Bodily Extremities: Preoccupations with the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture 2002024894, 9780754607267

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
1 Introduction
2 Skin and the Search for the Interior: The Representation of Flaying in the Art and Anatomy of the Cinquecento
3 ‘Ogni pittore dipinge sé’ – On Leonardo da Vinci’s Saint John the Baptist
4 The Repulsive Body: Images of Torture in Seventeenth-Century Naples
5 Execution, Dissection, Pain and Infamy – A Morphological Investigation
6 Dissecting Quaresmeprenant – Rabelais’ Representation of the Human Body: A Rhetorical Approach
7 Reading New World Bodies
8 Physicians’ and Inquisitors’ Stories? Circumcision and Crypto-Judaism in Sixteenth–Eighteenth-Century Spain
9 The Expression of Pain in the Later Middle Ages: Deliverance, Acceptance and Infamy
Index

Citation preview

Bodily Extremities

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Bodily Extremities Preoccupations with the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture

Edited by

FLORIKE EGMOND and ROBERT ZWIJNENBERG

First published 2003 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX 14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, N Y 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Florike Egmond, Robert Zwijnenberg and the contributors, 2003 The authors have asserted their moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this w o r k . A l l rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Bodily extremities: preoccupations w i t h the human body in early modern European culture 1. Body, Human—Symbolic aspects—Europe 2. Human figure in art 3. Body, Human, in literature 4. Europe—Civilization— 17th century 5. Europe—Civilization—16th century I . Egmond, Florike I I . Zwijnenberg, Robert 306.4'094'0903 US Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Bodily extremities: preoccupations w i t h the human body in early modern European culture / edited by Florike Egmond, Robert Zwijnenberg. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (alk. paper) 1. Human figure in art. 2. Violence in art. 3. Pain in art. 4. Arts, European. I . Egmond, Florike. I I . Zwijnenberg, Robert, 1954N X 6 5 0 . H 7 4 B63 2003 700'.45-dc21 2002024894 ISBN 13: 978-0-7546-0726-7 (hbk)

Contents List of Figures Notes on Contributors

vi ix

1 Introduction Florike Egmond and Robert Zwijnenberg

1

2 Skin and the Search for the Interior: The Representation of Flaying in the Art and Anatomy of the Cinquecento Daniela Bohde

10

3 ‘Ogni pittore dipinge sé’ – On Leonardo da Vinci’s Saint John the Baptist Robert Zwijnenberg

48

4 The Repulsive Body: Images of Torture in SeventeenthCentury Naples Harald Hendrix

68

5 Execution, Dissection, Pain and Infamy – A Morphological Investigation Florike Egmond

92

6 Dissecting Quaresmeprenant – Rabelais’ Representation of the Human Body: A Rhetorical Approach Paul J. Smith

129

7 Reading New World Bodies Peter Mason

148

8 Physicians’ and Inquisitors’ Stories? Circumcision and Crypto-Judaism in Sixteenth–Eighteenth-Century Spain José Pardo Tomás

168

9 The Expression of Pain in the Later Middle Ages: Deliverance, Acceptance and Infamy Esther Cohen

195

Index

221

List of Figures

2.2

2.3

2.4

2.5

2.6

2.7

2.8

2.9 2.10

Titian, Flaying of Marsyas, canvas, 212 x 207 cm, c. 1570, Krome˘ríz, Archiepiscopal Palace (Arcibiskupsky Zámek) (photo: museum) Michelangelo, St Bartholomew (detail from The Last Judgement), 1534–41, Vatican, Sistine Chapel (photo: museum) The Platonic Silen, emblem of the Accademici Occulti, woodcut, frontispiece of the Rime de gli Academici occvlti con le loro imprese et discorsi (Brescia, 1568) (photo: Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice – Foto Toso) Gasparo Becerra, ‘Écorché’, in Juan Valverde, Anatomia del corpo humano composto per M. Giovan Valverde di Hamusco (Rome by A. Salamanca, 1559), Book 2, Plate I, fol. 64 (photo: Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice – Foto Toso) Melchior Meier, Apollo with the flayed Marsyas and Midas, engraving, 231 x 312 mm, 1581, Munich, Staatliche Graphische Sammlung (photo: Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München) Anonymous, Apollo with the flayed Marsyas, pen drawing, 246 x 316 mm, 1580–90, Berlin, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Kupferstichkabinett (photo: Jörg P. Anders) Theodor Galle, Flaying of Marsyas, engraving after Stradanus, 179 x 130 mm, c. 1580–1600, Benediktinerstift Göttweig (photo: Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, K.-M. Vetters) Paolo Veronese (attr.), Flaying of Marsyas, canvas, 55 x 72 cm, c. 1580s, formerly Munich, collection of Kronprinz Ruprecht (photo: Kunsthistorisches Institut Florence) Titian, Flaying of Marsyas, detail of 2.1: Marsyas’ breast Titian’s device, woodcut in Ludovico Dolce, Imprese Nobili et Ingeniose (Venice, 1578) (photo: Biblioteca Universitaria, Bologna) ˆ ˆ

2.1

12

13

18

26

27

35

36

38 39

40

LIST OF FIGURES

2.11

3.1

3.2

4.1

4.2

4.3

4.4

4.5

4.6

5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4

6.1 6.2

Benvenuto Cellini, Apollo, seal for the Florentine Accademia del Disegno, pen drawing, 300 x 217 mm, c. 1563, Munich, Staatliche Graphische Sammlung (photo: Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München) Leonardo da Vinci, St John the Baptist, c. 1510, 69.2 x 57.2 cm, Louvre, Paris (photo: Kunsthistorisch Instituut, Amsterdam) Leonardo da Vinci, The Angel in the Flesh, c. 1510–15, 26.8 x 19.7 cm, black coal on paper, private collection, Germany (photo: Kunsthistorisch Instituut, Amsterdam) Jusepe de Ribera, Apollo and Marsyas, 182 x 232 cm, oil on canvas, 1637, Museo Nazionale di San Martino, Naples Jusepe de Ribera, Martyrdom of St Bartholomew, 202 x 153 cm, oil on canvas, c. 1644, Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona Jusepe de Ribera, Martyrdom of St Bartholomew, 145 x 216 cm, oil on canvas, c. 1630, Palazzo Pitti, Florence Jusepe de Ribera, Prometheus, 194 x 155 cm, oil on canvas, c. 1632, Barbara Piasecka Johnson Collection, Princeton Jusepe de Ribera, Apollo and Marsyas (detail), 182 x 232 cm, oil on canvas, 1637, Museo Nazionale di San Martino, Naples Luca Giordano, Apollo and Marsyas, 206 x 256 cm, oil on canvas, c. 1660, Museo Nazionale di San Martino, Naples A public dissection from Johannes de Ketham, Fasciculus medicine (Venice, 1495) Anonymous, Head of a Swiss Woman, watercolour, University Library, Basel (D11169) Anonymous, Head of a Swiss Woman, watercolour, University Library, Basel (D11169) Representation of a partly dissected brain from Charles Estienne, De dissectione partium corporis humani libri tres (Paris, 1545) Tarandus, from Conrad Gesner, Historia animalium, 1555, woodcut Various ‘things’, drawings from Le Double, Rabelais anatomiste, 1899

vii

42

49

58

70

73

75

76

78

91 110 116 117

128 138 142

viii 6.3 7.1

LIST OF FIGURES

Flying fish, from Pierre Belon, La nature et diversité des poissons, 1555

145

Nicolas Poussin, Les Israélites recueillant la manne dans le désert, oil on canvas, 149 x 200 cm, 1639, Louvre, Paris (photo: RMN) 154

Notes on Contributors Daniela Bohde teaches at the Kunstgeschichtliches Institut der GoetheUniversität in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany. Esther Cohen is Professor of Medieval History at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Florike Egmond is Head of Section on historical projects at the Dutch National Archive, The Hague. Harald Hendrix is Professor of Italian Literature and Culture at the University of Utrecht in The Netherlands. Peter Mason is Consultant in Art and Anthropology to the Taller Experimental Cuerpos Pintados Fundación América in Santiago, Chile. José Pardo Tomás teaches at the Department of History of Science of the ‘Milá i Fontanals’ Institute in Barcelona. Paul J. Smith is Professor of French Literature at Leiden University in The Netherlands. Robert Zwijnenberg is Professor of Art History in relation to the development of science and technology, Faculty of Arts and Culture, University of Maastricht, The Netherlands.

