during her pregnancy. Palomino goes on to mention that Jacoba was so distressed at the sight of the tormented figure that she gave birth to a child with similarly deformed hands: the fingers clenched ‘just as in the painting.’10 What is striking about these accounts is their engagement with paintings in terms of not only what they represent or mean, but also what they do – the processes they enact and the affects they produce on beholders. Baroque paintings display an entire constellation of material riches, from surfaces, colours, and textures that were interpreted by early modern writers in strong physical terms – of flesh, skin, blood and so forth. Sometimes the canvas weave was interpreted as flesh, while at other times the textured impasto was seen as skin, or vice versa.11 The identity of materials was never fixed in terms of their potential to produce a sense of corporeal presence. By insisting on the transformative power of materials – that is, their phenomenological specificity and generative potentiality – writers seemed more concerned with the ability of paintings to become corporeal surfaces, rather than to merely imitate and reflect an already existing reality. Paintings were seen to assert their materiality in terms of affects that renders violence in eminently physical and bodily terms. *** The Excess of Violence. The subject of this book is art and violence, or more precisely: the violence of art.12 Its scope: baroque painting. Baroque depictions of violence have often been perceived in art historical literature as ‘over the top’ and ‘excessive.’ The material richness of these paintings, their exciting visual complexity, and the visceral corporeal engagement they demand from beholders are often explained 9 ‘como lo manifiesta el San Bartolomé en el martirio, quitándole la piel, y decubierta la anatomía interior del brazo . . . Ixión, expresando (especialmente in éste) con tal extremo el dolor, atado a la rueda, donde era continuamente herido, y despedazado; que teniendo los dedos encogidos, para esforzar el sufrimiento; y estando esta pintura en casa de la senora Jacoba de Uffel en Amsterdam, a tiempo, que estaba preñada, parió un chicuelo con los dedos encogidos, a semejanza de dicha pintura.’ Palomino, Vidas, p. 139. 10 The idea of an image being able to make an impression on a foetus was very well known in the late Middle Ages and by the time Palomino was writing, the concept was something of a ‘throwaway’ that most people ‘knew’; see Pfisterer, Kunst-Geburten, pp. 57–60; Musacchio, The Art and Ritual, ch. 5. 11 For a discussion on how the materiality of canvas and paint were interpreted as corporeal surfaces, see: Pericolo, Caravaggio and Pictorial Narrative, ch. 13 and ch. 14. 12 A relevant theoretical text is Elaine Scarry’s seminal study The Body in Pain, which focuses on the meaning-making of pain, especially the irreducible resistance to language and its un-shareability.

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away as reflecting the presumed violence of early modern society. Recent studies have explored the various ways in which the material fabric of these images have served to articulate (as much as to conceal) the ideological agendas of their creators.13 A common thread among these studies is the interpretation of paintings as representations that reflect and mirror the violence manifested in the streets, in politics, in religion, and in judicial practices. Mostly concerned with the external factors surrounding a work of art, these approaches tend to run the risk of reducing paintings to illustrations of events produced or existing somewhere else. This book moves away from interpretations that consider the violence of baroque art as an index of the physical violence that is presumed to pervade seventeenthcentury society. Instead, I argue for an interpretation of paintings as corporeal presences, as intensities, capable of generating new senses, new perceptions, and new worlds. This approach offers an understanding of art as generative and transformative – of paintings as having the power to become. The focus on the creative potentiality of art reveals its disjointedness: namely, what these paintings produce cannot be easily contained or explained by a simple appeal to subject or context.14 Baroque paintings reveal a multitude of fractures and discontinuities that give rise to a radical form of violence that works in excess of any system of closure and continuity. Violence therefore is approached as a refusal to square subject and technique; this allows us to discover and explore forms of violence that are pictorial and material. Hence canvas, paint, flesh, and skin are shown to work, not in literal reference to a ‘reality’ outside the canvas, and not in alignment or identity with each other, but in violent relations of displacement in relation to figure and surface. Thus, this book seeks to locate violence in terms, not of pictorial materiality working in identity with subject, but as a dislocation between meanings produced by materials and the subject depicted. This is a violence that exceeds. And while excess has usually been dismissed as something that forgoes interpretation, I recognize its power to radically challenge established norms; thus excess is treated here as a transgressive force, disruptive and transformative. *** Baroque Excess. The origin of the notion of the baroque captures its propensity for abundance and excess. On the one hand, Erwin Panofsky argued for its origin 13 Terry-Fritsch and Labbie, Beholding Violence; Decker and Kirkland-Ives, Death, Torture; Nethersole, Art and Violence. 14 See the recent collection of studies edited by Graham and Kilroy-Ewbank, Visualizing Sensuous Suffering, which focuses on the constructive aspect of pain to become a powerful tool of self-fashioning.

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in ‘baroco’ – a linguistic device denoting false or deceptive conclusions; namely, something that is ‘obtuse, obscure, fanciful and useless.’15 On the other hand, there is a more common conception that goes back to the eighteenth-century writers, including Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who emphasize its derivation from the Portuguese term ‘barroco,’ meaning a flawed pearl. Both definitions, however, capture baroque’s tendency to subvert systems. Baroco – the obtuse, obscure, fanciful, and useless – implies reasoning that crosses over the boundaries of strict systematic articulation, thus defying the system’s aim at certainty and closure. And Barroco – the irregular, flawed pearl – can easily point to the overflowing of boundaries, to the ex-centric and the overabundant, the excess par excellence.16 The resistance of baroque art to coherency and continuity can also be seen in the work of Giambattista Marino, who himself acknowledged that his grand lyrical poems consist of many ‘digressions and luxuriances,’ excessive embellishment and intricate tableaux, rather than plot and orderly narrative. The numerous journals and letters of protestant travellers to Italy or Spain also make use of the word ‘excess’ to describe baroque art, although its connotation is largely used in pejorative ways. As the seventeenth century drew to a close, the voices of criticism became stronger while baroque’s propensity for excess fell under the sharp criticism of a new breed of literati, today mostly associated with the Accademia degli Arcadi in Rome. This attitude still permeates most scholarship on the baroque even to this day, and while scholars are quick to acknowledge the excess of the baroque, this mostly happens in the desire to dispel its affects under the cloak of shallowness and sugary playfulness. More recent scholarship, however, has opened new and compelling ways of engaging with excess as an essential trait of the baroque.17 This book follows the new exploration of excess as the potential of matter to disrupt pictorial narratives, break iconographic conventions, dislocate time, and disturb identities. *** Baroque Materiality. My approach takes materiality to be both historically contingent and historically productive. Baroque paintings often reveal or critically expose their own material presence. Victor Stoichita has pointed out the ability of baroque painting to reflect on itself, its limits, its potential, its claim to truth, and its material obscurity. In accordance with Hans Belting’s definition of the ‘era of art’ as the period in art history in which the image emancipated itself from its predominantly 15 Panofsky, ‘What Is Baroque?’ 16 For a history of the term baroque, see: Hills, ‘The Baroque.’ 17 Calabrese, Neo-Baroque, pp. 47–67.

An Introduc tion 

liturgical, cultic, and devotional functions, Stoichita traced the process of emergence through which painting became a distinct object of pictorial self-reflexivity.18 This phenomenon gave rise to a new poetics of meta-painting – a form of painting that critically refers to itself by pointing towards its own materiality.19 While Stoichita introduced the term of ‘meta-painting’ to the baroque period in art history, more recent scholarship has rightly signalled its relevance to earlier periods, some of which go back as far as Giotto and the Early Renaissance.20 This brings into sharp focus the question: What distinguishes meta-painting of the baroque period from earlier examples? One remarkable difference is a drastic shift in the relationship between artwork and beholder. Lorenzo Pericolo has pointed out that during this period painting started to be scrutinized compulsively and scrupulously, and performed self-consciously for an audience cognizant of its historical implications and capable of interpreting its excessive demands.21 Baroque paintings therefore employ a vast resource of material richness, complex textures, colours, and pigments that do more than simply provide the material supports of the subject and the narrative depicted. They show materiality to be fluid and indeterminate, overflowing and excessive, affecting its transgressive force as baroque’s operative function. By drawing on the work of Tim Ingold, Andrew Benjamin, Caroline Walker Bynum, and other scholars, I seek to show materiality as potential and productive.22 Benjamin argues for an understanding of materiality as the insistence of the medium within the creation of the work’s meaning. According to Benjamin, ‘meaning is always, and only, an after-effect of the way matter works. As such, the working of matter is the precondition for the possibility of meaning. This aspect of a work can be understood as it’s mattering.’23 The mattering of matter allows for the possibility of relating materiality to the conceptual and ideational, disposing with the imposition of an idea upon matter. Unlike an iconic sign, which established reference through visual resemblance, the work of materiality shows change that offered identity without a complete dependence on the mimetic model. This book explores the work of materiality by looking at its processes of dislocation and fracture. By materiality I do not simply refer to technique, nor the fixed function of paint and canvas to represent a given narrative or meaning. Instead, I 18 Belting, Likeness and Presence. 19 Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image. For meta-painting (and meta-image), see: Mitchell, ‘Metapictures.’ 20 See Bokody and Nagel, Renaissance Meta-Painting. 21 Pericolo, ‘What Is Metapainting?’ p. 31. 22 Ingold, ‘Materials against Materiality’; Benjamin, ‘Matter’s Insistence’; Benjamin, ‘Colouring Philosophy’; Benjamin, ‘Endless Touching’; Benjamin, ‘Surface Effects’; Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption; and Bynum, Christian Materiality. 23 Benjamin, ‘Colouring Philosophy,’ p. 401.

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interpret materiality as matter’s potential to exceed the literal object. Potentiality therefore can be thought as the work of materiality when matter (and its activity as mattering) is separated from its empirical presence.24 Thus the complex material qualities of pictorial surfaces are more than simple consequences of the process of its creation; they are potentially active to effect and generate new meanings – they can operate to distribute their own programmes of violence. More importantly, materiality stages a form of corporeality that is not exclusively dependent on figuration and the credible imitation of reality but extends to the material processes at play on the pictorial surface. The excessive demands made by baroque paintings in terms of violence can therefore be ascribed to the work of materiality that has the potential to exceed representation and mimesis – namely, the graphic depiction of physical acts of aggression. But how can violence be thought in excess of figuration? One way is to think of Caravaggio’s sharp contrast between light and dark, described by seventeenth-century writers and contemporary art historians alike in terms of a violent juxtaposition. The same Caravaggio also staged the process of becoming holy as a violent event that radically transforms the body of Saint Ursula. Another way is to look at Ribera’s depictions of flaying, where the materiality of the paint and canvas was interpreted as open flesh and ruptured skin. Zurbarán’s Saint Serapion renders a violence of corporeal fragmentation through the folding of the white habit. The excess of materiality appears as a transgressive force that disturbs mimesis and representation. This is not to imply, however, that pictorial subjects are incidental to the production of violence; on the contrary, the subject remains essential to the interference of materiality, since it is through that process of dislocation that violence can take flight as a destructive force and turn against the system of its production.25 *** Violent Corporeality. The relationship between materiality and violence allows for a new conception of corporeality to emerge – one that is not only restricted to figurative representation but also extends to the materiality of the surface. Georges Didi-Huberman has shown how the interpretation of paintings through the concept of mimesis has inadvertently striped art of its physicality and corporeality by reducing it to a form of ‘disembodied imitation.’26 In other words, mimesis has transformed art from a visceral – and violent – presence into an object of aesthetic 24 Benjamin, ‘Endless Touching,’ p. 76. 25 On the indeterminacy of the subject in painting, see: Pericolo and Nagel, Subject as Aporia. 26 Didi-Huberman, The Surviving Image.

An Introduc tion 

and intellectual appreciation.27 This book seeks to explore the intense physicality of artworks by looking at their potential to become corporeal presences – of paint to become flayed flesh, of the threads of the canvas to become ruptured skin, and of the pigments to be staged as spilled blood. My interpretation of paintings as corporeal surfaces is partly historical and partly contemporary. This book attends historically to paintings as corporeal surfaces – as pictorial bodies – grounded in a conception of matter as active. For this I draw on the work of Caroline Walker Bynum, who repositioned ‘the body’ from a simple conception of the ‘human individual’ to the notion of matter as active (materia).28 Analysing the medieval conceptions of matter – between 1150 to 1550, with allusions to the late sixteenth century – Bynum draws attention to Isidore of Seville’s definition of matter as mater (mother), making the fundamental nature of matter maternal, namely fertile and capable of becoming.29 She further points out that by ‘body,’ late medieval thinkers – including Isidore of Seville, Nicole Oresme, and Marsilio Ficino – understood ‘changeable things,’ from gems to trees, statues, rocks, paintings, and cadavers. According to Bynum, medieval art encapsulates this paradox of insistently displaying and commenting on its own materiality.30 While Bynum’s own focus is on holy stuff – including relics and sacramental and religious images – her approach can be extended to artworks and objects that were not specifically used for religious practices.31 When I argue for an interpretation of paintings as pictorial bodies, I do not suggest a relationship of similitude between paintings and actual living bodies – as human individuals – nor do I attempt to instil them with anthropomorphic features. Instead, I argue that materiality works analogously in revealing matter’s ability to change. Contemporaneous sources reveal a rich web of corporeal and bodily references to materials such as canvas and paint. Titian’s approach to painting is emblematic in this regard. Marco Boschini, describes in his Le minere della pittura veneziana (1664), Giacomo Palma il Giovane’s recollection of Titian’s method of working, when the artist ‘proceeded like a good surgeon treating a patient, healing an injury, reducing a swelling, adjusting an arm, or setting a bone if he did not like that way it lay, paying no attention to the pain he was causing or to any such thing.’ The suggestion that a painting can be a patient and thus suffer the intervention of the painter-surgeon is poignantly supported by the next statement where Titian gradually covered the surface of his paintings with 27 Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images, pp. 209–221. See also Didi-Huberman, The Surviving Image 28 Bynum, Christian Materiality, p. 32. 29 Bynum, Christian Materiality, p. 231. 30 Bynum, Christian Materiality, pp. 34–35. 31 Ivanic et al., Religious Materiality, p. 17.

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‘living flesh, going over them many times, so that only breath was lacking from them to come to life.’32 Palma il Giovane’s comparison between the artist and a surgeon goes beyond an understanding of paint as a mere material support for the representation of figures; it seems to suggest that the figures and the painting itself as a material presence can feel pain and anguish just like a body. Another case in point is Bernardo De Dominici’s description of Ribera’s technique of painting ‘with dense impasto so full of colour, he would not only turn [girare] the muscles of the human body, but every small part of the bones and of the hands and feet.’33 De Dominici seems to conflate signifier with signified to describe a dynamic process of becoming. And while it is easy to dismiss these descriptions as mere rhetorical tropes – as empty jargon routinely employed by art critics and writers to praise the skill of artists and their artworks – a critical engagement with them reveals a radical new engagement with art. For it will allow us to attend to the phenomenological specificity of each painting and better understand the visceral responses contemporaneous viewers had when confronted with such depictions of violence. My interpretation of the relationship between paintings as corporeal surfaces and violence is indebted to Gilles Deleuze’s analysis of the art of Francis Bacon. In Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (1981), Deleuze maps out how art can have an impact on the way we see, feel, and act.34 According to Deleuze, the violence of Bacon’s paintings is of a very special kind: it is not the representation of something horrible happening, for Bacon’s paintings do not narrate a story; instead, he paints ‘figures’ that are seated or crouching, detached from any context of a story. Since all these connections – built through narrative and representation – ‘disappear in favor of a matter of fact or a properly pictorial (or sculptural) ligature, which no longer tells a story and no longer represents anything but its own movement, and which makes these apparently arbitrary elements coagulate in a single continuous flow.’35 For Deleuze, Bacon’s figures ‘are made of flesh, and what fascinate him are the invisible forces that model flesh or shake it. This is the relationship not of form and matter, but of materials and forces making these forces visible through their 32 ‘[S]e in loro poteva trovar effetto, e scoprendo alcuna cosa che non concordasse al delicato suo intendimento, come chirurgo benef ico medicava l’infermo, se faceva di bisogno spolpargli qualche gonf iezza o soprabondanza di carne, radrizzandogli un braccio, se nella forma l’ossatura non fosse cosí aggiustata, se un piede nella positura avesse preso attitudine disconcia, mettendolo a lungo, senza compatir al suo dolore, e cose simili.… E di quando in quando poi copriva di carne viva quegli estratti di quinta essenza, riducendoli con molte repliche, che solo il respirare loro mancava.’ Boschini, quoted from (altered) Ferino-Pagden, Late Titian, pp. 21–22. 33 For a more detailed discussion on De Dominici’s description, see Chapter Three. 34 Deleuze, Francis Bacon. 35 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, p. 160.

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An Introduc tion 

effects on the flesh.’36 Deleuze points out that what emerges is another sort of violence, a violence of sensation that consists of the effects of colour and line more than anything else. This violence of sensation dissolves clichés of representation and instead releases intensive forces. As Deleuze says: ‘The violence of sensation is opposed to the violence of the represented (the sensational, the cliché).’37 Sensation, according to Deleuze, has an intensive reality of its own: and what is captures in his paintings are the invisible and intensive forces of becoming, those that act upon the body by seeping through its flesh. *** Time and History. Violence brings to the fore the relationship between paintings, time, and history. Art historical scholarship has more often than not limited its scope of inquiry to establishing the significance of a work of art within the historical horizon of its creation – to ‘reconstruct’ a point of origin and then proceed to retrace its history in a linear trajectory of time. While understanding the context of its production is crucial in the process of interpretation, a mere historicist analysis risks abandoning the artwork to a mere index of history – of reducing it to the status of a document – and thereby severing it from its phenomenological specificity and material potentiality. A more balanced approach is needed between our engagement with the work of art and understanding the moment of its production. For paintings have traditionally been considered works of art precisely because of their ability to affect beholders in different periods and times – including the present. The affective response to a work of art is contingent on the temporal situation in which it occurs and thus its intensity and complexity is embedded in time as are the works themselves. Paintings disturb and disrupt chronology rather than organize time and history in a linear succession. Aby Warburg recognized the power of images to break time. Working concepts such as Nachleben (survival or afterlife) and Pathosformel (emotional formula) have articulated the various ways in which images have lives that continue to haunt us long after the time of their creation.38 The ability of paintings to produce their own time and temporality is convincingly argued by Georges Didi-Huberman. He interprets a painted surface as an extraordinary montage of heterogeneous times forming anachronism.39 Christopher Wood and Alexander Nagel have shown that apart from understanding the context when a 36 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, p. x. 37 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, p. 39. 38 Didi-Huberman, The Surviving Image. 39 Didi-Huberman, ‘Before the Image, before Time.’

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painting was created, it is equally important to understand the temporal instability of a work of art: how it points away from the moment of creation, backward to a remote ancestral origin, to a prior artefact or image, even to an origin outside of time, situated in divinity.40 At times, artworks can also point to their own destiny. Amy Knight Powell showed how late medieval images of the deposition pre-figure not only the lowering of ‘dead images’ during the Protestant Reformation but also their subsequent later reappearances in the gallery context. 41 The history of art therefore emerges as a history of objects that are temporarily impure and complex. I interpret paintings as having the power to disturb our interpretation of linear history as well as creating their own time, which is neither uniform nor linear but rather multivalent and discontinuous.42 Time is thus treated as a duration that emerges from the materiality of the paintings with the potential to heightening or dislodging the violence of the scene depicted. At this point a brief cautionary note is necessary: I do not argue for an ahistorical approach to art history – the sort of context-less appreciation of art in a vacuum situated somewhere outside of time and history – but merely note that history is a construct whose limits are well tested by the artefacts. Artworks produce meaning across time, space, and peoples. They are material presences with a phenomenological specificity that create threads that disturb the past and complicate the present. Thus, rather than abolishing time and history, this book problematizes the temporal relation between our perception of time in history and the temporalities produced by artworks. For this I engage with contemporaneous sources as well as more recent theoretical writing in order to show how paintings disrupt linear trajectories of place and time to create new forms of violence. *** Structure. Each chapter focuses on an individual painting by a particular artist, including Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Giovanni Lanfranco, Artemisia Gentileschi, Jusepe de Ribera, Georges de La Tour, and Francisco de Zurbarán. The study of individual paintings allows for an exploration of violence moving from the particular to the general. Thus each chapter is structured thematically around a number of corporeal attributes discussed in relation to a specific painting: wound, touch, skin, flesh, blood, and death. The first two chapters are placed under the sign of the wound. Chapter One explores Caravaggio’s peculiar strategy of constructing his canvas of the Martyrdom 40 On the temporal instability of images, see: Wood and Nagel, Anachronic Renaissance. 41 Knight Powell, Depositions. 42 Moxey, Visual Time, pp. 1–8.

An Introduc tion 

of Saint Ursula (1610) around the depiction of a wound that is paradoxically hidden from sight. The obstruction of vision and the production of other forms of corporeal engagement are further investigated in Chapter Two, which focuses on Giovanni Lanfranco’s Saint Peter Healing Saint Agatha (1613–1614). Both chapters parallel the interpretation of the wound as a pictorial moment of miraculous transformations where the sacred intervenes violently within matter. The following chapters explore the notion of the painting as body by focusing on the potentiality of the pictorial surface to become either flesh or skin. Chapter Three discusses how Jusepe de Ribera’s Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew (1644) stages the pictorial surface as having the potential to become skin, and thus rendering the violence of the flaying as an event enacted onto the corporeality of the painting. Chapter Four explores Georges de La Tour’s Penitent Saint Jerome (1630s) as a painting where the potential of paint to become as flesh is conveyed through the violence of the artist’s impasto. Both chapters set forth an interpretation of pictorial surfaces as either flesh or skin. The last two chapters discuss the staging of the painting’s surface as a threshold of life and death. As the most recognizable sign of life, blood appears in abundance in Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes (1614–1629). Chapter Five explores the abject viscosity of blood and its staging of pictorial surface as a liminal threshold of violence. Zurbarán’s The Martyrdom of Saint Serapion (1628) is shown to display the fragmentation of the body as a violent act of baroque folding. Chapter Six explores Zurbarán’s painting in relation to the notion of the painting as tomb. As made clear by the structure and focus of each chapter, this book does not intend to provide a comprehensive history of violence in baroque paintings, nor does it attempt to offer a definitive view on the historical experiences of beholding violence. Instead, it focuses on the disquieting and unruly claims made by paintings in presenting violence as a forceful event that hinges on the opaque: violence as something that moves beyond the realm of form and visibility to create a violent rupture and contradiction.

Works Cited Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard, London, Flamingo, 1984. Belting, Hans, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1997. Benjamin, Andrew, ‘Colouring Philosophy: Appel, Lyotard, and Art’s Work,’ Critical Horizons, vol. 11, no. 3 (2010), pp. 399–416. Benjamin, Andrew, ‘Endless Touching: Herder and Sculpture,’ Aisthesis – pratiche, linguaggi e saperi dell’estetico, vol. 4, no. 1 (2011), pp. 73–92.

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Benjamin, Andrew, ‘Matter’s Insistence,’ n.d., http://tonyscherman.com/essay-banquosfuneral. Benjamin, Andrew, ‘Surface Effects: Borromini, Semper, Loos,’ The Journal of Architecture, vol. 11, no. 1 (2006), pp. 1–35. Bokody, Peter, and Alexander Nagel, Renaissance Meta-Painting, London, Harvey Miller, 2020. Bynum, Caroline Walker, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe, New York, Zone Books, 2011. Bynum, Caroline Walker, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion, New York, Zone Books, 1992. Calabrese, Omar, Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1992. Decker, John, and Mitzi Kirkland-Ives, eds., Death, Torture and the Broken Body in European Art, 1300–1650, Farnham, Ashgate, 2015. Deleuze, Gilles, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, London, Continuum, 2003. Didi-Huberman, Georges, ‘Before the Image, before Time: The Sovereignty of Anachronism,’ in Compelling Visuality: The Work of Art in and out of History, ed. Claire Farago and Robert Zwijnenberg, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2003, pp. 31–44. Didi-Huberman, Georges, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. Didi-Huberman, Georges, La peinture incarnée suivi de ‘Le chef-d’oeuvre inconnu’ de Balzac, Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1985. Didi-Huberman, Georges, The Surviving Image: Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms: Aby Warburg’s History of Art, University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016. Dupaty, Charles-Marguerite-Jean-Baptiste Mercier, Lettres sur l’Italie, en 1785, vol. 2, De Senne, 1788. Ferino-Pagden, Sylvia, ed., Late Titian and the Sensuality of Painting, Venice, Marsilio, 2008. Graham, Heather, and Lauren G. Kilroy-Ewbank, eds., Visualizing Sensuous Suffering and Affective Pain in Early Modern Europe and the Spanish Americas, Leiden, Brill, 2018. Hills, Helen, ‘The Baroque: The Grit in the Oyster of Art History,’ in Rethinking the Baroque, ed. Helen Hills, Farnham: Ashgate, 2011, pp. 11–38. Ingold, Tim, ‘Materials against Materiality,’ Archaeological Dialogues, 14 (2007), pp. 1–16. Ivanic, Suzanna, Mary Laven, and Andrew Morrall, eds., Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2019. Knight Powell, Amy, Depositions: Scenes from the Late Medieval Church and the Modern Museum, New York, Zone Books, 2012. Marin, Louis, To Destroy Painting, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1994. Mitchell, W.J.T., ‘Metapictures,’ in Picture Theory, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1994. Moxey, Keith, Visual Time: The Image in History, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2013. Musacchio, Jacqueline, The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 1999.

An Introduc tion 

Nethersole, Scott, Art and Violence in Early Renaissance Florence, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 2018. Paleotti, Gabriele, ‘Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre et profane,’ in Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento: fra manierismo e controriforma, vol. 2, ed. Paola Barocchi, Rome, Laterza, 1961. Palomino de Castro y Velasco, Antonio, Vidas, ed. Nina Ayala Mallory, Madrid, Alianza Editorial, 1986. Panofsky, Erwin, ‘What Is Baroque?’ in Three Essays of Style, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1995, pp. 17–90. Pericolo, Lorenzo, Caravaggio and Pictorial Narrative: Dislocating the Istoria in Early Modern Painting, London, Harvey Miller, 2011. Pericolo, Lorenzo, ‘What Is Metapainting? The Self-Aware Image Twenty Years Later,’ in The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Metapainting, ed. Victor Stoichita, London, Harvey Miller, 2015, pp. 1–31. Pericolo, Lorenzo, and Alexander Nagel, eds., Subject as Aporia in Early Modern Art, Farnham, Ashgate, 2010. Pfisterer, Ulrich, Kunst-Geburten: Kreativität, Erotik, Körper, Berlin, Wagenbach, 2014. Scarry, Elaine, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1987. Stoichita, Victor I., The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996. Terry-Fritsch, Allie, and Erin Felicia Labbie, eds., Beholding Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Farnham, Ashgate, 2012. Wood, Christopher, and Alexander Nagel, Anachronic Renaissance, New York: Zone Books, 2010. Wyss, Edith, The Myth of Apollo and Marsyas in the Art of the Italian Renaissance: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Images, Newark, University of Delaware Press, 1996.

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Image 2. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, 1610, oil on canvas, 143 × 180 cm, Palazzo ZevallosStigliano, Naples. Image Credit: Intesa Sanpaolo Collection.

1.

Wound: On Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of Saint Ursula Abstract Chapter One examines Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of Saint Ursula by focusing on the peculiar staging of the wound and its relation to the radical transformation of her body. By interrogating Caravaggio’s manipulation of time and pictorial narrative, the chapter emphasizes the fragmentation at play within the painting to draw an ontological distinction between the figure of the saint and the rest of the depicted figures. The chapter argues that the hidden violence of the wound sets forth a process of corporeal becoming that transforms the figure of the saint into an icon – a distinct sacred image of a living martyr that has already departed the world of the living to become an other-worldly image of divine redemption. Keywords: Caravaggio, wound, narrative, fragmentation, becoming, holiness

When a thing is hidden away with so much pain, merely to reveal it is to destroy it. – Tertullian

The bow is shot, the hands are lowered, the arrow transfixed into the body of the saint. Her countenance displays little emotion. With a slight furrow of the brow, she gazes down into the entry of her body. Gushes of blood flow in distinct yet dazzling drops that do little to stir any sign of distress or sorrow on her countenance; her face remains rigid, her gaze trapped in an unsettling pose of curiosity. Saint Ursula seems to linger on her wound with unnatural poise. Under the stunned gazes of the other participants, her wound becomes fertile; it overflows with blood and life. This phenomenon achieves a radical effect on her body. She is pale white, as if already drained of life; her body is brittle and evanescent – the concrete materiality of her flesh is shown to undergo a significant change; something akin to a miraculous act of transformation. Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of Saint Ursula (1610) (Image 2) invites viewers to dwell and linger on the effects of the wound. For everything revolves around it: the saint, the soldiers, and the king, they all seem absorbed by the entry in her body. With

Cornea, B., The Matter of Violence in Baroque Painting. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463727808_ch01

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Image 3. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, 1610, oil on canvas, 143 × 180 cm, Palazzo Zevallos-Stigliano, Naples. Image Credit: Intesa Sanpaolo Collection. DETAIL.

her hands held high, the saint frames the spot as a moment of intense obscurity – a pictorial fragment from where we see the bleeding, we see the arrow in her chest; and yet, despite all our the expectations, we cannot see the laceration in her flesh. The wound is hidden beyond a delicate white veil, rendered in diaphanous brushstrokes of ephemeral colour (Image 3). This concealment of the wound under a veil is nothing short of paradoxical: for not only are we invited to gaze onto a veiled wound, but we also discover that despite the overflowing of blood, the veil remains miraculously unspoiled and white. Caravaggio staged the wound as the origin of the painted world, its place of opening and imminent collapse. For it is through the hidden presence of the piercing wound that Saint Ursula becomes something else entirely: not merely a figure that must enact its role into the unfolding drama but a distinct body that reflects upon itself, self-absorbed into her own changing materiality. Her distinct corporeality

WOUND: ON CARAVAGGIO’S MART YRDOM OF SAINT URSUL A 

becomes something akin to an icon – a sacred image of corporeal and spiritual transformation. Together with the other figures, we are made to witness as she gazes down at herself; we are made to witness her own witnessing; we gaze as she gazes at her own process of transformation; yet we are not allowed to see the original violence; we can only gaze at the veiled surface that preserves the mystery of her transformation into a living martyr, which has already departed the world of the living to become an other-worldly image of divine redemption. *** The Artist. Two charges still stand against Caravaggio: one for murder and one for destroying the art of painting. In 1606, Caravaggio was forced to flee Rome after mortally wounding a young man over a tennis match. He spent the last remaining years of his life on the run, moving between Naples, Sicily, and Malta. In 1610, with the help of his Roman friends, including the powerful Cardinal Nephew Scipione Borghese, he made a final attempt to gain a pardon and departed Naples by water. During the voyage, on 18 July 1610, Caravaggio died of what was probably an infected wound; he died in Porto Ercole, never to reach the Eternal City.1 One can seldom find in the history of art an artist whose dramatic art supplied the perfect background for the study of his radical art. During the seventeenth century, it was believed that a man’s soul was mirrored in his body and that an artist’s soul was reflected in his works of art.2 The artist’s inner life and outer appearance was marked on the canvas for everybody to see. Caravaggio, it would seem, had nowhere to hide and his art stands to betray the dark recesses of his mind and soul; at least, this is what we are told by one of his first biographers, Giovanni Pietro Bellori, who in 1672 writes: ‘Caravaggio’s style corresponded to his physiognomy and appearance; he had a dark complexion and dark eyes, and his eyebrows and hair were black; this colouring was naturally reflected in his paintings.’3 It is no wonder then to find that Caravaggio’s art is usually interpreted as a reflection of his violent life. Indeed, much of his posthumous fame – not unlike the one he had known in his lifetime – is built on this assumption. Most approaches to his life and work, whether in studies, exhibitions, or movies, were conceived with the idea that the artist’s life offers the key to deciphering the stark attraction of his work. 4 While some art historians have scrutinized Caravaggio’s paintings 1 Drancourt et al., ‘Did Caravaggio Die.’ 2 Wittkower and Wittkower, Born under Saturn, pp. 192–195. 3 Bellori in Langdon, Caravaggio, p. 5. 4 For a recent critical reprisal of Caravaggo’s scholarship, see: Pericolo, ‘Interpreting Caravaggio,’ pp. 301–316.

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for a hint of his sexuality, others have interpreted them as self-referential in their violence – an obscure unconscious (or instead self-conscious) desire of the artist to punish himself for the murder of Ranuccio Tomassoni.5 This phenomenon was only heightened by a certain art historical propensity of attempting to identify the likeness of Caravaggio – namely, his expected self-portraits – in various canvases. As such, a commonplace in the literature on the Martyrdom of Saint Ursula is that the figure standing directly behind the saint and near the soldier is an image of Caravaggio himself.6 Michael Fried interpreted the figure as a pictorial moment of self-absorption, drawing a comparison with that of the soldier holding a lamp in the Taking of Christ (1602).7 Fried argues that Caravaggio included himself in the paintings only to cut himself physically from the representational field. According to Fried, Caravaggio’s paintings proclaim their quality as distinct gallery pictures by encapsulating two dialectical moments: one of ‘immersion,’ when the artist is caught in his/her own painting, and one ‘specular,’ when he/she detaches violently from the work.8 Fried places Caravaggio’s art firmly within the representational framework where the artist’s wishes and intentions remain tied to a specific historical moment, which he sees as capturing the emergence of the tableau or the gallery picture. The following interpretation of the Martyrdom of Saint Ursula focuses on the affect produced by the mysterious wound concealed under Ursula’s dress. The veiling of the wound and the peculiar appearance of the saint (when considered alongside the other figures) suggest a radically new engagement with the materiality of the pictorial surface, not in terms of what it represents but in the way it informs or, better yet, intervenes within the representational system of the canvas. This approach is interlaced with the notion of painting as transformative and transformational, where matter is transformed through the spirit and the spirit becomes materially present. The following chapter, therefore, probes the work of materiality – its processes of inflection, dislocation, and fracture – in relation to violence as a foundational process that allows for the figure of Ursula to become a distinct icon of divine redemption. *** To Destroy Painting – this charge was first brought against Caravaggio by Vincenzio Carduccio in 1633. He writes: ‘The coming of Caravaggio was an omen of the ruin and demise of painting, comparable to how at the end of the world the Antichrist, with false miracles and strange deeds, will lead to the perdition of a great number 5 See, for instance, Bersani and Dutoit, Caravaggio’s Secrets. 6 A compelling discussion on self-referentiality in Caravaggio’s pictorial narratives, see: Pericolo, Caravaggio and Pictorial Narrative. pp. 297–400. 7 Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio, p. 222. 8 For the argument, see: Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio, pp. 39–67.

WOUND: ON CARAVAGGIO’S MART YRDOM OF SAINT URSUL A 

of people, who will be moved by his works, apparently so admirable, but actually deceiving, false and transitory.’9 Giovanni Baglione, who took Caravaggio to court for libel, alludes to this image in softer terms, writing that: ‘some people consider him to have been the very ruination of painting, because many young artists, following his example, simply copy heads from life without studying the fundamentals of drawing and the profundity of art and are satisfied with colour values alone.’10 Although not quite the Antichrist, still, with a few chosen words, Baglione cuts deep into Caravaggio’s art, dismissing it as a mere copy of reality: one that registers only the appearance of things and thus forgetting the inner depths which were considered the domain of true art. This raises the pertinent question of what Baglione actually meant by the ‘profundity of art.’ He appeared to refer to Caravaggio’s failure to go in-depth and touch the very essence of art – to convey its internal rigorous structure. At this point, we must look for the meaning of the second charge, that of destroying the ‘art of painting.’ The question must be set within the representational framework that dominated the Renaissance ever since Leon Battista Alberti published his book Della Pittura in 1435. The entire first book of Alberti’s treatise is dedicated to demonstrating that a bi-dimensional medium – whether a canvas, a panel, or a portion of a wall – can artistically transform itself into a screen reproducing with exactitude and in relief the painter’s vision as if it were real. Painting, therefore, not only imitates nature, but is also conceived to mirror the external world in every detail, just as it appears to man’s sight. This implies a process where representation relies on the active involvement of the beholder.11 Suspension of belief was the key as artists resorted to various techniques throughout the centuries in order to achieve this end. Most often they used perspective, aiming to create a plausible continuation of space between the world of the beholder and the world of the painting. Figures looking outside of the painting were seen as an effective way of making the beholder part of the painting’s story. Indeed, everything should resemble and imitate the world of the viewer as the most successful of paintings were said to represent reality so closely that one might think that the figures depicted ‘lacked only breath.’12 *** Mimesis. Mimesis, or imitation, was the central concept of the Renaissance, revered by artists and writers alike. Starting from the fifteenth century, painting was almost 9 Quoted in Marin, To Destroy Painting, p. 4. 10 Quoted in Marin, To Destroy Painting, p. 4. 11 Puttfarken, The Discovery of Pictorial Composition. 12 Van Eck, Classical Rhetoric.

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exclusively interpreted through a paradigm that established a mimetic dependence between artist and model.13 This dependency, however, was necessary but not sufficient. For a painting to reach the highest quality of art, it must overcome nature by virtue of the artist’s invenzione or maniera, that is, his own style and imagination. As such, it was not sufficient for painters to copy what was before their eyes, but through their stylistic lenses, they must highlight various aspects of natural vision in order to enhance the grace and beauty of the subject represented. As Didi-Huberman pointed out, imitation was not a question of simply copying a model – which could be either the art of antiquity (as the Renaissance’s ultimate point of reference) and/or of surrounding nature – but of improving on it with the artist’s invenzione. A paradoxical move for sure but one that would allow representation to be understood as imitation to the extent that the pre-existing model was idealized with the help of the artist’s own imaginative faculties.14 In this way painting was transformed into a superior form of natural vision, one that allowed beholders to see the invisible beyond the visible, to observe the ideal essence of things beyond their natural, and, alas, imperfect appearance. The dominance of the ideal can best be observed in the Renaissance practice and theory of disegno, namely drawing and design. This is the point where Baglione’s critique of Caravaggio’s apparent lack of the fundamentals of drawing becomes critical. The art of drawing figured distinctly in theories of art in the sixteenth century as a key point of differentiation. There were recurring discussions on the different values of drawing and colour, with the Florentines privileging disegno in opposition to the Venetians, who valued more colore.15 The comparison between Michelangelo and Titian is a well-known example of how sixteenth-century writers regarded the opposition between drawing and colour – the first stands as the quintessential exponent of intellectual drawing while the latter of seductive colour. Caravaggio’s art did not conform to either of these rules of practice. This can be observed in his peculiar approach to colour. As Giovanni Pietro Bellori writes in Le vite de’ pittori, scultori et architetti moderni (1672): ‘Caravaggio aspired only to the glory of colour, so that the incarnation, skin, blood, and natural surfaces might appear real, he directed his eye and work solely to that end, leaving aside all the other aspects of art.’16 We have seen what the seventeenth-century critics meant by the ‘other aspects of art.’ Yet, Bellori is adamant in reminding his readers once again: 13 Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images, pp. 72–76. 14 Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images, p. 74; see also Cropper, The Domenichino Affair. 15 On the distinction between Florentine and Venetian painting, see: Rosand, Painting in SixteenthCentury Venice; Hills, Venetian Colour. 16 ‘E perche egli aspirava all’unica lode del colore, sinche paresse vera l’incarnazione, la pelle e ‘l sangue e la superficie naturale, a questo solo volgeva intento l’occhio e l’industria, lasciando da parte gli alti pensieri dell’arte.’ Bellori in Hibbard, Caravaggio, p. 362.