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CHAPTER ONE

Introduction Florike Egmond and Robert Zwijnenberg A strong preoccupation with the human body, which manifests itself in often startling ways, seems to be a characteristic shared by early modern Europeans and their present-day counterparts. Modern manifestations include body art, piercing and tattoos, as well as cosmetic surgery, genetic manipulation, several kinds of sports, body shaping techniques, experimentation with drugs, and a variety of eating disorders. Early modern preoccupations encompassed such diverse phenomena as monstrous births and physical deformity, body snatching, public dissection, flagellation, judicial torture, public punishment and phenomena that we would now describe as eating disorders or psychosomatic symptoms but were then regarded as expressions of religious fervour. Our interest in such early modern phenomena is, of course, related to present-day preoccupations and, perhaps, to a sense of unease with many modern body-practices. If the following investigations give us a slightly different perspective on the present, this might be an additional advantage, but it is not the principal purpose of Bodily Extremities. Our focus in this volume is on early modern times – not in order to ‘learn from history’, but to learn about history.

Cultural analysis There are many ways of writing about human bodies in the past. This volume concentrates on cultural themes, yet it cannot be classified as a product of traditional cultural history. It presents a way of going about research on the human body in which neither the method nor its contextual field have been determined beforehand. This does not imply, however, that anything goes, as will become evident from the emphasis on specific historical evidence, the persistent interest in reflection upon the methods used, and a tendency to take both historical and modern metaphors literally. Such an approach precludes a focus on long-term historical developments, which are, after all, no more than constructs by modern scholars – as easily deconstructed as rebuilt. Each contribution to this volume is firmly rooted in concrete early modern examples

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(literary texts, paintings, ritual practices) and can be regarded as a journey of discovery by its author into early modern history which investigates relevant contexts and methodologies. Our explorations cannot emulate the great early modern discoveries about the (new) world, the universe, or the human body. Neither need they be confined, however, by the strict boundaries of modern academic disciplines. Precisely because context and method are not determined beforehand, they can take us anywhere in early modern history. That is the principal reason why we do not want to label this volume ‘cultural history’. Since many of the contributors to this volume are not historians in the narrow sense of the term, moreover, we prefer to describe the domain of Bodily Extremities as a historically informed branch of cultural analysis. Over the last decades the literature about the history of the human body has grown exponentially.1 Yet, for the early modern period it is largely dominated by scholars trained in literary studies, who concentrate on literary sources and usually have a strong interest in metaphor, semiotics and rhetorical traditions.2 Most literary studies suffer from a strongly ‘internalist’ approach, which tends to neglect the rich contextual evidence available in the form of visual sources or nonliterary textual ones. The implicit assumption of this ‘literary turn’ in the study of early modern bodies seems to be, moreover, that literary sources offer a better ‘view’ of physical aspects of early modern society than other sources. In spite of the rapidly changing appreciation of visual evidence, images are too often still reduced to mere illustrations of textual interpretation, while other evidence is often ignored.3 This regularly leads to the strange phenomenon of bodies being reduced to text and metaphor alone, losing their principal characteristic of 1 For a very useful survey of influential older publications see the three volumes of Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Michel Feher, Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi (eds) (New York: ZONEBooks, 1989). 2 Some examples are: Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed. Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned. Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London and New York: 1995); and David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (eds), The Body in Parts. Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (New York and London: Routledge, 1997). 3 Of course this is an overstatement. See for instance: Kathleen Adler and Marcia Pointon (eds), The Body Imaged. The Human Form and Visual Culture since the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Sara E. Melzer and Kathryn Norberg (eds), From the Royal to the Republican Body. Incorporating the Political in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). And compare Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (eds), Framing Medieval Bodies (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996).

INTRODUCTION

3

physicality. In the present volume we have attempted to profit from the approaches suggested by literary historians, while at the same time trying to avoid their reductionism and to study early modern human bodies as living, acting and feeling subjects. In a similar way we have tried to learn from and yet not simply follow art historical procedure. Much of art history likewise tends to suffer from ‘internalist’ methodology as well as from simplistic notions of historical change and contextualization. Visual sources (and not just what art historians tend to classify as art) play an extremely important role in the present volume. In trying to study and interpret them, we will not endorse notions in which works of art are taken to reflect a Zeitgeist and vice versa.4 We cannot make any a priori assumptions about the connections between a work of art and the society in which it was created: these connections have to be investigated, discovered, and made plausible. Crucial, then, to this volume and its approach is the attempt to combine philosophy, literary studies, art history, sociocultural history, the history of mentalities, and aesthetics. As implied in our undertaking to make journeys of discovery, ‘combine’ means more than just gluing a piece of art history to an essay on politics or philosophy. It reflects our efforts to (re-)integrate disciplinary fields that have slowly grown apart over time because of institutional demands, increased academic specialization, and the concomitant territorial conflicts. Such efforts seem especially important (or even obligatory) when dealing with a period famous for the phenomenon of the uomo universale and the emphasis on connections and parallels – whether between signs and what they referred to or between macro- and micro-cosmos. Crossing disciplinary boundaries in order to discover new connections and allow new perspectives cannot but entail reflection on these disciplinary categories themselves. For instance, several contributors touch upon phenomena usually classified and dealt with as medical. We are not concerned, however, with medical history in the strict sense of the term – that is, the history of medical ideas or discoveries (of the ‘from Galen to Vesalius’ type) or the institutional history of the medical profession. In studying concepts, practices, or representations linked with the medical domain, our emphasis lies on their many possible links with a wider cultural context rather than on their ‘medical’ quality. This follows from our point of view that classifications such as ‘medical’, ‘judicial’ or ‘artistic’ are themselves cultural constructs that change over time, and should be investigated rather than taken as points of 4 Peter Mason, Infelicities. Representations of the Exotic (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), ch. I.

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departure. Where such a deconstruction of categories may take us will differ from one chapter to another in this volume. In that sense too our explorations can be compared to journeys of discovery. One consequence of our approach is that each chapter discusses heterogeneous material. Figures and phenomena belonging to the ‘canon’ of history – such as Leonardo da Vinci, dissection, Montaigne, self portraiture, Vesalius, gender, Rabelais, group identity, Louis XIV, Columbus, martyrdom – are jointly discussed with (as yet) rather more obscure ones. There is room for both high art and everyday practices in this volume. Heterogeneity in the use and combination of sources – visual, literary, and other textual sources – typifies every chapter, reflecting the fact that nearly every contributor to the present volume straddles the disciplinary academic boundaries. The joint approach, our shared interest in extremity, and the fact that all of us call upon the methods, material and traditions of several academic fields, are not fortuitous. The present volume is the result of a project developed by the present editors in the course of 1995–97 in the Dutch Huizinga Research Institute and Graduate School of Cultural History, which itself combines and coordinates research in many branches of the humanities. The project set out to be interdisciplinary from the start. Although it began in a Dutch context and during its first years mainly entailed a number of presentations and discussions among scholars living in The Netherlands, the intention was from the beginning to turn it into an international enterprise. Soon several colleagues from other countries joined us in this exploration of early modern bodily extremities, and thereafter debate and discussion have taken place mainly through electronic channels of exchange.