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‘Such praise caused Caravaggio to appreciate himself alone, and he claimed to be the only imitator of nature. Nevertheless, he lacked invenzione, or any knowledge of the science of painting. The moment the model was taken from under his eyes, his hand and his mind remained empty.’17 One may conclude that Caravaggio was guilty – in the eyes of his contemporaries – of imitation without idealization, of being much too reliant on the outer appearance of the model rather than seeking to depict its ‘true’ essence. He broke with the strict confines of what representation should be – that is, the ideal imitation of natural beauty – in order to reveal the paradox of painting as something that is always set in excess of (re)presentation. And without the ‘proper’ application of the art of drawing, Caravaggio could only fail, in view of his critics, to convey the internal structure of the body, which at the time corresponded to the internal mechanisms of art. We can notice that we are far off from the idea that Caravaggio was somehow incapable of painting or drawing, as Baglione suggested, or that his technique was a result of optic experiments with light cameras.18 Instead, one might suggest that his art can be interpreted as one concerned ambiguities, playing on the construction of complex surfaces, of bodies made of colour and light (though not exclusively): so much so that one as we can see the veins throbbing and chest breathing under the thin layer of paint as skin. *** Colour. Let us contrast and compare the figures of the king and the saint. The king of the Huns emerges from a tent now barely visible in the background. Moments after shooting his arrow, his figure is turned towards us in a moment of vulnerability or confusion that contrasts greatly with the self-assured radiance of his shield. His face reveals layers of wrinkles and saga rendered in sturdy brushstrokes of flesh colours. Surfaces of skin and flesh stand out, rising above and against the rest the ground – moving and turning ever so slightly towards his beloved. One can observe how the tints Caravaggio used for the king’s face are not the same as for the other soldiers. This distinction mark’s Caravaggio’s commitment to colour as something specific and particular to each figure, place, cloth, or surface. For Caravaggio used the subtle textures and nuances of colour – from pink to red and white shades – to proclaim the radical ontological distinction between the figures: soldiers, king, and, most significantly, the saint. 17 ‘Per le quail lodi il Caravaggio non apprezzava altri che se stesso, chiamandosi egli fido, unico imitatore della natura; contuttocio molte e le megliori parti gli mancavano, perche non erano in lui ne invenzione, ne decoro, ne disegno, ne scienza alcuna della pittura mentro tolto da gli occhi suoi il modello restavano vacui la mano e l’ingegno.’ Bellori in Hibbard, Caravaggio, p. 371. 18 See: Hockney, The Secret Knowledge.

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Saint Ursula is nothing like the rest of the figures: she is ghostly in her pallor and her body is distinctly bathed in a cold metallic light. Torso, breasts, neck, and face are all set in profile as if to signal a body caught in a constant state of withdrawing. She is bent over her body, folded in her white dress and draped in a red mantle, worn out, slowly draining of blood. Her edges are sharp yet obscure, her flesh immaterial yet concrete, her skin fluid yet solid – a contradictory figure offered to viewers in the midst of its withdrawing, turned towards the inside of herself as she is ready to depart the world of the visible. Across the canvas the king of the Huns emerges ceaselessly from the ground, his fleshy face and heavy garments enacts an alternated process of becoming – for if one figure is emerging from the dark ground the figure of Saint Ursula is set to forever dissipate or fade away into the superficial workings of the canvas. Between those two, a moving form of dialectical play is brought into attention by Caravaggio’s use of fleshy colour. *** Carnatura. Skin, flesh, and colour have long been considered associates; indeed, the ancient Greek notion of colour (chrôma) derives from chrôs, meaning skin.19 Early modern notions of flesh tones draw on the Greek chrôs in that they connect simultaneously to the colouration of the visible surface of the body as well as to its living substance, to the layers of flesh fused together in a corporeal consistency.20 The late-sixteenth-century artistic practice emphasized the materiality of colour and paint in rendering skin and flesh in all their complexity and varied gradations.21 Theoretical discussions of flesh colour – then known as carnatura – mostly revolved around studio practices, with Paolo Pino warning painters about skin looking like wood or stone and Giorgio Vasari advising artists not to use black in shaded areas. 22 Apart from the practical aspects of these comments, writers also stressed the importance of skin colour to establish the material identity of the depicted subject and the effect it had on the beholders.23 Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers acknowledged the crucial role of colour in creating softness, heat, cold, fluidity – all physical conditions and material properties produced by the handling of pigment. But more importantly it was the use of carnatura that was seen to endow figures with corporeality to the point 19 Connor, The Book of Skin, pp. 10–11. 20 Gavrylenko, ‘The Body without Skin,’ pp. 489. 21 Lehmann, ‘Fleshing Out the Body.’ 22 Lehmann, ‘Fleshing Out the Body,’ p. 97. 23 See Benthien, Skin; and in regard to early modern images of flaying, see: Bohde, ‘Skin and the Search for the Interior.’

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where viewers reported they could see the flesh moving and the veins throbbing underneath their skin.24 The depiction of flesh and skin played a central role in the historical debate known as the paragone, a theoretical dispute among artists and theorists in which one form of art (architecture, sculpture, or painting) is championed as surpassing all others. In his Dialogo di pittura (1548), Paolo Pino used the depiction of flesh to affirm the superiority of painting over sculpture by arguing that although painting and sculpture are both a product of human creation and fulfil the same aesthetic requirement, sculpture can only render the form, while painting adorns them with ‘total existence.’ Pino writes: Painting and sculpture were born together and were both produced by human minds to the same end and for the same purpose: to imitate and simulate natural and artificial objects. We come much closer to such an end than sculptors, in so far as they can only give their figures shape, which is mere being, but we painters, besides giving them shape and being, we adorn them with total existence, and this means that we also simulate the carnal body, where one notices the variety of complexions, the eyes as distinguished from the hair and from other parts, distinguish, that is, not only through shape but also through colours as they are distinguished in life.25

Colour therefore gives figures a bodily presence: a fleshy, weighty carnality distinguished from the rest of the things that populate the visual field. Skin colour brings a difference to each place and surface: the lip, the eyelids, the nose, the cheek, and the fingertips – all producing in their own distinct way corporeal surfaces. This distinction – which of instance sculpture does not entail – exceeds the pictorial system of imitation to further engage the production of affects through material process. There is a strong art historical tradition of interpreting the depiction of flesh colours in terms of ‘lifelikeness.’26 Indeed, a close inspection of sixteenth-century 24 Jacobs, The Living Image, pp. 82–86. 25 ‘La pittura e la scultura nacquero insieme, e furono ambe due prodotte da l’intelletti umani a uno istesso fine e a un solo effetto, per imitar e fignere le cose naturali e artificiali, al qual fine noi s’accostiamo molto più perfettamente che gli statuari, imperò che lor non puono dare a una figura altro che la forma, ch’è l’essere; ma noi pittori, oltre la forma e l’essere, l’orniamo del ben esser integramente, e questo è ch’insieme f igniamo la forma composita di carne, ove si discerne la diversità delle complessioni, gli occhi distinti dai capegli e dagli altri membri, non dico solo di forma, ma di colori, come è anco nel vivo distinto.’ Paolo Pino in Barocchi, Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento, pp. 127–128. Translation from: Klein and Zerner, Italian Art, p. 15. 26 Most lifelikeness responses are treated in a representational framework where the thing depicted is supposed to act for the thing represented. On different theories, see: Freedberg, The Power of Images;

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art treatises reveals that the impression of life was intimately connected with the successful rendering of a figure’s appearance of flesh and skin. Lodovico Dolce (1510–1568), for instance, argued in his Dialogo della Pittura (1557) that ‘colouring is so important and compelling that, when the painter produces a good imitation of the tones and softness of flesh and the rightful characteristics of an object there may be, he makes his paintings seem alive, to the point where only breath is the only thing missing in them.’27 Dolce was certainly not the only one to hold this idea at the time – that flesh colouring endows figures with the appearance of life. Gian Paolo Lomazzo (1538–1592) also observed on a similar tone that in Titian’s art ‘[t]he flesh has so much loveliness and grace, with its blend of colours that it appears real and alive, and particularly the gracefulness and tenderness that are so natural to him.’28 The equation of flesh tints to the appearance of ‘lifelikeness’ hinges on the notion of art as imitation and representation where figures become the idealization of an external model. And yet this was not always the case. Giovanni Pietro Bellori observed in his Le vite de’ pittori, scultori et architetti moderni (1672) that Caravaggio’s handling of the brush was said to rival nature through its ability to recreate what death takes away: life. Bellori recounts that at the death of Caravaggio ‘there was universal sorrow and Cavalier Marino, his very close friend, mourned his death and honoured his memory with the following verses: Death and Nature Michele made a cruel plot against you; The latter feared to be bested by your hand in every image Which was by you created rather than painted; The former burned with indignation Because with high interest As many people as his scythe cut down Your brush would recreate.29

Gross, The Dream of the Moving Statue; Jacobs, The Living Image; Van Eck, Classical Rhetoric; and Van Eck et al., The Secret Lives of Art Works. 27 ‘E cert oil colorito e di tanta importanza e forza, che quando il Pittore va imitando bene le tinte e la morbidezza delle carni, e la proprieta di qualunque cosa, fa parer le sue Pitture vive, e tali, che lor non manchino altro, che’l fiato.’ Dolce in Roskill, Dolce’s Aretino, p. 153. 28 ‘E nelle carni ha avuto tanta venustà e grazia, con quelle sue mischie e tinte, che paiono vere e vive, e principalmente le grassezze e le tenerezze che naturalmente in lui si vedono.’ Lomazzo in Sherman, Mannerism, p. 81. 29 ‘Fecer crudel congiura, / Michele, a’ danni tuoi Morte e Natura: / Questa restar temea / Da la tua mano in ogni / imagin vinta, / Ch’era da te creata e non dipinta; / Quella di sdegno ardea / Perché con larga usura, / Quante la / falce sua genti struggea, / Tante il pennello tuo ne rifacea.’ Quoted in Hibbard, Caravaggio, p. 371.

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Unlike other authors that lay an emphasis on the imitation of nature or the appearance of life, Marino points out that Caravaggio’s art achieved the highest praise to create figures that have long been dead anew; namely, he emphasized painting’s ability to affect and produce new and original forms of life that were not necessarily replicating a pre-existing model. Thus it may be fruitful to rethink the relationship between colour and life by turning to the modern notion of affects.30 For Deleuze and Guattari, affect does not denote a personal feeling or sentiment, but ‘a pre-personal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act.’31 Affects, therefore, are not simple affections, since they are independent from their subject. Artists create affects and precepts, ‘blocks of space-time,’ that enhance art’s power to become. The process of becoming removes or dislocates an element from its original place in order to bring about a new one. The process therefore is not one of analogy or imitation; it is not a correspondence between relations, neither is it a resemblance, an imitation, or an identification.32 On the contrary, becoming is generative of a new way of being, functioning more on the principle of movement and change rather than resemblance. Painting therefore has the potentiality to produce and vary affects that are not already given. And carnatura can become a vehicle for the production of corporeality and bodily presence. The figure of the saint and king inhabit two divergent worlds that only touch each other on the surface of the canvas. Their contrast is established through the contradictory depiction of flesh tints. This brings us closer to Jean-Luc Nancy’s interpretation of colour as ‘always the colour of “each time”: each time, in each place, local colour, literally.’33 By following Nancy, one cannot speak of colour in general, of red or green as a generic colour; instead, colour must be treated as local by its very nature; colour as the ‘empirical technique of the local,’ belonging to a particular place.34 A colour is always the surface of a moment, always the rendering of a time; never an essence that needs to be captured or translated on canvas, but a material intensity, a radiance of local presence. Carnatura appears in Caravaggio’s painting as surfaces of particular pigments and paint producing affects (hence those well-defined ‘blocks of space-time’) that establish a fundamental ontological difference between the figures depicted. For Caravaggio’s painting presents skin as a surface that sets the figures apart from each other, making them distinct and discreet. What colour opens up is not the 30 On the affective turn, see: Clough and Halley, The Affective Turn. 31 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. xvi. 32 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 237. 33 Nancy, The Birth to Presence, p. 352. 34 Nancy, Multiple Arts, p. 191.

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quality of the figure, but rather an event of its material process, which sets its presence forth. The colours of flesh and skin establish a world with various degrees and connections: origins, relations, and finalities. They are the colour of each time and each place with full potentiality to stage figures in different ways, to create new processes of becoming and coming into presence, distinct, if not divergent from the narrative of representation. The king and the saint enact a process of dissemblance or difference, a condition of heterogeneity: they hold each other, answer each other, echo one another. The king is painted with deep flesh tints; the saint already shows a superficial pallor; one bursts with the rich texture of life while the other fading away, one is thrown back while the other is thrown forward. Both are intimately connected by the speed of the arrow and the illimitable dark background. He is the coming into presence, moving forward through the colour of his flesh and the turning of his body. She is moving away, turning towards her inner self, bidding farewell as she slowly drains of blood to fade away into the painting’s depthless surface. A universe of complex surfaces presented to the eye, the hand, and the mouth as thick textures of paint – a distinct condition of two bodies ingrained in matter to unfold with difference in light and colour. *** On the Surface. Both figures are placed at the edge of an abyss, with no depth, nor any foreseeable end – a narrative of blind spots and loose ends unfolding in an undefined and indescribable space and time. In the infinite space of a moment, the king of the Huns shoots his arrow, transfixing Ursula’s body. His broken heart, full of rage and rejection, breaks her heart. Everything takes place at an impossible distance, almost side by side, as if the two antagonist figures touch each other at the limit of the wound and of the arrow. While looking in awe at his beloved, the king lowers his arms, leaving the action in a temporal and spatial loophole that baffles us in its obscurity. Time and space move slowly on this surface: never beginning, never ending, just contracting and expanding in a rhythm as subtle and gentle as the saint’s last breaths of life. Despite the intimacy of the half-length composition, the scene does not facilitate an effortless access to the scene; there is no figure to invite us into the painting, nor are we granted access through a compositional arrangement that presupposes a fictitious continuity between our world and the world of the painting. The soldier dressed in armour at the right-hand edge of the painting raises his arm in a gesture that can appear to bar our entry into the scene. Moreover, in the centre of the canvas, between the saint and the king, a hand reaches towards us, as if to keep us at a distance, to push us back on the surface of the painting, back

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on its threshold. Caravaggio employed here a long-standing tension of inclusion and exclusion, yet he did so in an a very peculiar manner: instead of creating any sense of shared physical or mental space, on the contrary, he stripped the canvas of the basic coordinates of place and time, the most common way of establishing a shared commonality between our world and the pictorial world; he striped it of its historia in order to retain only what is essential to the process of transformation: a return to the painting’s materiality, in other words, he refocused the emphasis of the painting on the workings of materiality. *** Blind Narrative. How are we to deal with these frictions and disjunctions in the narrative development of the story? How are these blind spots affecting our interpretation of the painting’s historia? Conceptualized by Alberti in his treatise Della Pittura (1435), historia was conceived as the greatest goal and achievement for any Renaissance artist. Painters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries followed a general rule of constructing their work around a basic narrative plot that presupposes a sequence of moments that unfold in a largely coherent spatial and temporal dimension. Among the most prized subjects were religious and historical scenes. Needless to say, despite the rules drafted by Alberti and prized by critics and painters alike, the massive corpus of Renaissance art is filled with subversive pictorial transgressions, intentional incoherencies, and hermeneutic chimaeras. Yet none were so powerful or striking to the eyes of his contemporaries than the transgressions and dislocations used by Caravaggio. Until Caravaggio the common practice of painters was to depict something that could be construed more or less as a recognizable imitation of reality with a pictorial recounting of a narrative that could be reconstructed and interpreted by beholders. With Caravaggio, however, the coherent depiction of historia in paintings would suffer a violent break from tradition – one that would shock his fellow painters and leave critics incapable of understanding his radical innovations. Lorenzo Pericolo pointed out how Caravaggio’s legacy can be understood as ‘bipolar.’ Since painters interpreted and adapted his innovative narrative features in their art, art theorists often lacked the conceptual instrumentarium (instruments) to appreciate the painter’s subversive changes in the category of historia, very often unveiling their ‘critical myopia.’35 This can be poignantly observed in Giovanni Baglione’s writings, who famously called Caravaggio and his so-called followers as ‘incapable of putting two figures together or of composing a story because they do not understand the high value of the noble art of painting.’ Baglione, it seems, 35 Pericolo, Caravaggio and Pictorial Narrative, p. 21.

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measured Caravaggio’s art against the credible composition of historia – of the relation between figures, space, and time. Valeska von Rosen pointed out how Caravaggio’s paintings cleverly draw on antique formulas and poses in order to subvert established models of imitation.36 She claims that Caravaggio in his work repeatedly tested the limits of what is tolerable and acceptable, always testing and poking the limits of what can and cannot be represented: we see dirty fingernails or feet, saints in lascivious poses, or sacred scenes that appear at first sight to be genre scenes. Von Rosen explored the various strategies used by Caravaggio to insert ambiguity into his paintings.37 For instance, she points out how in the Calling of Saint Matthew (1599–1600) from the Contarelli Chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome we are still unable to pinpoint which figure is in fact that of Matthew. Caravaggio aimed at endowing his paintings with a distinct multiplicity and ambiguity, which reveals a foundational vacillation between the profane and the religious image. According to von Rosen, ‘what Caravaggio explores by gliding along the border of what is “possible” and what is “feasible” is the ability to be named as such.’38 Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of Saint Ursula exposes that ambiguity and multiplicity by leaving aside the basic coordinates of a well-designed narrative. Beyond the close up arrangement of the figures – resulting from its half-length format – we are given no clear clues as to where this event is taking place: there is no landscape nor is there the suggestion of an architectural construction; the only thing visible in the background is the open fold of a tent, and even that is barely discernible. The suggestion of a folding tent surrounded by pitch-black darkness seems only to highlight the uncertainty of the scene – the tent itself as a temporary structure that has no fixed place – leaving it to drift in a spatial and temporal vacuum. And perhaps that was the point: the action does not occur in a particular place; it does not occupy or depend on a specific location. This is perhaps because Caravaggio opens up the space of the paintings through the presence of the figures. Instead of creating a given space, a landscape or an interior, for the figures to develop, it can also be that Caravaggio allowed for the figures to take their place in the indefinite space of darkness, that is, he imagined the space to open or grow from the corporeality of the figures. As such, the rich web of interactions and relations between figures, architecture, and landscape that characterized so much of what we define today as Renaissance painting is abolished. The use of darkness defies not only the coherence of the narrative through the annihilation of time and space. As Itay Sapir has shown, it is also the site of a 36 Von Rosen, ‘Inszenierte’; Von Rosen, ‘Caravaggio.’ 37 Von Rosen, Caravaggio. 38 Von Rosen, Caravaggio, p. 290.

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subversion of knowledge, of what he calls a proliferating non-savoir.39 For narrative is, after all, a specific case of knowledge, a particular way in which information can be organized and communicated, but Caravaggio’s use of darkness goes further than a simple rejection of linear narratives. Sapir argues that this resistance to knowledge is emerging in a period that gave rise to other forms of non-knowledge, such as Montaigne’s scepticism and Giordano Bruno’s insistence on the infinity of the universe – namely, with the inability to possess or even to access an exhaustive and systematic knowledge. This non-knowledge posed by Caravaggio’s pitch-black background does not necessarily involve an iconoclastic streak against images, but may allude to a different tradition of revealing the sacred through images. It may pertain to a process that Georges Didi-Huberman calls ‘stripping the image bare’ – something required in all religious fervour by the sublime theology of the pseudo-Dionysius, something required by any work devoted to the mystery of the Incarnation. 40 And this image would turn away from the mechanisms of ‘great art’ – that is, credible construction of a narrative and ideal mimesis – to reveal the incarnation of non-knowledge where the darkness of the background can draws analogous associations with apophatic theology. In his Mystical Theology, Pseudo-Dionysius argues that cataphatic and symbolic theology is concerned with what we can affirm about God, while apophatic theology is concerned with our understanding of God when speech and thought fail us and we are reduced to silence. 41 The core of apophatic theology for Pseudo-Dionysius is about arriving at the point of theological silence, in what he calls ‘the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence.’42 A parallel can be drawn between Caravaggio’s dark background and the white wall of Fra Angelico’s Annunciation (c. 1436–1445; Convent of San Marco, Florence). For Didi-Huberman the white wall of the fresco is more than a simple, painted object; it is an event, a powerful surface of paradoxes that amounts to a symptom. Didi-Huberman uses the Freudian concept of the symptom as a visual means that opens representation to the mystery of divine incarnation; it manifests as a ‘knot of an arborescence of associations or conflicting meanings.’43 As such, Caravaggio transformed the background of his painting into a symptom of the divine mystery by stripping the image bare to a dark surface. Against this surface stripped to the bare essentials that has the potential to become a material symptom of incarnation, Caravaggio staged the act of shooting 39 Sapir, ‘The Destruction of Painting,’ p. 72. 40 Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images, p. 200. 41 Louth, Origins of Christian Mystical Tradition, p. 160. 42 Turner, The Darkness of God, p. 21. 43 Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images, p. 19.

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the arrow, that is, of wounding the flesh, as disjointed and fractured. 44 Lorenzo Pericolo pointed out that in Caravaggio’s painting, discontinuities are not to be located in the passage of chronological time, but are actually created and made: they involve a set of juxtapositions that ultimately overcome the hold of narrative and history. This we can observe in the relationship between the time of the king, who has just fired his arrow, and the time of Saint Ursula, who is already, and for some time now, losing her energy and life. Moreover, the spatial coordination between the two figures is deliberately misaligned: the king is not facing the saint, as would be a logical result of shooting his arrow. In turn, the saint’s reaction does not imply she is in the same temporality as the rest of the figures; her impassive gaze suggests she is already somewhere else entirely. For the figure of Saint Ursula stands apart from the narrative as a distinct and visceral presence – an altered corporeality placed outside time, made to bleed before the viewers, ceaselessly. *** Wound. Draped in a deep red cloak over a fine white dress, Saint Ursula fixes her gaze on the place where the arrow punctures her body. The crimson mantle gathered in sumptuous folds around her waists is tightly folded under her right arm, forming a moment of convergence that rests alongside the bleeding wound. Fabric and flesh are placed next to each other in a relationship of displacement or substitution – a subversive move of dislocation that gives the red mantle a sense of carnality that is deliberately absent from the figure of the saint. Todd Olson has interrogated Caravaggio’s preoccupation with twisted cloth, patched elbows, and fraying ropes, stressing their narrative value in suggesting a set of material and temporal processes.45 For Olson, these traces of habitual actions are rich in semantic possibilities, becoming something that would later be described as metonymy – that is meaning gathered from contiguous relations.46 By refocusing attention from the human figure to these surfaces and textures of ‘gratuitous materiality,’ Caravaggio emphasizes the potential of the marginal to drive narrative, and thus, implicitly challenged the pre-eminence of the figure and the ideal forces that defined the Renaissance work of art. Olson goes further to suggest that the artist had ‘investigated the possibility of a material sign divested of motivated analogy and exemplarity,’ leaving his paintings to ‘gesture towards disenchanted materiality.’47 While Caravaggio did indeed use the folds and twisted cloth to divert attention from the figure, I would suggest that 44 Pericolo, Caravaggio and Pictorial Narrative, pp. 466–479. 45 Olson, Caravaggio’s Pitiful Relics, ch. 1. 46 Olson, Caravaggio’s Pitiful Relics, p. 21. 47 Olson, Caravaggio’s Pitiful Relics, pp. 48–49.

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Image 4. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Judith Beheading Holofernes, 1598, oil on canvas, 145 × 195 cm, Palazzo Barberini, Rome. Image Credit: Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica, Roma (MiC) – Bibliotheca Hertziana, Istituto Max Planck per la storia dell’arte/Enrico Fontolan.

in his Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, the materiality of the cloth cannot be described as anything like ‘disenchanted’ in fact, its materiality furthers the physicality of the saint – of its open flesh – visually while preserving the mystery of the wound under the thin white veil. Thus we see the surface of the cloak thicker and pastier, heavier even as its colour proclaims a physicality that is quite unlike the figure of Ursula. Carnality is not bestowed here by the application of flesh colours that would presumably give ‘lifelikeness’ to the figure, but through a material process of becoming. The figure of Saint Ursula is painted with light touches of white paint, making her appear light and brittle, otherworldly almost, her weight transfigured from mere flesh to something akin to a transformed presence; her body echoing the transfigured body of Christ after Resurrection, while the twisted red fabric grounding it still into the decaying realm of the living. In the absence of the visible wound, the crimson folds, coming together close to the saint’s breast, echo its visual presence. Caravaggio made violence a matter of excess – an excess of figuration and representation. And this approached radically diverged from his other paintings that depict scenes of extreme violence. We are not confronted here with the graphic violence of Judith Beheading Holofernes (1598) (Image 4) where the steely blade slices deep into the general’s neck. Nor

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Image 5. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Incredulity of Saint Thomas, 1602, Sanssouci Palace, Potsdam. Image Credit: Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg. Photographer: Hans Bach.

with the repelling opening in the flesh from the Incredulity of Saint Thomas (1602) (Image 5) where Thomas’s fingers seem to penetrate Christ’s open side. Indeed, the jets of blood in Judith Beheading Holofernes (1598) are painted with sturdy strokes of the brush, rendering simultaneously the violence of the event and the work of its materiality. This blood does not attempt to reproduce or imitate an external ‘reality,’ nor does it seek to shock through an excessive realistic gore, but rather it shows a form of violence that emerges from material processes – its dislocated materiality. In the Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, on the other hand, the visual presence of the wound is deliberately elided. There is the surface of the arrow, there is the surface of the splashes of blood, and there is the white veil. We cannot see beyond these surfaces simply because there is nothing to see underneath paint and canvas. For what is made visible can be contained and mastered by the eye – it can be limited to one scope and area – while what remains beyond figuration can be expand to reach its full potentiality. The miracle entailed by the materiality of the hidden wound necessarily exceeds the visible to become a visual affect. And thus the folding of the red cloak only accentuates the absence of the wound while dislocating its visuality and carnality onto a piece of paint as fabric – an intertwined play with

WOUND: ON CARAVAGGIO’S MART YRDOM OF SAINT URSUL A 

the surface of the painting itself. Thus we may consider the red tunic as a material and visual vehicle for opening flesh – one that dislocates the violence of the wound from the rest of her body. *** Becoming. Far from looking agonized or appearing to be in a state of divine bliss, the saint seems suddenly aware of her own changing corporeality. She is gazing at herself; she has become a spectator of her own transformation. The lack of any explicit signs of a divine presence does not necessarily imply the absence of the sacred; it only means that the sacred is to be intuited somewhere else. The moment of transformation enlivens the wound by staging it as an event of becoming. This process is one of continuous change and movement between matter and spirit – this is not to say that one becomes the other, but that it is an ever-changing process that continues to produce new forms of presences. 48 Thus, becoming is generative of a new way of being, functioning more on the principle of movement and change rather than resemblance. Hence the pallor of the saint is substantially different from the rest of the figures because she does not resemble anything at all; her skin is silver white, showing a suspension of her process of withdrawal from life. Or rather: her body assumes a state of withdrawal comparable to those of relics suspended somewhere between heaven and earth – at the point where matter becomes holy and the holiness reveals itself through the transformation of matter. 49 This potentiality of becoming can take multiple forms. Helen Hills points out the relationship between the corporeality of Saint Ursula and the display of relics in seventeenth-century Naples.50 Hills suggests that Saint Ursula’s body is shown in the full process of transformation analogous to the one contained by silver reliquaries. As such, the saint’s white pallor is comparable to the colour of silver while the puncture of the wound points acts like a fenestella, a small window that contains and displays the relics of the saint. For ‘we see at once together woman-saint and reliquary bust, as if in a montage.’51 The parallel between Ursula’s figure and the busts decorating the royal chapel of the Treasury of Saint Januarius in Naples is indeed striking, especially when considering the wound as the punctum of sanctity:

48 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 237. 49 See Olson, Caravaggio’s Pitiful Relics, for the relationship between the artist’s paintings and the invention of relics in the seventeenth century; for a further discussion on art and relics in early modern Europe, see: Stoenescu, The Interaction of Art. 50 Hills, ‘Through a Glass Darkly,’ pp. 57–59; Hills, The Matter of Miracles, p. 441. 51 Hills, ‘Through a Glass Darkly,’ p. 58.

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the place of martyrdom and transformation. The wound thus affects the figure of Ursula into a recognizable saint.52 The process of becoming entails a further fragmentation of the saint’s body. The place of the wound, framed by her hands, veiled by the white dress, is singled out as a distinct image within an image: a holy icon to be sensed and revered. However, the term icon does not refer here necessarily to the specific tradition of Byzantine imagery, but rather to what Jenny Slatman has described (in a phenomenological sense) as a certain feature of the image that is non-representable – in other words, that which exceeds the image as representation.53 A phenomenological view of iconicity implies an intentional relation between the image and the beholder – where the icon expresses a certain ‘meaning of being’ of the image that is seen by the beholder. The place of the wound as icon does not reveal or show anything visible or figurative. Unlike the fenestella that ensure the visibility of relics – of bodies transformed through the sacred – the place of the wound remains hidden under a thin white veil. The veil appears as a surface of desire and exclusion, designed to keeps viewers at a distance.54 As Jacques Derrida reminds us, it is impossible to do away with the veil, especially through an act of revealing: ‘[F]inishing with the veil will always have been the very movement of the veil: unveiling oneself, reaffirming the veil is unveiling.’55 Thus we can only engage with the surface and tactility of the veil and follow its effects in the economy of the painting. The veil shows the icon of the absent wound to be open up different, if not divergent, experiences and durations. The veil shrouds the saint like a corpse only moments after the arrow was shot. The intensity of time emanates from matter’s potential to become holy; the violent process of becoming imposes a necessary limit: to make the violence of divine transformation a matter of virtual presence; that is, not visible, nor figurative. It retains and preserves its mystery under a thin veil, and then depicts it on canvas for all to see, or, indeed, to not see.

Works Cited Barocchi, Paola, Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento, Fra manierismo e Controriforma, I, Bari, G. Laterza, 1960–1962. Benthien, Claudia, Skin: The Cultural Border of Self and the World, New York, Columbia University Press, 2002. 52 Hills, The Matter of Miracles, p. 441. 53 Slatman, ‘Phenomenological Anachronism,’ p. 8. 54 For the significance of the veil in sixteenth-century art, see: Pardo, ‘Veiling.’ 55 Derrida, ‘A Silkworm of One’s Own,’ p. 25.

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Bersani, Leo, and Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio’s Secrets, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1998. Bohde, Daniela, ‘Skin and the Search for the Interior: The Representation of Flaying in the Art and Anatomy of the Cinquecento,’ in Bodily Extremities: Preoccupations with the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture, ed. Florike Egmond and Robert Zwijnenberg, Farnham, Ashgate, 2003, pp. 10–48. Clough, Patricia Ticineto, and Jean Halley, eds., The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2007. Connor, Steven, The Book of Skin, London, Reaktion Books, 2004. Cropper, Elizabeth, The Domenichino Affair: Novelty, Imitation, and Theft in SeventeenthCentury Rome, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 2005. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Derrida, Jacques, ‘A Silkworm of One’s Own,’ in Veils, by Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2001. Didi-Huberman, Georges, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. Drancourt, Michel, et al., ‘Did Caravaggio Die of Staphylococcus aureus Sepsis?’ The Lancet, vol. 18, no. 11 (2018), p. 1178. Freedberg, David, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1989. Fried, Michael, The Moment of Caravaggio, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2011. Gavrylenko, Valeria,’ The Body without Skin,’ in Blood, Sweat and Tears: The Changing Concepts of Physiology from Antiquity into Early Modern Europe, ed. Manfred Horstmanshoff, Helen King, and Claus Zittel, Leiden, Brill, 2012, pp. 481–502. Gross, Kenneth, The Dream of the Moving Statue, University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992. Hibbard, Howard, Caravaggio, Boulder, CO, Westview Press, 1985. Hills, Helen, The Matter of Miracles: Neapolitan Baroque Sanctity and Architecture, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2016. Hills, Helen, ‘Through a Glass Darkly: Material Holiness and the Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro in Naples,’ in New Approaches to Naples c. 1500–c. 1800: The Power of Place, Farnham, Ashgate, 2013, pp. 31–62. Hills, Paul, Venetian Colour, Marble, Mosaic, Painting and Glass, 1250–1550, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 1999. Hockney, David, The Secret Knowledge, London, Thames & Hudson, 2006. Jacobs, Fredrika, The Living Image in Renaissance Art, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005. Klein, Robert, and Henri Zerner, eds., Italian Art, 1500–1600: Sources and Documents, Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press, 1990. Langdon, Helen, Caravaggio, A Life, New York, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1999.

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Lehmann, Ann-Sophie, ‘Fleshing Out the Body: The “Colours of the Naked” in Dutch Art Theory and Workshop Practice 1400–1600,’ in Body and Embodiment in Netherlandish Art/Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art, 58, ed. A. Lehmann and H. Roodenburg, Zwolle, Waanders, 2008, pp. 87–109. Louth, Andrew, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007. Marin, Louis, To Destroy Painting, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1994. Nancy, Jean-Luc, The Birth to Presence, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1993. Nancy, Jean-Luc, Multiple Arts: The Muses II, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2006. Olson, Todd, Caravaggio’s Pitiful Relics: Painting History after Iconoclasm, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 2014. Pardo, Mary, ‘Veiling the Venus of Urbino,’ in Titian’s ‘Venus of Urbino’, ed. Rona Goffen, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 108–123. Pericolo, Lorenzo, Caravaggio and Pictorial Narrative: Dislocating the Istoria in Early Modern Painting, London, Harvey Miller, 2011. Pericolo, Lorenzo, ‘Interpreting Caravaggio in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century: Between Galileo and Heidegger, Giordano Bruno and Laplanche,’ in Caravaggio: Reflections and Refractions, ed. Lorenzo Pericolo and David M. Stone, Farnham, Ashgate, 2014, pp. 301–320. Puttfarken, Thomas, The Discovery of Pictorial Composition: Theories of Visual Order in Painting, 1400–1800, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 2000. Rosand, David, Painting in Sixteenth-Century Venice: Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997. Roskill, Mark W., Dolce’s Aretino and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2000. Sapir, Itay, ‘The Destruction of Painting: An Art History for Art that Resists History,’ Leitmotiv, 5 (2005–2006), pp. 67–76. Sherman, John, Mannerism, Baltimore, MD, Penguin, 1967. Slatman, Jenny, ‘Phenomenological Anachronism,’ n.d., https://www.jennyslatman.nl/ download/publications/PhenomenologicalAnachronism.pdf. Stoenescu, Livia, ed., The Interaction of Art and Relics in Late Medieval and Early Modern Art, Turnhout, Brepols, 2019. Turner, Denys, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998. Van Eck, Caroline, Classical Rhetoric and the Visual Arts in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007. Van Eck, Caroline, Joris van Gastel, and Elsje van Kessel, eds., The Secret Lives of Art Works: Exploring the Boundaries between Art and Life, Leiden, Leiden University Press, 2014. Von Rosen, Valeska, ‘Caravaggio und die Erweiterung des Bildwürdigen. Zur epochalen Relevanz von Gattungserfindungen und -ausdifferenzierungen um 1600,’ in Novità

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– Neuheitskonzepte in den Bildkünsten um 1600, ed. Ulrich Pfisterer and Gabriele Wimböck, Zürich, Diaphanes, 2011, pp. 471–488. Von Rosen, Valeska, Caravaggio und die Grenzen des Darstellbaren. Ambiguität, Ironie und Performativität in der Malerei um 1600, Berlin, Akademie Verlag, 2009. Von Rosen, Valeska, ‘Inszenierte Unkonventionalität. Caravaggios Ironisierung der Antikenimitatio,’ in Renaissance. Episteme und Agon, ed. Kablitz Andreas and Gerhard Regn, Heidelberg, Winter, 2006, pp. 423–449. Wittkower, Margot, and Rudolf Wittkower, Born under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists, New York, NYRB Classics, 2006.

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Image 6. Giovanni Lanfranco, Saint Peter Healing Saint Agatha, 1613–1614, Galleria Nazionale, Parma. Image Credit: Licenced by Ministerio dei Beni e Delle Attivita Culturali – Complesso Monumentale della Pilotta-Galleria Nationale di Parma.

2.

Touch: On Giovanni Lanfranco’s Saint Peter Healing Saint Agatha Abstract Chapter Two explores the relationship between touch and the sacred in Giovanni Lanfranco’s Saint Peter Healing Saint Agatha. The chapter rethinks the relationship between sight and touch and the implication it has in the economy of the painting and the beholder’s relationship with the f igure of Saint Agatha. It argues for an understanding of touch as a new form of contact in separation. We are encouraged to contemplate the untouchable encountered in touching – and witness the desire to touch what can never be touched – the miracle of the divine working through matter, the miracle of transforming the figure of Saint Agatha into a distinct and sacred image. For the wound of the Saint Agatha marks the moment when the intense materiality of her body violently erupts within representational order to impose its own truth: the sacred made visible through martyrdom and sacrifice. Keywords: Lanfranco, touch, sight, materiality, sacred, image

The ‘sacred’ was always a force, not to say a violence. – Jean-Luc Nancy

There. The smallest pause. And then, a slight withdrawal. The promise of a touch, not yet delivered, never accomplished; suspended – a moment of expectancy split between two desires: longing to be touched and wanting to touch. Saint Agatha is brought into the light: a body of pain and acceptance. Her head tilted to one side. Her naked breast revealing a sharp cut, with small drops of blood dribbling down the brittle white dress. The angel shows the way. Saint Peter moves slowly, his hand gently guided by the angel – such a strange presence, almost like a negative projection, his skull rendered against the white light, his vision impaired. He reaches for the opening of the wound, and yet, he does not touch it. He pauses. Two hands suspended in mid-air – a touch without contact; or perhaps, a touch in separation,

Cornea, B., The Matter of Violence in Baroque Painting. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463727808_ch02

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at the limit. The painting stages the ellipse of touch; its limits and possibilities, its syncope; it invites us to touch the very limit of touch. Giovanni Lanfranco’s Saint Peter Healing Saint Agatha (1613–1614) (Image 6) presents two forms of touch turned against each other: touching to see and touching to no longer see; touching the untouchable, the inaccessible, or the unapproachable.1 The canvas opens a world of surfaces and skins, of colours and fabrics, of bodies extracted by light from the dark ground of the painting. We see the rich creases of the red cloak gathering in sumptuous folds around the body of Saint Agatha; we see the ochre and blue garments of Saint Peter; and the delicate skin of the angel, shining in the white light of the torch. A multiplication of material surfaces brought into collision with one another, displacing each other – materials that invite us to touch and in return be touched by their intensity – materials in motion, in operation, at work. And in front of a blue sky, barely visible between the grate of the window cell, we see a soldier, his face turned in profile, not seeing, not touching, not sensing; the very opposite from what is requested from us, the beholders of this scene. From hand to hand, from corner to corner; pointed fingers to poised brush, the painting gathers its force through a form of touch that takes place in the midst of intimacy – through the engagement produced by the materiality of its colour, line, skin, blood, and oil. Beholders are invited to touch what must always remain untouchable: the sacred image of martyrdom. This touch, however, is not one of gentleness and caress; it does not offer immediacy and fusion, nor does it provide direct and unmediated contact; on the contrary, it has the potential to become a forceful blow, a violent disturbance within the economy of the painting. It is rough and displacing, rather than healing; it pierces through the entrails of the body. It is the touch that imposes itself between the viewer and the painting; a touch that reinforces and confirms the miraculous event taken place though the materiality of the wound – the transformation of Agatha’s body into a sacred image, a body bearing the trace of the divine made flesh. *** Lanfranco and the Art of Touch. ‘The air painted for him’ – wrote Bellori in praise of Giovanni Lanfranco’s effortless abilities to render the most spectacular fresco paintings of the baroque age. Lanfranco’s name conjures a world of soaring domes painted with an ever-growing array of saints swirling around the glowing figure of Christ as the centre of the universe. His Assumption of the Virgin decorating 1 The painting is mostly discussed in literature in terms of its influence and its formal pictorial attributes, see: Pagano and Scarpa, ‘Giovanni Lanfranco,’ p. 25; Brown, The Genius of Rome, p. 334; and, more recently, Schleier, Giovanni Lanfranco, pp. 110.

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the dome of Sant’Andrea della Valle in Rome (completed in 1627), was one of the largest commissions of the day, and set the model for such decorations for the following decades.2 Of equal standing is his Paradise (1643) adorning the dome of the Royal Chapel of the Treasure of Saint Januarius in Naples Cathedral.3 Filled with light and painted in diaphanous colours, the figures populating these heavenly visions are rendered in sweeping touches of the brush; as Bellori mentions: ‘[H]e did not dwell on correctness of the expression of the affetti, but he was successful in harmonization and fluency.’4 Lanfranco’s large cycles of frescoes from Rome and Naples testify to his grand pictorial vision which has long been interpreted as illustrative of a certain baroque sensibility for illusionism and trompe l’oeil. Baroque trompe l’oeil often used anamorphism to combine actual architectural elements with illusory painted elements to create a seamless effect when viewed from a specific location. Quadratura and di sotto in su implied a fixed point of view from where the foreshortening of figures and the use of architectural vanishing points would appear to create the perception of an open space right above the viewer. They are orthogonal projection schemes that require a restricted viewing point to be fully appreciated. The illusion may be best experienced from one theoretical vantage point, although it still works if the viewer is placed within several degrees from that point. The distinctions of degree are important here, especially if we consider the degree of control over a viewer’s experience any particular composition might have. Thus, the structure of the visual field produced by Lanfranco’s ceiling paintings may appear to privilege a Cartesian notion of sight, where the disembodied and detached I/eye knows the world only from afar.5 A Different Proposition: Lanfranco’s frescoes offer an embodied experience that juxtaposes two apparently conflicting spaces – the rational and the irrational, the visible and the invisible. By celebrating the disorientating and the ecstatic, his frescoes disparage any attempt to bring a multiplicity of spaces into one essential point of convergence – the eye; they resist the simple reduction of baroque vision to a monocular geometrification of the Cartesian tradition. Instead, underneath Lanfranco’s domes, we find ourselves immersed in a fragmented space as a lived experience, where the inside is turned on the outside. After all, the world is all around us, and not merely before us. Christine Buci-Glucksmann argued for a return to an embodied vision, with the body and the emotions continually at play 2 See Haskell, Patrons and Painters, pp. 71–72; Costamagna, ‘La cupola.’ 3 Spinosa, ‘Lanfranco’; see also Marshal, Baroque Naples, pp. 34–39. 4 Wohl, Giovan Pietro Bellori, p. 288. 5 See Jay, ‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity.’

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on the visual field.6 Buci-Glucksmann highlighted the tactile and haptological quality of baroque surfaces, arguing for an interpretation that focuses on the infinite materiality of images and bodies.7 Lanfranco, it can be argued, endorsed the authority of sight only to highlight its deficiency and limits. One only needs to consider how the excess of figures and clouds in his murals dazzle and confound the eye, staging a world of fragmented bodies, spaces, and surfaces. As such, when sight is brought to the limit, that is, when it is made to fail, the subversive potentialities of touch can become another modality of contact – and this can be seen in Lanfranco’s Saint Peter Healing Saint Agatha. For although Peter directs his eyes towards the wound, his vision is obscured by the shadows; thus, we are left to intuit the direction of his sight, since we can never be quite sure of its focus. This poses a conundrum where the invisibility of the act of seeing allows for the visibility of touch to emerge, since we can only see what is to be touched. And that is the white skin of Saint Agatha, her open wound and naked breast, and the angel showing the way: an open invitation to explore the work of the hand in relation to touch – its processes and ends, limits and possibilities. In the classical hierarchy of the senses, sight has been considered the highest mode of perception; a clear, uniform, and totalizing way of understanding art – what Martin Jay called the ‘master sense of the modern era.’8 Renaissance thinkers, in particular, had theorized sight as the foremost vehicle for the acquisition of knowledge and aesthetic appreciation. Here one might think of Leon Battista Alberti’s well-known precept that the painter should be concerned with nothing else but that which can be seen. As Alberti wrote: ‘[O]f the things which we are not able to see, no one denies anything to pertain to the painter. The painter studies only to feign that which is visible.’9 Leonardo da Vinci’s writings also present one of the most eloquent expressions of that relatively mainstream intellectual position. Ideal sight and visual transparency dominated the Western art canon for more than a century, and it was not until the beginning of the seventeenth century that this changed abruptly. It was then that Caravaggio’s works began to problematize visibility to the point of threatening the coherency of the historia and the corporeal integrity of figures.10 In the past decades scholars have engaged in a broader cultural interrogation, one that has started to criticize the hegemony of vision in art history, particularly 6 See Buci-Glucksmann, The Madness of Vision. 7 Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason, p. 139. 8 Jay, ‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity.’ 9 ‘Delle cose quali non possiamo vedere, neuno nega nulla apartenersene al pittore. Solo studia il pittore fingere quello si vede.’ Alberti, On Painting, p. 43. 10 See Pericolo, Caravaggio and Pictorial Narrative; Olson, Caravaggio’s Pitiful Relics.

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at the expense of the other senses, namely, touch and hearing. This implicitly led to lively debates concerning the cultural implications of touch as a sense modality.11 More often than not, touch has been associated with the skin: an interface between the own and the foreign, skin as a surface that entails a sensitive realm open to various interpretations.12 In art historical discourse, new avenues of inquiry led to the broader recognition of the importance of touch, hearing, smell, and taste, in addition to sight, in what is defined as the ‘somaesthetic’ experience of beholding.13 This development implicitly challenged Michael Baxandall’s famous notion of a ‘period eye’ and proposed instead an understanding of the act of viewing in late medieval and early renaissance society as a necessarily multi-sensory process – what Geraldine Johnson interpreted as a more historically specific ‘period body.’14 Indeed, there is a general trend in scholarship to treat touch as a sense modality; namely, touch as the most direct and unmediated of the senses, the foundational sense, largely dependent on an organ-related sensorial model. One of the chief difficulties encountered when trying to define the sense of touch was already noted in Aristotle’s On the Soul. Aristotle pointed out that that touch has no clearly definable organ and that its objects are many.15 For that reason, it is difficult to define touch strictly as a sense modality, since it is not, in any straightforward way, an organ-related mode of sensing – taking also into consideration the largest organ of the body: skin. Touch involves processes that are not only sensuous qualities; we are in touch with anything and everything that can be felt and sensed by our bodies.16 As a result, instead of speaking of the sense of touch, it may be more productive to speak in plural of senses of touch.17 For not only can we touch with the tip of our fingers, but also our eyes are touched by light, our eardrums by sound waves, and some events, encounters, and experiences touch us deeply. If touch can be consider a process exceeding its simple equation to the operation of the hand – in order to become something more than a mere sensorial perception – paintings can also engage touch beyond simple representation. One of the most significant ways in which painting can evoke tactility is through the materiality 11 See, for instance, Marks, Touch; Classen, The Book of Touch; Paterson, The Senses of Touch. 12 See Benthien, Skin; Connor, The Book of Skin; Boothroyd, ‘Touch, Time and Technics.’ 13 For the use of beholding, rather than seeing as a more inclusive sensory experience of art, see: TerryFritsch and Labbie, Beholding Violence; for a short introduction to the historiography on the sensory turn in art history, see: Benay and Rafanelli, ‘Touch Me, Touch Me Not.’ On key studies of the role of senses in art, see: Bacci and Melcher, Art and the Senses; Sanger et al., Sense and the Senses. 14 Johnson, ‘The Art of Touch,’ p. 59. 15 Aristotle, On the Soul, 423b4-9 16 For nuanced treatments of the early modern hierarchy of senses and the relation between sight and touch, see: Shearman, Only Connect; Quiviger, Sensory World; Randolph, Touching Objects; Atkinson, Noisy Renaissance. 17 Paterson, The Senses of Touch, pp. 1–5.

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Image 7. Giovanni Lanfranco, Saint Peter Healing Saint Agatha, 1613–1614, Galleria Nazionale, Parma. Image Credit: Licenced by Ministerio dei Beni e Delle Attivita Culturali – Complesso Monumentale della PilottaGalleria Nationale di Parma. DETAIL.

of its colours and textures. The materiality of the pictorial surfaces can do more than evoke a mere metaphorical touch (as it is generally discussed in the literature concerning the tactile qualities of painting).18 Materiality has the potential to produce a form of touch as a liminal event of violence: touch as a type of engagement that is violent in its distancing. And this can be observed in Lanfranco’s Saint Peter Healing Saint Agatha (Image 7) where the distancing of the representational touch – the touch of Saint Peter – produces a movement of spacing and withdrawal. We are encouraged to contemplate the untouchable encountered in touching – and 18 See, for instance, the relationship between materiality and touch in Titian’s paintings in Cranston, The Muddied Mirror; see also Nichols, Titian, pp. 149–155.

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witness the desire to touch what can never be touched – the miracle of the divine working through matter, the miracle of transforming the figure of Saint Agatha into a distinct and sacred image. *** Distinction by the Line. Light travels fast: it moves across long distances of colour and skin to touch the figure of Saint Agatha. She has turned to one side, emerging slightly from the corners of the prison cell, her body slowly taking shape against the sea of darkness. The contour of her neck – starting from her delicate ear, running down the back of her shoulder before merging with the white and red folds of her dress – draws a thin line that traces the figuration of her body. Her outline becomes a trait – a line of distinction – creating a fracture within the ground of the painting; her figure becomes detached from the ground, pulled away, and cut out. This movement of emergence and separation is countered by her complete resignation, with eyes closed in the gentle expectation of a touch. She is raised away and lifted in a process of separation that transforms her figure into a fore – a definite frontal surface set against the ground of the painting. This trait constitutes the force and intensity of the painting. Jean-Luc Nancy points out that the trait belongs to the image’s double function: to draw a line means to traces a figure – that is, to draw it – and to enforce a separation or distance – namely, to withdraw it.19 The painting’s double movement of withdrawing in drawing and drawing in withdrawing establishes a tension and twofold separation. The raising of Saint Agatha’s body emphasizes the material quality of the painting; her figure becomes a matter of the distinct – its mass, thickness, density, and weight. Agatha’s open wound constitutes the fissure and the incision that marks her accession to the realm of the sacred. Before Saint Peter she is transformed into an image of the sacred – and by virtue of that new ontological state, she suddenly becomes untouchable and unappropriable. For the sacred is by definition something set apart and at a distance – the sacred cannot be touched (except perhaps only by a touch without contact). Touch therefore must be rethought as the force of the line that simultaneously establishes a contact and a separation between the beholder and the painting: touch as a new form of contact in separation. Lanfranco’s painting problematizes touch as an event of in-betweenness: as Saint Peter turns away from the radiant body of Saint Agatha, his gesture of reaching out to her wound becomes a suspended contact taking place in the interval of the withdrawal, at the limit of the incessant passing between sight and touch, visual and invisible. Peter is facing the wound although his vision retreats into the shadows of the prison cell, his eyes obscured by a veil of darkness as if the act of looking must 19 Nancy, The Ground of the Image, p. 5.

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be concealed in order for the hand to move forward and touch what is presented in the light. The strong white light emanates from a torch held up high by the angel; the same angel that can never touch, only direct the hand that does the touching. And yet, paradoxically, this is not intended for the hand of Saint Peter; for if we take a closer look at the crossings of their hands, we see the white hand of the angel placed above the hand of the saint, his finger extended not to him, but in an open invitation to us, the viewers. We are the ones invited to touch. But how can we touch that which must remain untouchable – the distinct and the sacred; how dare we touch what even the Prince of the Apostles dares not touch? *** The Distance of Touch. An ancient quest of blood and sacrifice, a yearning that can never be fulfilled: to touch the sacred and build a passage to what which is forever distant and separate. If the distinct takes place at a distance – being the very opposite of what is near and immediate – how can a contact be initiated between the human and the divine? Lanfranco’s depiction of touch plays on the withdrawal of the sacred and the suspension of the interval of touch by preserving its unblemished integrity – its distinctiveness. But what of the moments when touch is invited to penetrate the sacred and act as the ultimate proof of contact and presence of the divine – a touch so incredible that only Caravaggio could have imagined it in his Incredulity of Saint Thomas (1602)20 (Image 5) Caravaggio pushed the visual limit of depicting touch as a contact in separation; an event that exposes the spacing within the intimacy of touching the untouchable, which in turn reveals the syncopated relationship between humans and the divine. Despite its recent popularity, mostly due to its arduous reworking by various seventeenth-century artists, the subject was quite unusual at the time; in fact, in some quarters, it was even perceived as irreverent, despite the fact that Thomas’s gesture was central to the affirmation of his faith, and, by extension, to the faith of all Christians.21 The protestants especially ridiculed his action; Jean Calvin, for instance, went so far as to declare that the ‘stupidity of Thomas was astonishing and monstrous.’22 And yet, Catholic reformers, such as Carlo Borromeo, saw the gesture in a very different light. The archbishop of Milan reminded the faithful that it was Thomas’s gesture that ultimately proved Christ’s divinity – the embodied experience of the holy was pinned as central to the renewal of the faith since for Borromeo, touching is believing.23 20 For an interpretation of the painting through the notion of baroque historicism and vision, see: Bal, Quoting Caravaggio, pp. 31–39. 21 Benay, ‘Touching Is Believing,’ p. 59. 22 Benay, ‘Touching Is Believing,’ p. 59. 23 Benay, ‘Touching Is Believing,’ p. 67.

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Reach hither thy hand and thrust it into My side, said Christ to his disciple in one of the most intense moments of physical interaction in the New Testament. The scripture is silent on whether Thomas actually did touch Christ, but it goes on to record Him saying: Because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed (John 20:29). Caravaggio constructed the pictorial narrative around this elusive gesture of touch – all the figures are set in a semicircle focusing on Thomas’s piercing finger. Christ grabs the apostle’s hand and pushes the finger deep within His open wound; a moment of tension that absorbs the figures in the unfolding of the event – for what can be more captivating than witnessing the probing of a miracle, the touching of the sacred, and the contact with the divine?24 Caravaggio’s painting seems to leave little doubt about the contact that is taking place: the finger seems to be inserted within the body of the Saviour; indeed, the skin on top of the wound is gathered in two delicate folds as a result of the pressure applied by the apostle. Caravaggio’s painting offers the illusion of an unmediated touch only to reveal its instability and disjunction. This is first signalled by Thomas’s need to look where his hand is touching. Michael Fried pointed out that Thomas strains to gaze with wide-open eyes at what he himself is doing and feeling, as if he cannot quite trust his sense of touch without confirming it with his sight.25 This is a brilliant reversal of the conventional reading of the painting where touch is interpreted as the ultimate sense of confirming sight. The syncopation and precariousness of touch is further reflected by the spatial alignment of the figures. For Thomas is not actually looking at the wound on Christ’s side, but somewhere in the foreground of the pictorial space: Thomas’s figure is placed slightly in front of the figure of Christ, his right arm is not completely aligned with the almost planar surface of Christ’s torso.26 This misalignment becomes critical in the positioning of the hands – both Thomas’s and Christ’s hands are out of proportion with their respective bodies and seem to occupy the implausible intermediary space between them, thus making the gesture of touching an essential part of the pictorial act; a rupture within the pictorial space that signals a distancing within the relation performed by touch. The interval created by the spatial misalignment is further reinforced by the detached and poised expression of Christ, which stands in sharp contrast with the expression of shock and wonder visible on Saint Thomas’s face. The effect produced by the intrusive touch is paradoxically depicted on the apostle’s face, rather than the figure of Christ, for it is Thomas who holds his left hand high upon his side as the 24 On the absorbing qualities of the wound, see: Bal, Quoting Caravaggio, p. 33–35; Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio, pp. 83–86. 25 Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio, p. 84. 26 My interpretation of the misalignments between Thomas and Christ is indebted to Lorenzo Pericolo’s analysis in his Caravaggio and Pictorial Narrative, pp. 459–465.

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true point of contact. Caravaggio depicted a form of touch that does not act upon the person being touched, but, paradoxically, on the person who does the touching. This touch produces the small tear in the shoulder seam of Thomas’s jacket, forcing the fabric to tear and become a visual dislocation of Christ’s wound projected back onto the figure of Thomas. The tear and the piercing finger appear as visual cues for the self-expository nature of touch. For this touch is a touch upon one’s self, it is touching upon the I. Touch exposes the I to the exteriority of the touched, but in this exposing the I is exposed to itself. Caravaggio’s painting, therefore, presents a double exposure: the I who is exposed to its own exposing, the self outside itself, the I that is detached from itself. The threat to subjectivity emerges from a form of touch that is conceived as a tangency without contact, adjoining without mixture, proximity without intimacy. For Caravaggio’s painting does not represent that separation and detachment, it is that separation and detachment. The painting presents itself and exposes the beholder to that presentation. It lifts the materiality of its surface to a moment of crisis. The awkward alignment of the characters, especially the figure of Thomas, suggests that the apostle is not only piercing Christ’s side, but also the materiality of the painting.27 As Lorenzo Pericolo pointed out, Caravaggio staged the Incredulity of Saint Thomas around the miraculous and violent piercing of a body: not only the representational figure of Christ, but especially of the pictorial body. At this point Thomas’s gesture becomes a threat to the integrity of the pictorial surface by forcing his finger through the layers of paint and canvas.28 Thus, we can interpret touch here as an event that situates the body of Christ in an analogous relationship with the body of the canvas, transforming the pictorial surface into a distinct body; and like the body of Christ, the painting establishes simultaneously a withdrawal and a passage – a contact that does not imply continuity or merger, but a crossing that maintains distinction, remaining forever set apart from the world of the beholder. *** The Matter of Touch. What are we to make of the relationship between Saint Peter and Saint Agatha? Her body given and displayed as a frontal surface – what we might call a body image – while Saint Peter stands reserved in the shadows. He appears to be dazzled by the intense white glow of the body before him – her white skin, the gold inflections in her hair, and the mark of red paint opening the wound on her right breast; from these, he shies away, shielding his face in the dark, only to have his hand extended in the bright light. In the face of Agatha’s visual complexity, 27 Pericolo, Caravaggio and Pictorial Narrative, p. 459. 28 Pericolo, Caravaggio and Pictorial Narrative, p. 459.

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the figure of Saint Peter appears to be analogous to that of a painter in front of the canvas. His hesitation seems to evoke that daunting moment of uncertainty when the painter stands before the empty canvas, before ever touching its pristine white surface – a moment brilliantly captured by Rembrandt in The Artist in His Studio (1628).29 But if in Rembrandt’s painting the artist is placed at a distance, in Lanfranco’s painting, Peter stands in close intimacy with the body image of Saint Agatha, his hand already raised in the paradox of artistic creation: to touch as the making and the unmaking of a work of art. The act of painting denotes a certain subordination of the hand to the paintbrush, and painters have rarely been satisfied with the brush. The painting knife presented an alternative – as Rembrandt use to employ it extensively during the latter part of his career.30 And of course there is the famous case of Titian, who dissatisfied with the results yielded by the instruments of paint, resorted to painting the figures with his bare hands. Marco Boschini records in his Le minere della pittura veneziana (1664), the artist’s process in creating his celebrated pittura di macchia: He did the final retouching by rubbing with his fingers, blending the highlights into the halftones, and one shade with another; sometimes he used only his finger to put a streak of black in a corner to make it stronger, or he used a stroke of red like a drop of blood to enliven (invigorate) the surface.31

Titian’s creative process highlights the physical engagement involved in the act of creation. It also points towards an interpretation of the painting as a body – a body image – and of the painter as a ‘good surgeon treating a patient, healing an injury, reducing a swelling, adjusting an arm, or setting a bone’ as Boschini reminds us, ‘paying no attention to the pain he was causing or to any such thing.’32 The analogy between painter and surgeon, on the one hand, and painting and patient, on the other, brings touch to its potential of healing – the same action purposely performed by Saint Peter, since the reason of his visit to the dungeon is to heal Agatha of her wound. But then, surprisingly enough, he does not touch; nor does he put an end to her suffering. 29 The image can be viewed online at: https://collections.mfa.org/objects/32665/artist-in-his-studio. 30 The scholarship on Rembrandt’s ‘late style’ is immense and continues to grow. For recent studies on his technique, see: Van de Wetering, Rembrandt; Suthor, Rembrandt’s Roughness. 31 ‘Ma il condimento degli ultimi ritocchi era andar di quando in quando unendo con sfregazzi delle dita negli estremi de’ chiari, avicinandosi alle meze tinte, ed unendo una tinta con l’altra; altre volte con un striscio delle dita pure poneva un colpo d’oscuro in qualche angolo, per rinforzarlo, oltre qualche striscio di rossetto, quasi gocciola di sangue, che invigoriva alcun sentimento superficiale.’ Boschini in Ferino-Pagden, Late Titian, pp. 21–22. 32 For a detailed discussion, see the chapter on flesh.

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Peter’s reluctance to touch the figure of Agatha is intimately linked with her staging as a body image – namely, a distinct image that is untouchable. But it is also more than that. Touch appears here as simultaneously healing and destructive, creative and damaging – a paradoxical act of violence. By touching an empty canvas something of its purity is lost, its pure potentiality as a tabula rasa diminished. Yet this is done in order to allow matter to achieve its full potentiality. And even when painters did not abandon the use of their tool the paintbrush was still regarded as an extension of the hands, working the matter of paint and canvas into corporeal surfaces. The creative and generative aspect of touch is matched only by its destructive quality, since by touching an image something of its distinctiveness and sacredness becomes shattered. Light touches the body of Saint Agatha. It falls on her cheek and moves our eyes to become a hand. Light stages the saint as a blinding surface from which Saint Peter must turn away – a double movement that balances the work of the eye with that of the hand. Andrew Benjamin points out that ‘the material object, matter as skin or stone, for example, is that which the hand alights.’33 He further emphasizes that a difference is to be made between matter’s empirical presence and materiality by allowing for the necessity to incorporate the immaterial as part of matter’s presence.34 Thus touching as well as seeing must also be distinguished from their literal presences; their conceptualization must be opened up if we are to allow touch to become another modality of seeing. The density, activity, and persistence and resistance of materiality does not address the eye in its distant, contemplative, retinal mode, but in what Maurice Blanchot and Gilles Deleuze have termed the ‘haptic mode of the eye.’ The vast space of darkness that occupies much of Lanfranco’s canvas remains Saint Peter’s privileged site of exploration as much as our own. The act of looking into the dark signals an endless exploration of material sensibility, which Herder suggests belongs to darkness and night, for ‘it goes on feeling as it were indefinitely.’35 Both dark and light have the potential to blind viewers – the dark through impairment of vision and light through excess, both paradoxical ways of manifesting miracles. The materiality of Agatha’s skin cannot be mastered, neither by the eyes nor by the hand. Its endless dynamics brings viewers to a point of crisis through the opening of the wound; a few dashes of blood set against the purity of Agatha’s white skin. The wound appears as a place of miraculous transformation, where materiality becomes a process of intensif ication that remains elusive – it does not please nor does it delight, but strikes with violence, 33 Benjamin ‘Endless Touching,’ p. 74. 34 Benjamin ‘Endless Touching,’ p. 79. 35 Benjamin, ‘To Touch,’ p. 84.

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Image 8. Jusepe de Ribera, Apollo and Marsyas, 1637, Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, Naples. Image Credit: Direzione Regionale Musei della Campania.

producing chaos and a disruption, functioning above the laws of nature to dazzle us as it does Saint Peter. *** Creation through Destruction. To engage with darkness is not necessarily an act of negation and subtraction from the realm of visibility and light. On the contrary, darkness can assert its material presence to become a meaningful place of interaction: where the materiality of the surface achieves its greatest potentiality to be creative and productive. This can be observed in Ribera’s Apollo and Marsyas (1637) (Image 8). Apollo flaying Marsyas, or Apollo touching Marsyas is perhaps one of the best-suited subjects in the history of art to explore the issue of materiality and touch in relation to the making and unmaking of art.36 In Ribera’s painting, Apollo appears to create the body of Marsyas from within a patch of dark matter 36 Cranston, The Muddied Mirror, pp. 47–73. For a relevant comparison between Ribera’s Apollo and Marsyas and Titian’s Apollo Flaying Marsyas, see: Sapir, ‘Pain and Paint.’

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by paradoxically flaying him alive to reveal his pulsating red flesh – a generative act of creation through destruction. Just follow the depiction of Marsyas from the torso up to his legs tied to the tree trunk and to realize that at a certain point it becomes impossible to differentiate between the bark of the tree and the satyr’s furry goat legs.37 This pictorial moment of confusion presents itself as a dark patch of paint – a moment of disruption that proclaims itself not as a figure, object, or surrounding, but as matter: deformed, unmade matter. By no coincidence the Greek word used by Aristotle to refer to matter is hyle (ὕλη), meaning, among other things, wood, or tree. As such, the mark in which the satyr’s body dissolves is not merely the form of a tree set in darkness but has the potential to act as a scrap of productive matter. Aristotle does not place a sharp emphasis on the superiority of form over matter, although he does distinguish between the two.38 For Aristotle, matter is always something more than a mere passive receptacle for receiving form; it does not require the imposition of form to become meaningful. On the contrary, matter is sheer activity; it is, as Aristotle already insisted, essentially dunamis – dynamic and energetic. No less significant is the fact that matter comes from materies, which in turn comes from mater – which is mother, but also the heart of the tree, the hardwood. And as Nancy argues, it is in the mother and from the mother that distinction is created: it is in her intimacy, where another intimacy is born, separated from it to gather its force and detached in order to become itself.39 So there is differentiation within this dark patch of paint – this differentiation erupts violently as a different self within the representational clarity of the painting. It acts as a visual moment – a symptom that refuses to give in to imitation and mimesis. It is the paradoxical point where the figure of Marsyas loses his visibility in order to become visual – a distinction made by Georges Didi-Huberman where the visible is only a ‘disembodied imitation,’ while the visual belongs to the materiality and carnality of the painting. The dark patch opens the painting to a new conception of corporeality that is not confined to the credible representation of figures: it is the incarnation of the painting itself, which finds itself in a constant tension, a constant violence with mimesis. This would suggest that Apollo’s act of flaying becomes analogous with the art of painting – the surface of dark paint becomes the skin of Marsyas as the entire canvas becomes a commentary on the process of making and unmaking of art. 40 37 To note that although the canvas has certainly darkened over time, Ribera was a master at blurring lines and challenged figuration through his impasto technique. See: Sapir, ‘Blind Suffering.’ 38 Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1032.a–1033.a. 39 Nancy, The Ground of the Image, p. 12. 40 Payne and Bray, Ribera, pp. 138–142.

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By suspending hermeneutic activity, the dark patch frees the beholder from a purely retinal engagement with forms and figures. At this point, the engagement with Ribera’s painting becomes a matter of touch. For Apollo’s touch pertains to the representational order of the painting: a touch that creates form from matter by opening the body of the satyr to visibility and presence. His touch may seem at first sight to be an imposition of form over matter – an interpretation that signals a retreat to the classic Apollonian (ideal, superior) versus Dionysian (base, lower) dichotomy. It may seem the ideal of beauty, crispness, and divinity at first, especially as he is placed in sharp contrast with Marsyas’s body. 41 But on close inspection, we can see that his hands are dirty, and filth is stuck beneath his fingernails. This grubby detail shows the act of creation to be anything but an ideal act. The process of figuration through touch becomes a corporeal process of extracting and opening up the satyr’s body from within the dark materiality of the impasto, thus bringing it to light and visibility. 42 The heavy strips of dark paint that penetrate the body of the satyr from down below become a menacing presence that threatens Apollo’s figurative integrity, for they effectively sever his leg from the rest of his body. Ribera’s destruction of figuration through the dark patch can be compared with Caravaggio’s deconstruction of pictorial composition. Todd Olson has pointed out in Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of Saint Matthew (1599–1600) the penetrating surfaces of dark paint obscuring parts of the figures act as indicators of the saint’s imminent corporeal fragmentation. 43 In Ribera’s painting, however, the act of violence exceeds the limits of pictorial and corporeal fragmentation. The materiality of the dark patch produces a violence that threatens to engulf the entire pictorial body; it works to disfigure the clarity of representation, carving a wound within the surface of the painting, which renders matter palpable in its violence. The disruption brought about by the dark patch of paint is by itself interrupted by the visual opening of the wound, just like the integrity of Saint Agatha’s body is painfully punctured by the sharp cut on her breast. The wound is the privileged place where Lanfranco’s depiction of Saint Agatha and Ribera’s rendering of Marsyas evokes a close comparison. This touch, however, is one of distinction and deferral. If in Ribera’s painting the wound appears as a moment that brings back figuration 41 Damian Dombrowski interpreted the difference is depicting Apollo as bright and colourful and Marsyas as rough and dark as Ribera’s recognition (in 1637) of the error of his earlier career, the choice of lowly Caravaggism, as opposed to his loftier neo-Venetian style. See Dombrowski, ‘Die Häutung des Malers.’ 42 An interesting analogy can be made with Merleau-Ponty’s argument from his essay on Cezanne, where painting (creating) works as a non-philosophical case in point of thinking through perception – ‘thinking in painting.’ See: Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt,’ p. 178. 43 Olson, Caravaggio’s Pitiful Relics, pp. 53–103.

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and visibility to the chaos of material forces – taming its destructive quality through a paradoxical flaying of the body of Marsyas – in Lanfranco’s painting the wound appears as a miraculous event. This distinction is drawn more sharply by the relationship between touch and the wound: if Marsyas’s wound is created through Apollo’s touch, Agatha’s cut remains untouchable by any figure in the painting. For the wound of Saint Agatha marks the moment when the intense materiality of her body violently erupts within the representational order to impose its own truth: the sacred made visible through martyrdom and sacrifice. *** The Wounded Image. The angel shows the way of the faithful. From frame to frame to frame, we move closer to the figure of Saint Agatha. On her white skin, a few strokes of the brush render the opening of her wound: an intense red streak below a dash of dark paint, suggesting depth from a distance, yet somehow remaining flat as a surface. At this moment we are reminded of Bellori’s remark on Lanfranco’s painting technique: ‘[H]e did not dwell on correctness of the expression.’ This rings especially true when considering the visual moment of Agatha’s wound, which cannot be interpreted as a ‘realistic’ depiction of a cut, with open flesh and so forth. It belongs to the incarnation of the image, which can be interpreted as a limited representational event that cannot be rendered in mimetic terms. Thus, the wound appears as a mark where the materiality of the painting becomes critical – a visual moment that rends representation to present viewers with the incarnation of the sacred in the figure of Saint Agatha. The sacred irrupts through matter; it does not gently transform, nor does it inform or represent; on the contrary, it bursts with violence, it acts to produce its own truth. The truth of the sacred is made visually present in Agatha’s wound. The wound invites viewers to witness this truth – to touch it and testify to its miraculous appearance. For it is only through touch that one is made part of the community of the faithful. Sight does not suffice; one needs to touch and be in touch. Yet this touch is not one that produces unmediated contact; on the contrary; it is a touch of separation, at a distance; touching the limit of what can never be touched; the miracle of the divine made present. Conversely, the soldier barely visible through the window in the background remains excluded from the miraculous event, as his face is shown in profile – a visible reminder that miracles create community as much as they generate exclusion. 44 They draw attention to boundaries. And it is through this awareness that viewers are invited to become witnesses to martyrdom – witnesses to the witnessing 44 Hills, The Matter of Miracles, pp. 174–211.

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of the miraculous. Thus, the distinction of Agatha’s body and the materiality of her wound invite viewers in an exploration of material sensibility that endlessly produces itself, thereby setting forth a violence of the sacred that can be felt and touched only at the limit.

Works Cited Alberti, Leon Battista, On Painting, trans. John R. Spencer, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 1966. Atkinson, Niall, Noisy Renaissance: Sound, Architecture, and Florentine Urban Life, University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016. Bacci, Francesca, and David Melcher, eds., Art and the Senses, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011. Bal, Mieke, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2001. Benay, Erin, ‘Touching Is Believing: Caravaggio’s Doubting Thomas in Counter-Reformatory Rome,’ in Caravaggio: Reflections and Refractions, ed. Lorenzo Pericolo and David M. Stone, Farnham, Ashgate, 2014, pp. 59–82. Benay, Erin, and Lisa Rafanelli, ‘Touch Me, Touch Me Not.’ Open Arts Journal, 4 (Winter 2014–2015). Benjamin, Andrew, ‘Endless Touching: Herder and Sculpture,’ Aisthesis – pratiche, linguaggi e saperi dell’estetico, vol. 4, no. 1 (2011), pp. 73–92. Benjamin, Andrew, ‘To Touch: Herder and Sculpture,’ in Sculpture and Touch, ed. Peter Dent, Farnham, Ashgate, 2014, pp. 79–87. Benthien, Claudia, Skin: The Cultural Border of Self and the World, New York, Columbia University Press, 2002. Boothroyd, Dave, ‘Touch, Time and Technics: Levinas and the Ethics of Haptic Communications.’ Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 26, no. 2–3 (2009), pp. 330–345. Brown, Beverly Louise, The Genius of Rome 1592–1623, London, Royal Academy of Arts, 2001. Buci-Glucksmann, Christine, Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity, Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage, 1994. Buci-Glucksmann, Christine, The Madness of Vision: On Baroque Aesthetic, Athens, Ohio University Press, 2014. Classen, Constance, ed., The Book of Touch, Oxford, Berg, 2005. Connor, Steven, The Book of Skin, London, Reaktion Books, 2004. Costamagna, Alba, ‘La cupola di Sant’Andrea della Valle,’ in Giovanni Lanfranco: Un pittore barocco tra Parma, Roma e Napoli, ed. Erich Schleier, Mondadori Electa, 2001, pp. 71–76. Cranston, Jodi, The Muddied Mirror: Materiality and Figuration in Titian’s Later Paintings, University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010.

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Dombrowski, Damian, ‘Die Häutung des Malers. Stil und Identität in Jusepe de Riberas Schindung des Marsyas,’ Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 72 (2009), pp. 215–244. Ferino-Pagden, Sylvia, ed., Late Titian and the Sensuality of Painting, Venice, Marsilio, 2008. Fried, Michael, The Moment of Caravaggio, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2011. Haskell, Francis, Patrons and Painters: A Study in the Relations between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the Baroque, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 1980. Hills, Helen, The Matter of Miracles: Neapolitan Baroque Sanctity and Architecture, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2016. Jay, Martin, ‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity,’ in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster, Seattle, Bay Press, Dia Art Foundation, 1988, pp. 3–27. Johnson, Geraldine, ‘The Art of Touch in Early Modern Italy,’ in Art & the Senses, ed. Francesca Bacci and David Melcher, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 59–84. Marks, Laura, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Marshall, Christopher, Baroque Naples and the Industry of Painting, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 2016. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt,’ in Sense and Non-Sense, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1964, pp. 159–190. Nancy, Jean-Luc, The Ground of the Image, New York, Fordham University Press, 2005. Nichols, Tom, Titian and the End of the Venetian Renaissance, London, Reaktion Books, 2013. Olson, Todd, Caravaggio’s Pitiful Relics: Painting History after Iconoclasm, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 2014. Pagano, Denise Maria, and Tiziana Scarpa, Giovanni Lanfranco: barocco in luce, Napoli, Electra, 2001. Paterson, Mark, The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies, Oxford, Berg, 2007. Payne, Edward, and Xavier Bray, Ribera: The Art of Violence, London, GILES, 2018. Pericolo, Lorenzo, Caravaggio and Pictorial Narrative: Dislocating the Istoria in Early Modern Painting, London, Harvey Miller, 2011. Quiviger, François, The Sensory World of Italian Renaissance Art, London, Reaktion Books, 2010. Randolph, Adrian, Touching Objects: Intimate Experiences of Italian Fifteenth-Century Art, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 2015. Sanger, Alice E., Kulbrandstad Walker, and Siv Tove, eds., Sense and the Senses in Early Modern Art and Cultural Practice, Farnham, Ashgate, 2012. Sapir, Itay, ‘Blind Suffering: Ribera’s Non-visual Epistemology of Martyrdom,’ Open Arts Journal, 4 (Winter 2014–2015), pp. 29–39. Sapir, Itay, ‘Pain and Paint: Titian, Ribera, and the Flaying of Marsyas,’ in Visualizing Sensuous Suffering and Affective Pain in Early Modern Europe and the Spanish Americas, ed. Heather Graham and Lauren G. Kilroy-Ewbank, Leiden, Brill, 2018. pp. 33–52.

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Schleier, Erich, ed., Giovanni Lanfranco: Un pittore barocco tra Parma, Roma e Napoli, Naples, Mondadori Electa, 2001. Sherman, John, Only Connect…: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1992. Spinosa, Nicola, ‘Lanfranco e la pittura napoletana tra Sei e Settecento,’ in Giovanni Lanfranco: Un pittore barocco tra Parma, Roma e Napoli, ed. Erich Schleier, Naples, Mondadori Electa, 2001, pp. 83–91. Suthor, Nicola, Rembrandt’s Roughness, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 2018. Terry-Fritsch, Allie, and Erin Felicia Labbie, eds., Beholding Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Farnham, Ashgate, 2012. Van de Wetering, Ernst, Rembrandt: The Painter at Work, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2009. Wohl, Hellmut, Giovan Pietro Bellori: The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

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Image 9. Jusepe de Ribera, The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew, 1644, Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona. Image Credit: Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona.

3.