Extremes and extremity: the relevance of boundaries, the core, and the surface Looking for a point of departure and shared interest which could present a challenge on both a practical and a theoretical level to all participants in the project, we chose the theme of bodily extremity. Practically speaking, examples abound of an early modern interest in the human body that reflected a – perhaps new and certainly increasing – preoccupation with the margins of the human body, physical violence, the body in extremis, the crossing of physical boundaries, the transition between outside and inside the human body, and bodily orifices. Moreover, this early modern fascination was closely linked with the quest for further knowledge – or, as it would have been called at the

INTRODUCTION

5

time, curiosity or wonder – about the workings of the human body, as reflected in a professional and public fascination with dissection, torture, and world-wide physical differences between human beings. Again the parallel with present-day professional and public interest in extreme and transgressive forms of physicality such as genetic manipulation, body art, or sex changes is striking. These are all borderline or marginal phenomena in the literal sense of the word and they affect more than physical appearances. Pertaining to the relation between the outside and the inside of the human body, they can throw light on a theme of ongoing interest: the connection between physical characteristics and identity. It is not by chance that the themes of dissection and curiosity (in the early modern sense of the term) figure in several contributions to this volume. Both were central issues in the early modern period and are recurring themes in historical debate. Precisely in the early modern period ‘anatomy’ came to stand for research and discovery in general, for the uncovering of hidden, inner truths and the laying bare of previously hidden secrets.5 As will become clear, there was a darker side to this type of exploration as well. ‘Anatomy’ can also epitomize the violent and extreme side of curiosity: discovery by destruction. Many of the questions in the present volume deal with early modern explorations of physical limits. Inevitably, our questions about these limits pertain not only to the physical phenomena themselves, but also to the ways in which bodies are presented and represented in our sources – in texts, images and objects. After all, the bodies themselves and their physical sensations are long gone. A study of bodily extremities in the past therefore cannot but deal with the boundaries of the rhetorical and stylistic rules that governed such representations at the time. Theoretical considerations were equally important in guiding our choice to concentrate on extremity. The project started from the assumption that situations in which boundaries are crossed can be particularly revealing. This assumption is inspired both by older anthropological studies of the importance of social and symbolic boundaries and boundary markers, and by the work of Carlo Ginzburg on the crucial relevance of the marginal.6 These works have served as

5 Cf. D.L. Hodges, Renaissance Fictions of Anatomy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985). 6 See especially the work of the anthropologists Mary Douglas, Edmund Leach and Victor Turner. Examples are: Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London: Routledge, 1966); eadem, Implicit Meanings: essays in anthropology (London: Routledge, 1975); Edmund Leach, Culture and Communication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Edmund Leach and D. Alan Aycock, Structuralist interpretations of Biblical Myth

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important sources of inspiration and as starting points for discussion, but not exactly as models. One reason why they have been both inspiring and problematic is that they suffer from a lack of clarity about the precise relations between the marginal, extreme, or liminal, and what is supposed to be the core.7 In spite of his long-term interest in questions of historical evidence and methodology, not even Ginzburg seems to have explicitly raised the question of whether such relations – which are, after all, part of an epistemological model – are subject to change over time. That is precisely the sort of problem we are grappling with in the present volume.8 What we certainly do not propose to do here is, therefore, to present another variety of the structuralism à la Edmund Leach or Mary Douglas in which liminality automatically implies special meaning, and any meaningful situation or phenomenon is therefore immediately characterized as liminal.9 We have also tried to avoid both the assumption that the extreme and transgressive should be the reverse of the normal/regular, and its implication that we need only study the extreme or irregular to deduce the normal or regular. Extremes are not necessarily irregular or abnormal. They may be characterized by excess or lack, or they may bear no recognizable relation to what is regarded as normal at all. The heterogeneity of the material used here, the variety of approaches, and the search for relevant contexts are therefore an integral part of our investigations into the relations between core and periphery.

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Victor Turner, The Ritual Process (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969), and idem, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974). For a method of reasoning from apparently irrelevant external details to the main points of a criminal problem, the singularities of a specific illness, or the identity of a painter as epitomized in his style see Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm’, in idem, Myths, Emblems, Clues (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1990); cf. idem, ‘High and Low: the theme of forbidden knowledge in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, Past and Present 73 (1976), pp. 28–41; and idem, History, Rhetoric, and Proof [The Menahem Stern Jerusalem Lectures] (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1999). 7 In this respect, Ginzburg’s essay ‘Clues’ (see note 6 above) still goes further than any other publication we have come across. For a further discussion of these methodological problems see Florike Egmond and Peter Mason, The Mammoth and the Mouse. On Microhistory and Morphology (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); and Florike Egmond and Peter Mason, ‘A horse called Belisarius’, History Workshop Journal 47 (1999), pp. 240–52. 8 This seems not to be the kind of question that is dealt with in the history of ideas either. 9 As is the case in some of the contributions to Hillman and Mazzio’s The Body in Parts.

INTRODUCTION

7

Metaphors and explanations Underlying the whole of this volume in a generally implicit way is the question of whether the theories mentioned above concerning the relevance of boundaries and the marginal can be of any use at all in the historical setting in which the very metaphors that play such a large role in modern western epistemology – superficial, crucial, marginal, anatomy, penetrating, and so on – gained new meaning and importance. To apply a theory before having established whether the theory is part of or extraneous to the phenomenon that is being studied, let alone what the phenomenon consists of, seems to be putting several carts before a lot of horses. If it is no longer self-evident that the surface is superficial, the marginal at the outer borders, the core crucial, or the essential concealed, then an analysis no longer needs to be penetrating or a truth deep. What about the marginal? Where is it, and can it still remain marginal? Should we look for the essence at the surface or rather give up any such search? Proximity between approach and subject – which cannot but entail a new look at metaphors – becomes a different matter, moreover, when extremes, the crossing of physical boundaries, and matters of individuality or identity are investigated. Incisive remarks or skimming the surface take on a new meaning in a discussion of the flaying of Marsyas; the same applies to penetrating views, or getting to the core of the matter when speaking about dissection, or to stretching the evidence while referring to torture. Since we are not anatomists but investigators of cultural history, this book should at least raise the question of whether such metaphors can still be used without further qualification or should be treated rather as clues to changing historical epistemologies. What we can establish is that an interest in physical boundaries, extreme physical manifestations and situations existed and grew stronger during the early modern period. What we do not know and what we wish to investigate is whether this interest can be traced in a wider range of cultural phenomena, and should therefore be given a prominent place in any future characterization of the early modern period. Together, the essays in this volume can be read as an attempt to investigate new contexts in which to investigate the cultural history of the human body as well as the metaphors of research and investigation themselves.10 10 We are, of course, by no means the first ones to explore this domain. The discussion about Renaissance curiosity, and the work of Jean Céard are famous examples. See especially Jean Céard, Marie Madeleine Fontaine and Jean-Claude Margolin (eds), Le

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Finally, we do not propose to deal directly or explicitly with the question of why preoccupations with bodily extremes and boundaries became so prominent in early modern Europe. In keeping with our point of view outlined earlier, we believe that a head-on approach to the question ‘why’ can only lead to predictable answers, pointing to economy (usually poverty), politics (state formation, absolutism, political insecurity), social structures (class struggle, poverty, the rising bourgeoisie), or psychology (collective identity crises, insecurity). To this clear-cut, direct and usually reductionist approach, with its overtones of fragmentation and amputation, we prefer more indirect questions and a non-incisive approach, which circles around the subject and investigates its surface, boundaries and extremities.

The parts An approach which regards as desirable a close connection between a subject and the way it is studied can obviously not lead to a volume in which a single theoretical framework guides every contribution. Moreover, in the course of preparing this volume it seemed increasingly important that each contributor should have a chance to test metaphors and investigate the appropriateness of theories or models current in the various disciplines, and if possible come across unexpected connections with the others. In each of the following contributions, therefore, the author applies methods deemed appropriate to her or his subject: as far as possible the subject motivates the choice of theoretical instruments and the vocabulary of interpretation. Books – as textual bodies – are supposed (and required) to have coherence, to hang together. Given the fact that we are primarily exploring new contexts for the early modern history of the human body and are not looking for long-term developments, chronology plays no part as a guiding principle in the presentation of the various chapters of this volume. They are connected first and foremost by overlapping ranges of interest, while the book as a whole can be regarded as a meandering journey that alternately looks at the surface of the body and at the various early modern ways of using or interpreting that surface, or examines early modern investigative movements into the body by verbal, visual and physical means. This alternation between the outside surface of the body – the skin – and its extremities on the one hand, and its (often fragmented) inside and the dissected parts, on the other hand, corps à la Renaissance. Actes du XXXe Colloque de Tours 1987 (Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres, 1990).