Skin: On Jusepe de Ribera’s Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew Abstract Chapter Three explores the relationship between corporeality and paint in Jusepe de Ribera’s Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew (1644). By tracing the critical reception of Ribera’s art, the chapter identifies a common tread in locating the violence of his paintings in paint’s potentiality to become flesh. Ribera thus confronts beholders with a violence that is inflicted upon the painting as a body. This complicates the act of martyrdom to the extreme. For unlike in previous versions of the canvas where Bartholomew is shown facing a redeeming light, in this last surviving painting, Ribera shows facing us the beholders in an unresolved act of disturbing violence. For this is not a violence that will end soon with the saint’s demise – and the promise of divine redemption – but continues to be enacted forever on the painted canvas. Keywords: Jusepe de Ribera, skin, paint, materiality, corporeality, flaying

All works of art are scar tissue. – John Banville

A cold stare – pointed straight at us from the surface of the canvas. It makes one wonder and pause: Is it a look of despair or staunch resolution? Or perhaps it is neither, for it is difficult to resolve what it is trying to convey. There is no rage, nor there is the promise of divine bliss. His eyes are wide open and his forehead full of wrinkles rendered in solid strokes of the brush. He struggles to look at us – to keep looking at us. His neck is bent and his torso is contorted; another strain on a body that is already undergoing such an extreme form of suffering – to have one’s skin slowly flayed from living flesh. And live to see one’s own body turned into an open wound. In the Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew (1644) (Image 9), Jusepe de Ribera painted the saint with a stare and a glance that transforms us, the beholders,

Cornea, B., The Matter of Violence in Baroque Painting. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463727808_ch03

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Image 10. Jusepe de Ribera, The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew, 1644, Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona. Image Credit: Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona. DETAIL.

from detached observers into objects of intense scrutiny. Between his gaze and ours an entire world unfolds; a world caught in the textures of the linen cloth, of cut skin, and surfaces stretched on the easel of a canvas. His gaze performs an extreme reversal of the roles, where the viewer paradoxically becomes the viewed. An uncomfortable exchange of circumstances that leaves viewers in a state of dread. Its ambiguity reaches a point of climax that makes us aware of the limits of our own bodies. And maybe that was the point all along – to touch our skin, to poke it and go beneath it, to make it distinct from the rest of our body, to raise it and gather it in folds; to make us painfully aware of our own skin, being in our own skin; to fold what lies on our inside and bring it to the outside. For skin is the focus of this painting. Skin as a pictorial and corporeal surface. Skin as the rough textures of the canvas and skin as the subtle smears of paint. Skin as the surface through which violence is produced and affected, rather than simply represented. And one can hardly think of an artist more dedicated to expressing the intricate complexities of skin than Jusepe de Ribera. Ribera painted Saint Bartholomew stretched like a canvas on an easel – his arms and the upper part of his torso outstretched in a position that turns the surface of his body into the linen cloth of a painting (Image 10). A relationship unravels between the surface of paint and the surface of the body: a process of becoming where the flaying of the body becomes the flaying of the painting. For the cut of the executioner opens

SKIN: ON JUSEPE DE RIBERA’S MART YRDOM OF SAINT BARTHOLOMEW 

the paint as skin, peeling away its smooth surface to reveal the canvas as flesh looming underneath. *** Lo Spagnoletto. Mutilated bodies, faces twisted with pain, flaying and ruthless martyrdoms – these are the subjects that occupy much of José de Ribera’s oeuvre. Known to his contemporaries and early modern writers as Lo Spagnoletto (The Little Spaniard) and Lo Spagnolo (The Spaniard), Ribera’s name has become synonymous over the centuries with a terrifying art of victims and executioners – a conflation of his ‘Spanishness’ and supposed cruelty. The Romantics found Ribera’s art fascinating in their gruesome bloodshed. Lord Byron praised the artist by writing: ‘Spagnoletto tainted / His brush with all the blood of all the sainted’ (Don Juan, xiii. 71) while Théophile Gautier wrote in his sonnet ‘Prometheus’: ‘Thou cruel Ribera, harder than Jupiter, / You make hollow flanks, by frightful gashes, / Rivers of blood flow in cascades of guts!’ (‘Sur le Prométhée du musée de Madrid,’ 1843). Even today, most scholarship tends to interpret Ribera’s violent images as the product of either his supposedly tormented life, his Spanish origin, and/or the purportedly violent nature of Neapolitan society.1 A life can be made of Ribera; and for centuries he enjoyed a mythical life, too – Ribera the artist who delighted in subjects of violence, Ribera the artist who maintained artistic success through violence. Ribera’s mythical life was spurred by his contemporary biographers, most notably Bernardo De Dominici, and follows a standard formula, appealing to anyone familiar with the notion that genius is defined by personal oddity or a general refusal to conform to normal expectations. It tells of Ribera, the Spaniard, the son a shoemaker, who forsakes the study of law for art; who travels to Rome, but quickly moves to Naples, where he rose to meteoric success with his paintings; the artist who was raised to glory only to be brought down by poor health, family vicissitudes, and financial difficulties; the father who lost his family honour by having his daughter seduced by the royal bastard, Don Juan of Austria. Ribera, the painter who led a double life: one as a highly esteemed court painter to the Neapolitan viceroys, gathering commissions from the leading aristocracy of the time (in Naples, as well as back home, in his native Spain), and another as the leader of a dark group: the so-called Cabal of Naples, a notorious triumvirate of painters (apart from Ribera it counted the Neapolitan Battistello Caracciolo and the Greek Belisario Corenzio) who allegedly used methods including harassment, 1 See, for instance: Felton and Jordan, Jusepe de Ribera, pp. 35–36; Whitfield and Martineau, Painting in Naples, p. 22.

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banishment, or even poison to prevent other artists from various parts of Italy competing for commissions in the city.2 Not only was Ribera an artist concerned with the depiction of violence, it seems he was also an artisan of violence, using it against his fellow artists to further his grip on Neapolitan artistic life. Or so the story goes, according to his myth-creating biographer Bernardo De Dominici. And while scholarship has tried to clear the rubble from De Dominici’s biography, this image of the artist has stuck in the public’s imagination. So much for Ribera’s life myth – a story steeped in violence that conveniently accounts for his images of violence. Except, this approach carries the formulaic constituents of art as a reflection of the artist’s life and tries to reduce the violence of his painting to either his tormented life or the endemic violence of Neapolitan society. Perhaps greater care is needed when untangling facts from fiction and artistic biography from artistic creation. It was during his stay in Rome that Ribera started to gain a dark reputation. Giulio Mancini writes how the artist exhibited lax behaviour and often ran into trouble with the authorities – most of the time for living beyond his means and not paying his debts, despite earning a large income.3 And it was also suggested by Mancini that Ribera’s sudden move to Naples had less to do with the search for patrons or a new clientele and more with his attempts to escape his creditors. While his negative personal reputation continued for generations to come, his art continued to be held at high esteem by viceroys and kings alike. Not only did he count among his patrons prestigious religious institutions and collectors in the city, but several viceroys of Naples, including Pedro Téllez-Girón, 3rd Duke of Osuna, as well as most of his successors to that post (the Duke of Alcalá, the Count of Monterrey, Duke of Medina de las Torres, the Count of Oñate), commissioned works from Ribera, mostly to be sent back to their home country of Spain. 4 And it is perhaps of no coincidence that King Philip IV accumulated more paintings by Ribera than by any other Spanish artist (around a hundred paintings, distributed between El Escorial and the Royal Palace in Madrid). Perhaps the most sensationalist subject in Ribera’s life is his alleged involvement in the Cabal of Naples. Bernardo De Dominici claims that Ribera – together with two other painters, Battistello Caracciolo and Belisario Corenzio – held a tight grip over the city’s artistic life, and no major commission could be obtained without the consent of the three painters. Artists who dared defy this monopoly would face violence, and often their works in-progress would be destroyed or sabotaged. Major 2 For a summary of the incident, see: Wittkower and Wittkower, Born under Saturn, pp. 251–252. More recently Edward Payne suggested the difference between Ribera and Domenichino was rooted in stylistic differences – that is might have more to do with the depiction of affetti, the passions of the soul expressed externally, rather than a mere rivalry in receiving commissions. See: Payne and Bray, Ribera, pp. 17–22. 3 For the artist’s roman years, see: Papi, Ribera a Roma. 4 See Marshall, Baroque Naples, pp. 52–67.

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artists, including Annibale Carracci, Cavalier d’Arpino, and Guido Reni, accepted invitations to work on the chapel only to find Naples an inhospitable place to live and work. Domenichino was so harassed by the Cabal that he fled Naples only to return years later to finish his work on the chapel. And soon after his return in 1641, Domenichino suddenly died, leaving his widow convinced the Cabal had poisoned him.5 While Naples has long enjoyed a volatile reputation, it seems now that Ribera was one of its chief architects, or so his biographer Bernardo De Dominici would have us believe. This would of course offer a plausible explanation as to why Ribera depicted so many scenes of extreme violence. However, Naples and Ribera did not have a monopoly on the depiction of violence, and the documents show a markedly different image of the artist from the disdainful and arrogant man that De Dominici makes him out to be for posterity. Scholarship on Ribera deals mainly with questions of style, attribution, and biography, while attempting to place his art within the Neapolitan artistic milieu.6 Spinosa accounts for the violence of Ribera’s painting, especially his scenes of martyrdom as the artist’s employment of violence as giving ‘visual form to the conflict between spirit and matter, nature and history, and dream and reality. Using strong slashes of light and shadow and dynamic contrasts of resplendent materials and gloomy tones, Ribera participates more sorrowfully in the drama of the event.’7 Somewhere else Javier Portús explains Ribera’s images of violence by attributing them to the artist’s interest in depicting emotions in order to convey fervent religious feelings: ‘[W]ithin the wide range available to him, in most cases he explored those aspects related to devotion, piety, cruelty and pain.’8 Other scholars have interpreted Ribera’s images of violence by appealing to the philosophical and literary ideas that circulated in Naples in the early years of the seventeenth century. Juan Luis González García interprets Ribera’s chiaroscuro in his paintings of cruelty and violence as reflecting the rising popularity in the early seventeenth century of Aristotle’s Poetics – with its emphasis on tragedy – and Longinus’s On the 5 For a summary of the incident, see: Wittkower and Wittkower, Born under Saturn, pp. 251–252. More recently Edward Payne suggested the difference between Ribera and Domenichino were rooted in stylistic differences, that it might have more to do with the depiction of affetti, the passions of the soul expressed externally, rather than a mere rivalry in receiving commissions. See: Payne, Ribera, pp. 17–22. 6 For questions of attribution and style, see: Spinosa, Ribera; Papi, Ribera a Roma; Papi, ‘The Young Ribera.’ Indeed there is a growing interest in Ribera’s early years, between his arrival in Italy and settling in Naples, evidenced by the 2011 itinerary exhibition Il giovane Ribera and El joven Ribera in Naples and Madrid. See the catalogues accompanying the exhibitions: Spinosa, Il giovane Ribera, and Milicua and Portús, El joven Ribera. For studies that contextualize Ribera’s art in Naples, see: Felton and Jordan, Jusepe de Ribera; Cassani, Civiltà del Seicento a Napoli; Whitfield and Martineau, Painting in Naples. For a study that considers Ribera’s art in relation to Naples and Spain, see: Pérez Sánchez and Spinosa, Jusepe de Ribera. 7 Spinosa, ‘Ribera and Neapolitan Painting,’ pp. 22–23. 8 Portús, Ribera, 92.

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Sublime.9 Harald Hendrix argues that the ‘aesthetic of extreme violence’ permeating early-seventeenth-century Neapolitan painting – of which Ribera stands as a case in point – can be interpreted as a response to the dissemination of Giambattista Marino’s poetical concept of meraviglia – meaning ‘shock,’ ‘wonder,’ and ‘astonishment.’10 More recently a number of studies have engaged with Ribera’s works more widely and daringly. Itay Sapir has focused on Ribera’s depictions of martyrdom to explore the play between saints’ tactile experience of their suffering in relation to the deficiency of visual perception and the viewer’s own limited access to visual information available to reconstruct the narrative on the basis of pictorial evidence.11 In my doctoral research, I have explored the materiality of Ribera’s paintings of flaying as posing a new relationship between corporeal and pictorial surfaces, one which allows new forms of violence to emerge.12 Joris van Gastel has looked at the way in which the materiality of Ribera’s canvases impacts the beholder, relating its transgressive affects with Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject.13 Edward Payne has engaged with Ribera’s paintings of martyrdom by investigating the strategies through which narrative is suppressed in order to focus on the suffering body of the saint and the nature of looking and not looking.14 Ribera’s preoccupation with violence, materiality, and temporality can best be observed in his images of flaying. Ribera’s paintings explore violence as a phenomenon that cannot simply be reduced to either the gruesomeness of its subject, the dramatics of the gestures, the brilliance of the impasto, or the lavish handling of the chiaroscuro. There is a quality of excess to his paintings that escapes the easy assignation of violence to the graphic depiction of bloodshed. Ribera’s images of flaying – as exemplified here by his Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew and elsewhere in the book by his two versions of Apollo Flaying Marsyas – layer the tension between the materiality of paint and canvas; they stage the work of materiality as a process of becoming that present viewers with a body of violence, or better yet, with a violent body. *** To Strike with Terror. The scene is set in darkness – the saint in bright white light. A strong chiaroscuro spreads over the surface of the canvas. A dark black cloud, thick 9 González García, ‘Jusepe de Ribera y lo trágico sublime.’ 10 Hendrix, ‘The Repulsive Body.’ Hendrix also attributed the rising popularity of paintings depicting violent subjects to the late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century dissemination of Aristotle’s Poetics. See also: Hendrix, ‘The Representation of Suffering’; Hendrix, ‘Renaissance Roots.’ 11 Sapir, ‘Blind Suffering.’ 12 Cornea, ‘“Why Tear Me from Myself?”’ 13 Gastel, ‘Slow Violence.’ 14 Payne, ‘Bodies Suspended in Space and Time.’

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and dense, unfolds above a horrid scene of a barren landscape. The air is heavy and the sound is still. Marginal relief can be glimpsed within two small patches of dark blue sky. The rest seems submerged in a thick curtain of grey and murky whites – the firmament opens before us to reveal a succession of nuances and tones that evoke the dimness and the coolness of a summer night’s sky. This is not the pitch-black darkness of Ribera’s earlier paintings – as we might, for instance, see in his Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew (1628) – nor the bright blue skies of his much later works – such as can be seen in his Apollo Flaying Marsyas (1637) (Image 8). This is Ribera at his most inventive – using chiaroscuro to achieve the suffocating effect of a heavy night’s storm. Set against this darkened background, the saint is bathed in a shimmering white light, different in tonality and substance from the warm radiating light of Ribera’s earlier canvases. This particular light is cold, almost neon-like. It offers no comfort and no reassurance – it is the light of an eerie indeterminacy where the clear signs of salvation are withheld for eternity. A harsh proposition for what should be an image of divine redemption. So why did Ribera paint this strange tonality of light in a scene of martyrdom? It was a typical subject meant to give reassurance of eternal life after a life and death devoted to Christ. Was it only to show nature conspiring with the violence of the event unfolding in the foreground? It could be, although, in Ribera’s paintings, the chiaroscuro always stands for something more than a mere dramatic effect picked up from Caravaggio. Through the use of light and dark, Ribera sharpens the edges of things depicted, setting them against each other, raising their surfaces; bringing things to the limit, and on the limit, creating new forms of pictorial and corporeal violence. *** Ribera – Follower of Caravaggio? The question seems trite to anyone opening a book on the artist’s life and work. Giulio Mancini – one of Ribera’s earliest biographers – places Ribera among Caravaggio’s ‘followers’ in Rome, together with Bartolomeo Manfredi and Cecco del Caravaggio. In his Considerazioni sulla pittura (1617–1624), Mancini remarks that Ribera’s ‘determination and handling of paint, which for the most part follows the path of Caravaggio, is more experimental and bolder.’15 There is also Bernardo De Dominici who writes in his Vite dei pittori, scultori ed architetti napoletani (1742) that ‘Jusepe, matching the valiant nature of Caravaggio, chose the naturalism and the beautiful colour of the Lombard school, from which he created his own manner.’16 To consider Ribera a ‘follower’ of Caravaggio soon 15 Pérez Sánchez and Spinosa, Jusepe de Ribera, p. 236. 16 ‘Così dunque Giuseppe accoppiando alla fierezza del Caravaggio lo scelto del naturale, ed il bel colore della scuola lombarda, ne compose la maniera che fu sua propria.’ De Dominici, Vite, p. 115.

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became a common trope in most eighteenth-century sources. As late as 1724, Antonio Palomino wrote that Ribera ‘applied himself a great deal to the school of Caravaggio, and reached that manner of chiaroscuro to which he was increasingly dedicated every day.’17 The question therefore appears to have been definitively answered by contemporaneous sources. And thus, it comes as no surprise to find that most scholarship today interprets Ribera’s art – especially his early period – to be under the sign of Caravaggio.18 But despite the popularity of this approach, the notion of ‘Ribera as follower of Caravaggio’ poses considerable problems: first, it risks turning his art into a receptacle of stylistic influences from Caravaggio; second, it reduces his originality to finding new pictorial solutions to someone else’s problems. This mode of art history usually groups artists according to style – another move that risks imposing a grand narrative onto particular artworks and individual artists that are substantially and fundamentally different. A closer look at Ribera’s paintings reveals a different story. Ribera’s body of work shows how the framework of linear progression of ‘influences’ from Caravaggio to Titian is simply not adequate, for it does not explain why the artist returned time and time again during his long career to the specific use of a strong chiaroscuro. Ribera’s Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew (Image 11), painted late in his career, in 1644, is a case in point. Moreover, despite the constant comparison with Caravaggio and his so-called followers, Ribera placed his art in a very different artistic paradigm. In the same interview given to Martinez in 1625, when asked about his preferences among Italian artists, Ribera offers a surprising answer. Martinez writes: I asked him whether he had any wish to travel to Rome to see again the original paintings he had studied in the past; he heaved a great sigh, saying: ‘Not only do I long to see them, but I wish to study them again, for they are such great works that they demand to be studied and meditated upon many times. For although we now paint in a different way and style, the artist who does not base his foundations on these studies will easily end in ruin. He should study especially the history paintings, which are the polestar of the perfection I have told you of, and which can be seen in the stories the immortal Raphael painted in the Holy Palace: whoever studies these works will become a true and consummate history painter.19 17 ‘Si applico molto alla scuola del Caravaggio, e raggiunse quella maniera di chiar oscuro, nella quale s’impregnava ogni giorno di piu.’ Palomino in Spinosa, Ribera, p. 410. 18 Spinosa, Ribera, pp. 146–175; Papi, ‘The Young Ribera,’ pp. 408–409; Loughman, Fierce Reality; Schütze, ‘Caravaggism in Europe,’ pp. 45–46. 19 ‘No solo tengo deseo de verlas, sino de volver de nuevo a estudiarlas, que son obras tales que quieren ser estudiadas y meditadas muchas veces, que anque ahora se pinta por diferente diferente rumbo y práctica, si no se funda en esta base de estudios parara en puina facilimente, y ne particular en sus historiados, que

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Not only does Ribera not mention Caravaggio’s name – it is Raphael who he has singled out for praise among all Roman painters. In truth, we cannot know for certain that Ribera did indeed say what Martinez reported. By the time Martinez conducted the interview, Caravaggio’s art had lost favour, and, thus, Ribera may have wanted to associate his art with a more ‘respectable’ and consecrated artist. And while it is undeniable that Ribera employed a strong chiaroscuro – especially at the beginning of his career – that does not mean he followed the straight path of influence from Caravaggio. As remarked by contemporary sources, Ribera’s chiaroscuro is substantially different from that of Caravaggio; it is employed with a particular purpose in order to satisfy a specific end. And as we glance at the contrast between light and dark in the Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew, we see how the tension of its contrast – which shapes the edges of the figure depicted – creates a new form of pictorial violence. As Jean-Baptiste Mercier Dupaty observes in his Lettres sur l’Italie, en 1785, Ribera’s use of chiaroscuro is in itself a source of pictorial violence: Lo Spagnoletto’s pencil is rather gloomy and severe, it is true; but it is vigorous and boldly aimed, as that of Caravaggio, to strike with terror, and astonish the eye by contrasts, rather than to move or flatter it by gradations and shades; Lo Spagnoletto lavishes his light and shade.20

As Dupaty points out, Ribera’s chiaroscuro can be identified as a powerful source of violence, which has the potential to strike with terror and astonish the eyes of the beholder. For the violence of the chiaroscuro in Ribera’s painting is in effect a violence of the edge: the edge of light, the edge of dark, the edge of the body, and the edge of paint – its very surface. A sharp line with no gradations or soft touches drawn between two distinct ways of being: to be in the light and to be in the dark, to be recognized and to be shrouded in the dim mass of blacks, greys, and ochres. Everything rendered in various gradations of soft and strong touches of the brush. To place things at the edge of light and dark is to bring them to the extreme point of their visibility; to flesh out the condition of their being; to give them corporeality and weight, flesh and skin, matter and spirit. In the Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew the edge of light and dark emphasizes the violence of the surface; a violence rendered through the texture of paint and the texture of the son el norte de la perfeccion en la que nos enseñan las historias del immortal Rafael pintadas en el Sacro Palacio; el que estudiare estas obras, se hara historiaror verdadero y consumado.’ Martinez, Discursos practicables del nobilísimo arte de la pintura, translated in Pérez Sánchez and Spinosa, Jusepe de Ribera, pp. 239–240. 20 Dupaty, Lettres sur l’Italie, p. 189.

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canvas – rough and distraught, moved and torn apart, cut and ruptured like the skin and flesh of the saint. *** Stretched Like a Canvas. The knife is set aside, the hand sunken within the body of the saint. Skin is slowly removed from living flesh. The executioner turns towards his assistant to issue an order: the body must be firmly tightened. The assistant bends down and pulls the rope around the saint’s left leg, stretching his figure slightly above ground. This forces the body of Saint Bartholomew into a movement of folding – starting from his upper part before curving downwards to his feet. His torso, chest, and open hands give the impression of a body stretched and widened like a canvas on a stretch bar. His lower body is engaged in a twisted movement of folding and turning, which replicates the white cloth that falls down in sumptuous folds. Skin variously blends with the ground of the painting – its textures and surfaces.21 For the folds created by the white cloth, laid underneath the saint, appear to be continued by the folds of his skin; and on the hip, the folds of the cloth, echo the creases of his skin. The folding of Saint Bartholomew’s body in relation to the cloth can be contrasted with Ribera’s earlier depiction of the Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew (Image 11) from 1634.22 In this earlier canvas the artist devised a half-length composition where the figure of the saint is seen up close, slightly turned away from the viewers, with one hand raised high and one kept low, his body reaching for the limits of the canvas and in so doing becoming something of its limit – analogous to the open canvas. The executioner, sharpening his knives, occupies the right-hand side of the painting. His attitude is one of wonder and puzzlement, for he appears to have paused in his ghastly business to stare at the body/canvas. One might interpret his attitude as one of momentary empathy and perhaps doubt at he prepares for the ghastly task ahead of him. But perhaps we may go even further and suggest that his attitude can be compared to that of a painter before an empty canvas. His knives becoming something akin to paint brushes. Again, we see here Ribera’s propensity for exploring the tension between making and unmaking – the unmaking of the body becomes the making of the canvas, with the viscosity and versatility of the impasto as a medium that simultaneously encompasses the creation of the pictorial surface through the destruction of skin and flesh.23 In the Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew of 1644, Ribera develops the relationship between the body of the saint and the cloth even further with various effects. 21 Fend, Fleshing Out Surfaces, p. 9. 22 For an in-depth comparison between the two canvases, see: Cornea, ‘Flaying the Image.’ 23 For a relevant text, see: Scarry, The Body in Pain.

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Image 11. Jusepe de Ribera, The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew, 1634, oil on canvas, 104 × 113 cm, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Image Credit: Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Here we are presented with a folding of the body onto itself as well as the folding of the same body in a shared entanglement with the white cloth, and indeed, the stretching and unfolding of the painting’s canvas. The texture of the canvas takes on the potentiality of skin, thus turning the body inside out whilst transforming the figure of Bartholomew into a complex layering of surfaces devoid of a meaningful interior. Thus the body of the saint becomes analogous with the pictorial surface, both united in a movement of folding and unfolding that allows for the interpretation of the surface of the paint as skin and the body as a stretched canvas. It is on this skin – fluent and viscose, elastic and flexible, sagging and wrinkled, cut and flayed – that the ground of the presentation of the body takes place, offered to us viewers without reservations. *** The Surface as Skin. There is a long tradition of describing paintings in corporeal terms. Titian provides a spectacular example in that his paintings were discussed by contemporary observers with the use of strong adjectives meant to evoke the incremental

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presence of skin, flesh, blood, bones, and even breath (spirit).24 These accounts show a visceral engagement that can take place at the limit of two bodies. To consider paintings as bodies suggests a parallel between the layers and textures of paint and canvas with those of a human body – flesh and skin. The technical term for skin – pelle in Italian or cutis in Latin – was used as a synonym for the canvas and the picture’s upper layers, as was defined in Leon Battista Alberti’s De Pictura of 1435. Mary Pardo calls attention to Alberti’s treatment of painting as an art of surfaces.25 Alberti’s writes: If many lines, like the threads on a cloth, are joined closely together, they will produce a surface. For the surface is the extreme part of the body, which is known not through its depth, but only its height and breadth.26

Pardo emphasizes that, in Alberti’s view, ‘[a]mong the properties of the surface, the contour is the border or … hem [ora o … lembo],’ whereas the expanse of surface proper moves textile into quasi-anthropomorphic analogy, as it ‘is in a manner of speaking like a kind of skin [una certa pelle] stretched over the entire back [dorso] of the surface.’27 Pardo concludes that, although Alberti was notably uninterested in the materiality of the pictorial materials, by attending to the machinery of perception and representation, he attached the physicality of the velo (a conceptually charged cloth/canvas) to the poetics of the painting.28 However, as Daniela Bohde and Lorenzo Pericolo have shown, in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theory, there was no fixed identity ascribed to either material; canvas and paint were interpreted as unstable materials.29 This interpretation allows for the work of materiality to emerge and destabilize the relationship between signifier and signified in the economy of representation and mimesis; more importantly, it allows for pictorial surfaces to be variously understood as either flesh or skin. Two influential sixteenth-century texts shed some light on this issue: Giovanni Battista Armenini’s De’veri precetti della pittura (1582) and Raffaello Borghini’s Il Riposo (1584).30 Armenini’s book, dedicated ‘to beginners, to scholars, and to lovers of fine arts,’ contains philosophical as well as practical considerations on the artistic process. When advising artists how to create a figure, Armenini writes: 24 See the Introduction. 25 Pardo, ‘Veiling.’ 26 Alberti, quoted in: Pardo, ‘Veiling,’ p. 113. 27 Pardo, ‘Veiling,’ p. 113. 28 Pardo, ‘Veiling,’ p. 121. 29 Pericolo, Caravaggio and Pictorial Narrative, pp. 447–449; Bohde, ‘Skin and the Search for the Interior’; Bohde, Haut, Fleisch und Farbe; Cornea, ‘Flaying the Image.’ 30 My discussion of Borghini and Armenini’s texts is indebted to Lorenzo Pericolo, Caravaggio and Pictorial Narrative, ch. 14.

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And then comes the skin, which covers everything, and which Nature created soft and delicate, strewn with a beautiful and alluring variety of tints; as a covering, the skin renders the body’s whole composition pleasant, graceful, and marvellous; [the execution of] this part is difficult by all means, but especially so in the representation of those nudes demanding much artifice, which therefore causes knowledgeable scholars to insist ordinarily on an excess upon whatever lies underneath it, which they believe to be accomplished and, always keeping this in mind they hardly tolerate [adding] the ultimate finish of the skin, as if they were displeased to employ [here] their knowledge, which they [instead] strive to express outside [in representing whatever lies underneath the skin] with such hardship.31

Armenini suggests that painters should not pay excessive attention to anatomical precision – what is today categorized as the under-drawings – when depicting the human figure. Instead, they should take more care in the way they cover the surface of figures, advising artists to depict soft and delicate skin in a variety of tints. This should make figures look less artificial, giving them a natural and pleasant appearance. Armenini further suggests that paint has the potential to be become skin. Indeed, he mentions the surface of paint as ‘the ultimate finish of the skin,’ covering the under-drawings of the depicted figures. Raffaello Borghini’s Il Riposo, on the other hand, is more concerned with the difference between sculpture and painting and discusses the relationship between paint and skin by taking into consideration the effect colours have on the surface: The good painter must put aside the canvas for many days until the applied colours are dry; then, one must consider it attentively, and amend what needs to be amended, giving [the surface] its ultimate skin of finest colour, diluted in little oil, so that they will be always beautiful and lively [alive].32

31 ‘Di poi vien la pelle, che cuopre ogni cosa, la quale la natura ha fatto molle e delicata, sparsa di belle e vaghe varietà dei colori; la qual coperta fa che tutto il componimento del corpo riesce piacevole, vago e meraviglioso; la qual parte e difficile in tutte le maniere, ma e molto pui ne gl’ignudi molto artificio, il che ne cagiona la troppo impressioni che gli studiosi si sogliono pigliare delle parti di sotto, le quali essi trovano esser terminate e cosi, tenedo in mente tuttavio, fan che mal pastiscono poi quest’ultimo compimento della pelle, come che siano quasi constretti a dover mostrare quella intelligenza di loro cosi spiacevole, che con tanta fatica si sforzano voler esprimer fouri, dove che molti se ne lavano poi finalmente, tardi accorgendosi quella dover essere maniera pui conveniente ed atta per I sommi principi che per le private persone, alle quail essi pui spesso servono e dove, con piu riputazione e men fatica, fanno I fatti loro.’ Armenini in Pericolo, Caravaggio and Pictorial Narrative, p. 488. 32 ‘Il buon pittore … dee metter da canto il cuadro per molti giorni, tantoche I colori dati siano secchi; poi lo rivegga deligentemente, e racconci quello che gli pare da racconciare, e gli dia l’ultima pelle si colori

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Borghini interprets the thin layers of paint as the figure’s ultimate skin – the ground and the place that endow figures with a sense of life and movement. But nonetheless, he shies away from assigning a fixed identity to either material: paint as skin or canvas as flesh. Rather, he sees skin as colour and life, while each painting may take various corporeal potentialities.33 Elsewhere, on the contrary, he interprets the supporting surface – in this case, the wall of a fresco found underneath the layer of paint – also as skin: One must apply this mixture on the wall with a large brush, spreading it with a heated towel in order to cover all the holes of the plaster layer, thereby making a uniform and smooth skin over the entire wall.34

Skin appears here as a smooth surface that supports the creative endeavours of artists. For Borghini, therefore, both the supporting material and the final layers of paint had the potential to be interpreted as skin. To complicate matters further, Lodovico Dolce, in his Dialogo della Pittura (1557), argues for the surface of the paint to be interpreted as flesh: So he who practices a detailed elaboration of the muscles is really aiming at giving an organized picture of the bone structure, and this is commendable; often, however, he succeeds in making the human figure look flayed or desiccated or ugly. He who works in the delicate manner, on the other hand, gives an indication of the bones where he needs to do so; but he covers them with sweet flesh and charges [fills] the nude figure with grace.35

Echoing Armenini’s advice, Dolce suggests that painters should not be unduly concerned with anatomical knowledge and drawings, since it risks making the figure look dry and lifeless. Instead, they painters should be attentive to the surface of figures, covering them with sweet flesh (‘ricopre dolcemente di carne’) in order to give them grace and beauty. Most striking in Dolce’s account is the use of the finissimi e temperate con poco olio, che d’ital maniera saranno sempre vaghi e vivi.’ Borghini in Pericolo, Caravaggio and Pictorial Narrative, p. 449. 33 On colour and corporeality, see: Lehmann, ‘Fleshing Out the Body,’ 34 ‘E questa mistura con un pennel grosso si metta sopra il muro e si vada distendendo con una cazzuola infocata che riturera tutti I buchi dell’arricciato e fara una pelle unita e liscia per il muro.’ Borghini in Pericolo, Caravaggio and Pictorial Narrative, pp. 448–449. 35 ‘Chi adunque va ricercando minutamente i muscoli, cerca ben di mostrar l’ossature a luoghi: ilche e lodevole; ma spesse volte fa l’huomo scorticato, o secco, o brutto da vedere: ma chi fa il delicate, accenna gliossi, ove bisogna, ma gli ricopre dolcemente di carne, e riempie il nudo di gratia.’ Dolce in Roskill, Dolce’s Aretino, pp. 142–143.

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word carne, which is usually translated as ‘flesh,’ although in sixteenth-century Italian it could also have meant ‘skin.’ Both the support of a painting (namely, the canvas or the priming coat of a wall prepared for fresco painting) as well as the outer layer of paint, the thin membrane of paint, and even the thin patina of aging could potentially be regarded as skin.36 If Caravaggio is usually credited as a introducing a moment of crises in the history of representation, it is significant to observe that his depiction of skin drew as many criticisms as it did compliments. Marianne Koos has rightly pointed out that in the case of Caravaggio one may indeed speak of paint as a smooth layer of skin, although this skin, if it were to be dissected, will probably only reveal yet another layer of smooth skin, rather than a fleshy interior.37 This suggests a surface-like construction of bodies, of skin-deep figures, layered by a multiplicity of surfaces; skin after skin after skin. The interchangeable understanding of the surface of the canvas and layers of paint as either flesh or skin allows for the dislocation between the work of materiality and mimesis to emerge more sharply. It opens the possibility of interpreting violence in Ribera’s Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew as the rupture of paint and the rough visible texture of canvas. If we consider the surface of the painting as skin, then the violence done to the painting becomes a violence enacted upon a body that becomes present before our eyes. No longer a representation, the painting becomes a presentation of violence achieved through the work of materiality, made visual by Ribera’s impasto technique – through the loose and vibrant strokes of the brush, the rough textures of the canvas, and the strong tones of the colours, all rendered in various consistencies on the surface of the canvas. *** Tremendo Impasto. Bernardo De Dominici observed in his Vite dei pittori, scultori ed architetti napoletani (1742) a remarkable quality of Ribera’s paintings: And so [Ribera] returned to his earlier studies, and began to paint with bold innate power and tremendous impasto so dense and full of colour, that it can reasonably be said that in this respect he superseded Caravaggio himself.38

De Dominici associated Ribera’s thick and coarse application of paint with a powerful sense of violence, describing it as tremendo. The Italian adjective tremendo (meaning 36 Bohde, ‘Le tinte delle carni,’ p. 43. 37 Koos, ‘Haut als mediale Metapher.’ 38 ‘Torno dunque a’primieri studi, e si diede col naturale avanti a dipingere di forza con tremendo impasto di color tanto denso, che ragionevolmente puo dirsi che egli in questa parte superasse il Caravaggio stesso.’ De Dominici, Vite, p. 3.

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‘tremendous’) stands for what is awful, terrifying, fearsome, and unbearable. It suggests a state or moment of extreme tension and anxiety, an inspiring awe or dread. De Dominici located at least part of the violence of Ribera’s paintings in the artist’s technique of handling paint – its density, texture, and colour. De Dominici was not alone in this. Antonio Palomino also observed the relation between corporeal and pictorial surfaces in Ribera’s work, especially their potential to produce violence. In El Museo pictórico y escala óptica (1724) he writes: Ribera did not delight in painting sweet and pious things, but in expressing horrendous and rough things: such as the bodies of an old men, dried, wrinkled and consumed with skinny and haggard faces; all done with natural accuracy, as a passionate painter, with forceful and elegant handling: as it is made visible by the [depictions of the] martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew, where he is being flayed and the internal anatomy of his arm is exposed.39

Palomino connects the violence of Ribera’s paintings with the forceful and yet elegant handling of the brushwork, his tremendo impasto. He draws particular attention to the worn, dried, creased skin of old men rendered through open brushstrokes. For Palomino these surfaces are horrendous and rough; they bear the excessive violence of the paintings, exhibited with remarkable strength in the depictions of the martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew. The violence produced by the impasto in Ribera’s paintings is closely related to the production of corporeality. Bernardo De Dominici showed the impasto to be a source of movement that transforms the paint into a corporeal surface: Is it truly a wonder to see how, with his dense impasto so full of colour, he not only made the muscles of the human body rotate [girare], but also the minute parts of the bones of the hands and feet, which are always finished with an unattainable degree of diligence and mastery. 40 39 ‘No se deleitaba tanto Ribera en pintar cosas dulces, y devotas, como en expressar cosas horrendas, y asperas: quales son los cuerpos de los ancianos, secos, arrugados y consumídos, con el rostro enjuto, y malicento; todo hecho puntualmente por el natural, con extremado primor, fuerza, y elegante manejo: como lo manifiesta el San Bartolomé en el Martyrio, quitándole la piel, y descubierta la anathomia interior del brazo: el célebre Tcio, a quien el Buitre lesaca las entrañas, por caítigo de su insolente atrevimiento: los totmentos de Sisifo, de Tántalo, y de Ixion, expressando (especialmente en este) con tal extremo el dolor, atado á la rueda, donde era continuamente herido, y despedazado.’ Palomino in Spinosa, Ribera, p. 410. 40 ‘Così dunque Giuseppe accoppiando alla fierezza del Caravaggio lo scelto del naturale, ed il bel colore della scuola lombarda, ne compose la maniera che fu sua propria; e fa veramente maraviglia il veder come col suo impasto così denso di colore egli facesse girare non solamente i muscoli del corpo umano, ma eziando le parti minute dell’ossa delle mani e de’ piedi, i quali si veggono finiti con diligenza e maestria

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While emphasizing the role played by impasto in furnishing Ribera’s figures with a sense of corporeality, De Dominici makes use of the verb girare (meaning ‘turning’ or ‘revolving’) to describe its effect on the figures. This suggests an interpretation of the painting as a whole body, complete with an external as well as an internal structure, since De Dominici’s is careful to point out that Ribera’s figures are not only furnished with skin, but also with flesh, muscles, veins, and bones. Most poignantly, De Dominici collapses the distinction between signified and signifier thus assigning to Ribera’s impasto technique and the materiality of the paint and colours the potentiality of endowing figures with a strong sense of physicality. The movement of turning exercises a terrifying violence on the saint’s internal structure by turning his body inside out and bringing his inner flesh to the surface. Violence becomes the foundational act of Ribera’s painting; the technique of its making entails its very unmaking. Creation is achieved through destruction as the figure of Saint Bartholomew is taken apart and disfigured by the very brush that gives it visuality and figurability. 41 *** The Wound. Relegated into the upper-right corner of the canvas, the wound is slightly obscured. The angle of the flaying makes hard to notice at first for the full extent of the opening is slightly turned away from our sight; as such, we are left to contemplate a thin layer of paint as a strip of freshly flayed skin hanging loosely in the executioner’s hand. Ribera’s depiction of the wounds conceals as much as it reveals. The artist chose poignantly to depict the wound through a succession of thin layers of red paint, not unlike the texture and consistency that characterizes the rest of Bartholomew’s body, thus, allowing for the canvas to seep through the layers of paint as it does on the surface of the skin. The treatment of the wound offers a stark contrast with Ribera’s own earlier depiction of flaying, for instance, in his Apollo Flaying Marsyas (1637) (Image 1). In contrast with the wound on Bartholomew’s hand, the flaying of Marsyas’s leg reveals an anatomically correct interior, with muscles, fibres, and veins. Apollo removes the skin from the satyr’s leg with great care in order to expose the moist tissues of a muscle and the dangling membrane of skin. Marsyas’s wound preserves the requirements of mimesis and representation, while the flaying on Bartholomew’s hand, on the other hand, appears as a patch of red paint. The difference is striking inarrivabile. Laonde così fondato nel disegno, nel colore, e nel naturale più nobile, espose con occasione … un quadro … che rappresentava un San Bartolomeo scorticato, ove nella persona del santo espresso una divota costanza, e in quella de’ carnefici la perfidia e la crudeltà.’ De Dominici, Vite, p. 115. 41 See Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images, pp. 12–52

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for it suggests that Ribera had intentionally showed the open wound in this way. This patch stands as a moment of pictorial resistance against what Georges DidiHuberman calls ‘the tyranny of imitation’ – a mark of opaque materiality that collapses the reference to an external reality. Ribera’s rendering of the wound shows the potential of paint to produce a form of violence that does not depend on mimesis and the credible representation of an accurate anatomical interior. *** The Painful Opening of Paint. Ribera’s paintings reveal a close affinity between the use of impasto and the peculiar position occupied by the figures in the compositional structure. Let us return to our earlier comparison between Ribera’s earlier canvas of the Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew from 1634 and his last surviving version of 1644. 42 In the 1634 painting, the figure of the saint is staged as a paradoxical body, encompassing a double movement: one of detachment and distinction, as well as openness and accessibility. The first state is achieved through the painting’s compositional arrangement where Bartholomew’s body appears trapped in a move of turning away from the viewer – his hands and torso acting as a cut separating the surface of the picture in two parts. The saint’s separation is further emphasized by his spiritual absorption, made apparent by Bartholomew’s gaze firmly directed towards the light shining from above. Conversely, the state of openness is accomplished through Ribera’s powerful impasto; the artist worked the materiality of his impasto in such a way as to present the broad open brushstrokes as sections of opened flesh, thus turning the body of the saint inside out. This way, Bartholomew’s figure becomes a threshold – a body caught in conflicting movement of turning away from the viewer while unfolding its corporeal surface onto the surface of the canvas. This subtle opening of Bartholomew’s flesh disrupts yet again the painting’s narrative sequence by altering the temporality of the scene in an act of prolepsis: a strategy that urges viewers to interpret the moment depicted through the subsequent narrative moment. Certain areas of the saint’s body, like the neck, face, and hands, are staged as open flesh and these variations in the texture and thickness have the ability to create narrative foci that disrupt the temporality of the painting. Skin is already torn away from the body to display pulsating living flesh, while the executioner is still sharpening his knife. Impasto therefore has the potential to disrupt the sequential moments of the narrative by making visible simultaneously the moment before the flaying and what is yet to come. This process of opening up the saint’s body emphasizes the role of the surface in heightening the intensity 42 For an extended comparison on these two paintings, see: Cornea, ‘Flaying the Image.’

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of the scene, giving it that extreme sense of violence, ferocity, and horror that contemporaries such as Dezallier d’Argenville so passionately articulated in their writing. The opening of the body through the impasto is countered by the saint’s compositional arrangement. In the 1634 canvas, Bartholomew’s body dominates the foreground, in a peculiar, oblique composition, which, together with the proximity offered by the half-length format, has the effect of drawing viewers ever so closely to the picture’s surface. This dramatic axis created by the hands sharpens the saint’s pose by forcing his torso to turn away from the viewer. One is confronted with a body caught in a semi-profiled angle, an inwardly facing figure, with his arms opened not towards the viewer in a move of exposition, but turned towards his executioner and the internal space of the picture. The sense of detachment is further reinforced by the saint’s absorbed look towards the light shining from above. Bartholomew’s pose in the Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew (1634) appears in its full eccentricity when considered alongside Ribera’s later version from 1644. In this last version Ribera shows the saint with his arms outstretched and eyes fixed upon the viewers. The entire composition revolves around the depiction of Bartholomew’s body in the very act of presentation. We encounter a saint who is actively presenting his own body to the viewer through direct engagement. Thus we may conclude, that one of the features that differ between the two depictions of Bartholomew lies in the figure’s physical reference to his own corporeality, or at least to certain aspects of it. If in the Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew (1634) the saint seems detached from the events of the narrative and his body is turned away from us – towards the heavenly light above – while in the Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew (1644) the saint is vigorously presenting himself to the viewers in a puzzling gaze of suspension. *** Flaying the Painting. The chest is raised high, the arms outstretched, the neck bent, the face forced into a frozen pose – Saint Bartholomew’s body is delivered for attention. Skin fills the lower surface of the canvas: white, thin, grey, and fragile. A delicate membrane rendered with fine layers of subtle paint: a brushstroke here, a brushstroke there, folded and stretched, worn out and restive in painful abandonment. The surface of skin and the edge of its surroundings seem on the verge of being lost or ruptured in the extremity of dislocation – between time and narrative – as if the skin itself was somehow anxious to be flayed, to be cut away and peeled off the flesh, touched by our eyes and the executioner’s bulky hand. A material process of dislocation is taking place on the surface of the saint’s body. During the slow process of drying, the crust of the solidifying paint resolved

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into a process of disintegration and cracking, thus allowing for the rough textures of the canvas to become visible as part of the surface, thus making the body of Saint Bartholomew at one with the course weave of the fabric. 43 We are confronted with a painting at work and with the work of painting – a moment where the materiality transforms Saint Bartholomew’s physical appearance from a smooth and articulate exterior to one that is rough and broken. The texture of the canvas and the consistency of paint exceed their roles as simple material supports to become active elements in the narrative depicted. They bring into focus the relationship between corporeal and pictorial surfaces: a dynamic that echoes and reinforces the flaying of the saint. For they show a figure ruptured and flayed in areas where the executioner’s hand has not yet touched, thus staging a temporal duration situated outside of the historia depicted. The temporality of the painting exceeds the confinements of the moment depicted. The flaying of the body becomes analogue to the flaying of time and history.44 The figure of Saint Bartholomew belongs to ancient times while the executioner is dressed in contemporary seventeenth-century clothes. The seventeenth-century man is flaying the ancient man – flaying the past which is made present. This gives rise to a tension between how temporalities engage with each other and how the seventeenth century interacted with the past: flaying it and revealing its depths as surfaces. On the other hand, the man in the background (whose profile we can see looming through Bartholomew’s stretched hand) pertains to a different temporality, a temporality that is neither human – be it ancient or early modern – nor divine. His time is the temporality of the painting’s surface. By turning away from the act of flaying, the figures seen in the background withdraw from the two temporalities embodied by the three front characters. This move creates a further rift between the temporality of that figure that has become one with the surface of the painting and the two distinct temporalities belonging to the saint and executioner. The painting therefore distances itself in order to become a critical time that looks away from the subject’s temporal engagements. A further split can be detached along two other competing lines: one moving inward, the other along the surface of the painting. The first emerges from Bartholomew’s gaze; it displaces the event of violence from the wound to a suspended interior time of anxious or resigned anticipation. Already knowing the outcome, we are compelled to contemplate what the apostle is thinking and feeling: to follow his gaze inward. Once we have reached the surface of the canvas, we are made aware that something quite different is taking place. The materiality of the surface – the thin layers of paint coupled with the texture of the canvas – produce 43 Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Informe Intern de Prestec, no. 141L131-34/2015. 44 See further: Cornea, ‘“Why Tear Me from Myself?”’ p. 45.

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a dislocation in the temporal coherence of the picture. Quite apart from the time prolonged indefinitely by the gaze of the saint, Ribera’s canvas reminds us that time is passing, and that it involves a corporeal violence that is already underway. Bartholomew’s wrinkled skin records an altogether different time: one where the martyrdom is not only just starting but in fact well advanced. The temporality of the surface of skin – damaged and worn by time and later interventions – engages the beholder in a material relationship where the ruptures and breaks visible on the saint’s skin produce a horrifying affect of endless violence. Ribera creates a point of crisis in the narrative where one is confronted with a violence enacted upon a painting as a body – the surface staged as skin is ripped and broken. We are confronted here with a violence that will not end soon with the saint’s demise – within the fictive progression of the narrative sequence – but will continue to be enacted forever on the painted surface. At this point, the materiality of the paint as skin becomes horrible, yet resolution is not offered lightly. For if we compare it with his earlier canvas of 1634, where although the body of the saint is staged as already opened by the impasto – even before the executioner’s knife has touched his skin – the sign of redemption is visible and imminent there. Yet in the 1644 painting, Ribera shows us the figure of the saint staring back at us coldly, offering no sign of comfort or relief (for he does not yet know he will become a saint) and the heavenly bliss that should presumably await him in the afterlife remains an eternity away.

Works Cited Bohde, Daniela, Haut, Fleisch und Farbe – Körperlichkeit und Materialität in den Gemälden Tizians, Berlin, Emsdetten, 2002. Bohde, Daniela, ‘Le tinte delle carni. Zur Begrifflichkeit für Haut und Fleisch in italienischen Kunsttraktaten des 15. bis 17. Jahrhunderts,’ in Weder Haut noch Fleisch: das Inkarnat in der Kunstgeschichte, ed. Daniela Bohde and Mechthild Fend, Berlin, Gebr. Mann, 2007, pp. 41–63. Bohde, Daniela, ‘Skin and the Search for the Interior: The Representation of Flaying in the Art and Anatomy of the Cinquecento,’ in Bodily Extremities: Preoccupations with the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture, ed. Florike Egmond and Robert Zwijnenberg, Farnham, Ashgate, 2003, pp. 10–48. Cassani, Silvia, ed., Civiltà del Seicento a Napoli, Naples, Electra, 1984. Cornea, Bogdan, ‘Flaying the Image: Skin and Flesh in Ribera’s Martyrdoms of Saint Bartholomew,’ Open Art Journal, 6, article 6 (Winter 2017/2018). Cornea, Bogdan, ‘“Why Tear Me from Myself?” The Depiction of Flaying in the Art of Jusepe de Ribera.’ PhD thesis, University of York, 2015, https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/11996/6/ Thesis_-_whole_thing%20(3).PDF.

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De Dominici, Bernardo, Vite dei pittori, scultori ed architetti napoletani, vol. 3, Napoli, Tipografia Trani, 1844. Didi-Huberman, Georges, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. Dupaty, Charles-Marguerite-Jean-Baptiste Mercier, Lettres sur l’Italie, en 1785, vol. 2, De Senne, 1788. Felton, Craig, and William Jordan, Jusepe de Ribera: ‘Lo Spagnoletto,’ 1591–1652, Fort Worth, TX, Kimbell Art Museum, 1982. Fend, Mechthild, Fleshing Out Surfaces: Skin in French Art and Medicine, 1650–1850, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2016. Gastel, Joris van, ‘Slow Violence: Jusepe de Ribera and the Limits of Naturalism,’ Oxford Art Journal, vol. 41, no. 1 (2018), pp. 1–17. González García, Juan Luis, ‘Jusepe de Ribera y lo trágico sublime. A propósito del Martirio de San Bartolomé y su modelletto (1624),’ Goya: Revista de arte, 277–278 (2000), pp. 214–225. Hendrix, Harald, ‘Renaissance Roots of the Sublime: Ugliness, Horror and Pleasure in Early Modern Italian Debates on Literature and Art,’ in Histories of the Sublime, ed. Christophe Madelein, Jürgen Pieters, and Bart Vandenabeele, Brussels, Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor Wetenschappen en Kunsten, 2005, pp. 13–22. Hendrix, Harald, ‘The Representation of Suffering and Religious Change in the Early Cinquecento,’ in Forms of Faith in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Catholic Christendom, 1300–1700), ed. Abigail Brundin and Matthew Treherne, Farnham, Ashgate, 2009, pp. 149–170. Hendrix, Harald, ‘The Repulsive Body: Images of Torture in 17th-Century Naples,’ in Bodily Extremities: Preoccupations with the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture, ed. Florike Egmond and Robert Zwijnenberg, Farnham, Ashgate, 2003, pp. 68–91. Hills, Helen, The Matter of Miracles: Neapolitan Baroque Sanctity and Architecture, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2016. Koos, Marianne, ‘Haut als mediale Metapher in der Malerei von Caravaggio,’ in Weder Haut noch Fleisch: Das Inkarnat in der Kunstgeschichte, ed. Daniela Bohde and Mechthild Fend, Berlin, Mann Verlag, 2003, pp. 65–85. Lehmann, Ann-Sophie, ‘Fleshing Out the Body: The Colours of the Naked in Dutch Art Theory and Workshop Practice 1400–1600,’ in Body and Embodiment in Netherlandish Art/Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art, 58, ed. A. Lehmann and H. Roodenburg, Zwolle, Waanders, 2008, pp. 87–109. Loughman, Thomas (ed.), Fierce Reality: Italian Masters from Seventeenth Century Naples, Milan, Skira, 2005. Marshall, Christopher, Baroque Naples and the Industry of Painting, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 2016. Milicua, José, and Javier Portús, eds., El joven Ribera, Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado with the collaboration of the CEEH, 2011.

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Palomino de Castro y Velasco, Antonio, El Museo pictórico y escala óptica: El Parnaso Español Pintoresco Laureado, Lucas Antonio de Bedmar, 1724. Palomino de Castro y Velasco, Antonio, Vidas, ed. Nina Ayala Mallory, Madrid, Alianza Editorial, 1986. Papi, Gianni, Ribera a Roma, Soncino, Edizioni dei Soncino, 2007. Papi, Gianni, ‘The Young Ribera: Reflections,’ in Caravaggio’s Rome, ed. Rossella Vodret, Milan, Skira, 2012, pp. 407–417. Pardo, Mary, ‘Veiling the Venus of Urbino,’ in Titian’s ‘Venus of Urbino’, ed. Rona Goffen, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 108–123. Payne, Edward, ‘Bodies Suspended in Space and Time: Execution, Suffering and Spectatorship in Ribera’s Martyrdom Scenes,’ in Autopsia: Blut- und Augenzeugen, ed. Carolin Behrmann, München, Fink, 2014, pp. 213–229. Payne, Edward, and Xavier Bray, Ribera: The Art of Violence, London, GILES, 2018. Pérez Sánchez, Alfonso E., and Nicola Spinosa, eds., Jusepe de Ribera, 1591–1652, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 1992. Pericolo, Lorenzo, Caravaggio and Pictorial Narrative: Dislocating the Istoria in Early Modern Painting, London, Harvey Miller, 2011. Portús, Javier, Ribera, Barcelona, Ediciones Polígrafa, 2011. Roskill, Mark W., Dolce’s Aretino and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2000. Sapir, Itay, ‘Blind Suffering: Ribera’s Non-visual Epistemology of Martyrdom,’ Open Arts Journal, 4 (Winter 2014–2015), pp. 29–39. Scarry, Elaine, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1987. Schütze, Sebastian, ‘Caravaggism in Europe: A Planetary System and Its Gravitational Laws,’ in Caravaggio and His Followers in Rome, ed. David Franklin and Sebastian Schütze, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 2011, pp. 26–47. Spinosa, Nicola, Ribera: The Complete Work, Florence, Electra, 2003. Spinosa, Nicola, ‘Ribera and Neapolitan Painting,’ in Jusepe de Ribera, 1591–1652, ed. Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez and Nicola Spinosa, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 1992, pp. 19–33. Spinosa, Nicola, ed., Il giovane Ribera tra Roma, Parma e Napoli. 1608–1624, Naples, Arte’m, 2011. Whitfield, Clovis, and Jane Martineau, eds., Painting in Naples: From Caravaggio to Giordano, London, Royal Academy of Arts, 1983. Wittkower, Margot, and Rudolf Wittkower, Born under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists, New York, NYRB Classics, 2006.

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Image 12. Georges de La Tour, Penitent Saint Jerome, 1630–1635, oil on canvas, 157 × 100 cm, Musée de Grenoble, Grenoble. Image Credit: Ville de Grenoble/Musée de Grenoble – J.L. Lacroix.

4. Flesh: On Georges de La Tour’s Penitent Saint Jerome Abstract Chapter Four explores the relationship between paint and flesh in the creation of violence in Georges de La Tour’s Penitent Saint Jerome. Building on the previous chapter’s research on the potentiality of paint to become either skin or flesh, this chapter focuses on how materiality becomes open flesh. By drawing comparisons with the works of other artists, La Tour is shown to have used the impasto technique to displace the violence of flagellation; this act of displacement is twofold: for the wounds on Jerome’s back are made visually present through the open surfaces rendering his face and hands, surfaces which confront the beholder with an open body. This violence that unfolds on the surface of the canvas is unexpectedly thrown at the beholder through an unexpected gaze that stares back at us from the corner of the canvas. Keywords: Georges de La Tour, flesh, paint, wounds, flagellation

La Tour’s paintings are images that are enigmas. – Pascal Quignard

It opens from a dark corner: halfway along the ground – an old man, fallen in deep penitence. A naked body, slightly covered by the cardinal’s red cloak, worn and torn at the edges, reveals its pitiful state. The skin hangs low with battered elegance around the swollen abdomen, the light grey curls frame the thick wrinkles on his face; the flesh, aged by the imputed sin of our forefathers, shiver under the rhythmic strokes of the rope. The fluidity of paint, rendered with unsurpassed elegance and speed, brings forth the fleshiness of the wretched body, making it gleam in the warm radiance of the candlelight. We slowly find ourselves lost in the materiality of these traces: moving from one brushstroke to another, from one layer to another, pausing ever so slightly on their broken edges, finding ourselves

Cornea, B., The Matter of Violence in Baroque Painting. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463727808_ch04

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moved by an intense desire to touch and engage with the surface of paint as open fragments of rough flesh. Georges de La Tour’s Penitent Saint Jerome (1630-1635) (Image 12) is a painting of displaced violence. The canvas reveals as much at it conceals: it shows the instrument of violence without showing the wound; it shows blood, although there is no visible lesion on the body; and it shows the potentiality of the paint to become open flesh in an image where the very denial of flesh is at stake – flagellation as the mortification of the flesh. An endless work of displacement between the suggestion of the wound on Saint Jerome’s back and the impasto on his face and body – a back-and-forth movement as rhythmic and painful as the whips of the flagellation. A process where the ripped and torn flesh on the back of the saint that remains invisible to sight is made visually present through the lose rendering of the impasto, particular to the wrinkles of his face, the hair on his body, and the sagging of his skin. A sound, perhaps, or a fugitive thought and everything stops; a fleeting moment of distraction that breaks the monotone rhythm of the flagellation. The saint turns away from the crucifix to stare into the middle distance, his face shrouded in darkness. The rope falls on the ground, staining with fresh blood the surface of the canvas, its fringes almost touching the edge of the frame. Two worlds forever set apart: on our side of the frame, the whispers and brightness of the gallery, on his, the cold damp floor of the cave, lofty and quiet, dim in its high and far corners. We follow the brushstrokes as they stretch into marks, marks into traces, and traces into open surfaces, before we take notice of the fleshless skull that stares back at us from the corner of the canvas, directing at us a form of violence that belongs to the already decayed flesh: opened, dried, and desiccated – a violence as the degradation of the body. *** The Artist Vanishes. Georges de La Tour is a man of two ages: he is as much a man of the seventeenth century as he is one of the twentieth century. Completely forgotten after his death in 1652, La Tour was rediscovered at the beginning of the twentieth century when Hermann Voss published an article of attribution on two canvases from the museum in Nancy.1 Despite the scarcity of sources, scholarship rose gradually, to the point that in 1972, a majority of his known works were exhibited at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris.2 The exhibition proved to be a game changer for his artistic legacy: it transformed La Tour from an obscure art historical curiosity 1 2

Voss, ‘Georges du Mesnil de la Tour.’ La Tour’s rediscovery is discussed at length in Kazerouni and Collange, Georges de La Tour.

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into one of the greatest artists of the seventeenth century. And though the corpus of his work is still fluctuating – as some works are rejected and other approved as autograph – there is now a broad consensus surrounding some 40 canvases considered to be by his own hand.3 This obliteration of memory is unusual as it is remarkable for such a prolific artist of the seventeenth century.4 Often explained as one of the consequences of the wars that devastated the Duchy of Lorraine, this sad state of affairs was supplemented by the dramatic change in taste in the middle of the seventeenth century – a shift that ensured the artist’s total descent into oblivion.5 The magnitude of this wretched situation can be discerned from the fact that no critical text on art from the seventeenth and eighteenth century – including André Félibien’s Entretiens sur les vies et sur les ouvrages des plus excellents peintres anciens et modernes (1671) and Antoine-Joseph Dezallier d’Argenville’s Abrégé de la vie des plus fameux peintres (1745) – contains any mention of La Tour’s name. It is as if the artist had vanished into the thick clouds of history or never existed at all. Unlike his fellow artists of the seventeenth century – such as Poussin or Caravaggio – La Tour remains a figure shrouded in mystery. And while some official documents account for some of his life events or transactions, we have no written sources to detail the reception of his art. The only instance that suggests the high esteemed in which his art was held at the time comes in the form of his appointment in 1639 as peintre ordinaire du roi to Louis XIII and the successive patronages of the Dukes of Lorraine.6 For there are no letters like those of Poussin that seem to evoke his thoughts and feelings to the point that we can almost hear him speak, no interviews recorded like the one Ribera gave to Martinez, nor the critical texts that detail Caravaggio’s tumultuous life against the dramatic innovations of his art. The only surviving description of La Tour dates back to 1646 and it focuses on the man, rather than his art. It shows La Tour as a man living beyond his station: ‘Master Georges de La Tour, painter, renders himself odious to the people by the number of dogs he keeps, both greyhounds and spaniels, as if he were the local lord, hunting hares through the cultivated fields, tramping and spoiling them.’7 And while La Tour seems to have lived like a nobleman, he certainly was not one, despite the fact that he did manage to obtain some privileges from the dukes of Lorraine, including a valuable exemption from taxes. One of the most debated aspects of La Tour’s biography is his alleged trip to Italy. Despite the severe lack of any documentary evidence – either in France 3 Salmon, ‘Georges de La Tour’; also Kazerouni, ‘Georges de La Tour,’ p. 15. 4 La Tour’s critical destiny can be compared with that of Johannes Vermeer. 5 Miskimin, ‘Lorrain.’ 6 For a recent appraisal of La Tour’s appointment to Louis XIII, see: Fohr, Georges de La Tour, pp. 185–214. 7 Thuillier, Georges de La Tour, p. 7.

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or Rome – it has been argued repeatedly by scholars that La Tour travelled to Italy somewhere between 1610 and 1616 in order to complete his education.8 This assumption is mostly grounded in stylistic comparisons between artists who were active in Rome at the time and La Tour’s canvases. Caravaggio’s art, in particular, and that of his so-called followers in Rome, is often assumed to have ‘inspired’ La Tour’s night scenes.9 Another reason for supposing that La Tour had travelled to Rome is the fact that most contemporaneous painters from Lorraine – and indeed of France – did make the journey over the Alps. Three of most important artist in Lorraine at the time, Jacques Callot (1592–1635), Jean Le Clerc (1587/1588–1633), and Claude Deruet (1588–1660), travelled to Rome, and most significantly, they all shared the same patrons as La Tour.10 Other scholars have pointed out that La Tour could have just as well been ‘influenced’ by the ‘Northern Caravaggisti’ – especially Hendrick ter Brugghen.11 He could have seen night scenes at home in his native Lorraine, since Jean Le Clerc painted one as a Group of Musicians by Night which proved immensely popular to the point that he engraved it and painted it several times.12 The entire saga of establishing whether La Tour actually travelled to Rome or not, and if he was or was not influenced by northern artists, reads like a fascinating detective story, although one that most likely will remain undecided, considering the severe lack of any documentary evidence. The silence of history thus forces us to return to the primacy of the visual object. And thus let us engage with the materiality of the canvas and peculiarity of its surface, to look anew at La Tour’s presentation of the body of Saint Jerome. The painting’s violence cannot be easily pinned down: it is not something made visible in the iconography of the wounds nor is it in the depiction of physical acts of aggression. The lack of an iconographic depiction of an open wound made Anthony Blunt argue that the moving simplicity of La Tour’s art transcends naturalism and attaining a certain classicism in which all violence and movement are eliminated, imbuing his work with a stillness and silence rarely rivalled in art.13 Blunt argument 8 This was first suggested by Voss in his article and picked up my most subsequent scholarship that explored La Tour’s life and work. Art historians such as Jacques Thuillier and Pierre Rosenberg argue for a visit to Rome, while Anthony Blunt, Jean-Pierre Cuzin, and Philip Conisbee postulate for the influence of the northern followers of Caravaggio. For an overview of the problem, see: Fohr, Georges de La Tour, pp. 27–57. 9 Regarding recent opinions on La Tour’s possible visit to Italy, see: Cuzin, ‘Celui qui croyait a Rome, celui qui n’y croyait pas.’ For a recent study on the relationship between Caravaggio and La Tour (especially the depictions of card players), see: Feigenbaum, ‘Perfectly True, Perfectly False.’ 10 Thuillier, Georges de La Tour, p. 7. 11 Regarding the relationship between La Tour and northern artists, see: Slatkes, ‘Georges de La Tour.’ 12 Cuzin, ‘La Tour Seen from the North.’ 13 Blunt, ‘Georges de la Tour at the Orangerie,’ p. 525.

FLESH: ON GEORGES DE LA TOUR’S PENITENT SAINT JEROME

may hold truth in regard to other, and indeed much later canvases by La Tour, but in the case of Penitent Saint Jerome (1630), the poignant use of the impasto, which is characteristic for this early period in the artist’s creation, conveys a violence that creeps slowly through the visible brushstrokes that render so strikingly the degradation of the flesh. And yet, despite the fact that the wound is deliberately concealed from sight, we are made aware of its painful visual presence, for in the lower-left corner of the canvas, we see the rope lying on the ground, its heavy knots and fringes dripping with fresh blood. *** The Marks of Flesh. The wounded back, the skin crumbling on his face. A body made of scratches and scrapings, extracted from the darkness of the cave. In the Grenoble Penitent Saint Jerome (1630–1635), La Tour presents a body in a full process of disaggregation – unclothed, hanging, opened, fallen – submitted to various degrees of erasure and degeneration. The figure of Saint Jerome offered artists of the seventeenth century the opportunity to engage with the subject of corporeal decay: La Tour presents us with a semi-nude figure, distended stomach, and wrinkled skin, messy hair and a callus on his big toe – the very opposite of the dignity one might expect from a prince of the church.14 The only sign of his high position is the red cloak that covers his abdomen before falling over his left arm, its colour alluding to his rank as cardinal.15 This symbol of power and prestige is subverted by the artist, for if we take a closer look at the cloak, it is visible how the fabric is degraded and its structure is worn at the edges. The degradation of his body seems to collide with the degradation of his dignity represented by the cloak – perhaps a transgression too far for La Tour since in the later version from Stockholm of Penitent Saint Jerome (1630–1632), the robe is no longer shown in tatters.16 Thus, in the Stockholm painting, there is a rebalance between the degradation of the body and that of preservation of his dignity; the red cloak is depicted intact and there is even the introduction of the cardinal hat in the background.17 14 On La Tour’s depiction of the body of Saint Jerome, see: Thuillier, Georges de La Tour, p. 128; and Tosatto, catalogue entry on Penitent Saint Jerome in Salmon and Úbeda de los Cobos, Georges de La Tour, pp. 114–119. 15 Although during Jerome’s life, cardinals did not exist, in time it became common practice for a secretary to the pope to become a cardinal (as Jerome had effectively been to Damascus), and so this was reflected in artistic interpretations. 16 For a comparison between the Grenoble versions of La Tour’s Penitent Saint Jerome, under consideration in this chapter, and the Stockholm canvas, see: Conisbee, ‘An Introduction,’ pp. 78–84. 17 The image can be viewed online at: http://collection.nationalmuseum.se/eMP/eMuseumPlus?servi ce=ExternalInterface&module=collection&objectId=19030&viewType=detailView.

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Image 13. Georges de La Tour, Penitent Saint Jerome, 1630–1635, oil on canvas, 157 × 100 cm, Musée de Grenoble, Grenoble. Image Credit: Ville de Grenoble/Musée de Grenoble – J.L. Lacroix. DETAIL.

In the Grenoble Penitent Saint Jerome, the process or degradation, both corporeal and textile, is mostly conveyed through La Tour’s application of paint. This varies greatly; some areas are highly polished while others show the rough and textured trace of the brushstroke (Image 13). Betraying an unrivalled speed and freedom, La Tour’s brush builds a precise pattern of barely defined areas of local colour: the hair and beard are rendered with short and sharp strokes while the wrinkles on the forehead are executed with wavering lines. The distinctiveness of the brushstrokes prevents certain areas of the body to blur away and become indistinguishable from the rest of the surface; the brushstrokes on the forehead retain their distinct presence without dissolving into the surface as skin. They appear as marks or traces of an absence made anxiously present. They follow a movement of displacement between the violence of what must remain hidden from sight – the wound – and the traits of the paint, left visible on the face, on the hands, and on the torso. *** Open Surfaces. La Tour’s painting presents viewers with a multitude of unstable surfaces, of open marks and gentle smears, some digressing and diverging from the

FLESH: ON GEORGES DE LA TOUR’S PENITENT SAINT JEROME

figure they are supposed to embody. Instead of clarity, we find more obscurity; with their distinct yet wandering outlines, the marks of paint resist easy identification. They open the world of resemblance and imitation to something more dark and unstable. They withstand the simple categorization along the lines: these strokes are wrinkles and these are hair in favour as moments of open potentiality, where the artist’s brushstrokes does not establish a clear relationship between signifier and signified, but allows for the materiality of paint to intrude upon the assumed coherency of the pictorial surface. And although this is not to suggest that these marks are just a chaotic mass of paint, on close inspection they reveal the work of self-referentiality; for it is through the materiality of paint, made distinct by the strokes of the brush, that painting can assume its position as an object of deep self-awareness. The instability of the marks necessarily brings into focus the relationship between the impasto technique and the production of flesh. As was pointed out before, during the sixteenth and seventeenth century, there was no fixed identity ascribed to the pictorial surface; artists and writers referred interchangeably to paint as either flesh or skin.18 The identif ication of paint with flesh emerged from the particularity of colours and technique used to render the surface of a human f igure. In the early modern period flesh was often associated with materiality and colour while skin with the boundaries and contours of figures.19 One powerful way of making the materiality of flesh readily perceptible was the use of impasto. The term ‘impasto’ refers to a technique used by artist to intentionally leave certain areas of an artwork – or indeed of the entirety work – in a rough, unpolished state. This method emphasizes the unevenness of the surface, while suggesting an unf inished viewing process, which allows the artwork to continue in the imagination of the viewer in decidedly unf ixed ways; indeed, the impasto is also known as non-finito, which suggests infinity (as something never finished). The impasto traces the artist’s stages of execution by revealing the artworks artifice while creating an awareness of the dynamic interaction between artist and artwork. The term ‘non-finito’ is predominantly associated in the history of art with Michelangelo’s sculptures, and thus closely related to the master’s terribilità and furore. His series of ‘slaves’ for the Tomb of Julius II, for instance, shows the human figure engaged in a strenuous effort of surfacing from the undistinguished masses of marble.20 In 1547, Benedetto Varchi attempted to settle the paragone 18 See Chapter Three. 19 Fend, ‘Bodily and Pictorial Surfaces,’ pp. 311–312. 20 The bibliography on Michelangelo’s non-finito is extensive. For key studies, see: Sanpaolesi, ‘Il “Non finito”’; Brunius, Michelangelo’s Non Finito; Gilbert, ‘What Is Expressed.’

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debate once and for all by soliciting the opinion of the Florentine artistic elite, including Michelangelo. Michelangelo wrote back, saying ‘by sculpture I mean that which is done by subtracting. That which is done by adding (namely, modelling) resembles painting.’21 Michelangelo argued that painting was subordinate to sculpture because it presented only one view, while a single block of stone contained all the possibilities for a work of art. For Michelangelo, the method of extracting bodies from a base mass of marble through his ‘divine’ touch was far superior to the painterly technique of adding surfaces. The technique of adding and layering surfaces made Titian one of Michelangelo’s greatest counterparts in painting. Titian was among the first to develop a distinct technique of loose brushstrokes and open surfaces; indeed, it was Vasari who coined the term pittura di macchia (painting of blotches) to describe the Venetian master’s approach to pictorial surfaces. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writings reveal a widespread interest in Titian’s work, and contemporary art historical literature has done much to advance knowledge on the subject.22 Vasari praises his figures as ‘natural and as if alive’ and writes that ‘these last works are executed with bold strokes and dashed off with a broad and even coarse sweep of the brush, insomuch that from near little can be seen, but from a distance they appear perfect.’23 Despite his praises, Vasari sensed the danger of the impasto for his project of placing art firmly within the framework of mimesis – for it allowed the physicality of the medium to disturb its illusionistic qualities – and thus warned viewers keep their distance in order to ‘properly’ enjoy the paintings. An up-close view of his paintings reveals, through the sketchiness of its execution, the physical stuff of matter, the work of materiality, while distance would ultimately preserve the integrity of the mimetic idea.24 The challenge posed by the impasto to the integrity of the mimesis can best be observed in Marco Boschini’s account of Titian’s technique of painting. In his Le minere della pittura veneziana (1664), Boschini writes down in some detail Giacomo Palma il Giovane’s recollection of Titian’s approach to painting: 21 Richter, Paragone, p. 91. 22 There are a few solid studies on the matter, such as: Cranston’s The Muddied Mirror on Titian and the use of materiality to address issues of desire, making and unmaking and violence. Puttfarken’s Titian and Tragic Painting draws attention to the way Titian’s loose brushstrokes acts upon the eye by urging it to explore what seem to be unsteady and therefore moving connections between figures and background. Elsewhere, David Rosand, The Meaning of the Mark, considers Titian’s technique as a method design to transform colour and paint into a physical substitute for flesh, whereas Bohde’s ‘Skin and the Search for the Interior’ points out that Titian’s use of the technique is meant to express the decomposition of the physical body. See also Nichols, Titian. 23 ‘e queste ultime, condotte di colpi, tirate via di grosso e con macchie, di maniera che da presso non si possono vedere e di lontano appariscono perfette.’ Vasari, Lives of the Artists, pp. 457–458. 24 On the issue of distance in viewing Titian’s paintings, see: Sohm, Pittoresco, pp. 43–53.

FLESH: ON GEORGES DE LA TOUR’S PENITENT SAINT JEROME

And if he found anything [in the paintings] that was not in strict conformity with his intentions, he proceeded like a good surgeon treating a patient, healing an injury, reducing a swelling, adjusting an arm, or setting a bone if he did not like that way it lay, paying no attention to the pain he was causing or to any such thing.… And then, having done it, he laid his hands on the next one, even before the first was dry, and did the same to it. Gradually he covered these quintessential extracts with living flesh, going over them many times, so that only breath was lacking from them to come to life.25

Boschini related the production of flesh with the materiality of paint and Titian’s exceptional technique. For Titian, painting a figure is a matter of processing materials, of working the paint directly onto the canvas, rather than resorting to preparatory drawings – and hence to the notion of art as a reflection of an idea embodied by the presumed purity of the line. Boschini remarked that Titian looked down on the idea that a figure had to be prepared in advanced – as valued in the classical Florentine approach – considering it a sign of impoverishment of the art. Titian created figures alla’prima, gave them texture and consistency so as to ‘give liveliness to the surface.’26 So powerful is the sense of bodily presence that Titian’s strokes of red appears in Boschini’s account as drops of blood, while the mass layers of paint present themselves as flesh. Boschini was not the only one drawing attention to the potentiality of paint to become flesh. Lodovico Dolce, in his Dialogue on Painting, described Venus from Titian’s Venus and Adonis (1553) as a figure made of flesh: [T]here is no man so sharp of sight and discernment that he does not believe when he sees her that she is alive … for if a marble statue could, with the shafts of its beauty, penetrate to the marrow of a young man so that he left his stain there, then what should this figure do which is made of flesh, which is beauty itself, which seems to breath?27

25 ‘E scoprendo alcuna cosa che non concordasse al delicato suo intendimento, come chirurgo benefico medicava l’infermo, se faceva di bisogno spolpargli qualche gonfiezza o soprabondanza di carne, radrizzandogli un braccio, se nella forma l’ossatura non fosse cosí aggiustata, se un piede nella positura avesse preso attitudine disconcia, mettendolo a lungo, senza compatir al suo dolore, e cose simili. Cosí operando, e riformando quelle figure, le riduceva nella piú perfetta simmetria che potesse rappresentare il bello della natura, e dell’arte; e dopo fatto questo, ponendo le mani ad altro, fino che quello fosse asciutto, faceva lo stesso; e di quando in quando poi copriva di carne viva quegli estratti di quinta essenza, riducendoli con molte repliche, che solo il respirare loro mancava.’ Boschini in Ferino-Pagden, Late Titian, pp. 21–22. 26 This practice echoes the ancient story of Pygmalion, see: Stoichita, Pygmalion Effect. 27 ‘non si truova huomo tanto acuto di vista e di giudicio; che veggendola non la creda vivav… se una statua di marmo pote in modo con gli stimoli della sua belleza penetrar nelle midolle d’un giovane, ch’ei

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Again referencing the terms of the paragone, Dolce claims that Titian’s painting surpasses classical sculpture by producing a powerful sense of desire, especially from the figure of Venus, which is ‘made of living flesh’ and ‘seems to breathe.’ Dolce’s evocation of Titian’s Venus focuses on the production of desire, affected by the surface of paint as flesh. Although it remained highly controversial during his lifetime, Titian’s pittura di macchia became a source of further exploration for artists such as Tintoretto and Veronese, who reworked it in their own unique way, and thus made it a trademark of late-sixteenth-century Venetian painting.28 This incursion into the critical legacy of Titian’s pittura di macchia allows a rethinking of the relationship between the impasto and the violence of a scene. However, differences arise between Titian’s use of pittura di macchia and La Tour’s impasto. Titian’s Saint Jerome in the Wilderness (1575) (Image 14) offers a poignant point of contrast. The painting reveals the entire figure of the saint to be painted in loose strokes of the brush. Surrounded by a wild landscape, the saint holds a stone in his right hand for beating his breast, while his left hand rests on a Bible placed before a crucifix. The entire image seems to succumb to a frenzy of open glazes and lose brushstrokes, and while some areas are thickly built, others remain thin to the point in which the canvas can be seen with the naked eye – especially in the section of the landscape. The range of colours is reduced to a minimum, becoming almost monochrome in appearance, with highly subtle modulations of earth tones. The only strong patch of colour is in Jerome’s red tunic, which is painted with rapid strokes of the brush, particularly on the saint’s left leg. Titian’s pittura di macchia seems to convey Jerome’s spiritual torment by extending it to the surrounding nature. La Tour’s painting, on the other hand, shows the f igure of Saint Jerome in a much more polished state; most of the paint is smooth and the brushstrokes are subtle and elegantly drawn. La Tour focuses his brush to introduce distinction and confound certain areas of the body: the face, the neck, the hair, the hands, and the lowered abdomen, not forgoing the impact of the red cloak. These areas are made to stand out from the rest to articulate a renewed physicality; one where the impasto opens certain areas of the body of the saint, spreading them out to become surfaces. While the brushstrokes of the impasto can be read in an uncomplicated way as a depiction of Jerome’s body – as signifying wrinkles and hair – the materiality of paint exceeds the limits or resemblance and imitation. The brushstrokes deliver the viscosity of the pigment as flesh; not merely vi lasciò la macchia: hor, che dee far questa, che è di carne; ch’è la beltà istessa; che par, che spiri?’ Dolce in Roskill, Dolce’s Aretino, pp. 215–217. 28 For an excellent study on the relationship between Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese, see: Ilchman, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese.

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Image 14. Titian Vecellio, Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, c. 1575, oil on canvas, 137 × 97 cm, ThyssenBornemisza Museum, Madrid. Image Credit: Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.

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a representation of flesh, but the potentiality of matter to become open flesh. Something quite close to manipulation is taking place in La Tour’s canvas: for violence emerges as a displacement at work within the body of the painting, where the absence of the wounds are made anxiously present through the open glazes of the face and the hands, not incidentally the most expressive parts of the human figure. *** The Texture of Violence. To engage with the texture of the impasto is to be confronted with the process through which paintings produce violence and are in themselves acts of violence. This violence resists the disembodiment of art performed by the humanist idea of art as imitation and representation; it goes beyond the restrictions of disegno to present viewers with a conception of paintings as transformative. As we have seen earlier, Boschini drew attention to this fact in his description of Titian’s method of painting, where the artist, like a surgeon, intervened into the body of the canvas, thoroughly disregarding the pain he was causing, fragmenting its integrity. Somewhere else, De Dominici described Ribera’s technique as tremendo impasto – suggesting something terrifying, fearsome, and unbearable.29 La Tour’s use of impasto to dislocate the violence of the painting can be fruitfully compared with Caravaggio’s art, in that both artists employed the non-finito to create new forms of violence.30 If Caravaggio’s earliest paintings were generally characterized by precision and polish, such as The Boy with a Basket of Fruit (c. 1593), during his fugitive years, the artist started to use an increasingly loose brushstroke. Caravaggio’s use of the non-finito, however, never reached the profusion of Titian’s pittura di machhia nor Ribera’s tremendo impasto; for the Lombard master it was always a question of making a point, of highlighting a certain aspect of the work to create new relationships or strings of association. There is a definite trend in Caravaggio’s application of the non-finito: a strong focus on the human body – though in no way restrictive to it – intended to emphasize the fleshiness of the figures and draw attention to their distinct corporeality. As Bellori observed, Caravaggio’s brushwork, together with the tones of paint, acquires a meaningful role in the creation of figures: ‘Thus by avoiding all prettiness and vanity in his colour, Caravaggio strengthened his tones and gave them blood and flesh. In this way he induced his fellow painters to

29 See Chapter on skin. 30 For Caravaggio’s use of the non-finito in relation with the painting’s historia, see: Pericolo, Caravaggio and Pictorial Narrative, pp. 415–446.