INTRODUCTION

9

highlights four closely connected themes that recur in different combinations in most of the chapters: honour and shame, bodily integrity, identity and self-presentation (whether of individuals or groups), and pain. Early modern extremities, margins and extremes thus help us investigate themes that are at the core of present-day debates.

This ‘body-project’ has been very much a joint enterprise. We would like to thank the Huizinga Institute – in particular Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, Paul Koopman, and the institute’s director Joep Leerssen – for making this project possible, supporting it as well as taking an active part in it. A large number of colleagues participated in the various meetings connected with the project; many papers were presented and the discussions were lively and instructive, especially when they revealed the complications caused by apparently negligible disciplinary boundaries. Not all contributions could be included in this volume, but we hope that we have profited from the discussions. We also thank the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) for its financial support.

CHAPTER TWO

Skin and the Search for the Interior: The Representation of Flaying in the Art and Anatomy of the Cinquecento Daniela Bohde* Skin is the outermost layer covering the body. Were it removed one would see inside the still living body. In the Metamorphoses, Ovid described such a sight on the occasion of the flaying of Marsyas: … and he is all one wound: blood flows down on every side, the sinews lie bare, his veins throb and quiver with no skin to cover them: you could count the entrails as they palpitate, and the vitals showing clearly in his breast.1

Few people in the sixteenth century would have seen a living, skinned body. The instance of Venetian commander Marcantonio Bragadin being flayed by Turkish troops was an isolated case, which provoked horror2 – but pictures of what such a thing looked like came to be widely disseminated. From the mid-sixteenth century, pictorial art featured more and more representations of flayed bodies. These were usually either the silen Marsyas flayed by Apollo, or St Bartholomew, but many * Parts of this text were presented at the conference ‘Körpermarken – Bildermarken’ under the auspices of the VW-Nachwuchsgruppe ‘Kulturgeschichte und Theologie des Bildes im Christentum’. The subsequent discussion was very stimulating for which I am thankful, in particular I would like to thank Mechthild Fend for our continuous exchange on the subject of skin. I am also grateful to Marianne Koos and Daniela Hacke for reading earlier versions of the article and their pertinent contribution discussing the question of the historical conception of identity. 1 Ovid, Metamorphoses, English translation by Frank Justus Miller, 2 vols, vol. 1, book VI, lines 388–391, p. 315 (London and Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1961). 2 Bragadin was flayed in September 1571 at the taking of Famagosta. See the contemporary account by Agnelo Gatto, Morte di M. Antonio Bragadin ed altri, in Biblioteca del Museo Correr Venezia, Cod. Cicogna 2993/IV, Estratti storici intorno l’assedio e la presa di Famagosta 1570 (= 1571), 5r–8v and Breve discorso dell’assedio di famagosta, in Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana Venezia, Cod. It. VII 210 (8188), Guerra di Cipro 1571, particularly 65v–66v.

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anatomical illustrations emerged at that time of dissected, skinless écorchés whose bodies give the impression of still being alive. Yet partly skinned corpses were, in fact, exhibited. They were displayed during ceremonial dissections held in the universities which excited considerable public interest. Skin does not simply function as a covering, but is also a complex sense organ sensing vastly different and varied stimuli and communicating them to the interior body. Equally the appearance and qualities of the skin give information to the outside world. Skin is essential for life, fulfilling numerous functions for the body and its contact with the environment and therefore capable of representing a wide spectrum of symbolic meanings.3 English everyday sayings demonstrate this, with typical expressions such as ‘to save one’s skin’, ‘something or someone gets under one’s skin’, ‘to be thick-skinned’ or ‘beauty is only skin deep’. The same applies in Italian. Skin appears in these expressions as something intimate or as something superficial; often it refers to life or to the actual person.4 The analysis of Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas (Fig. 2.1) and Michelangelo’s St Bartholomew from his Last Judgement (Fig. 2.2) will demonstrate how the act of flaying puts the figure’s identity into question. This occurs in contradictory ways: on the one hand skin is presented as a bearer of identity, on the other it appears as a covering, concealing ‘real’ identity. Here the fundamental question to be asked is how identity was conceived in the sixteenth century. Do these images intimate that personal identity is based on a ‘separating off’ from the environment, or contrarily, that the borders between self and environment are porous? These questions in the past have been dominated by Burckhardt’s concept of the self-conscious Renaissance individual and have since been

3 For the function of skin see Didier Anzieu, The skin ego (New Haven/London 1989), pp. 14–15 (original edition: Le Moi-peau, Paris, 1985), Barrie M. Biven, ‘The Role of Skin in Normal and Abnormal Development with a Note on the Poet Sylvia Plath’, International Revue of Psycho-Analysis, 63 (9), pp. 213 and 220. 4 Claudia Benthien, in her important pioneer study of the cultural history of skin, noted that in some idioms or everyday sayings skin was equated with subject but that elsewhere skin appears simply as a cover in which the subject lives. Benthien suggests a progressive separation of skin from subject which has developed in the course of history. She regards this separation as loss. See Claudia Benthien, Im Leibe wohnen. Literarische Imagologie und historische Anthropologie der Haut (Berlin, 1998), particularly p. 39–58 and 69–100. For the use of the Italian language see Salvatore Battaglia, Grande dizionario della lingua italiana (Turin, 1984), vol. 12, pp. 955–9, lemma ‘pelle’, it contains many examples of the use of language in the Renaissance period.

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Titian, Flaying of Marsyas, canvas, 212 x 207 cm, c. 1570, Krome˘ríz, Archiepiscopal Palace (Arcibiskupsky Zámek) (photo: museum)

given critical revision by social historians.5 Through an investigation of images of the body and the social attitudes to skin, a new access to these old questions can be acquired. But when linking the theme of identity to 5 See Jacob Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien: Ein Versuch (Basel, 1860), in particular the chapter ‘Entwicklung des Individuums’. For the arguments concerning Burckhardt’s idea of the individual see, Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Boundaries and the Sense of Self in Sixteenth-Century France’, in Thomas C. Heller et al. (eds), Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought (Stanford, CA, 1986), pp. 53–63; Ronald F.E. Weissman, ‘The Importance of Being Ambiguous: Social Relations, Individualism, and Identity in Renaissance Florence’, in Susan Zimmerman and Weissman (eds), Urban Life in the Renaissance (Newark, NJ,

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Michelangelo, St Bartholomew (detail from The Last Judgement), 1534–41, Vatican, Sistine Chapel (photo: museum)

1989), pp. 269–80 and Samuel K. Cohn, ‘Burckhardt Revisited from Social History’, in Alison Brown (ed.), Language and Images of Renaissance Italy (Oxford, 1995), pp. 217–34 and John Martin, ‘Inventing Sincerity, Refashioning Prudence: The Discovery of the Individual in Renaissance Europe’, American Historical Review 102 (1997), pp. 1309–42. Rather than using Burckhardt’s concept of the ‘individual’, I prefer the term ‘identity’ which leaves a more open potential for various identity concepts or forms of the notions of self.

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the history of the body the number of problems increases. Little is known about identity concepts in early modern history and virtually nothing is known of the meaning of skin, both in the everyday and in medical or religious discourses.6

The flaying of Marsyas In the myth of Marsyas the silen or satyr, Marsyas challenges Apollo, god of the muses, to a musical contest. The satyr competes with the shepherd’s pipes, aulos, the Olympic god with his seven-stringed lyra. Inevitably Marsyas was defeated and punished for his hubris in questioning the superiority of the god. Apollo cut the skin off his living body. After which the satyr was transformed into the Phrygian river Marsyas – or, according to Ovid, the river was created from the tears of the compassionate.7 In the Renaissance period the Marsyas myth was known through Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Ovid was read in vernacular versions, and was generally given a clear, unambiguous moral meaning: Apollo justifiably punished a presumptuous, daring challenger. A great amount of painting and graphic work portrayed the god as radiant victor, triumphant against the wild satyr. This connects to a socio-political dimension in which culture, wisdom and justice have been juxtaposed against barbarism, stupidity and an overestimation of self.8 6 Anzieu, The skin ego, developed a psychoanalytical interpretation of the relationship between skin and identity, which also offers stimulating debate for cultural history. However, his model of the skin ego cannot be applied to the early modern period, as one cannot prove that an identical notion of self existed at that time. Moreover, if one is to base one’s research on the modern psychoanalytical conception of the self, one encounters great difficulty in recognizing the specificities of those concepts of the self in early modern history. See Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture’, in Patricia Parker and David Quint (eds), Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts (Baltimore, 1986), pp. 210–24. 7 The most detailed discussion of antique sources is to be found in Burckhardt, ‘Marsyas’, in Pauly-Wissowa, Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaften, vol. 14, 2, cls 1986–95 (Stuttgart, 1930); Katharina Volk offers an overview, ‘Marsyas in der antiken Literatur’, in the exhibition catalogue Apoll schindet Marsyas: Über das Schreckliche in der Kunst – Adam Lenckhardts Elfenbeingruppe (München, Bayerisches Nationalmuseum 1995), pp. 13–18. 8 The social dimension of the reception of this myth was first emphasized by Augusto Gentili, Da Tiziano a Tiziano, Mito e allegoria nella cultura veneziana del Cinquecento (Rome, 1988), pp. 114–37 and pp. 225–43. Detailed investigations of the political context of the Marsyas iconography can also be found in Edith Wyss, The Myth of Apollo and Marsyas in the Art of the Italian Renaissance. An Inquiry into the Meaning of Images (Newark and London, 1996), pp. 45–6, pp. 89–90 and pp. 125–7.

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In the sixteenth century, the representation of flaying displayed the excoriated body in an increasingly detailed manner. Apollo appears as an anatomist engaged in vivisection, and Marsyas’ flesh resembles an anatomical preparation (Figs 2.5–2.8). Hardly any painting pays the properties of Marsyas’ skin any attention; usually it is simply an indifferent hide, stripped from a body of muscles. A great exception lies here – and not only here – in Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas of around 1570 (Fig. 2.1).9 The composition is already unusual in that Marsyas’ flayed body encompasses almost the whole central axis of the painting, which is over two metres high. He is tied to the boughs of a tree by his hooves, scraping the earth with his bound arms. The figures around him are ornamentally arranged: the satyr and his pail, the seated King Midas – probably a self-portrait of Titian10 – and the boy satyr with the dogs, one of which is licking the blood running from Marsyas’ wound. On the other side we see a kneeling Apollo, in the upper half his Scythian helper, to the side of whom is a musician with a lira da braccio uninvolved in the action.11 9 Titian, Flaying of Marsyas, oil on canvas, 212 x 207 cm, Archiepiscopal Palace, Krome˘ríz. The first owner or the person who commissioned the painting is unknown; from the early seventeenth century on it has been documented in various collections. For his composition Titian refers to a drawing by Giulio Romano from around 1527, which he significantly altered (50.1 x 66.3 cm, Louvre, Département des Arts graphiques, Paris). Secondary literature on Titian’s painting is extensive; see the bibliography in the exhibition catalogue, Tiziano (Venice, Palazzo Ducale, 1990), p. 370. Aside from the abovementioned work of Genitili, Da Tiziano a Tiziano, and Wyss, The Myth of Apollo and Marsyas, see in particular: Jaromir Neumann, Le Titien, Marsyas écorché vif (Prague, 1962); Philipp Fehl, ‘Realism and Classicism in the Representation of a Painful Scene: Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas in the Archiepiscopal Palace at Krome˘ríz’, in Miloslav Rechcigl, Jr. (ed.), Czechoslovakia Past and Present, 2 vols (Den Haag and Paris, 1968), vol. 2, pp. 1387–415; Sydney J. Freedberg, ‘Il musicista punito’, FMR (Franco Maria Ricci) 45 (1986), pp. 140–52 (first published in the English edition, 4 (1984), pp. 52–64); Jürgen Rapp, ‘Tizians Marsyas in Kremsier, Ein neuplatonisch-orphisches Mysterium vom Leiden des Menschen und seiner Erlösung’, Pantheon 45 (1987), pp. 70–89; Hans Ost, Tizian-Studien (Köln et al., 1992), as well as my dissertation Haut, Fleisch und Farbe – Körperlichkeit und Materialität in den Gemälden Tizians, Universität Hamburg, 1998, Emsdetten/Berlin, 2002. 10 Neumann, Le Titien, pp. 19–20 first formulated the self-portrait thesis and is agreed upon by the majority of researchers. See for a detailed discussion and further considerations on Titian’s painterly self-reflection Bohde, Haut, Fleisch und Farbe, pp. 281–3. Note that not only Midas was famous for his greed, but also Titian. He was said to be so greedy that he would have permitted himself to be flayed for money. 11 The musician is the most discussed figure in the painting, because at first he was mistaken for Apollo who could not be seen as the torturer – see Fehl, ‘Realism and Classicism’, p. 1407. Rapp, ‘Tizians Marsyas’, pp. 72–80 identifies the musician as Orpheus, but as yet few scholars concur with this thesis.

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With his left hand Apollo pulls the skin from Marsyas’ chest and with his right he carefully scrapes over the fibres with a knife. Yet one cannot distinguish between skinned flesh and intact skin. As the spectator tries to discern the impasto flecks of colour, he realizes that his gaze, just like Apollo’s knife, is about to force its way into the satyr’s unprotected body. The satyr himself directs his visible eye in a steadfast gaze toward the viewer of the painting scrutinizing with equal intensity how he himself is observed. Not only do the role of the observed and the observer oscillate, but also that of victim and perpetrator: at the side of the huge satyr the kneeling god appears small and his brutal torture appears ineffective. Marsyas expresses little of what is happening to him, rather than involuntarily cramping his muscles in pain, he simply hangs, head down from the tree, almost relaxed. Titian has almost provocatively positioned this huge, paradoxical body in the centre of the painting. The satyr and his well-lit skin, which offer the observer such a disturbing insight into the inner layers of the body, are in fact the central theme of the painting. Precisely this subject matter has barely been addressed in the extensive art historical literature. To re-centre the arguments around skin accesses fundamental questions about the Cinquecento and Titian’s art, and is far from a marginal issue. Upon further investigating Titian’s representation of skin it emerges that the very lack of decision between interior body and external skin, gives rise to critical arguments concerning anatomy and its search for the hidden interior, and tackles concepts of identity, that are based on kind of ‘separating off’ from the environment. Not least significantly the preoccupation with skin in his work connects with a reflection about painting itself.