FLESH: ON GEORGES DE LA TOUR’S PENITENT SAINT JEROME

work from nature.’31 The strong tones remarked by Bellori, coupled with the fluid materiality of paint, instil Caravaggio’s figures with a strong sense of corporeal presence: of flesh and blood. Caravaggio’s shift in technique and the adoption of a highly personal and specific approach to the non-finito was different in nature and value from that of his Venetian predecessors. Bellori, for instance, observed the change in style while describing Caravaggio’s Beheading of Saint John the Baptist (1608): ‘In this work, Caravaggio used all the power of his brush, and worked with a great deal of fierceness that he left the canvas in the preliminary half-tones [imprimatur].’32 Bellori shifts the emphasis from Caravaggio’s use of a strong chiaroscuro – until then a common trope in the Caravaggesque critical legacy – to the master’s use of spontaneous brushstrokes and rough colouring. Most significantly, Caravaggio’s brush is described as powerful and fierce – a term that charges the non-finito with the power to produce violent inflections. In the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, Caravaggio used the depiction of blood that gushes from the Baptist’s severed neck to infamously inscribe his own name on the canvas. Here again the materiality of paint opens up the system of representation through a drastic work of oscillation, where paint becomes blood and blood paint. While the blotches of red paint are staged as a poring puddle of blood, the artist, in a self-referential gesture, drags out the brush to sign the painting as f. Michelang.o. If at first sight the red patches of paint participate fully in the mimetic order on the image by tending towards the exactitude of appearance, the artist’s gesture breaks that order to impose itself as an act of disruption – a double gesture where illusion is implied and yet quickly subverted by the act of painting. Caravaggio destabilized the interpretation of red as a representation of blood to become a violent act of creation, where the identity of the material is dislodged by the identity of the artist – the meaning of red as blood is brought into question by Caravaggio’s signature as artist. Perhaps is it all the more significant that from all of La Tour’s paintings, the depictions of Saint Jerome are only ones where blood is made visible. Blood points to an already opened body; yet one not made visible by the graphic depiction of a wound. The impasto instead produces a relative process of disfiguration, where certain areas of the body are taken apart, segmented, and presented as marks devoid of a clear and stable identity. These marks have the potential to become corporeal: they have the viscosity and texture of flesh, yet on close inspection they tend to resist easy identification. Where some brushstrokes are immediately recognized 31 See Chapter One. 32 ‘In quest’opera il Caravaggio uso ogni potere del suo pennello, avendovi lavorato con tanta fierezza che lascio in mezza tinte l’imprimitura della tela.’ Bellori in Hibbard, Caravaggio, p. 369.

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as wrinkles, others as hair, and some as sagging skin, there are also those that blur that distinction and remain open to interpretation. And while La Tour’s later works show an increasingly polished surface and a clear reduction in the visibility of brushstrokes, the figure of Saint Jerome makes a particular poignant point about their significance to the production of violence. The potentiality of the impasto to dislocate time and place in order to produce violence can also be observed in Rembrandt’s Saint Bartholomew (1661) (Image 15). Reminiscent of Titian’s splotchy brushwork, Rembrandt laboriously moulded his paints on canvas, manipulating the thick, oily substance with a knife, scratching them with the end of his brush and rubbing them with his f ingers. Ernst van de Wetering describes his crusty masses of paint as the outcome of a geological process in which one stroke of the brush can barely be distinguished from another.33 Rembrandt’s Saint Bartholomew shows the saint in a half-length pose, holding a knife in his right hand – a reference to the fact that he was skinned alive when martyred. Bartholomew appears pensive; holding his chin as if lost in thought while his eyes seems to gaze past the viewer into eternity. Rembrandt used a broader, freely brushed technique to render the figure; he specifically employed a palette knife on the saint’s forehead, nose, ears, and hands. The short, thick, impasto strokes sculpt the face, while a close inspection reveals the artist’s broken and unblended brushwork. Sculpted and broken – Bartholomew’s face is created through brushstrokes that simultaneously decompose it into segments of open flesh. Rembrandt decision not to depict the saint during martyrdom draws our attention to the way materiality works to dislocate time and place. Steven Goldsmith argued that by choosing to detach Bartholomew from the lurid scene of martyrdom, and relegating the knife into the corner of the canvas, Rembrandt succeeded in displacing its violence by splitting the painting’s temporality along two competing axes: one moving inwards and another running along its surface.34 According to Goldsmith, the first temporality moves inwards – replacing graphic violence with an internalized effect of anxious resignation – while the second involves a violence of the surface that is already underway, in fact, well advanced. Bartholomew’s wrinkled skin records the time of corporeal decay and fragmentation – it registers the vulnerability of flesh and skin thereby remaining true to Bartholomew’s fate without resorting to the gore of martyrdom. In a comparable approach, La Tour’s depiction of Jerome draws on the work of materiality to 33 Van de Wetering, Rembrandt, p. 157. 34 Goldsmith, Almost Gone, p. 420.

FLESH: ON GEORGES DE LA TOUR’S PENITENT SAINT JEROME

Image 15. Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, Saint Bartholomew, 1661, oil on canvas, 86.7 × 75.6 cm, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA. Image Credit: Open Content.

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produce a form of displaced violence that eschews the visibility of the wound in favour of the visuality of the brushstrokes; it highlights their potentiality to become something darker and more violent than the mere degradation of flesh by old age. For La Tour’s poignant use of the impasto has the power to the open flesh – to make it visually present – and thus fulfilling a radical act of dislocation and transference. *** Flagellation. Flagellation as penance was long thought to be an integral part of the ascetic life led by the Early Church Fathers, especially the fourth- and f ifth-century hermits in the Egyptian desert. Saint Jerome spent two years in the desert of Chalcis, to the southeast of Antioch, known at the time as the ‘Syrian Thebaid,’ and was thus quickly associated with this practice. Flagellation appears in one of his dreams as divine punishment. During an illness, Jerome dreamed that he was hauled in front of a heavenly court and accused of being a follower of Cicero, and not a true Christian; for this crime he was horribly whipped by angels. The presence of an open book may allude to Jerome’s Latin translation of the Bible or it may equally suggest his love for Roman philosopher. The self-flagellation is a response to a call of the true Word – that of Christ – that overcomes the artful seduction of Ciceronian rhetoric. A penance that aims to incorporate Christ, to imitate the Word turned flesh through the opening of his own flesh, incrusting the Word it into his body, and thus making it a part of his own flesh.35 This was the spiritual aim of all flagellant movements across Europe. Even though self-flagellation was practiced since the eleventh century in remote monastic settlements, it was not until the middle of the fourteenth century that the practice became a widespread phenomenon. In the summer of 1349, large groups of flagellants were reported to be wandering all over Europe before gathering in Tournai (the seat of an important bishopric in that period). The relative novelty of self-flagellation shocked the local abbot Gilles Li Muisis, who wrote in his chronicle that he has never seen such a practice before.36 Despite its quick propagation among the clergy and laity, the practice met with strong opposition within the Church and was finally condemned as heretical by Pope Clement VI in a bull dated 20 October 1349. The pope ordered Church leaders to suppress any such movement within their territories. Despite constant and renewed objections by the Church authorities, self-flagellation continued to 35 Judovitz, Georges de La Tour, pp. 19–21. 36 Vandermeersch, ‘Self-Flagellation,’ p. 254.

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be practiced sporadically throughout Europe, with the Inquisition and local princes taking up increased action against the various groups and individuals who embraced it.37 In accordance with papal doctrine, self-flagellation was extensively condemned in treatises and writings. In 1417, for instance, Jean Gerson – an influential Parisian theologian – denounced the practice as sectarian and heretical in his Contra Sectam Flagellatium. In sixteenth-century France, self-flagellation continued to be practiced as an isolated phenomenon of manly marginal religious orders and groups. One notable exception is none other than the king, Henry III. On his return from Poland in 1574, the king made a brief stop in Avignon, where he was impressed by the piety of the penitent brotherhoods. On 20 March 1583, Henry III founded the Brotherhood of the White Penitents of the Annunciation of Our Lady, an organization in which he was an active member.38 During the reign of Henry IV – a former protestant who was not fond of such extreme forms of devotion – self-flagellation was again discouraged and the practice was severely restricted in public religious life. This was due partly to religious concerns regarding the sacrality of the body, and partly because of the traditional association of the whip with emotional, sensual, and even erotic excitement. Niklaus Largier has shown how the stimulating qualities of medieval visual displays, especially flagellant practices, processions, and spectacles, were subjected to a form of criticism that ultimately sought to bring the imagination under the strict control of the Church.39 The early seventeenth century saw the revival of such practices by religious orders and congregations, especially the newly created orders, most notably, the Jesuits. 40 The most extraordinary acts of self-flagellation were reported among the zealous students of the English College in Rome. Known at the time as ‘the discipline,’ self-flagellation was explicitly linked with the veneration of images. 41 In 1582, Anthony Munday wrote in his English Romayne Lyfe: The Jesuits have, some of them, to whip them selves, whip with Cordes of wier, wherewith they will beaate them selves, tyl with too much effuse of blood, they be readie to give up the ghost. And this they doo in their Chambers, either before a Cricif ix, or the image of our Ladie, turning their backes when they bleede towards the Image, that it may see them. 42 37 See Chen, Flagellant Confraternities and Italian Art. 38 Cooper, A History of the Rod, pp. 110. 39 For the devotional and the erotic implications of flagellation and its history, see: Largier, In Praise of the Whip. 40 Vandermeersch, ‘Self-Flagellation.’ 41 Olson, Caravaggio’s Pitiful Relics, p. 83. 42 Munday quoted in Olson, Caravaggio’s Pitiful Relics, p. 83.

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Munday’s account describes a remarkable reversal of roles between artwork and viewer – the viewer becomes the seen and the image the observer. The act of self-f lagellation opens the body of the penitent towards the image in order to reveal the bleeding back while the image, in return, gazes back at him, transforming his wounded body into a subject of intense scrutiny. This curious performance entails a drastic, if not violent, loss of subjectivity on the part of the viewer. The image is transformed into a witness to martyrdom while the viewer becomes the image of a body violated and violent – an open image, fleshy, and torn apart. *** Returned Violence. What then, we may wonder, is the figure of Saint Jerome trying to conceal? Can it be an obsession with the open body or perhaps a constant work of dislocation creeping through the visible marks of the brush? Or can it be something directed at the beholder? The painting presents a violence that is displaced, not once, but twice over: the violence of the (invisible) wounds on Jerome’s back is displaced and made visually present through the open surfaces on his front – wrinkles, etc. – and there is the violence that affects the beholder; for the painting redirects the violence of the surface by means of an unexpected gaze that stares back at us from the corner of the canvas. Peeking from behind the covers of the open book: a human skull – a symbol of vanitas – almost hidden by the open covers of the book, tucked away in the lower-right corner of the canvas. Together with the book, it stands as a theatrical prop of symbols attributed to the saint, and yet, it faces us, with empty eyeholes; it looks back at us, dried up and desiccated of flesh. A macabre twist of the Albertian requirement to introduce a figure that looks outside the painted space of the canvas, directly straight at the viewers, drawing them into the narrative depicted. 43 But here, it is oddly placed, and the skull does less to draw us into the painting as it does to throw something at us, to directing an empty gaze – empty, yet not void – that whips us with its tenacity. This is an ironic detail in a painting where the problem of the flesh is central to Jerome’s penitence, since we become paradoxically engaged by a skull devoid of all traces of flesh. For all violence of the flesh will soon end – will irreversible decay – awaiting its ever-postponed resurrection.

43 On the rhetorical implication of Alberti’s figures looking outside of the painting towards the beholder, see: Van Eck, Classical Rhetoric, pp. 17–20.

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Works Cited Blunt, Anthony, ‘Georges de la Tour at the Orangerie,’ The Burlington Magazine, 114 (1972), pp. 516–525. Bohde, Daniela, ‘Skin and the Search for the Interior: The Representation of Flaying in the Art and Anatomy of the Cinquecento,’ in Bodily Extremities: Preoccupations with the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture, ed. Florike Egmond and Robert Zwijnenberg, Farnham, Ashgate, 2003, pp. 10–48. Brunius, Teddy, Michelangelo’s Non Finito, Stockholm, Victor Pettersons, 1967. Chen, Andrew, Flagellant Confraternities and Italian Art, 1260–1610, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2018. Conisbee, Philip, ‘An Introduction to the Life and Art of Georges de La Tour,’ in Georges de La Tour and His World, ed. Philip Conisbee, Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art, 1996, pp. 13 –148. Conisbee, Philip, ed., Georges de La Tour and His World, Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art, 1996. Cooper, William, A History of the Rod, London, Routledge, 2002. Cranston, Jodi, The Muddied Mirror: Materiality and Figuration in Titian’s Later Paintings, University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010. Cuzin, Jean-Pierre, ‘Celui qui croyait à Rome, celui qui n’y croyait pas,’ in Georges de La Tour: 1593–1652, ed. Dimitri Salmon and Andrés Úbeda de los Cobos, Museo nacional del Prado, 2016, pp. 63–69. Cuzin, Jean-Pierre, ‘La Tour Seen from the North: Observations on La Tour’s Style and the Cronilogy of His Works,’ in Georges de La Tour and His World, ed. Philip Conisbee, Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art, 1996, pp. 183–199. Feigenbaum, Gail, ‘Perfectly True, Perfectly False: Cardsharps and Fortune Tellers by Caravaggio and La Tour,’ in Caravaggio: Reflections and Refractions, ed. Lorenzo Pericolo and David M. Stone, Farnham, Ashgate, 2014, pp. 253–271. Fend, Mechthild, ‘Bodily and Pictorial Surfaces: Skin in French Art and Medicine, 1790–1860,’ Art History, vol. 28, no. 3 (2005), pp. 311–312. Ferino-Pagden, Sylvia, ed., Late Titian and the Sensuality of Painting, Venice, Marsilio, 2008. Fohr, Robert, Georges de La Tour, Le maitre des nuits, Paris, Cohen & Cohen, 2018. Gilbert, Creighton E., ‘What Is Expressed in Michelangelo’s “Non-Finito,”’ Artibus et Historiae, vol. 24, no. 48 (2003), pp. 57–64. Goldsmith, Steven, ‘Almost Gone: Rembrandt and the Ends of Materialism,’ New Literary History, vol. 45, no. 3 (2014), pp. 411–443. Hibbard, Howard, Caravaggio, Boulder, CO, Westview Press, 1985. Ilchman, Frederick, ed., Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice, Boston, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 2009.

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Judovitz, Daria, Georges de La Tour and the Enigma of the Visible, New York, Fordham University Press, 2018. Kazerouni, Guillaume, ‘Georges de La Tour,’ in Georges de La Tour: 1593–1652, ed. Dimitri Salmon and Andrés Úbeda de los Cobos, Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2016, pp. 15–28. Kazerouni, Guillaume, and Adeline Collange, Georges de La Tour: Trois nuits pour une renaissance, Rennes, Musée des Beaux-arts de Rennes, 2014. Largier, Niklaus, In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal, New York, Zone Books, 2007. Miskimin, Patricia Behre, ‘Lorrain in the Time of Georges de La Tour,’ in Georges de La Tour and His World, ed. Philip Conisbee, Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art, 1996, pp. 219–231. Nichols, Tom, Titian and the End of the Venetian Renaissance, London, Reaktion Books, 2013. Olson, Todd, Caravaggio’s Pitiful Relics: Painting History after Iconoclasm, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 2014. Pericolo, Lorenzo, Caravaggio and Pictorial Narrative: Dislocating the Istoria in Early Modern Painting, London, Harvey Miller, 2011. Puttfarken, Thomas, Titian and Tragic Painting: Aristotle’s Poetics and the Rise of the Modern Artist, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 2005. Rosand, David, The Meaning of the Mark: Leonardo and Titian, Lawrence, Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, 1988. Roskill, Mark W., Dolce’s Aretino and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2000. Salmon, Dimitri, ‘Georges de La Tour, “Despite Many Twists and Turns,” “After Considerable Trial and Error,”’ in Georges de La Tour: 1593–1652, ed. Dimitri Salmon and Andrés Úbeda def los Cobos, Madrid, Museo nacional del Prado, 2016, pp. 29–61. Salmon, Dimitri, and Andrés Úbeda de los Cobos, eds., Georges de La Tour: 1593–1652, Museo nacional del Prado, 2016. Sanpaolesi, Pietro, ‘Il “Non finito” di Michelangelo in scultura e architettura,’ in Atti del Convegno di Studi Michelangioleschi, 1966, pp. 228–240. Slatkes, Leonard, ‘Georges de La Tour and the Netherlandish Followers of Caravaggio,’ in Georges de La Tour and His World, ed. Philip Conisbee, Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art, 1996, pp. 201–217. Sohm, Philip, Pittoresco: Marco Boschini, His Critics, and Their Critiques of Painterly Brushwork in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Italy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991. Stoichita, Victor I., The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2008. Thuillier, Jacques, Georges de La Tour, Paris, Flammarion, 2012.

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Van de Wetering, Ernst, Rembrandt: The Painter at Work, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2009. Vandermeersch, Patrick, ‘Self-Flagellation in the Early Modern Era,’ in The Sense of Suffering: Constructions of Physical Pain in Early Modern Culture, ed. Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen and Karl Enenkel, Leiden, Brill, 2009, pp. 253–265. Van Eck, Caroline, Classical Rhetoric and the Visual Arts in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007. Voss, Hermann, ‘Georges du Mesnil de la Tour: A Forgotten French Master of the Seventeenth Century,’ Art in America, 17, (1928–1929), pp. 40–48.

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Image 16. Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Slaying Holofernes, 1614–1629, oil on canvas, 146.5 × 108 cm, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Image Credit: Gabinetto Fotografico delle Gallerie degli Uffizi.

5.

Blood: On Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes Abstract Chapter Five addresses the excess of blood and the creation of violence in Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes. By drawing a distinction in the depiction of blood – the blood that flows from the neck and the drops on the surface – this chapter argues that Gentileschi staged the painting into a surface of violence. By engaging extensively with primary sources, the chapter analyses the paradoxical coupling of horror and delight, relating it with the notion of abjection and its potential to transform the painting into a liminal surface of violence. The chapter argues that Judith’s handling of the sword slices away not only the head of Holofernes, but also performs an act of transformation, where the pictorial surface, through the materiality of the blood, becomes a liminal space of abjection and violence. Keywords: Artemisia Gentileschi, blood, surfaces, horror, delight, cut

I see thee still; And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood, Which was not so before. There’s no such thing: It is the bloody business, which informs Thus to mine eyes. – William Shakespeare

Blood stands out – a life-giving substance overflowing and overwhelming. Blood compels; it holds our gaze in repulsive fascination. We are astonished by its abundance; it spouts violently from the neck in mid-air, poring over the white sheets; lingering in crisp creases and fabrics. We are repulsed yet we cannot look away. Blood wields its power to produce an abject coupling of horror and delight. In Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes (1614–1629) (Image 16), blood stages the painting as a liminal space of abjection. Its presence demands distinction – there is the blood that streams from the general’s neck in jets of unbounded energy and the drops that drip and hover

Cornea, B., The Matter of Violence in Baroque Painting. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463727808_ch05

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over the surface of the canvas, as if the artist delivered a violent splash, a sudden stroke of the fully loaded brush, and spread its content on the surface of the canvas. These small drops are different in substance and form from the violent gushes that stream from the severed head. They proclaim their presence as something that belongs to the surface of the painting, yet is set apart and made distinct from the rest of the unfolding drama. Each drop enacts difference within similitude. This drop is not as thick or pasty as that drop, or this drop does not have the same translucency and colour as the other drop. Drop by drop the blood creates a rhythm that discloses the dark intimacy of a physical presence. Through its materiality, the body of the painting forms an impenetrable surface – one that keeps viewers at a distance, but not out of danger. For horror is brewing on the surface of the oils, on the texture of the canvas, and on the cold blade of the sword. And in that most visceral of relations, where violence aggregates into materiality, we see how the surface of the canvas is made to bleed before our very eyes, slashed away by Judith’s sword and the artist’s terrible brush. *** Two Women. The woman as artist and the woman as heroine – it is between these two identities that the artist finds her place in the history of art. For art history did much to confront and conflate Artemisia, the woman and the artist, with Judith, the woman and the heroine of the biblical story. The woman as artist. When Artemisia Gentileschi was not yet eighteen she was raped by Agostino Tassi – a friend and collaborator of her father, Orazio Gentileschi. After the rape, she continued to have sexual relations with Tassi under the promise of marriage. It was only when Tassi – who had a long history of rape and violence – reneged on his promise that her father was compelled to initiate prosecution. A long trial followed, which was more legally concerned with Tassi’s failure to fulfil his promise of marriage than the physical act of rape (since marriage would have been the proper way to restore Gentileschi’s honour).1 And indeed, Gentileschi stood to lose more than her virginity at that point: she was in danger of losing her respectable social standing, without which, she would not have been able to receive commissions and gain patronage.2 During the legal proceedings, Gentileschi was subjected to humiliation and torture; she had to undergo a gynaecological examination and her testimony was verified by the use of thumbscrews. One can imagine that few things are less dangerous or more 1 For the documents relating to the trial, see: Cavazzini, ‘Documents’; for the trial in context see: Cohen, ‘The Trials of Artemisia Gentileschi.’ 2 Cohen, ‘What’s in a Name?’

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insulting to a painter than having your fingers slowly crushed into a vice. The same fingers that would later pick up the brush and create works of such violent beauty. Tassi was found guilty in the end and sentenced to two years in prison: a conclusion that not only saved Gentileschi from social ostracism but also ensured her future respectability. Soon after she married the painter Pierantonio Stiattesi, on 29 November 1612, in the Church of Santo Spirito in Sassia in Rome. Under the protection of the Grand Duchess of Tuscany, Gentileschi first moved to Florence, from where a successful career followed that would take her to Naples, Rome, and even London. The woman as heroine. From all the figures populating Gentileschi’s pictorial world, Judith stands out in the public’s imagination as representative of the artist’s independent and fiery personality.3 Judith is one of the worthy women of the Old Testament who plans to kill the Assyrian general Holofernes as he lays siege to her hometown, Bethulia. Judith, donned in her finest clothes and accompanied by her maidservant Abra, gains entry into the Assyrian camp one evening. During dinner the general becomes inebriated and falls into a drunken slumber. Seizing the moment Judith takes up Holofernes’s sword and cuts off his head. In the dead of night, both Judith and Abra escape the Assyrian camp with the Holofernes’s severed head hidden in their food basket. Judith’s actions weakened the Assyrians and thus saved Bethulia from destruction. This story captured the public’s imagination while providing art historians with the perfect premise of interpreting the painting as expressing Gentileschi’s metaphorical revenge on her rapist. And yet, as Griselda Pollock pointed out, the story is not strictly speaking a revenge theme, but a story of political courage and collaboration between two women committing a daring political act of murder in a war situation. 4 Mary Garrard suggests another modality of subverting Gentileschi’s daring act was to transform the artist by referring to her as ‘Artemisia’ and transforming her into an ideal of feminine beauty, where ‘to own an Artemisia’ became a question of possessing and containing the rising personality of this female artist.5 Gentileschi resisted the desire of her contemporaries to assign her with a stable feminine identity – one that was consistent with the established gender norms – and thus she proceeded in creating a very unique and distinctive persona to stage herself and her art. Identity. The Ufizzi Judith Slaying Holofernes has long been considered as an axis of interpretation for the artist’s work through a psychobiographical lens.6 This particular angle gave rise to a large body of feminist literature that identified the figure of Judith as the artist’s other self: her point of displacement into the 3 Gregori, ‘Artemisia Gentileschi e le eroine.’ 4 Pollock, Differencing the Canon, pp. 120–124. 5 Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi around 1622, p. 8. 6 Ciletti, ‘Gran Macchina è Bellezza,’ p. 80.

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painting as a figure meant to absolve and revenge the artist traumatic past. This conflation can be traced back to Anna Banti’s fictional account of Gentileschi’s life and work published in 1916. Banti sees this particular painting as the artist’s visual revenge on her rapist, Agostino Tassi – an interpretation that touches both artist and painting alike in its desire to account with biographical details for the creation of such a disturbing image of violence. Mary Garrard most famously interpreted the painting through a psychoanalytical key by associating its subject with the artist’s traumatic experience. Garrard suggested that the canvas functions as ‘a cathartic expression of the artist’s private, and perhaps repressed rage’ directed against Tassi.7 Soon the image of Gentileschi as the canonical woman artist was formed: firstly as a woman, secondly as an artist. This approach, however, entails a constant indexing of her oeuvre back to the moment of her rape with no other effect than to re-inscribe the painter to her adolescent years and lessens her to the status of a sex object. It ironically confines her to the level of a perpetual and disempowered victim while providing Tassi with a foundational role in her success. It is as if her diligent years of study, her astute networking among patrons, her clever negotiation of fees, her artistic explorations and pictorial solutions, were all set aside to act as peripheral details to an unfolding psychological trauma, rather than forming the basis and essence of her labour and achievements. And despite increasing attempts by scholars to shift the focus from such psychobiographical interpretation and situate Gentileschi’s oeuvre in a wider methodological and ideological framework, this correlative relationship between the artist’s life and work still dominates much of our perception of her art.8 This brings us to the question of how did Gentileschi negotiate her own persona to collaborators and patrons? Did she indeed stage herself as the autonomous, liberated woman artist? Did she express her gender identity and sexual history through her art? Or did she adopt a more distinct persona, one that would challenge the established gender norms of the period? An examination of her letters offers a glimpse into a more nuanced performance of gender identity. For instance, in a letter to Duke Francesco I d’Este written on 25 January 1635, Gentileschi refers to ‘mia casa humilisima’ (‘my humble house’).9 The term casa during the seventeenth century implied the headship of a family, which would have included her brother Francesco and, by extension, her father, Orazio. Moreover, in a letter to Don Antonio Ruffo dated 13 November 1649, Gentileschi writes: ‘[Y]ou will find the spirit of Caesar in this soul of a woman.’10 Rather 7 Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi, p. 311; see also: Cohen, ‘The Trials of Artemisia Gentileschi.’ 8 Bal, The Artemisia Files, pp. ix–xxv. 9 ‘Prima per esser la mia casa humilisima serva della serenis.ma sua.’ Letter to Duke Francesco I D’Este in Menzio, Artemisia Gentileschi Lettere, p. 117. 10 ‘e ritrovera uno animo di Cesare nella’anima duna donna.’ Letter of 13 November 1649 to Don Antonio Ruffo; see Mann in Christiansen and Mann, Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, p. 420.

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than actually attempting to stage her own gender as somehow equal or superior to that of her male family members, it may be safe to assume that both letters suggest Gentileschi adopted some of the masculine features associated with the role of the head of a casa in her attempt to stage her artistic persona. This approach reveals a more subtle balance between the high quality of her paintings and the non-conventionality of her status. Indeed, Virginia Cox pointed out that women writers in the early modern period adopted masculine poetic models in their writing in order to subvert feminine stereotypes.11 Thus, it is conceivable that Gentileschi appropriated some of the cultural norms related to masculinity in order to perform a distinct gender identity that would have promoted her artistic skill and subvert the impact of her persona as a woman painter.12 That being said, it is time to move away from such questions of biography and authorial intent in order to engage with the particular violence of Gentileschi’s painting – for, as Mieke Bal rightly pointed out, Judith Slaying Holofernes is a painting most often looked through, rather than at.13 And thus, let us look at the painting – at the excess of blood, its material presence, and its potential to dislocate narrative and create violence. *** Horror and Delight. Not long after it was completed, the painting became an object of intense curiosity. Visitors flocked to see it and writers discussed it enthusiastically. The seventeenth-century Florentine biographer Filippo Baldinucci (1624–1697) described Judith Slaying Holofernes as ‘beautiful’ and ‘certainly surpassing every other work by her in quality, and so well considered and expressed in such a lifelike way that merely looking at it arouses no small measure of terror.’14 Later in 1792, the Florentine patrician Averardo de’Medici wrote about Gentileschi’s painting in the following way: To these must be added other wonders that exist in our city of Florence: that is, the work that hangs in the Royal Gallery, where Judith is in the act of cutting the head from Holofernes’s neck, a work so well realized and expressed with such vivid colours that whoever sees it is filled with revulsion [ribrezzo].15 11 Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, pp. 58. 208. 12 Modesti, ‘“Il Pennello Virile.”’ 13 Bal, The Artemisia Files, p. xxii. 14 ‘opera al certo che ogna’altra di sua mano avanza in bonta, e tanto ben pensata, e si al vivo espressa, che solamente il mirarla cosi dipiuta mette non poco terrore.’ Baldinucci, Notizie, p. 254. 15 ‘ai quali si ne devono aggiungere due altri stupendi che esistono in questra nostra cita di Firenze: cioe quello che adorna la Real Galleria ov’ e Giuditta nello’ atto recidere dal busto la testa d’Oloferne, opera cosi bene immaginata, e con si vivi colori espressa, che mette ribrezzo in chi la mira.’ De’Medici, ‘Artemisia Gentileschi,’ p. 457.

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For both Baldinucci and de’Medici, the coupling of such extreme emotions as horror and delight constituted an extraordinary response, and yet, somehow, their juxtaposition comes as no particular surprise, since both authors seem to recognize the relationship as part of an established sensibility regarding paintings of violence. These accounts seemingly rehearse a rhetorical motif originating in latesixteenth-century art criticism that attempts to explain the proliferation of images of extreme violence through an ancient and thus authoritative aesthetic paradigm. In his Poetica, Aristotle observed that ‘all men find pleasure in imitations.… For there are some things that distress us when we see them in reality, but the most accurate representations of these same things we view with pleasure – as, for examples, the forms of the most despised of animals or corpses.’16 Aristotle therefore associated the notion of imitation with the idealization of nature and assumed pleasure as its natural outcome. Aristotle’s conceptualization appealed greatly to art historians in explaining the aesthetic of violence by connecting it to the Albertian notion of imitation. Scholars have shown how Aristotle’s ideas slowly permeated the artistic discourse on painting and poetry by the most ambitious of artists, while poets attempted simultaneously to arouse feelings of horror and delight in their readers with the aim of inspiring admiration for their skill and appreciation for their works of art.17 During the late sixteenth century the coupling of violence and delight became a commonplace in literature. Writers, including Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti in his Discorso intorno alle immagini sacre e profane (1582), Romano Alberti in the Trattato della nobiltà della pittura (1585), Gian Paolo Lomazzo in the Trattato dell’arte della pittura, scoltura et architettura (1585), and Gregorio Comanini in his Il Figino overo del fine della Pittura (1591), all agreed that the skilful depiction of a distressing subject naturally leads to feelings of pleasure and delight. In the case of religious subjects, the portrayal of horror was only condoned if it led to the enhancement of the viewer’s devotion towards the figure depicted and lastly to emphasize the greater glory of God. Comanini’s description of Gulio Romano’s frescos in the Palazzo del Te (1525–1535), on the other hand, is illustrative for a common appreciation of mythological scenes depicting extreme violence: I recall having seen in Mantua, in a room in the Palazzo del Te, the condemned giants painted by Gulio Romano, crushed and injured by masses of falling stones and rocks, in positions and forms so strange and horrible, that if someone else ever saw a similar spectacle in real life he would certainly be horrified and feel great displeasure at such a sight. Nonetheless, because it is imitation and painting, 16 Aristotle, Poetics, 1448b. 17 See, for instance, Hendrix, ‘The Repulsive Body.’

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there is no man who does not enjoy seeing this work and finds it most pleasant, as is confirmed by the great number of visitors who come to see it.18

Comanini drew a distinction between a scene from real life and one that is painted. A depiction, no matter how horrible and disgusting the subject, will always produce aesthetic pleasure in the beholder if executed properly. Again, the idealization of nature is key. Horror was acceptable only insofar as it was aesthetically pleasing and sanctioned by a higher purpose. This perspective on violence in the visual arts changed around the beginning of the seventeenth century when a different notion gained new ground. According to this new paradigm, images of violence should elicit powerful and contrasting emotions of horror and delight all at the same time. Horror and delight became emotions that should be experienced in concert, thus replacing the Aristotelian idea that horror must always lead to pleasure. The person who propagated this idea during his stay in Florence, Rome, and Naples was none other than the celebrated Neapolitan poet Giambattista Marino (1569–1625). In his poem on Guido Reni’s Massacre of the Innocents – written around 1620 and published after his death in 1632 – Marino highlighted the paradoxical effect produced by scenes of extreme violence on the passing beholder: What are you doing, Guido, what are you doing? The hand that paints angelic forms Now treats of bloody deeds? Do you not see that, While you revivify the bloody throng of infants You are giving them new death? O compassionate even in cruelty, Gentle artificer, well you know That a tragic event is also a precious object, And that often horror goes with delight.19 18 ‘Mi soviene d’aver veduto a Mantova in una camera del palazzo ducale del Tè, dipinti da Giulio Romano, i Giganti folminati in Flegra, pesti et infranti dalle ruine de’ sassi e de’ monti, in forme et in atti così strani et orribili, che s’altri fosse riguardatore d’un simile spettacolo che vero fosse, inorridirebbe sicuramente e gran noia sentirebbe di cotal vista. Nondimeno, perché quella è imitazione e pittura, non è uomo che non abbia caro di veder quest’opera, e che sommamente non se ne compiaccia, sì come ne può far fede la frequenza de’ forastieri che là concorrono.’ Comanini, Il Figino overo del fine della Pittura, p. 272. 19 ‘Che fai Guido, che fai? / La man, che forme angeliche dipinge, / tratta or opre sanguigne? / Non vedi tu, che mentre il sanguinoso / stuol di fanciulli ravvivando vai / nuova morte gli dai? / O nella crudeltà anche pietoso / fabbro gentil ben sai, / ch’ancor tragico caso è caro oggetto, / e che spesso l’orror va col diletto.’ Marino, La Galeria, p. 56.

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Marino accentuated the notion that horror can often go with delight at the same time, but only if the artist is skilled enough to keep both elements in the right balance: angelic forms and bloody deeds, life and death, cruelty and piety. If such a balance is achieved, these two contrasting emotions can create an astonishing effect of meraviglia. Meraviglia was Marino’s signature concept. In Dicere Sacre (1614) he wrote that ‘the poets ultimate goal is to astonish’ (‘e’ del poeta il fin la meraviglia’). And indeed this astonishment seems to emerge from the paradoxical juxtaposition of two radical opposites, since ‘horror often goes with delight.’20 Distancing himself from the model of imitation and its assumed effect of pleasure, another, more important, shift can be noticed in Marino’s writings. Horror and delight do not seem to originate from the skilful idealization of a subject of violence – as the late-sixteenth-century authors listed above believed it to be – but from a tension within the materiality of the painting. This can be observed in Marino’s poem on Ludovico Carracci’s Ariadne, where the poet subtly evoked how the historia of the painting physically interacts with the materiality of the paint. Sorrowful and sighing girl, And still tearless, You blame your Theseus, And cry without crying, Yet, I see your beautiful, sweet eyes Wet and laden with tears. Why then is your sad face not Soaked in beautiful tears? Oh, great and sound trick of the wise painter! No, do not cry, for colours will suffer Damage from your flooding tears.21

Marino justified Carracci’s restraint in showing Ariadne’s sadness by appealing to the materiality of the surface. The painter is portrayed as a cautious and wise artist since he avoided depicting Ariadne’s tears, not because he did not possess the virtuosity to do so, but because he could do it all too well. For under his brush, Ariadne’s tears would have turned into real floods of water, which in turn, would have washed away the pigments of paint and smear the sensuous surface of his canvas. 20 ‘spesso l’horror va col diletto.’ Marino, La Galleria, p. 69; see also Cropper, ‘The Petrifying Art,’ p. 207. On Marino and Aristotle’s Poetics, see: Hendrix, ‘The Repulsive Body.’ 21 ‘Del tuo Teseo ti lagni / Ma piangente non piagni. / Fanciulla addolorata e sospirosa. / Non pero lagrimosa / E pur vegg’io que’ begli occhi soave / Di perle umidi e gravi. / Perche dunque non bagni / De le lagrime belle il mesto viso? / Oh di saggio pittor ben sano avviso! / Non pianger, no, che’ da’ cadenti umori / Foran guasti I colori.’ Marino in Pericolo, Caravaggio and Pictorial Narrative, p. 453.

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Luigi Lanzi wrote about Gentileschi’s ‘picture depicting Judith killing Holofernes as a painting of strong impasto, and of such tone and convincingness that it inspires terror.’22 For Lanzi, it is the strong impasto and the tone of colouring that inspires terror – namely, the materiality of the surface has the potential to produce strong feelings associated with extreme forms of violence. And Lanzi was not alone in his assertion. In 1741 Alessandro Da Morrona also wrote about that the horror and admiration viewers experience while casting their eyes on Gentileschi’s canvas: The blood that spouts and gushes from his neck while the unsheathed blade cuts it, and the dazzling bed linens reddened with drops of blood, simultaneously awaken in the soul of the attentive viewer a profound horror and admiration for the learned brush.23

Da Morrona lingered with concealed pleasure over the viscosity and dazzling colouring of blood set against the crispness of the white sheets. Its substance and colour – in its manyfold varieties of reds – producing the strongest effect of repulsion and a somewhat concealed pleasure. *** To See Red: not just a figurative expression but a material presence. In Gentileschi’s painting, the drops are set apart: blood red, crimson red, deep red, scarlet red – all shimmering in various consistencies on the surface of the canvas. Some are thicker and pastier while others are translucent and superficial. Some writhe with unbounded energy while others sit quietly at the point of diminishment. Each drop appears as a distinct and unique spot: a single brilliant shard of colour – in all variations of monochrome red; a solitary streak, either faded as a ghost or opaque as dark matter; singular presences shining with obstinate clarity on the surface of the canvas. Separated from the rest of the painting’s narrative, these colours shudder and burst, each with a violence of its own, glowing alone, and suffering alone. They are the colours of abjection: blood-like reds that cut away the fictitious opening into the painting to reveal unknown agonies and horrors. Alone they offer the immediacy of accidentally encountered material. For the splashes of red paint create a strong awareness of the materiality of the pictorial surface, where the various nuances of red take on the peculiarity, vivacity, and preciousness of spilled 22 ‘quello rappresenta Guditta che uccide Oloferne, pittura di forte impasto, di un tuono e una evidenza che spira terrore.’ Lanzi, Storia Pittorica, p. 235. 23 ‘Il sangue che sgorga, e zampilla dal collo di lui che va troncando il nudo acciaro, il candido panno del letto che asperso ne rosseggia, destano nell’animo dell’ osservatore che intende raccapricciamento insieme ed estimazione del dotto penello.’ Da Morrona, Pisa illustrata nelle arti del disegno, p. 486.