The Platonic satyr and the model of a hidden interior The common meaning of Titian’s painting is that Apollo releases Marsyas’ soul out of the ‘carcere corporeo’. This way of thinking about the painting draws from a passage from Plato’s Symposium in which the inebriated Alcibiades compares Socrates with satyrs and specifically Marsyas. Alcibiades felt the similarity between them lay in the fact that both enchanted their listeners – Marsyas with his shepherd’s pipes and Socrates through his words. The difference between them is that the philosopher only appeared to be interested in external beauty, in truth he was interested in that within. In a further comparison Alcibiades likens Socrates’ speeches to opened satyr figures. From outside they

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appear ridiculous but delving deeper one recognizes a great truth and beauty.12 For I say he is likest to the Silenus-figures that sit in the statuaries’ shops; those, I mean which our craftsmen make with pipes or flutes in their hands: when their two halves are pulled open, they are found to contain images of the gods. And I further suggest that he resembles the satyr Marsyas.13

Due to this comparison between Socrates and Marsyas, also known in the Renaissance, art historians have concluded that precisely Titian’s Marsyas hides, within his interior, a great truth and beauty that will be revealed unto daylight by flaying. Seen in this way Apollo no longer tortures Marsyas to death but instead is in the act of freeing his soul from its fleshly gaol. However, no known source exists, which refers the above opened, shrine-like satyr figures to the flaying of Marsyas.14 On the contrary, the emblem of the Accademici Occulti in Brescia, which draws directly from Plato’s metaphor, displays a satyr with a gate in his breast but, significantly, no representation of flaying (Fig. 2.3).15 In 12 See Plato, Symposium, 215 b and c, 221 d and e, 222 a; ed. and trans. by W.R.M. Lamb, Plato in twelve volumes, vol. 3 Lysis, Symposium, Gorgias (London and Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1967), p. 223. 13 Plato-Lamb, Symposium, 215 a and b, p. 219. 14 Neumann presented the first Neoplatonic interpretation in 1962 (Le Titien) modified by Rapp, ‘Tizians Marsyas’ and Wyss, The Myth of Apollo and Marsyas. For the Neoplatonic reading one always harks back to the beginning of Dante’s Paradiso, in which the poet appeals to Apollo referring to the flaying of Marsyas. A translation error made it appear that Dante wished to be flayed like Marsyas. The correct meaning, however, is that he wished to be as inspired as Apollo in the conquering and flaying of Marsyas. See Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Kunst und soziales Gedächtnis’, in Spurensicherungen. Über verborgene Geschichte, Kunst und soziales Gedächtnis (Munich, 1988), pp. 149–233, here p. 191, also Ost, Tizian-Studien, p. 118 and Wyss, The Myth of Apollo and Marsyas, note 32, p. 160. The translation error occurred when Edgar Wind gave Raphael’s Marsyas fresco in the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican a Neoplatonic interpretation in his Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, see the London edition 1968, p. 173. Wind regarded the flaying as a ‘Dionysian purification ritual’, although the Marsyas myth bears no connection to Dionysus and it is Apollo who flays Marsyas (see ibid., pp. 171–6). Neumann’s interpretation of Titian’s painting culminates in seeing Apollo as a prefiguration of Christ (Le Titien, pp. 21–3). Wyss mainly draws on the Platonic metaphor of the silen and Pythagorism in the Renaissance. Referring to the Pythagorean concept of harmony she arrives at formulations such as ‘The holy consonances will envelope Marsyas’ soul and raise it to the celestial realm. Apollo’s cruel sacrifice of Marsyas is reaffirmed as an ordeal of cleansing that will liberate his soul from the “carcere corporeo” and release it into the dominion of the celestial harmony’ (The Myth of Apollo and Marsyas, p. 139). 15 See Rime de gli Academici occvlti con le loro imprese et discorsi (Brescia, 1568), in particular the introduction ‘Discorso intorno al Sileno: Impresa de gli Academici occulti’, no page indication. The motto of the emblem is ‘intus non extra’.

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The Platonic Silen, emblem of the Accademici Occulti, woodcut, frontispiece of the Rime de gli Academici occvlti con le loro imprese et discorsi (Brescia, 1568) (photo: Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice – Foto Toso)

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Titian’s period Marsyas was generally seen as hollow, stupid and presumptuous rather than containing a store of wisdom.16 On an even more serious note, Titian is not displaying a precious, metaphysically charged interior, hidden by skin, but rather that the very skin and flesh, the outer and inner, have been merged together leading the spectator’s eye to the body’s materiality and colour. Rapps’ opinion that the silen’s well-lit breast displays the purification and freeing of Marsyas’ soul is not convincing. What one sees is not the immaterial soul radiating from the opened body, but Marsyas’ skin glowing.17 Thus the Symposium does not provide the philosophical background to Titian’s painting, but rather indicates how the painter is turning his back on this tradition of thought. The heuristic value of the comparison between Socrates and the wooden Silenus-figures works at a quite different level: the hierarchy of outer and inner, core and shell, depth and superficiality becomes the paradigm, which shapes the epistemological model not just in the Renaissance but also of modern science.18 Thus, according to this conception, the truth always lies within, in the interior, hidden by a surface sheath, which one has to penetrate. In pursuit of this model a great majority of art historians search for the hidden meaning of the painting and in so doing neglect the surface, which is offered up. But Titian’s central concern is precisely that of skin and of oil paint brushed onto canvas. Hence it is not the painting which is Neoplatonic but the art-historical method.

16 For the negative evaluation of Marsyas see the vernacular editions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses from Giovanni de Bonsignore, Ovidio methamorphoseos vulgare (Venice by Christofolo de Pensa 1501), fol. 50r up to Andrea dell’Anguillara, Le metamorfosi d’Ovidio (Venice by Gio. Griffio 1561), fol. 95r or also mythographic texts such as Giovanni Boccaccio’s Genealogia de gli Dei in the translation by Giuseppe Betussi (Venice al segno del Diamante 1554), Book 5, ch. ‘De Baccho’, fol. 94r or Natalis Comes, Mythologiae sive explicationum fabularum libri X (Venice 1581), Book 6, p. 408. The most interesting is Bonsignore’s idea, that the flaying made it clear how little understanding was in Marsyas’ inner ‘el poco seno ch[e] elli hauia dêtro di se’. 17 See Rapp, ‘Tizians Marsyas’, pp. 84–5. 18 In particular Erasmus adopted Plato’s metaphor, see Wyss, The Myth of Apollo and Marsyas, p. 130. See also Pico della Mirandola, who, in a letter to Ermolao Barbaro of 1485 compared the conversation between the philosophers with the silens who are outwardly ugly but inwardly beautiful: when one is associating with philosophers one should turn away from the senses and get as close as possible to the depth of the soul, in order not to listen to the earthly Marsyas but the heavenly Apollo – Pico della Mirandola, Opera Omnia I (Basel, 1557, reprint Hildesheim, 1969), p. 354 or see the English translation in Quirinus Breen, ‘Document – Giovanni Pico della Mirandola on the Conflict of Philosophy and Rhetoric’, Journal of the History of Ideas 13 (1952), p. 398.

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Anatomy and the metaphysics of the interior Nevertheless, the Platonic epistemological mode is important in the iconography of flaying. An écorché from Berengario da Carpi’s anatomical work Isagogae breves of 1523 shows, in fact – exactly what Rapp wishes to see in Titian’s painting – a radiating ‘inner body’ as it becomes shed of its skin.19 Thereby anatomical research is strongly shaped by a metaphysics of the inner body: the anatomist skins the body and penetrates its depths in order to obtain new knowledge of the nature of the human. ‘Nature’ here not only refers to the bones, muscles and organs, but also the human soul as described by Vesalius in his famous opus De humani corporis fabrica of 1543.20 Correspondingly many authors of anatomy tracts draw on the Apollonian maxim ‘know yourself’.21 The self is conceived as the inner, which can be revealed by anatomy. Such promise of knowledge made anatomy the leading science of the Cinquecento. Artists in particular were enthusiastic about this enhancing of their finest subject matter, the human body. Simultaneously the increasingly visual orientation of the anatomists required the cooperation of artists, to sustain their results in images. Vesalius’ important anatomy atlas came into being through cooperation with Titian’s studio.22 19 See Rapp, The Myth of Apollo and Marsyas, p. 85 and Berengario da Carpi, Isagogae breves perlucidae ac uberrimae in anatomiam humani corporis (Bologna, 1523), fol. 6v (illustrated in Katharine Park, ‘The Criminal and the Saintly Body: Autopsy and Dissection in Renaissance Italy’, Renaissance Quarterly 47 (1994), pp. 1–33, here p. 27 and in Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned. Dissection and the human body in Renaissance Culture (London and New York, 1996), fig. 17). 20 So claimed Andreas Vesalius about the achievements of anatomy in the dedication of De Fabrica to Karl V.: ‘Quamuis augurer, ex uniuersa Apollinea disciplina, adeoq[ue] tota naturali philosophia, nihil tuæ Maiestati gratius acceptius’ ue procudi posse, historia, qua corpus & animum, ac praeterea diuinum quoddam numen ex utriusq[ue] symphonia, & nosmetipsos denique (quod verè hominis est) cognoscimus’ – Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (Basle by Johannes Oporinus 1543, reprint Brussels, 1964), Dedication, no page indication. 21 See also Francesco Sansovino, L’Edificio del corpo humano … Nel quale brevemente si descrivono le qualita del corpo dello huomo & le potentie dell’Anima (Venice by Comin da Trino di Monferrato 1550), fol. 3r, ‘che Apollo hauea detto, conosci te stesso’. For the topos of ‘Nosce te ipsum’, see William Schupbach, The Paradox of Rembrandt’s ‘Anatomy of Dr. Tulp’ (London, 1982), p. 31–40 and Appendix III, p. 66–84. 22 Critic of anatomy and himself a doctor, Leonardo Fioravanti saw artists as a driving force in the practice of dissection desirous of utilizing their new knowledge to compete with heavenly creation in a sinful way, see Leonardo Fioravanti, Dello specchio di scientia universale … Libri tre, Nuovamente ristampato (Venice, 1572), fol. 48v–52r. Whether the excellently crafted woodcut in De Fabrica is by Titian or can be attributed to one member

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Many artists performed dissections themselves, some of which took place in the artistic academies. Knowledge of the inner body served not only to represent the human figure ‘correctly’, but also to enhance the status of their own art metaphysically. One was no longer compelled to illustrate the body from outside, but now comprehended the inner principles of the body’s construction. The artists were able to orientate themselves directly via nature’s construction plan and make it the model of their own creation.23 The central concept of this was the disegno, the drawing or design. Most saliently it illustrated the anatomically correct outline and the artist’s capability therein. Furthermore it signified the idea or outline which lay behind the artistic production as well as the divine creation.24 The goal was not to reproduce visible things but to of his workshop, Giovanni da Calcar, is a matter of dispute. See Erica Tietze-Conrat, ‘Neglected Contemporary Sources Relating to Michelangelo and Titian’, Art Bulletin 25 (1943), pp. 154–9; Martin Kemp, ‘A Drawing for the Fabrica; and some thoughts upon the Vesalius Muscle-man’, Medical History 14 (1970), pp. 277–88; Charles M. Bernstein, ‘Titian and the Anatomy of Vesalius’, Bollettino dei Musei Civici di Venezia 22 (1977), pp. 39–50 and Michelangelo Muraro, ‘Tiziano e le anatomie del Vesalio’, in Tiziano e Venezia, Convegno Internazionale di Studi, Venezia 1976 (Vicenza, 1980), pp. 307–16. 23 The artist and art theorist Giorgio Vasari insisted on the importance of anatomy for the maniera moderna. See Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori scultori ed architettori scritte da Giorgio Vasari pittore aretino, ed. Gaetano Milanesi, 9 vols (Florence, 1878–85), vol. I, p. 172, III, p. 295 and IV, p. 34–5 and 374–5, VII, p. 146. See also A. Allori, ‘Il primo libro de’ ragionamenti delle regole del disegno d’Alessandro Allori con M. Agnolo Bronzino’, in Paola Barocchi (ed.), Scritti d’arte del Cinquecento, 3 vols (Milan and Naples, 1971–77), vol. 2, pp. 1941–81; Benvenuto Cellini, Sopra i principii e ‘l modo d’imparare l’arte del disegno, in Cellini, Opere, ed. Bruno Maier (Milan, 1968), pp. 869–77; Gian Paolo Lomazzo, Idea del Tempio della Pittura, 1590, in Lomazzo, Scritti sulle arti, ed. Roberto Paolo Ciardi (Florence, 1974), 2 vols, vol. 1, p. 276 and Vincenzo Danti, Il primo libro del trattato delle perfette proporzioni (Florence, 1567), in Paola Barocchi, Trattati d’Arte del Cinquecento fra Manierismo e Controriforma, 3 vols (Bari, 1960–62), vol. I, p. 207–69, in particular p. 231–3. The statutes of the Florentine Accademia del Disegno of 1563 stipulated that dissections took place in the cold winter months, see Detlef Heikamp, ‘Appunti sull’Accademia del Disegno’, Arte illustrata 50 (1972), pp. 298–301, here p. 298. A written acount was made of a dissection in the Accademia di San Luca in January 1593, see Federico Zuccari and Romano Alberti, Origine e progresso dell’Accademia del disegno di Roma (Pavia, 1604), in F. Zuccari, Scritti d’arte, ed. Detlef Heikamp (Florence, 1961), p. 40. This is why engravings of the art academies often portray parts of corpses, dissections or écorché figures: see the Academy of Bachio Brandin by Agostino Veneziano, 1531, the Academy of Baccio Bandinelli by Enea Vico after Bandinelli, c. 1545 and P.F. Alberti’s engraving of an art academy (in Zygmunt Wazbinski, L’Accademia medicea del Disegno a Firenze nel Cinquecento. Idea e istituzione, 2 vols (Florence, 1987), vol. II, figs 11, 12 and 95). 24 Many artists and theorists have concerned themselves with the development of the disegno theory and given it their own particular accent, but the most influential was in fact Giorgio Vasari; see the chapter ‘Che cosa sia disegno’ in Vasari-Milanesi, Vite, I, pp. 168–74. On the history of the idea see Wolfgang Kemp, ‘Disegno. Beiträge zur Geschichte

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imitate the metaphysical disegno. Titian’s conception of painting differed to that of Vasari and other Florentine theoreticians, so he was criticized for not having mastered the disegno and simply being concerned with mere portrayal or reproducing the object’s surface with colour.25 Vasari felt his ideals were realized by Michelangelo, who was not only outstanding in his mastering of the disegno, but actually dissected bodies himself.

Michelangelo and the dialectic of the outer and inner In bestowing greater value on the inner than the outer, Michelangelo seems to correspond to the Platonic model. For Michelangelo the form of the sculpture was contained within the stone. The sculptor’s task was to free the form through an act of ridding the stone of unnecessary material, by means of the forza del levare, the ‘force of taking away’. For Michelangelo this attitude towards the stone elevated sculpture above painting, which required an inferior mode he dubbed via del porre, ‘the way of adding’. In this view material is assigned a role acting as a kind of irksome shroud of the form, rather than revealing any of its own qualities. Michelangelo’s understanding of skin is quite similar, viewed by him as a deceiving layer, concealing the interior.26 Michelangelo’s conception of skin is particularly visible in his representation of St Bartholomew (Fig. 2.2). The saint is allocated a des Begriffs zwischen 1547 und 1607’, Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 19 (1974), pp. 219–40; on the forming of the term by Varchi see Leatrice MendelsohnMartone, Benedetto Varchi’s ‘due lezzioni’: ‘Paragoni’ and Cinquecento Art Theory, doctoral thesis (New York, 1978); on the Venetian discussion see Thomas Puttfarken, ‘The dispute about Disegno and Colorito in Venice: Paolo Pino, Lodovico Dolce and Titian’, in P. Ganz (ed.), Kunst und Kunsttheorie 1400–1900 (Wiesbaden, 1991) (Wolfenbüttler Forschungen 48), pp. 75–95; on Vasari see Thomas Ketelsen, Künstlerviten Inventare Kataloge. Drei Studien zur Geschichte der kunsthistorischen Praxis (Hamburg, 1990). 25 See Vincenzo Danti on Titian in Egnazio Danti, Le scienze matematiche ridotte in tavole (Bologna, 1577), plate 44, quoted in Margaret Daly Davis, ‘Beyond the “primo libro” of Vincenzo Danti’s “trattato delle perfette proporzioni”’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Instituts in Florenz 26 (1982), pp. 63–85, here p. 65 (Fig. 1). See VasariMilanesi, Vite, VII, pp. 426–7 and 447–8. On Vasari’s life of Titian see Ketelsen, Künstlerviten Inventare Kataloge. It should in no way be concluded from the disegnocolore controversy that Titian did not draw or that disegno was not a crucial idea in Venetian art literature. Maurice George Poirier regards the disegno-colore conflict as myth, see Studies in the Concepts of Disegno, Invenzione and Colore in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Italian Art and Theory (New York, 1976). 26 See Michelangelo’s letter to Benedetto Varchi (in Barocchi, Trattati, I, p. 82). For the hidden inner form see the sonnet ‘non ha l’ottimo artista’, in Michelangelo Buonarroti, Rime, ed. V. Enzo Noé Girardi (Bari, 1960), p. 82, no. 151.