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blood. As Marino writes: ‘colours are not only vivacious, but vital; not only precious, but priceless.’24 The tension produced by the preciousness of blood, its life-giving transformational power draws viewers near its viscous surface. And yet there is a movement backwards. For in the brisk passing of a moment, one can almost feel the violence of Judith’s blade that traverses the surface of the canvas – a quick virtual act of beheading that seems to slice away our access into the painting. *** Two Paintings, Both Alike in Dignity. One can rarely find in the history of art two images more compared and contrasted than Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes and Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes (Image 4). Scholarship usually interprets Gentileschi’s painting as being directly influenced by Caravaggio’s canvas; indeed, scholars have attempted to establish where Gentileschi might have come in contact with Caravaggio’s work by conducting a formal analysis of the two canvases in terms of composition, violence, and atmosphere.25 And yet these paintings reveal several striking differences that naturally raise the question of whether Gentileschi did indeed rely on Caravaggio’s model and, if she did rework his ideas, to what extent. Compositionally, the two canvases bear no immediate resemblance. Gentileschi’s painting shows the event on a vertical line structured by a triangle formed by the protagonists. Standing on the right is Judith wearing a sumptuous yellow dress, with one hand wielding the sword while the other holds Holofernes’s nearly severed head. Next to her, her servant Abra struggles to pin down the general. The focal point is built around Holofernes’s half-naked figure lying on a bed. His right hand has escaped Abra’s hold and desperately reaches for her neck. The determination of Judith’s act is matched only by the intensity and force of Holofernes’s struggle. This is the general’s last gesture. The expression on his face, and in particular his white empty eyes, suggest the final glimpses of life leaving his body. Caravaggio’s painting, on the other hand, is constructed on a horizontal line. The figures are set out in a shallow place, theatrically lit from one side, isolated against the inky black background. To the right Abra stands beside her mistress as Judith extends her arm to hold a blade against Holofernes’s neck; he is lying on his stomach, neck contorted under the pressure of Judith’s hand. The distance 24 ‘Colori non solo vivi ma vitali, non sol preziosi ma inestimabili.’ Marino, Dicerie sacre, p. 137. 25 It is beyond the scope of this study to resume the immense and varied scholarship on the comparison between Caravaggio and Gentileschi. However, for the most important accounts, see the following. On questions of direct influence, see: Schütze, Caravaggio, p. 268. On formal comparison in terms of ‘caravaggesque style,’ see: Garrard, ‘Identifying Artemisia,’ pp. 17–18; on the differences between Caravaggio’s painting and that of Gentileschi, see: Bissel, Artemisia Gentileschi, pp. 12–13; Salomon, ‘Judging Artemisia,’ pp. 51–54. See also Olson, Caravaggio’s Pitiful Relics, p. 196; and Mann, ‘Artemisia Gentileschi,’ p. 58.

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between Judith and Holofernes as well as the expression of her face – one that ranges between disgust and determination – make her figure appear uninvolved in the event of death. Although they depict the same climactic moment of the story, the two paintings contain striking differences. Caravaggio’s painting has an air of detachment. Judith is removed from the body of her victim – making it thus physically impossible to carry the realistic act of beheading – while the centre of the canvas remains occupied by a dark compact surface opening between her outstretched arms. Gentileschi’s canvas in contrast shows the strenuous struggle of the event where all characters are engaged in a brutal fight for life and death. Here Judith’s hand occupies the centre of the canvas, clutching the sword that slowly cuts deep into the general’s neck. The most poignant difference between the two paintings it would seem is their depiction of blood. Caravaggio painted the blood with strong and almost linear brushstrokes of consistent reds that flow like powerful, almost unstoppable, streaming jets. And while countless interpretations aim to show Caravaggio’s realism in depicting violence – this is a major focus in the modern secondary literature – it is apparent that the artist did not strive to make the flow of blood a credible imitation of reality. For blood in Caravaggio’s painting stands as a key element which points towards the materiality of the canvas, a point of self-referentiality that does not rely on imitation and the credible representation of reality. Rather than being descriptive, the depiction of blood is productive and generative, refusing to satisfy a simple assignation of identity in order to allow a new form of violence to emerge, one that belongs more to the pictorial surface, rather than the simple fulfilment of a narrative.26 And thus, it becomes paradoxical that blood stands as the ultimate pictorial device where the two painting differ from each another iconographically while conversing with one another’s materiality; that is, in the way the materiality of red is deployed as a source of violence. Caravaggio painted the violent spillage of blood with thick strokes of the brush that points towards their material presence as paint full of potentiality. Gentileschi resorted to the depiction of blood that states its twofold violence. There is the blood that plays a part in the fictive narrative: the blood that we can see from afar, the jets that spurt with unbounded energy from the severed head of the general. And there is the blood that sits quietly on the surface of the sheets, on the skin of Judith, and on her richly decorated garments (Image 17).27 The blood emerging directly from the neck is more intense in its colouring and keeps in accordance with the narrative development of the story. The blood on the garments and skin of Judith, on the other hand, is more translucent. It looks as if 26 Caravaggio’s depiction of blood as pointing to the materiality and self-referentiality of the canvas can also be observed in his Beheading of Saint John the Baptist discussed in Chapter Four. 27 For the frontality of the depiction of blood, see: Ciletti, ‘Gran macchina è bellezza,’ pp. 82–83.

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Image 17. Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Slaying Holofernes, 1614–1629, oil on canvas, 146.5 × 108 cm, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Image Credit: Gabinetto Fotografico delle Gallerie degli Uffizi. DETAIL.

the artist just picked up the brush and sprinkled some paint on the surface of the canvas. This suggests that there is a split in the act of violence – one performed within the fictive narrative of the painting and another on the painting, as if a cut was happening somehow in front of the canvas, or more emphatically, on its surface. ***

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Image 18. Bernardo Cavallino, The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew, 1634, Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, Naples. Image Credit: Direzione Regionale Musei della Campania.

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Image 19. Bernardo Cavallino, The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew, 1634, Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, Naples. Image Credit: Direzione Regionale Musei della Campania. DETAIL.

Surface of Blood. Gentileschi’s radical depiction of blood can be further contrasted with the painful patch of open flesh and blood in Bernardo Cavallino’s Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew (1634) (Image 18).28 Cavallino depicts the saint seated on a marble slab with his arms and legs tied for execution. On Saint Bartholomew’s right, the artist allegedly painted himself in contemporaneous fashion, pointing towards the scene in a self-referential device meant to involve the viewer in the narrative depicted. The two executioners are going about their work, one proceeding to flay Bartholomew’s left forearm, while the other one secures the ropes. A gathering of figures observes the scene with tense curiosity. The display of vibrant colours 28 Spinosa, Grazia e tenerezza in posa, pp. 290–293.

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draws viewers closer to the materiality of their surface – from the intensity of the blue sky to the blood-red patch of the wound. Cavallino’s depiction of the wound does not resemble an anatomically correct human interior, with muscles, fibres, and veins, but rather a patch of red paint pulled from the arm of the saint (Image 19). The surface of the wound becomes a distinct site of negotiation between the inside and the outside of the painting. While in Cavallino’s painting blood becomes a distinct surface, it does not stand outside on its surface as something distinct from the unfolding drama – it fulfils a double function of always affecting violence and at the same time collapsing its system of representation. In Gentileschi’s canvas, on the other hand, the distinction between the two types of blood – the blood inside and on the surface – draws attention to the absence of any passage or crossing between the inside and the outside of the canvas. The surface of the canvas becomes a threshold where violence is affected into a corporeal presence whose blood is shed before the beholder’s very eyes. *** A Surface Cut. Positioned parallel to the surface of the painting, Judith’s incandescent blade performs a double movement: it cuts away the head of Holofernes while at the same time slashing away the surface of the painting. This cut transforms the pictorial surface of the canvas into a threshold – a liminal place of violence located neither inside nor outside of the painting. To access the threshold is to come into close intimacy with the materiality of the canvas and the freshly spilled blood. These drops pose the ground of their existence – they disclose the potential of matter to become a body violated and violent. As Jean Luc Nancy writes: ‘We are there without leaving the threshold, on the threshold, neither inside nor outside – and perhaps we are, ourselves, the threshold just as our eye conforms to the plane of the canvas and weaves itself into its fabric.’29 By displaying a dark materiality, the surface of the painting poses the ground for violence to unfold – through the textures of the canvas threads, the consistency of paint, and the stroke of the brush. What is visible is the matter of the painting – the canvas, the paint, the pigment and the texture. By locating viewers on its threshold, Gentileschi’s painting evokes a position that is analogous to human existence. For Nancy, if there is not death itself, neither is there a before or a beyond: we are never in death, and we are always there. Between the two planes, there is no mediation or communication just like there is no passage between the inside and the outside of a painting. From the one point of view, there is the unapproachable, unknowable side of death that awaits the submissive coming of the living. From the other, there is the side of life, where the 29 Nancy, The Ground of the Image, p. 57.

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viewer encounters death and faces up to their own mortality through the death of others. And thus Gentileschi’s painting does not confront us with death as a general abstraction but with a cut body, whole and firm, present and woven into our lives. *** Revulsion. Marco Lastri described in his L’etruria pittrice (1791) the circumstances in which Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes was moved from the royal apartments to a corner of Vasarian corridor, where it would remain until well into the twentieth century. Lastri observed that: To such an extent was the horror inspired by the truncated neck of Holofernes spurting blood onto the white bed linens, and the proud posture of the heroine, that it was necessary to condemn this painting to the darkness of a corner of the Royal Gallery so that it wouldn’t offend the sensibilities of our late sovereign, Maria Luisa, who many times expressed her revulsion.30

The grand duchess expressed her revulsion: the painting was moved – not an unusual string of events considering the history of the painting. Lastri’s writing echoes Averardo de’Medici’s previous description of Gentileschi’s painting, and thus it is still significant that he specifically retain the use of the word ribrezzo (revulsion). In Italian, ribrezzo does not only point to a strong feeling of repugnance, distaste, or dislike, but also to a sudden, almost violent, change of feeling in sentiment or taste. The gesture of removing the canvas from the royal palace had therefore less to do with the whims of an oversensitive royal lady and more with the peculiarity of its effects. This can be justified on a superficial level as dramatic shift in the aesthetic appreciation of violence, and indeed, of the entire baroque movement. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the baroque came under heavy attack by an elite group of intellectuals and artists who favoured a new aesthetic of good taste and pastoralism. These literati gathered in the garden of the Corsini Palace in Rome to form the Accademia degli Arcadi, a circle founded in 1690 and dedicated to reforming poetry, which they believed had been corrupted by the ornamentation of the baroque style, in favour of a pastoral literature inspired by the perceived idyllic life of shepherds and the country life.31 Taste changed dramatically: out went the swirling dramas of the baroque, in came the pleasures of pastoral life 30 ‘Tale e l’orrore che ispira il tronco collo di Oloferne sgorgante sangue sui i bianchi lini del letto, e l’atteggiamento fiero dell’Eroina, che bisogno condannare questro Quadro nell’oscurità di un angolo della detta R. Galleria, perche non offendesse la sensibilita della nostra passata sovrana, Maria Luisa, che ne avea più volte mostrato ribrezzo.’ Lastri, L’etruria pittrice, lxxxiv. 31 See Minor, The Death of the Baroque.

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longing in self-absorption for a long lost golden age. As a consequence, Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes disappeared from public discourse only to resurface as a masterpiece of baroque art in 1916, when Roberto Longhi published an essay on Gentileschi, father and daughter. The reaction of the grand duchess – her particular revulsion – points, however, towards a more complex response. The artistic taste in the reception of violence had indeed changed, but many other baroque paintings or artists that were deemed unfashionable at the time did not suffer the same fate. There was something about this painting in particular that prompted such a visceral reaction. The depiction of violence is extreme and graphic, that is certainly true, but it is also extreme and graphic in Caravaggio’s painting Judith Beheading Holofernes. And one can easily find other paintings from the same time that contain a similar, if not a higher, degree of graphic violence. Take, for instance, Johann Liss’s Judith in the Tent of Holofernes (1620), where the beheaded body of the general is turned towards the viewer in a composition that shows with striking detail the wound of the severed neck.32 We must therefore turn our attention somewhere else to account for the contemporaneous reactions stirred by the canvas – and, in particular, their peculiar engagement with the plentiful depiction of blood. *** Abject Violence. Contemporaneous descriptions, from Filippo Baldinucci to Averardo de’Medici and Marco Lastri, do not cease to emphasize the quality and effect of blood as a source of horror and disgust, albeit mingled with a certain degree of admiration and pleasure. These accounts can best be explained by appealing to Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject as described in her book Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection.33 Abjection relates to the process of the separation and differentiation of identities through a breakdown in the distinction between self and other – it is what the subject-in-becoming must get rid of in order to become an I.34 According to Kristeva, the protection of the boundaries of the body is the main function of abjection. The anxieties triggered by the abject are first of all anxieties resulting from the end products and by-products of the body, such as body fluids, blood, urine and faecal matter. These draw attention to the ambiguity of boundaries by creating feelings of fear and horror, of expulsion and removal – yet involving a morbid excitement of not being able to stop looking at things that disgust and repulse. 32 The image can be viewed online at: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/johann-liss-judithin-the-tent-of-holofernes. 33 Kristeva, Powers of Horror. 34 Foster, ‘Obscene, Abject, Traumatic,’ p. 114.

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Abjection can be interpreted as instrumental in understanding the process of the identity formation that takes place at the intersection between artefacts and bodies. The materiality of paint hinges on its viscous quality, and blood, as a flowing substance, made viscously present through the materiality of oils, is staged as neither completely fluid nor solid. This dissolving, ambiguous entity can be related not only to Kristeva’s notion of the abject but also to Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of the viscous – as pointed out by Rosalind Krauss in her essay on formlessness.35 Both Kristeva’s abjection and Sartre’s viscous are defined by their treatment of the clean and proper body. Red paint, running down the canvas, or hanging above its surface, at times carefully defined, at others thrown in careless splatters, becomes expelled blood, tracing its indexicality on the heroine’s breast, her silky garments, her gold bracelet, with its delicate cameo insertions, and, most dreadfully, on the crisp white sheets that hang in crested folds as a shroud hereafter. The viewer is drawn towards the erotic sensuality of Judith’s movement yet repelled by the horror of the gaping wound and the gushing blood. ‘Sacrificial terror and seduction co-habitate,’ as Kristeva writes in her consideration of images of decollation, ‘the latter permitting desecration by insinuating castration; a blasphemous perversity establishes itself there, the artist and the viewer taking turns playing the parts of the wound and the knife.’36 This process causes in the beholder fear and jouissance. The object of fear is a substitute formation for the subject’s abject relation to drive – the fear caused by the breakdown of any distinction between subject and object, of any distinction between ourselves and the world of dead material objects. Kristeva further associates the abject with jouissance: ‘One does not know it, one does not desire it, one joys in it. Violently and painfully. A passion.’37 This paradoxical statement offers a glimpse of understanding the contemporaneous reactions to Gentileschi’s painting, where art critics and various beholders are continually and repetitively drawn to its abject depiction of violence. Their accounts carried with them a certain pleasure that is quite different from the dynamics of desire. Kristeva associates this aesthetic experience of the abject with poetic catharsis: ‘an impure process that protects from the abject only by dint of being immersed in it.’38 *** Excess of Blood. Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes presents blood as a twofold substance – at once sacred and transformative, abject and dispelling; its viscose 35 Krauss, ‘“Informe” without Conclusion,’ p. 92. 36 Kristeva, ‘Decollations,’ p. 36. 37 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 9. 38 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 29.

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substance flowing as a fertile source of distinction and difference. Blood provides lineage – points to past and future while also drawing a distinction and separation between life and death.39 The drops of paint on the surface of the painting become corporeal secretion of the unfolding violence. The distinction between the two types of blood rests in their potentiality to signify or actually produce violence. The blood that flows from the general’s neck in spouting jets is figurative and therefore signifies the death of the figure. In the presence of signified blood, we react with detachment, understanding, and acceptance. We understand where it comes from and why it is there; the signified blood is spilled by Judith to ensure the salvation of her people – the nation chosen by God. This blood stands for righteousness and salvation; it performs a specific task within the figurative and visible economy of the narrative depicted. The blood that rests on the surface of the painting, on the other hand, has the ability to produce unforeseeable forms of abjection. For it confronts us with violence that is overexposed like a stripped nerve. While the jets of blood are keeping in line with the fictitious boundary of the unfolding drama, the drops of translucent blood resting on the surface throws doubt upon the existing order of the painting. This is the blood of revulsion, eliciting disgust and desire in the intensity of its presence. It generates a violence from which we permanently thrust aside in order to live. This blood is the material remains of a cut enacted within the body of the painting. The same cut that forces us to extricate ourselves from ourselves – to continuously create a process of difference where the narrative attached to our body is severed by the sword. For this cut transforms the brilliant materiality of its surface into a threshold of the world and of existence. The ‘I,’ through an endless process of dislocation, no longer belongs to the world of the living, but is threatened to become – just like the surface of the painting – a bloody threshold of death.

Works Cited Bal, Mieke, ‘Grounds of Comparison,’ in The Artemisia Files: Artemisia Gentileschi for Feminist and Other Thinking People, ed. Mieke Bal, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2005, pp. 129–167. Bal, Mieke, ed., The Artemisia Files: Artemisia Gentileschi for Feminists and Other Thinking People, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2005. Baldinucci, Filippo, Notizie de’ professori del disegno da Cimabaue in qua …, Florence, Guiseppe Manni, 1728.

39 See Zorach, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold.

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Bissell, Ward R., Artemisia Gentileschi and the Authority of Art: Critical Reading and Catalogue Raisonne. University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. Cavazzini, Patrizia, ‘Documents Relating to the Trial of Agostino Tassi,’ in Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, ed. Keith Christiansen and Judith W. Mann, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 2001, pp. 432–445. Christiansen, Keith, and Judith W. Mann, Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001. Ciletti, Elena, ‘Gran Macchina è Bellezza: Looking at the Gentileschi Judiths,’ in The Artemisia Files: Artemisia Gentileschi for Feminists and Other Thinking People, ed. Mieke Bal, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2005, pp. 63–105. Cohen, Elizabeth S., ‘The Trials of Artemisia Gentileschi: A Rape as History,’ The Sixteenth Century Journal, vol. 31, no. 1 (2000), pp. 47–75. Cohen, Elizabeth, ‘What’s in a Name? Artemisia Gentileschi and the Politics of Reputation,’ in Artemisia Gentileschi: Taking Stock, ed. Judith Mann, Turnhout, Brepols, pp. 121–128. Comanini, Gregorio, Il Figino overo del fine della Pittura, in Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento: fra manierismo e controriforma, ed. Paola Barrochi, Paola Barocchi, vol. III, Roma, Laterza, 1960–1962. Cox, Virginia, Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400–1650, Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Cropper, Elizabeth, ‘The Petrifying Art: Marino’s Poetry and Caravaggio,’ Metropolitan Museum Journal, 26 (1991), pp. 193–212. Da Morrona, Alessandro, Pisa illustrata nelle arti del disegno, vol. II, Livorno, 1821. De’Medici, Averardo, ‘Artemisia Gentileschi,’ in Memorie istoriche di più uomini illustri pisani, ed. Angelo Fabroni, vol. IV, Pisa, 1792, pp. 453–456. Foster, Hal, ‘Obscene, Abject, Traumatic,’ October, 78 (Autumn 1996), pp. 106–124. Garrard, Mary D., Artemisia Gentileschi around 1622: The Shaping and Reshaping of an Artistic Identity, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2001. Garrard, Mary D., ‘Artemisia Gentileschi’s Self-portrait as the Allegory of Painting,’ The Art Bulletin, vol. 62, no. 1 (1980), pp. 97–112. Garrard, Mary D., Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1989. Garrard, Mary D., ‘Identifying Artemisia: The Archive and the Eye,’ in Artemisia Gentileschi in a Changing Light, ed. Sheila Barker, Harvey Miller Publishers, 2018, pp. 11–40. Gregori, Mina, ‘Artemisia Gentileschi e le eroine,’ in Artemisia Gentileschi: Storia di una passion, ed. Roberto Contini and Francesco Solinas, Milan, 24 Ore Cultura, 2011, pp. 18–20. Hendrix, Harald, ‘The Repulsive Body: Images of Torture in 17th-Century Naples,’ in Bodily Extremities: Preoccupations with the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture, ed. Florike Egmond and Robert Zwijnenberg, Farnham, Ashgate, 2003, pp. 68–91. Krauss, Rosalind, ‘“Informe” without Conclusion,’ October, 78 (Autumn 1996), pp. 89–105.

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Kristeva, Julia, ‘Decollations,’ in Psychoanalysis, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Work of Julia Kristeva, ed. Kelly Oliver and S.K. Keltner, New York, State University of New York Press, 2009, pp. 29–46. Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, New York, Columbia University Press, 1984. Lanzi, Luigi Antonio, Storia pittorica della Italia, 2 vols., Remondini, Bassano del Grappa, 1795–1796. Lastri, Marco, L’Etruria pittrice; ovvero, Storia della pittura toscana, dedotta dai suoi monumenti che si esibiscono in stampa dal secolo X. fino al presente, Florence, 1791–1795. Mann, Judith, ‘Artemisia Gentileschi nella Roma di Orazio e dei caravaggeschi: 1608–1612,’ in Artemisia Gentileschi: Storia di una passion, ed. Roberto Contini and Francesco Solinas, Milan, 24 Ore Cultura, 2011, pp. 51–60. Marino, Giovan Battista, ‘Dicerie sacre,’ in Edizioni di storia e letteratura, ed. Erminia Ardissino, Rome, 2014. Marino, Giovan Battista, La Galeria, I, 1620. Menzio, Eva, ed., Artemisia Gentileschi lettere, precedute da atti di un processo per stupor, Abscondita, 2004. Minor, Vernon Hyde, The Death of the Baroque and the Rhetoric of Good Taste, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006. Modesti, Adelina, ‘“Il Pennello Virile”: Elisabetta Sirani and Artemisia Gentileschi as Masculanized Painters?’ in Artemisia Gentileschi in a Changing Light, ed. Sheila Barker, Turnhout, Brepols, pp. 131–142. Nancy, Jean-Luc, The Ground of the Image, New York, Fordham University Press, 2005. Olson, Todd, Caravaggio’s Pitiful Relics: Painting History after Iconoclasm, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 2014. Pericolo, Lorenzo, Caravaggio and Pictorial Narrative: Dislocating the Istoria in Early Modern Painting, London, Harvey Miller, 2011. Pollock, Griselda, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories, London, Routledge, 1999. Salomon, Nanette, ‘The Art Historical Canon: Sins of Omission,’ in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, ed. Donald Preziosi, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 344–355. Salomon, Nanette, ‘Judging Artemisia: A Baroque Woman in Modern Art History,’ in The Artemisia Files: Artemisia Gentileschi for Feminists and Other Thinking People, ed. Mieke Bal, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2005, pp. 33–61. Schütze, Sebastian, Caravaggio: The Complete Works, Köln, Taschen, 2009. Spinosa, Nicola, Grazia e tenerezza in posa: Bernardo Cavallino e il suo tempo 1616–1656, Rome, Ugo Bozzi, 2013. Zorach, Rebecca, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2006.

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Image 20. Francisco de Zurbarán, The Martyrdom of Saint Serapion, 1628, oil on canvas, 120.2 × 104 cm, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford. Image Credit: Allen Phillips\Wadsworth Atheneum.

6. Death: On Francisco de Zurbarán’s The Martyrdom of Saint Serapion Abstract Chapter Six explores the relationship between corporeal fragmentation and darkness in Francisco de Zurbarán’s The Martyrdom of Saint Serapion. The chapter argues that the painting’s modulation of white and dark produces a form of violence that is simultaneously concealed and revealed in the dazzling succession of deep folds. This implies an interpretation where the white garment, instead of hiding away the martyred body, become a visual vehicle for its violence; namely, its deep and heavy folds establish an analogous relationship with the fragmentation of the saint’s body. The folding of the body is replicated in the folding of light and dark on the surface of the painting – a material and temporal process that has the potential to transform the pictorial surface into a tomb. Keywords: Zurbarán, corporeality, fragmentation, folds, tomb, death

St. Serapion, I wrap myself in the robes of your whiteness which is like midnight in Dostoevsky. – Frank O’Hara

Observe: there is no blood, no wound, no instrument of torture or execution, nothing to betray the presence of any sign of physical violence. The friar’s white habit is spotlessly clean. The man looks calm, almost asleep. Surely, there is no violence to be seen in this painting for there is none shown outwardly. And yet, we see the head sunken, the body hanging low. His hands are tied with ropes to some kind of wooden frame barely discernable in the background. Perhaps he has been knocked out, has fainted, or is exhausted – or is he dead? One cannot really say. The thick bonds hold his limp body frontally to the painting’s frontal view; he is presented to us, exposed, displayed, strung up, and put on show. We are confronted with a figure stretched out on the canvas’s stretcher, extracted from the dark ground,

Cornea, B., The Matter of Violence in Baroque Painting. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463727808_ch06

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wrapped in a succession of white folds, deep and heavy, broken and fragmented, like the saint’s martyred body. From within the folds a paradox arises: How is it possible to convey the violence of martyrdom without showing any signs of bloodshed and suffering, to render a torn body without depicting ripped flesh and skin, or to make death an absent presence? Francisco de Zurbarán’s The Martyrdom of Saint Serapion (1628) (Image 20) accomplishes just that. It renders the fragmented body of the saint – tied to a cross, broken, disembowelled, and beheaded – by paradoxically draping it in a succession of white heavy folds that twist and turn on the surface of the canvas. They dazzling brilliance without any graphic sign of cruelty or martyrdom, for they extricate the body from the peculiarity of time and place to (dis)place it in the obscurity of the painting as tomb. Behind everything, beneath everything brilliant and particular, there is this: the dark earth to which we all must return. And perhaps that is the challenge: to consider the ground of the painting as the ground of the tomb. And in that ground, between us and the body of Saint Serapion, a relationship unravels: the white folds of the habit produce the violence of the saint’s body. For Zurbarán offers a body not made of flesh, blood, and skin, but one of white folds – the body as fold and the fold of the habit as tomb, or perhaps, the painting as tomb. The painting exposes us to death, to that which must always remain absolutely inaccessible – the impenetrable materiality of the surface, of white folds and dark ground, as the threshold of our own existence. *** Zurbarán, Painter of White Folds. Francisco de Zurbarán made his entry into the history of art as a painter of folds – those superbly white garments belonging to the Mercedarian friars.1 Zurbarán first painted them in a series of 22 canvases depicting the life of Saint Peter Nolasco, the founder of the Order of the Merced Calzada de la Asunción. Commissioned by the Mercedarian friars of Seville in 1628, the paintings were destined to decorate the halls of their cloister – the original place where the order was founded almost 400 years before. Although painted for the same convent, The Martyrdom of Saint Serapion does not appear to be mentioned in the initial contract. This led art historians to believe the canvas was executed as a trial piece for the friars to ascertain the skills and talent of the young artist.2 The series proved to be a great success and helped established Zurbarán’s reputation as an accomplished and excellent painter. A 1 2

On Zurbarán’s monastic series, see: Fernández López, ‘Zurbarán’s Monastic Series and Alterpieces.’ For a recent interpretation, see: Delenda, Francisco de Zurbarán, p. 64.

Death: On Fr ancisco de Zurbar án’s The Mart yrdom of Saint Ser apion 

year later, in 1629, the artist was off icially invited by the city’s council to take up residence in Seville. Seville was one of the most important trading ports of the Spanish empire and benefited from the great wealth and diversity of the new colonial markets. After his arrival, Zurbarán was quick to set up a successful studio that received lucrative commissions from all over Spain; his images were even disseminated all over South America.3 Prosperous Seville became the artist’s home for almost three decades. It was the place of his greatest triumphs and personal losses. And it was not until 1658 that the artist found himself in the strenuous position of having to move again, only this time, to Madrid. The decline in commerce and a change in popular taste forced the artist to search for new patrons as well as renew old acquaintances, especially with his fellow Sevillian, Diego Velázquez. Despite the fame his works enjoyed during his youth and maturity, in later years Zurbarán’s art fell out of favour and his reputation slowly faded to the point that, after his death, the artist’s name does not appear in any book on Spanish art until the beginning of the eighteenth century. 4 The first books that show interest in his art appear quite late; they are: Antonio Palomino’s El Museo pictórico y escala óptica (1715–1724), Antonio Ponz’s Viaje de España (1776), and Juan Agustín Ceán Bermúdez’s Diccionario historico de los mas ilustres profesores de las bellas artes en España (1800). Antonio Palomino (1653–1726) was the first to single out the artist’s skill in depicting the monumentality of clothes and drapery. Palomino writes: He [Zurbarán] acquired the reputation of being an excellent painter [in Seville] with the many works he did there and particularly those by his hand which can be found in the second cloister of the Calced Mercy, of Saint Peter Nolasco, which is a famous work and truly excellent. The habits of the monks draw great admiration, because although they are all white, they are different from each other, depending on their degree of development; with such an admirable perfection in the strokes, the colour and the way they belie nature itself. This artist worked so studiously that he painted all the fabrics on a mannequin and the flesh from a live model.5

Palomino’s observations would set the tone for interpreting Zurbarán’s artistic legacy for generations to come: the rendering of large and intricate garments, the imitation of nature and reality, and the comparison with three-dimensional objects. By placing figures against a dark background or within an indeterminate 3 See Pérez Sánchez, ‘The Artistic Milieu’; on the dissemination of Zurbarán works in South America, see: Navarrete Prieto, ‘Concerning Wit.’ 4 See recent studies on Zurbarán’s critical fortune until the twentieth century: Ros de Barbero, ‘Zurbarán’s Critical Fortunes’; also Brown, ‘Francisco de Zurbarán.’ 5 Palomino, El Museo pictórico y escala óptica, vol. 3, pp. 274–275.

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place – one that looks more like a theatrical stage, rather than a credible construction of space – Zurbarán achieved a powerful effect of rilievo, which was inherently conceived as challenging the flatness of the medium. The rilievo effect is closely connected with Zurbarán’s striking use of light and dark – a technique that prompted earlier writers to compare his art with that of Caravaggio. Indeed, for the better part of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Zurbarán was known as the ‘Spanish Caravaggio’ and his paintings were seen to emulate the style of the Lombard master. This correlation goes back to his first biographer, Palomino, who wrote ‘that anyone who looked upon Zurbarán’s painting, not knowing whose they are, would not hesitate to attribute them to Caravaggio.’6 The comparison soon became a trope in literature; for instance, it appears in Ceán’s Diccionario, published in 1800, where Zurbarán is described to have ‘imitated’ Caravaggio. And while recent literature is more reserved in trying to establish a direct relationship between Zurbarán’s art with that of Caravaggio, most art historians agree to some form of influence: for if Zurbarán had limited access to Caravaggio’s paintings in Spain, it has been repeatedly suggested that he drew his inspiration from ‘Caravaggesque painters’ such as Juan Bautista Maíno or Jusepe de Ribera.7 Zurbarán’s dramatic rendering of folds and drapery, together with the striking use of light and dark, is usually credited with impressing upon the viewer the three-dimensional effect of sculpture. At the core of this interpretation stands one of Zurbarán’s earliest canvases: a Christ on the Cross painted in 1627 (Image 21) for the small oratory attached to the sacristy of the Convento de San Pablo el Real in Seville. Set against a dark background, the painting shows a life-size Christ nailed to the cross, his body illuminated from the right – the same place where the oratory was lighted. In a much-quoted description of the painting, Palomino wrote: ‘There is a Crucifixion by his hand, which is shown behind a grille of the chapel (which has little light), and everyone who sees it and does not know [it is a painting] believes it to be [a work] of sculpture.’8 In 1780, Antonio Ponz, added the following observation: ‘In a chapel of the sacristy there is a crucifix by Francisco de Zurbarán, a painting of stupendous relief.’9 It is of no surprise that Christ on the Cross became a poster image for art historians to argue that Zurbarán was aware of at least some of the theoretical literature on 6 ‘que quien viere sus obras, no sabiendo cuyas son, no dudará en atribuírselas a Caravaggio.’ Palomino, El Museo pictórico, y escala óptica, vol. 3, p. 275. 7 Finaldi, ‘Zurbarán.’ 8 ‘hay un Crucifijo de su mano, que lo muestran cerrada la reja de la capilla (que tiene poca luz) y todos los que lo ven, y no lo saben, creen ser de escultura.’ Palomino, El Museo pictórico, y escala óptica, vol. 3, p. 275. 9 Ponz, Viaje de España, p. 785.

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Image 21. Francisco de Zurbarán, Christ on the Cross, 1627, oil on canvas, 290.3 × 165.5 cm, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. Image Credit: Robert A. Waller Memorial Fund.

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the parangón, and he was deeply familiar with the relation between painting and sculpture from his training as an artist. It is true that Zurbarán’s apprenticeship in Seville, like all of the other artists of his generation, included the painting of sculptures, the so-called pintor de ymaginería, a ‘painter of [religious] imagery.’ There are also two documented cases when the young Zurbarán worked on commissions that included the painting of sculptures: the retablo for the Church of Nuestra Señora de la Granada de Fuente de Cantos painted in 1622 and the carving and painting of a wooden Crucifixion for the Mercedarian convent in Azuaga (near his native Llerena) in 1624.10 The dramatic staging the painting in a dark oratory, coupled with Zurbarán’s experience of working with polychrome sculpture, spurred art historians to argue that Christ on the Cross embodies the artist’s attempt to demonstrate the superiority of painting over sculpture – to show how painting can surpass the power of sculpture to evoke ‘reality’ and physical presence.11 In a similar vein, The Martyrdom of Saint Serapion was described by art historians as realistic, illusionistic, and, in a catalogue, even ‘hyperealistic,’ comparing its effects with those of polychrome sculpture.12 Xavier Bray described Zurbarán as ‘the most sculptural of painters,’ and his Martyrdom of Saint Serapion as a striking example of the Spanish parangón, which ‘produced sculpture that was exceptionally painterly, and paintings that were remarkably sculptural.’13 The theme of the parangón is further explored by Steven Ostrow, who interprets Zurbarán’s art as an invitation to ‘ponder what is real and what is illusion,’ suggesting that the introduction of small pieces of paper that bear the artist’s signature constitute his ‘conscious engagements with art theoretical ideas.’14 The piece of paper pinned next to the figure of Saint Serapion – a white cartellino bearing the inscription B[eato] Serapius and the signature of the artist – is taken as Zurbarán’s ultimate commentary on the parangón.15 Most of the literature on Zurbarán’s The Martyrdom of Saint Serapion, therefore, shares the same determination of interpreting the painting as challenging the confines of the medium – the potential of the folds to reveal the artist’s mastery in rendering the illusion of three-dimensionality on a flat canvas. They also share an 10 Ostrow, ‘Zurbarán’s Cartellini,’ pp. 79–80. 11 Bray argues that Zurbarán painted the canvas with visual aid from sculpture. See: Bray, The Sacred Made Real, p. 32, while Jeannine Baticle argued that it is Zurbarán painting that inspire polychrome sculpture and not the other way around. Baticle, Zurbarán, p. 79. 12 For instance, in the catalogue entry of the Zurbarán exhibition held in New York City in 1988, the painting is described as being represented realistically, with an almost illusionistic manner. See: Baticle, Zurbarán, pp. 102–104. 13 Bray, The Sacred Made Real, p. 191. 14 Ostrow, ‘Zurbarán’s Cartellini,’ p. 69. 15 Ostrow, ‘Zurbarán’s Cartellini,’ p. 69.

Death: On Fr ancisco de Zurbar án’s The Mart yrdom of Saint Ser apion 

understanding of art as representation – of imitation of an idealized reality; be it the imitation of people or of polychrome sculptures. With regards to the question of violence, art historians have usually remarked upon its absence, thus assuming an equation of violence with visible acts or signs of physical aggression.16 Odile Delenda, for instance, observed that Zurbarán’s Saint Serapion is shown without the wounds of his martyrdom because ‘the painter never liked to make specific reference of the horrific aspects of violent death.’17 Thus, it became quite common in the literature of the painting to interpret the white folds as a visual sublimation of violence, one that conceals the fragmentation of the saint’s body, rather than revealing its gruesome martyrdom. In order to engage with the peculiar violence produced by this painting, a different proposition is needed. Let us consider Zurbarán’s The Martyrdom of Saint Serapion as an image that negotiates its violent presence through a process that is simultaneously concealed and revealed in the succession of deep folds that make up the saint’s body. This implies an interpretation where the white folds, instead of hiding away the violence inflicted on the body, can be considered a visual vehicle for its violence; namely, the deep and heavy folds of the robe establish an analogous relationship with the fragmentation of the saint’s body. Thus, a different conception of corporeality emerges: one not grounded in the realistic representation of a figure, nor in the faithful imitation of flesh and skin, but in a material process of movement and fragmentation produced by the folding surfaces of the white habit. For it was a long-held assumption in the seventeenth century that the habit of a friar becomes part of his body – the habit is closely tied not only to his identity but also his physical being – and thus his robes an integral part of its martyrdom. *** Inflection. Begin here, and then find the contour, the edge, the shadows, and the light, shinning brightly against the deep folds of Saint Serapion’s habit. ‘Although they are all white, they are different from each other,’ wrote Palomino, praising the delicacy of the strokes of the brush and their varied degree of development. Each surface perishes in the other, losing itself in the other: light grey yields to white, which in turn yields to light grey, each one the beginning of the other, the end of the other, the giver of the other. A work of continuous deferral where surfaces of white and light grey constitute a curvilinear movement defined by the fabric of 16 Recent interpretations that point to its lack of violence: Finaldi, ‘Zurbarán,’ p. 49-59; Bray, The Sacred Made Real, p. 192. 17 Delenda, Francisco de Zurbarán, p. 64.

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the Mercedarian habit; its intensity and force folding the surface of the canvas in a dazzling display of textures and finishes, seemingly without end or beginning. Apart from the ropes holding the body up at the corners of the canvas, there are no visible instruments of torture or execution, no worldly thing to distract us from the movement of the folds, except perhaps what hides at the limit of the shadows. For the edge of white is the edge of light and darkness draws a heavy line, clear and sharp – a contour of difference raised amidst the figure of the saint and that of the dark surroundings. Between the white folds of the habit and the dark background, there is a mixture, a break, and a process of fragmentation, but nothing more. For their difference divides nothing, nor does it slice up or separate. It is neither a severance nor a partition. Rather, it is the distinction of the same among the same – inflection as a point of turning of difference, a folding texture – the varied surface of the same fabric. The inflection of the fabric becomes a visual analogy for the fragmentation of the body. For unlike an iconic sign that establishes reference through visible resemblance, Zurbarán’s The Martyrdom of Saint Serapion offers identity in its visual presence. It shows a body made of white folds, rather than an image of a figure that is violently torn apart and cut into pieces. The white folds do not hide a valuable interior, nor do they sublimate the violence of the martyrdom, but, on the contrary, they produce the violence of the body through the force and intensity of their fabric. Thus, the surface of the garment becomes the surface of the body and its fragmentation, the very fragmentation and dismemberment of his body. Saint Serapion’s body is transformed through violence – for it is a body made of fragments of white cloth – whose surfaces produce an endless process of becoming. *** The Folded Body. To follow the movement of the folds is to follow the violent fragmentation of Saint Serapion’s body, made visually present by the struggle between the folds of the robe and those of the cape. The front of the cape hangs down like a sheet. Inside the cape and wrapped around the body is the robe. The head has moved slightly from the regime of the robe to the world of the cape. The open cape seems in the process of performing a break within the body. It allows the eyes to move ‘inside’ of the body of the saint, while at the same time revealing nothing of its inside, keeping the viewers on the surface of the habit. There is an intensity of movement and fragmentation that gives corporeality and weight to the body, transforming its inside into an outside – the folds of the garment move slowly, one after another, beneath the surface, on the surface, pushing each other to infinity. The folds take on the material qualities of the body; this body, however, does not imitate the appearance of a human figure – with flesh and bones – but captures its

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Image 22. Francisco de Zurbarán, Veil of Veronica, c. 1630, oil on canvas, 107.3 × 79.4 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Image Credit: Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation, Houston.

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coming into presence.18 This process invites comparison with another of Zurbarán’s canvases: The Holy Face or The Veil of Veronica (c. 1630) (Image 22).19 The painting shows on a dark background a white cloth bearing the image of Christ – the socalled Veil of Veronica: a miraculous ‘portrait’ of Jesus taken on His way to Calvary (an acheiropoieta image, from the Greek αχειροποίητα, i.e. ‘not made by hands’).20 Unlike other depictions of the same subject that show Christ’s face as a painted portrait – a vera icona, true image – Zurbarán discarded the use of flesh tones in favour of a sketch-like figuration. The image of Christ appears to be traced, rather than painted; the soft application of paint gives the impression of a figure eroded by the passage of time.21 The white cloth becomes here the absent body of Christ – a sacred body whose absence is made present through the materiality of its surface. The connection between the figure of Saint Serapion and the white cloth of the veil can be discerned in the subtle use of the fold as a vehicle for the production of the body. On a formal level, both paintings show a white cloth set against a dark ground, with its edge folded and tied with ropes in the upper corners of the frame. The connection, however, stops there since these two paintings present substantially different forms of corporeality – the veil makes visible a divine absence made present, while Serapion displays the fragmented body of a martyr. The materiality of the white folds are not to be treated here as mere matter conceived as bound, stable, and representational, for their materiality has the potential to exceed the literal object to implicate a new form of corporeality. To understand how the folding of a cloth can become a body let us turn to Gilles Deleuze’s conceptualization of the baroque world. For Deleuze, ‘the Baroque refers not to an essence but rather to an operative function, to a trait. It endlessly produces folds.’22 The movement of the fold is elusive and multiple, a ‘trait’ where the subject/ object distinction collapses, and cannot therefore be attributed unambiguously to an external agency. Deleuze’s fold allows the thinking and embodiment of relationships without the appeal to a centre – it circumvents binaries, absolutes, and hierarchies.23 According to Deleuze, the baroque universe is made up of small subdivisions called monads that are connected in a general texturology of the world. The fold is the principle that informs the inside and the outside, the internal and the external, body and soul, the sensible and the inanimate world. All universe is a process of folding and unfolding the outside – which creates an interior that 18 Victor Stoichita has explored the material significance of Zurbarán’s depictions of the veil of Veronica in Stoichita, ‘Zurbarán’s Veronika,’ p. 196. 19 For an overview of Zurbarán depiction of the Holy Face, see: Delenda, ‘The “Cloth of Veronica.”’ 20 Brown, Francisco de Zurbarán, p. 112. 21 Stoichita, Visionary Experience, p. 66. 22 Deleuze, The Fold, p. 3. 23 Bal, ‘Ecstatic Aesthetics,’ pp. 5, 19.

Death: On Fr ancisco de Zurbar án’s The Mart yrdom of Saint Ser apion 

is a doubling of the outside, rather than an inside grown autonomously from the outside world.24 This vision of life is compared to a baroque house with two stories, the lower level, with windows, corresponding to the pleats of matter, while the upper, windowless level with folded drapes hanging from the wall, corresponds to the folds of the soul. By way of Leibniz’s ontology, Deleuze opposes the Cartesian dualism between mind and body as two separate substances is overridden by the notion that all matter, living and non-living, is composed of matter that is variously folded. Deleuze’s materialism maintains that any actual thing retains its own virtual power –namely, art can at once be actual and virtual, having the ability to become. As such, paintings have the power to simultaneously produce and vary affects that are not already given. The folds of Saint Serapion’s robes, therefore, can be thought of as the vehicle for producing the violence inflected on his body. Deleuze’s folds allows for the interpretation of the body as the result of matter that has been folded and folded and folded until interiority has become exteriority – namely, the body of Saint Serapion becomes the material production of the white habit. The texture of the garment becomes a buoyant surface congruent with the skin and flesh and bones of the saint, while the deep folds of the robe and cape become the virtual production of the violence exerted upon the body. This process of fragmentation, however, does not imply a complete severability of parts. For Deleuze, the fold entails a surface can be fragmented into a multiplicity of distinct parts, without implying their condition of separability or complete detachment.25 Like the fragments of relics that at the same time are distinct, they are not completely separated, for they still retain their cohesion and power of the saint. The white folds of the Mercedarian habit encapsulate this relationship. According to Deleuze, white falls apart into monads – microscopic bits, like convex mirrors that enlarge and deform what they reflect. The monad is like a constant and uninterrupted coming and going between the soul and the body, a mirror and a perspective onto the world, yet it draws its perceptions from within itself, because it is a unity with neither doors nor windows. These microscopic white mirrors problematize the simultaneous importance of fragmentation and wholeness, of what is small and large, of detailed and encompassing parts. The folds envelop and produce the fragmentation of the body from larger parts into small units. To get close to the surface of the folds is to engage with the materiality of their impenetrable surface. With their mirroring quality, the monads that make up the general texturology of the white folds have the potential to bounce back the gaze they absorb, folding the beholders in a relation of violence within the process of fragmentation. 24 Deleuze, The Fold, p. 39. 25 Deleuze, The Fold, pp. 5–6, 13.

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This folding relationship engages subject and object across time. As Mieke Bal argues, the painting appear ‘as remote historical objects moulded within our present being.’ Bal is quick to point out that this does not mean the painting did not exist in the past, but, ‘to use a Baroque conceptual metaphor, it only comes to life – or rather to light, to visibility – for us through our point of view, which itself is modelled by it, folded in it.’26 This engagement can best be described as an endless shift from subject to object, and then back again to the subject, creating a movement of folding that sets the subject and object into a co-dependent relation.27 As such, the surface of Serapion’s body engages us in the force of its fragmentation, capturing our gaze and folding us in a process that has the potential to extend its violence to infinity. *** Buried Dead. The surface of the white habit invites us to travel along its sinuous lines of folds, to move slowly from white to grey and white again, from texture to texture, piece by piece, in a temporal process that reveals light as a source of material transformation. On the surface of the white fabric, light and time travel together to produce fluidity and change. The texture and consistency of the habit exceed its simple identification of a specific time and place to engage a polytemporal narrative: the white folds render the violence of the body while at the same time shrouding it for burial. The folds do not follow a linear, teleological movement; instead, they produce a temporal and spatial ‘trait’ that proliferates in unpredictable directions – an everchanging category that is infinite, contingent, and at the same time provisional. For it is the white light of the folds that displaces the production of the body, shifting its violence of fragmentation to its unsettling display as a glistening garment for burial. In his poem ‘À Zurbarán,’ Théophile Gautier captured in writing this crucial effect produced by Saint Serapion’s garment: its potential to appear as a shroud that carefully envelops the saint’s body. Gautier writes: Like a sinister frock he lengthens the folds; How he knows how to give it the light of the shroud, so much so that one looks like buried dead!28

The light of the folds becomes the light of the shroud in a process that entails a work of displacement: the bodies of the friars are removed from the world of the living 26 Bal, Quoting Caravaggio, p. 27. 27 Bal, Quoting Caravaggio, p. 28. 28 ‘Comme du froc sinistre il allonge les plis; / Comme il sait lui donner les pâleurs du suaire, / Si bien que l’on dirait des morts ensevelis!’ Gautier, Poésies completes, p. 360.

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Image 23. Francisco de Zurbarán, Saint Francis of Assisi According to Pope Nicholas V’s Vision, c. 1640, oil on canvas, 180.5 × 110.5 cm, Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona. Image Credit: Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona, 2022.

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into the realm of the dead. Gautier goes on to remark how viewers are filled with ‘dread’ at this terrible sight. For what can be more terrifying than to see figures that are prepared for burial while they still appear to be alive? Zurbarán’s portrayals of the ambiguous state of Saint Serapion’s body – set somewhere on the threshold of death, or indeed beyond death – invites a parallel with another painting by Zurbarán, Saint Francis of Assisi According to Pope Nicholas V’s Vision (Image 23). The canvas shows the moment when the Saint Francis’s body was discovered undecayed, standing in his burial crypt as though living: his eyes raised to heaven gazing at something positioned outside of the painting.29 Like The Martyrdom of Saint Serapion, Saint Francis contains almost no mention of the story, which is exceptional, since the majority of the other works on this subject are, on the contrary, narrative, and show the circumstances of the discovery of the body of Francis in the presence of all the witnesses. The strong effect produced by Zurbarán’s depiction of Saint Francis standing in the tomb was confirmed when the nuns of the order of contemplation of St. Elizabeth, in Lyon, who owned a similar version of the canvas, found it so frightening that they had it taken down and relegated to the attic.30 Years later, in the late eighteenth century, the architect Jean-Antoine Morand (1727–1794), who was charged with restoring the Couvent des Colinettes in Lyon, found the painting is the attic and declared it to be ‘a terrifying object.’31 If Saint Francis shows a dead figure that appears to be alive, the figure of Saint Serapion leaves us wondering whether he is either on this side or on the other side of death. The eyes are closed. The face shadowed in darkness. The position of the head does not show any sign of life. And yet, the mouth is slightly open as if to suggest the possibility of breath. The dark background also prevents a clear placement of the scene – the presence of a wooden cross is more suggested, rather than clearly displayed, for it is difficult to distinguish it from the rest of the dark ground. According to the life of the saint, Serapion was flogged, dismembered, and disembowelled while still alive. Looking at this painting, the viewer cannot know for certain whether he is still alive or already dead. The Martyrdom of Saint Serapion does not present us with a clear depiction of death, just like it withholds any precise coordinates of time and space. The painting creates its own flights of temporality and place; between the white folds and the dark ground there is only the immobile stuff of painting – the canvas, the oil, the pigment, and the texture, and the most important thing in-between: light and dark. 29 The image can be viewed online at: https://www.mba-lyon.fr/fr/fiche-oeuvre/saint-francois. 30 Although Saint Francis does not bear the evidence of the dead, Victor Stoichita explains by resorting to Freud’s essay ‘Das Unheimliche’ (‘The uncanny’): ‘What seems to many people, in the most disturbingly disturbing degree, is all that is connected with death, with corpses, with the reappearance of the dead, of specters, and ghosts.’ Stoichita, L’oeil mystique, p. 299. 31 On the reception of the painting, see: Letvin, ‘“A Terrifying Object.”’

Death: On Fr ancisco de Zurbar án’s The Mart yrdom of Saint Ser apion 

*** Chiaroscuro. Against the ground, light shines harshly with brisk violence, producing a moment of clarity that brings to visibility the smooth texture of the white folds. At the edge of things, there is obscurity and smokiness, and under the surface, always, the earth, and the dark. The modulation of dark – light – dark brings about a moment of inflection, a point of change, which lifts the body into light. Light does not appear here as the opposite of dark; instead, the two enter into concrete relations of contrast with each other, shading or mixing each other in order to be seen and sensed. The dark ground shimmers. Thick and moist, it has a luminosity of it’s own, a shine, and a texture that rivals with the complexity of the white folds. It shines with dark light – as Christine Buci-Glucksmann points out: dark light is central to baroque aesthetics. In the work of baroque painters, she observes ‘a black that doesn’t look black for it is just as light as it is dark.’32 Buci-Glucksmann describes the baroque as emitting a dark luminosity or an ‘irradiated dark clarity.’33 This dark luminosity in Zurbarán’s painting appears as a fold, a varied surface, a point of inflection that envelops Serapion’s body; it is distinct from, yet not unlike, the folds of the white habit. Rather than suggesting depth and opposition, Zurbarán painted light and dark as distinct surfaces, joined together by the shared luminosity of their fold – the fold of pictorial surfaces. How can we think of light and dark as two surfaces of the same fold? Deleuze’s conceptualization of the baroque and its ‘new regime of light and colour’ offer an opening.34 According to Deleuze, the dark base of the background does not negate light, nor is it configured in opposition to it. Baroque light ensures that clarity ‘endlessly plunges into obscurity’ and yields striking effects of colour, movement, surface materiality, and depth to its darkness. To quote Deleuze: ‘Things jump out from the background, colours spring from the common base,… figures are defined by their covering more than their contour.… [T]his is not in opposition to light.’35 Deleuze lays emphasis upon thickness, materiality, and depth in baroque art, such as the painting of ‘thicker and thicker shadows’ or depictions of ‘cavernous matter.’36 The production of light and dark in Zurbarán’s canvas can be thought of as analogous to Leibniz’s conceptualization of the baroque monad.37 The monad is 32 Buci-Glucksmann, The Madness of Vision, p. 45. 33 Buci-Glucksmann, The Madness of Vision, p. 45. 34 Deleuze, The Fold, p. 31 35 Deleuze, The Fold, pp. 31–32. 36 Deleuze, The Fold, p. 32. 37 ‘Leibniz’s most famous proposition is that every soul or subject (monad) is completely closed, windowless and doorless, and contains the whole world in its darkest depths, while also illuminating some little

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the smallest unit of a body, although it can also be an entire body.38 It involves a clear region, a place of perception, with everything outside of this region making up the larger dark background: the imperceptible.39 Describing the interior of the monad, Deleuze refers to the point of inflection as the force of the fold, as ‘the pure Event of the line, or of the point, or of the virtual, ideality par excellence.’40 Not unlike a monad, Zurbarán’s painting stages light as an event that emerges against the dark background, thick and dense; the light of the folds appear as a moment of inflection into the dark enclosure of the pictorial surface. The parallel between the monad and a tomb is defined by their shared attributes: a dark, enclosed space containing drapery diversified by folds, without windows or doors and no possibility of escape. Zurbarán’s painting stages itself as the inside of a tomb, or a monad, the site of death and of the past, as well as of life and of the present, enclosed and sealed in its chilling surface. *** Cartellino. On the right-hand side of the painting, darkness is pointedly interrupted by the presence of a white piece of paper pinned to the surface of the canvas. Usually interpreted by scholars as the artist’s attempt to engage with the Spanish parangón – a tour de force of illusionism and trompe l’oeil – the cartellino stages itself as an epitaph, a privileged inscription that bears the name of the deceased: B[eato] Serapius, and the date 1628 and the signature of the artist. 41 Antoine Furetière, in his Dictionnaire universel (published posthumously in 1690) writes that ‘epitaphs are put over graves, some inscriptions to mark the one who is lying beneath the tomb.’42 Louis Marin argued that such inscriptions like the cartellino mark a place that belongs to death; it is the visual mark of identification of the dead person. For a detail that is interpreted as clarifying the identity of the figure represented and of the artist, the presence of the cartellino remains surprisingly undecided. The edges are creased and the whiteness of the paper set on the dark background positions it neither above, nor within the painting, but on its surface; the place of pictorial self-reflexivity, where the painting stages itself as the fold of an open tomb. 43 portion of that world, each monad, a different portion. So the world is enfolded in each soul, but differently, because each illuminates only one little aspect of the overall folding.’ Deleuze, Negotiations, p. 157. 38 Deleuze, The Fold, pp. 121–123. 39 Deleuze, The Fold, p. 36. 40 Deleuze, The Fold, p. 15. 41 Bray, for instance, argues that the cartellino is pinned to the dark surface of the canvas, while Ostrow has it attached to the wood that makes up the X-shaped cross in the background. See: Bray, The Sacred Made Real, p. 197; Ostrow, ‘Zurbarán’s Cartellini,’ p. 82. 42 Quoted from Marin, On Representation, p. 272. 43 On painting and self-awareness, see: Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image.

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*** Painting as Tomb. Death and the body are never far away from Zurbarán’s painting. Despite the Catholic tradition of dressing and exposing the dead, The Martyrdom of Saint Serapion does not document or capture death; instead, it confronts us with the presentation of a body, shrouded and placed into the darkness of the painting as tomb. The transformation of the painting extends beyond the folds of the habit to engage the painting’s dark background. The rhythm of dislocation changes here drastically. The inflection between the white folds and the dark ground produces a temporal and spatial deferral that transforms the painting into a tombal surface – its dark background becomes the dark ground of the earth while the Mercedarian white habit the shroud of the martyr’s body. The relation between Zurbarán’s canvas and death is historically contingent. The painting played an important part in the funerary rites of the Mercedarian friars in their convent in Seville. From early on, it is known that The Martyrdom of Saint Serapion was displayed in the Sala de Profundis – a room positioned next to the refectory, which served as a mortuary chapel for the deceased friars to lay in state before burial. It is believed that the painting had a companion piece since Antonio Ponz mentions two paintings by Zurbarán of ‘holy martyrs’ facing each other near the refectory door. 44 By the nineteenth century, however, it seems that one painting had disappeared since Juan Agustín Ceán Bermúdez only mentions the canvas depicting Saint Serapion. 45 And yet, despite its function and proximity to death, what is intriguing about Zurbarán’s canvas is its potential to stage its surface as tomb and engage us in a material and temporal relation that is nothing but violent and horrible. Zurbarán’s painting presents a corpse inside the dense, totally enclosed place of a sepulchre. This is not a tomb seen from the outside, but a vision of the inside brought to the outside, a claustrophobic confrontation with death and the black non-place of darkness. The subject of the tomb was designated by Louis Marin as the privileged site of representation during the seventeenth century.46 Marin argues that Caravaggio’s technique of depicting figures in a dark room traversed with only one streak of light signifies the death of the subject of painting. The black space that envelops the white folds of the habit is not a specific place, but a non-place, the place of one and millions. This dark surface is heavy and thick, dense and full, made of the most terrestrial ground, which denies access into the space of the 44 Ponz, Viaje de España, p. 785. 45 ‘It is not already in the room … more than one of the martyrs of Zurbarán that is San Serapio placed in front of the door of the reflector with the signature of 1623 [sic].’ Juan Agustín Ceán Bermúdez in Delenda, Francisco de Zurbarán, p. 101. 46 Marin, ‘The Tomb of the Subject.’

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painting. Darkness and light perform material and mobile reversals between the inside and the outside, bringing to the surface, from the pit of grave, a body that is struck and stupefied – dazzled by the lightning flash of life. The painting of Saint Serapion therefore offers no reassurance of the afterlife, no promise of eternal life and divine grace of the kind one might expect from a painting destined for a mortuary room. There are no figures, no extras, no witnesses or faithful to mourn and believe in the friar’s resurrection – thus, no Albertian strategy to draw the viewer into the scene. There is no divine intervention, no crown of martyrdom, and no sign of sanctity. Zurbarán’s painting suspends the promise of redemption to confront us with something that is difficult to see, something that we all fear, which remains strange and foreign. To be imprisoned in a claustrophobic, dark cell, with only this: the fragmented dead body of the saint that becomes our tomb, a monad without windows, exits, or any possibility of escape. A dead body woven and folded into the fabric of our lives, presenting us with the impossibility of ever comprehending our own death, and then acting it out against the dark enclosure of the painting as tomb.

Works Cited Bal, Mieke, ‘Ecstatic Aesthetics,’ in Compelling Visuality: The Work of Art in and out of History, ed. Claire Farago and Robert Zwijnenberg, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2003, pp. 1–30. Bal, Mieke, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2001. Baticle, Jeannine, Zurbarán, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1988. Bray, Xavier, ed., The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture, 1600–1700, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 2009. Brown, Jonathan, Francisco de Zurbarán, New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1976. Brown, Jonathan, ‘Francisco de Zurbarán, Master painter of Seville,’ in Zurbarán: Jacob and His Twelve Sons: Paintings From Auckland Castle, ed. Susan Grace Galassi, Edward Payne, and Mark Roglan, Seattle, Lucia Marquand, 2014, pp. 21–28. Buci-Glucksmann, Christine, The Madness of Vision: On Baroque Aesthetic, Athens, Ohio University Press, 2014. Delenda, Odile, ‘The “Cloth of Veronica” in the Work of Zurbarán,’ Bilbao Fine Arts Museum [bulletin], 7 (2013), pp. 125–161. Delenda, Odile, Francisco de Zurbarán: 1598–1664: catálogo razonado y crítico, Madrid, Fundación Arte Hispánico, 2009. Delenda, Odile, and Mar Borobia, eds., Zurbarán: A New Perspective, Madrid, Fundación Colección Thyssen-Bornemisza, 2015.

Death: On Fr ancisco de Zurbar án’s The Mart yrdom of Saint Ser apion 

Deleuze, Gilles, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, New York, Continuum, 2006. Deleuze, Gilles, and Clair Parnet, Dialogues, New York, Columbia University Press, 1987. Fernández López, José, ‘Zurbarán’s Monastic Series and Alterpieces,’ in Zurbarán: A New Perspective, ed. Odile Delenda and Mar Borobia, Madrid, Fundación Colección ThyssenBornemisza, 2015, pp. 37–43. Finaldi, Gabriele, ‘Zurbarán, il “Caravaggio Espagnol,” e la pittura italiana,’ in Zurbarán (1598–1664), ed. Ignacio Cano Rivero, Brussels, Bozar Books & Mercatorfonds, 2014, pp. 49–59. Gautier, Théophile, Poésies completes, Charpentier, 1845. Letvin, Alexandra, ‘“A Terrifying Object”: The Invention of Zurbarán,’ in Zurbarán: Jacob and His Twelve Sons: Paintings from Auckland Castle, ed. Susan Grace Galassi, Edward Payne, and Mark Roglan, Seattle, Lucia Marquand, 2014, pp. 55–69. Marin, Louis, On Representation, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2001. Marin, Louis, ‘The Tomb of the Subject in Painting,’ in On Representation, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2001, pp. 269–284. Marin, Louis, To Destroy Painting, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1994. Navarrete Prieto, Benito, ‘Concerning Wit, Ingenuity, and Copying: Zurbarán, Creator of Sacred Images,’ in Zurbarán: A New Perspective, ed. Odile Delenda and Mar Borobia, Madrid, Fundación Colección Thyssen-Bornemisza, 2015, pp. 45–51. Ostrow, Stephen, ‘Zurbarán’s Cartellini: Presence and the Paragone,’ The Art Bulletin, vol. 99, no. 1 (2017), pp. 67–96. Palomino de Castro y Velasco, Antonio, El Museo pictórico y escala óptica: El Parnaso Español Pintoresco Laureado, Lucas Antonio de Bedmar, 1724. Pérez Sánchez, Alfonso E., ‘The Artistic Milieu in Seville during the First Third of the Seventeenth Century,’ in Zurbarán, ed. Jeannine Baticle, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1988, pp. 37–52. Ponz, Antonio, Viaje de España, Ibarra, 1725–1792. Ros de Barbero, Almudena, ‘Zurbarán’s Critical Fortunes in Spain up to the Nineteenth Century,’ in Zurbarán: A New Perspective, ed. Odile Delenda and Mar Borobia, Madrid, Fundación Colección Thyssen-Bornemisza, 2015, pp. 53–57. Stoichita, Victor I., L’oeil mystique. Peindre l’extase dans l’Espagne du Siècle d’Or, Paris, Editions du Félin, 2001. Stoichita, Victor I., The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2008. Stoichita, Victor I., The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996. Stoichita, Victor I., Visionary Experience in the Golden Age of Spanish Art, London, Reaktion Books, 1997. Stoichita, Victor I., ‘Zurbarán’s Veronika,’ Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, vol. 54, no. 2 (1991), pp. 190–206.

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Conclusion Baroque depictions of violence display an excess of material richness and visual complexity that engage viewers in new forms of corporeal and visceral relations. This book has traced a path that avoids the prevailing interpretation of paintings as mere reflections of the supposedly violent nature of seventeenth-century society; instead, it explores them as active presences or intensities capable of producing unforeseen and untameable set of engagements. The power of these paintings is shown to emerge from a violence that erupts from within the materiality of the painting that works at times in alignment but most often in disjunction with the subject of representation. As such, the violence mostly observed is not one that can be reduced to a simple depiction of a beheading of flaying, but exceeds any system of closure demanded by representation; thus the excessive work of materiality is shown to be transgressive, disruptive, and transformative – enacting a violent event of becoming. The first two chapters explored the paradox of staging a painting around the violent opening of a wound. The first chapter showed how Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of Saint Ursula (1610) is built around the focal point of the wound – the saint, the soldiers, and the king – all figures absorbed by its presence. The wound, however, is hidden from sight. The obstruction of sight as a means of refocusing and bringing into play other forms of corporeal engagement was further investigated in the second chapter on Giovanni Lanfranco’s Saint Peter Healing Saint Agatha (1613–1614). We have seen how in both paintings, the place of the wound can become, in distinct ways, a pictorial moment of miraculous transformation where the sacred intervenes violently within matter. Both chapters have explored the various disruptions and dislocations – temporal, figurative, and narrative – that are set into motion in order to transform the saintly figures of Ursula and Agatha into distinct sacred images within an image. This process of dislocation challenges sight and touch as primary modes of artistic engagement. For if Caravaggio concealed the wound from visibility – and hence made invisible the blinding power of the sacred made material – Lanfranco opened the question of touching as a contact at the limit of the sacred image. The image as sacred – the figure of the saint that has become an image of the process of transformation into a saint – is shown to be always untouchable; for where vision fails, touch is made to bear as a form of contact in separation – an engagement at the limit that imposes a limit, violently.

Cornea, B., The Matter of Violence in Baroque Painting. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463727808_conc

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The following chapters looked at the notion of the painting as body, each focusing on the interchangeable potentiality of the pictorial surface to become either flesh or skin. Chapter Three discussed how the materiality of Jusepe de Ribera’s Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew (1644) stages its pictorial surface as skin, thereby rendering the violence of the flaying as an event enacted onto the corporeality of the painting. The thin layer of paint as skin, altered by various superimposed and fragmented temporalities, enacts a new form of violence that brings the flaying of the saint and the rupture of the pictorial surface into a colliding tension. Chapter Four explores Georges de La Tour’s Penitent Saint Jerome (1630s) as a painting where the potential of paint to become flesh is expressed through the violence of the artist’s impasto technique. It shows how the impasto displaces the location of violence from Jerome’s back – the locus of flagellation – to the visible front. Both chapters emphasize the potential of canvas and paint to become corporeal surfaces – as open flesh and ripped skin. Before these canvases, viewers are transformed from passive observers to active witnesses, where violence is not only fictitiously represented, but made corporeally present; violence, therefore, becomes incarnated through the materiality of paint. The last two chapters discuss the staging of the pictorial surface as a threshold of life and death: the ground of the painting is shown to confront viewers with the insurmountable passage between life and death. The most recognizable sign of life is blood: the substance that moves through the body to sustain life. Blood appears in abundance in Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes (1614–1629); there is the blood that gushes from Holofernes’s severed neck and the splashes of red paint visible on the surface of the canvas. Considered in conjunction with the position of Judith’s sword as parallel to the pictorial plane, this chapter explores the distinction of blood as a staging of pictorial surface as an abject surface. Blood transforms the painted surface into a threshold of violence where the body of the painting is slashed away by Judith’s sword. As an abject substance, blood forces a radical and violent change in the beholder, whose subjectivity is questioned by the breaking of boundaries between self and object. Zurbarán’s The Martyrdom of Saint Serapion (1628) is shown to display the fragmentation of the body as a violent act of baroque folding. This chapter argues that Zurbarán’s painting does not document or capture death, but rather confronts viewers with the presentation of a dead body, fragmented and shrouded in the white folds of the habit, and placed into the darkness of the painting as tomb. The spilling of blood in Gentileschi’s canvas and the presentation of a corpse in Zurbarán’s painting set forth a pre-objectal relationship of abjection of immemorial violence that threatens the breaking of boundaries between beholder and artwork. The emphasis on the creative potentiality of art has revealed its disjointedness, for what these paintings produce cannot be easily contained or explained by a simple

Conclusion 

appeal to subject or context. We have seen how the materiality of the surface has the potential to disrupt, derail, and confuse the beholder’s ability to reconstruct the narrative of the story. These fractures allow new forms of violence to emerge in excess of any system of closure and continuity. Canvas, paint, flesh, and skin work, not in literal reference to a stable ‘reality’ outside the canvas, and not in alignment or identity with each other, but in violent relations of displacement in relation to figure and surface. Thus, in Ribera’s The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew the relationship between skin and paint encompass the temporality that is intrinsic to such an act of violence. By relating the surface of the body to the surface of the painting, the artist brought the act of flaying to bear on the surface of the painting itself. Furthermore, in Gentileschi’s canvas, blood appears as a twofold material presence that simultaneously emerges from the general’s neck as well as being sprinkled on the surface of the painting as if Judith’s cut does not merely behead a figure but actually slices away the body of the painting, making it bleed before the eyes of the onlookers. Violence, therefore, is revealed as the disruption of the mimetic order where materiality’s potential is unleashed from its subordination to form and imitation; and this allowed us to explore new and unforeseen forms of actualized violence. To that effect, we have seen how in Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes the strenuous act of decapitation takes centre stage, made shockingly visible in all its gory details, while in Zurbarán’s The Martyrdom of Saint Serapion violence emerges as a process of corporeal fragmentation and folding devoid of any figurative signs of graphic bloodshed. This violence engages the beholders in radical new ways – for we have seen how in Ribera’s Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew the saint throws back at the onlookers a gaze that involves them in a temporal and corporeal loop. Further on, La Tour’s Penitent Saint Jerome projects back onto the beholder, in an ironic twist, the violence of the saint’s flesh through the empty sockets of a desiccated skull. Violence can be concealed as much as it can be revealed in the figurative economy of a painting, and this is brilliantly problematized in Caravaggio’s depiction of the wound in his Martyrdom of Saint Ursula. Above all, violence appears as a transformative process of becoming – as an event that shows matter at work in transforming paintings into violent corporeal surfaces throbbing under the eyes of the beholder.

163



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Index abjection 78, 119, 127, 135-136, 137, 162. Accademia degli Arcadi 18, 134. Alberti, Leon Battista 33, 41, 56, 79, 80, 81, 87, 108, 109, 129, 144, 157. Aristotle 57, 66, 77, 124. Armenini, Giovanni Battista 84, 85, 86. Baglione, Giovanni 33, 34, 35, 41. Bal, Mieke 123, 152. Baldinucci, Filippo 123, 124, 135. Baroque 16-20, 55, 134, 135, 151, 155, 161. Barthes, Roland 14. Baxandall, Michael 57. become 14, 17, 21, 25, 29, 30, 31, 32, 39, 46, 47, 48, 54, 59, 66, 67, 82, 83, 84, 87, 89, 90, 92, 93, 97, 98, 105, 106, 108, 109, 112, 114, 133, 135, 137, 141, 148, 151, 157, 158, 161, 162. Bellori, Giovanni Pietro 31, 34, 38, 54, 55, 68, 108, 109. Belting, Hans 18. Benjamin, Andrew 19, 64. blood 16, 21, 25, 29, 30, 34, 36, 46, 63, 64, 75, 78, 84, 98, 109, 113, 119 – 137, 162, 163. Blunt, Anthony 100. Borghese, Scipione 31. Borghini, Raffaello 84, 85,86. Borromeo, Carlo 56. Boschini, Marco 21, 22, 63, 104, 105, 108. Bray, Xavier 146. Buci-Glucksmann, Christine 55, 56, 155. Byron, George Gordon 75. Calvin, Jean 60. Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da 20, 29-51, 61, 62, 67, 79, 80, 81, 87, 100, 108, 109, 128, 129, 135, 144, 157, 161, 163. Boy with a Basket of Fruit 108. Judith Beheading Holofernes 45, 46, 102, 128, 135. The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist 109. The Calling of Saint Matthew 42. The Incredulity of Saint Thomas 46, 60, 62. The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew 67. The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula 29-51. 161, 163. The Taking of Christ 32. Carduccio, Vincenzio 32. carnatura 36, 39; see also flesh. Carracci, Annibale 77. cartellino 146, 156. Cavallino, Bernardo 131 – 132. The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew 131. Ceán Bermúdez, Juan Agustín:143, 144, 157. chiaroscuro 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 109, 155-156. colour 15, 16, 19, 22, 23, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35-40, 45, 54, 85, 87-89, 106, 120, 127, 128, 155. corporeality 20, 30, 36, 39, 42, 44, 47, 66, 73, 81, 88, 89, 91, 108, 141, 147, 148, 150, 162.

d’Arpino, Cavalier 77. Da Vinci, Leonardo 56. De Dominici, Bernardo 22, 75, 76, 77, 79, 87, 88, 89, 108. death 38, 125, 126, 129, 133, 134, 137, 141-158, 162. Deleuze, Gilles 22, 23, 39, 64, 150, 151, 155, 156. Derrida, Jacques 48. Dezallier d’Argenville, Antoine-Joseph 91, 99. Didi-Huberman, Georges 14, 20, 23, 34, 43, 66. disegno 34, 108. Dolce, Lodovico 38, 86, 105. Dupaty, Jean-Baptiste Mercier 15, 81. excess 16 – 20, 35, 45 – 46, 56, 64, 78, 85, 88, 119, 123, 136-137, 161, 163. flaying 13, 20, 25, 65, 66, 68, 73, 74, 75, 78, 79, 89, 90, 91, 92, 161, 162. flesh 16, 17, 20, 21, 22, 23, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 44, 45, 46, 81, 82, 84, 86, 87, 89, 90, 97-114, 132, 142, 143, 162, 163; see also carnatura. Florence 43, 121, 123. folding / unfolding 20, 25, 42, 46, 82, 83, 90, 120, 122, 147, 148, 150, 151, 152, 156, 162, 163. Fra Angelico 43. fragmentation 20, 25, 29, 48, 67, 141, 147, 148, 151, 152, 162, 163. Fried, Michael 32, 61. Furetière, Antoine 156. Garrard, Mary 121, 122. Gautier, Théophile 75, 152. Gentileschi, Artemisia 24. Judith Slaying Holofernes 119-137. Hills, Helen 47. historia 41, 42, 56, 92, 126. holiness 29, 47; see also sacred. horror and delight 119, 123-127. icon 29, 31, 32, 48, 150. imitation 20, 33, 34, 35, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 49, 66, 90, 103, 124, 126, 129, 147, 163. impasto 15, 16, 22, 67, 78, 82, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 93, 97, 98, 101, 103, 104, 106, 108, 109, 110, 112, 127, 162; see also tremendo impasto and pittura di macchia. Krauss, Rosalind 136. Kristeva, Julia 78, 135, 136. La Tour, Georges de 25, 162, 163. Penitent Saint Jerome (Grenoble) 25, 96-114. Penitent Saint Jerome (Stockholm) 101-102. Lanfranco, Giovanni 24, 25, 161. Assumption of the Virgin 54-55.

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Paradise 55. Saint Peter Healing Saint Agatha 52-69. Lanzi, Luigi 127. Lastri, Marco 134, 135. lifelikeness 37, 38, 45. Liss, Johann 135. Lomazzo, Gian Paolo 38, 124. Mancini, Giulio 76, 79. Marin, Louis 156, 157. Marino, Giambattista 18, 38, 39, 78, 125, 126, 128. materiality 14, 16, 17, 18-20, 21, 24, 29, 30, 32, 41, 44, 45-46, 54, 56, 57, 58, 62-69, 78, 84, 87, 89, 90, 92, 93, 97, 103, 104, 105, 106, 109, 110, 120, 126, 127, 129, 133, 136, 150, 155, 161-163. Medici, Averardo de’ 123, 124, 134, 135. Michelangelo Buonarroti 34, 103, 104. mimesis 43, 84, 87, 89, 90, 104; see also imitation. Morrona, Alessandro da 127. Munday, Anthony 113-114.

Apollo Flaying Marsyas (Naples) 65-68, 78, 79. The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew (Barcelona) 25, 72-93. The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew (Washington); 82-83, 90, 91. rilievo 144. Romano Alberti 124. Rome 18, 31, 42, 55, 75, 76, 79, 80, 100, 121, 125, 134. Rosen, Valeska von 42. sacred 25, 29, 31, 42, 43, 47, 48, 53, 54, 59, 60, 61, 64, 68, 69, 136, 150. Sartre, Jean-Paul 136. Seville 142, 143, 144, 146, 157. sight 25, 33, 55, 56, 57, 59, 61, 67, 68, 89, 98, 101, 102, 105, 161. skin 13-14, 17, 20, 21, 34, 35, 36-40, 47, 54, 57, 64, 66, 73-93, 101, 110, 142, 162, 163. Stoichita, Victor Ieronim 18, 19, 150, 154, 156, 177. symptom 43, 66.

Nancy, Jean-Luc 39, 59, 66, 133. Naples 31, 47, 55, 75, 76, 77, 121. narrative 18, 19, 22, 29, 40, 41-44, 61, 78, 80, 90, 91, 92, 93, 114, 123, 127, 129, 130, 132, 137, 152, 154, 161, 163. non- finito 103; see also impasto.

Tassi, Agostino 120, 121, 122. Titian Vecellio 21, 34, 38, 63, 80, 83, 104-106, 108, 110. Saint Jerome in the Wilderness 107. tomb, painting as 141, 142, 154, 156, 157, 158, 162. touch 53-69, 74, 91, 92, 93, 98, 104, 161.

Olson, Todd 44, 67. Ostrow, Steven 146.

Varchi, Benedetto 103. Vasari, Giorgio 36, 104. Vermeer, Johannes 14. virtual 48, 128, 151, 156. visible 14, 34, 36, 46, 48 55, 66, 68, 88, 90, 92, 100, 109, 114, 133, 137, 148, 150, 161, 162, 163; see also virtual and visual. visual 19, 37, 43, 45-46, 47, 55, 56, 59, 60, 62, 66, 67, 68, 77, 78, 87, 89, 98, 100, 101, 112, 113, 114, 147, 148, 156.

Paleotti, Gabriel 15, 124. Palma il Giovane, Giacomo 21, 104. Palomino, Antonio; 15, 16, 80, 88, 143, 147. Panofsky, Erwin 17. paragone 37, 103, 106, 146, 156. patch (of paint), 14, 44, 65, 66, 67, 79, 89, 90, 106, 109, 132, 133. Pericolo, Lorenzo 16, 19, 41, 44, 62, 84. Pino, Paolo 36, 37. pittura di macchia 63, 104, 106. Ponz, Antonio 143, 144, 157. Proust, Marcel 14. punctum 14, 47. Rembrandt, Harmenszoon van Rijn 63, 110, 111. Saint Bartholomew 110-111. The Painter is His Studio 63. Reni, Guido 77. Ribera, Jusepe de 15, 20, 22, 67, 99, 108, 144, 162, 163. Apollo Flaying Marsyas (Brussels) 12, 13, 14, 89.

Walker Bynum, Caroline 19, 21. Warburg, Aby 23. wound 14, 24-25, 29-48, 53, 54-55, 59, 61-69, 73, 89-92, 97,98, 100, 101, 102, 108, 109, 112, 114, 133, 135, 136, 137, 141, 147, 161, 163. Zurbarán, Francisco de 20, 24, 25, 162, 163. Christ on the Cross 144 -145. Saint Francis of Assisi According to Pope Nicholas V’s Vision 153-154. The Martyrdom of Saint Serapion 140-158. Veil of Veronica 149-150.