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central position in his Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel: the martyr is positioned close below the judging Christ holding in one hand the knife with which he was flayed, and in the other his skin. The flayed skin doesn’t bear the face of the bearded saint, but that of Michelangelo himself.27 Leo Steinberg has forwarded the most advanced interpretation of the self-portrait on the skin.28 For him the point of departure is the discrepancy between the countenance on the skin and the saint. Steinberg postulates that Bartholomew does not have his own skin in his hand but Michelangelo’s. This view transforms the martyr’s functions to those of intercessor, pleading for the painter’s resurrection. Steinberg claims that the background to the self-portrait on the skin is Hiob 19, 25+26 according to the Vulgata ‘Scio enim, quod Redemptor meus vivit, et in novissimo die de terra surrectus sum. Et rursum circumdabor pelle mea, et in carne mea videbo Deum meum.’ In the fresco, Steinberg concludes, Michelangelo expresses the hope that on Judgement Day he will meet his maker clothed in flesh and skin. Steinberg overlooks, however, that the status of skin in Hiob does not tally with the fresco. In the Vulgata hope is expressed of being reunited with the skin, yet in Michelangelo’s fresco the artist is dramatically united via the self-portrait with his empty skin, which has been left to hang at the precipice of hell, situated in the lowest corner of the monumental work. Even Steinberg’s basic assumption that Bartholomew is not holding his own skin in his hands is equally problematic. It is a fundamental facet of Bartholomew iconography that the saint holds his own skin in his hands as a symbol of his martyrdom. Furthermore this is how Condivi and Vasari describe the saint’s figure.29 Michelangelo varies this iconography by projecting his own face on Bartholomew’s skin. More illuminating is Marcia Hall who explains that the discrepancy between the appearance of the saint and his skin is rooted in the Pauline

27 The self-portrait was discovered by Francesco La Cava, Il Volto di Michelangelo scoperto nel Giudizio Finale (Bologna, 1925). See the detailed discussion in Leo Steinberg, ‘The Line of Fate in Michelangelo’s Painting’, in W.J.T. Mitchell (ed.), The Language of Images (Chicago and London, 1980), pp. 85–128, also Avigdor W.G. Posèq, ‘Michelangelo’s Self-Portrait on the Flayed Skin of St. Bartholomew’, Gazette des BeauxArts 124 (1994), pp. 1–14; additionally some observations in Robert S. Liebert, Michelangelo. A Psychoanalytic Study of His Life and Images (New Haven and London, 1983), p. 343–59. 28 Steinberg, ‘The Line of Fate’, pp. 104–10. 29 See Ascanio Condivi, La Vita di Michelangelo Buonarotti raccolta dal suo discepolo Ascanio Condivi, ed. Paolo d’Ancona (Milan, 1928), p. 157 and Vasari-Milanesi, Vite, VII, p. 212.

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conception of the resurrection. According to Corinthians 1:15, earthly life passes with death and a spiritual body rises up.30 The past sinful life could be identified with the skin, as such allusions have occasionally appeared in Christian tradition.31 Significantly, however, Michelangelo himself formulated these thoughts in his own written work, in his poems. Here the difference between Hiob’s hope to regain his skin and Michelangelo’s preoccupation with his own skin becomes even more obvious. A madrigal written for Vittoria Colonna, dedicated to the approach of death, describes how difficult it is to ‘change the hide’. At the same time he felt that the soul would soon depart from its shell and leave this ‘dangerous and deadly veil’ behind.32 Thus he hopes not to be reunited with his skin, but wishes to be ‘separated off’ from the skin. This theme of exaltation and humiliation, self-sacrifice and redemption via excoriation is confined not only to the religious. One meets with precisely these ideas in his love poems to Tommaso Cavalieri, in which Michelangelo expresses the desire to sacrifice his skin for his lover. This split between the soul and the sacrificed skin appears to be reflected in the representation of St Bartholomew through his new glorified body and his old skin.33 For Michelangelo skin appears, on the one hand, not to belong to the person but to conceal him, yet on the other hand is

30 Marcia B. Hall, ‘Michelangelo’s Last Judgment: Resurrection of the Body and Predestination’, Art Bulletin 58 (1976), pp. 85–92. 31 Hall refers here to Tertullian’s commentary on Paul (ibid., p. 87, note 5). More meaningful and possibly more influential was perhaps Petrus Berchorius, Repertorium morale from the mid-fourteenth century, see below. 32 See Michelangelo-Girardi, Rime, p. 87, no. 161: ‘Per quel mordace lima / Discrescie e manca ognior tuo stanca spoglia, / Anima inferma, or quando fie ti scioglia / Da quella il tempo, e torni, ou’ eri, in cielo, Candida e lieta prima, / Deposto il periglioso e mortal uelo? / C’ ancor ch’ i’ cangi ‘l pelo / Per gl’ultim’ anni e corti, / Cangiar non posso il uechio mie antico uso, / Che con piu giorni piu mi sforza e preme. …’ See the expression ‘L’anima, della carne ancor uestita’ in the sonnet ‘Veggio nel tuo bel viso’ (Michelangelo-Girardi, Rime, p. 46, no. 83) and additionally the canzone ‘Io vo, lasso, ahimè’ with the line ‘Or che ‘l tempo la scorza cangia e muda’ in Le Rime di Michelangelo Buonarroti pittore scultore e architetto, ed. Cesare Guasti (Florence, 1863), p. 349. In linking his ‘old habits’ with skin Michelangelo connects with a topos already formulated by Berchorius, who explains that we cast off the skin of bad habits or that we should cut off the skin of our mortal and fleshly determinedness. See Petrus Berchorius, Dictionarium, vulgo Repertorium morale, lemma ‘pellis’, in the Cologne edition 1731, vol. 5, pp. 215–16. 33 See Michelangelo-Girardi, Rime, p. 55, no. 94: ‘D’altrui pietose e sol di sè spietato / Nascie un vil bruto, che con dolce doglia / L’altrui man veste, e la suo scorza spoglia, / E sol per morte si può dir ben nato. // Così volesse al mie signior mie fato / Vestir suo viva di mie morta sopoglia; / che, come serpe al sasso si discoglia, / Pur per morte potria cangiar mie stato. // O fussi sol la mie irsuta pelle / Che, del suo pel contesta, fa tal gonna / Che con ventura stringe sì bel seno // …’ or: ‘Sie pur, fuor di mie proprie, c’ogni altr’arme …’ (Michelangelo-Girardi, Rime, p. 17, no. 33) for another variant on the snake metaphor.

SKIN AND THE SEARCH FOR THE INTERIOR

25

identified with it through the self-portrait, albeit with a debasing gesture. Thus the question of identity with skin and flaying is linked in a contradictory way.34

Identity and flaying The theme of identity is not only relevant to Michelangelo’s work. This is already displayed in the artistic reception of his St Bartholomew. We come across Michelangelo’s invention in an anatomy tract by Juan Valverde from 1556. Here is featured an illustration by Gasparo Becerra (Fig. 2.4) of an écorché figure. The man appears to have just flayed himself, holding up his hide in one hand and in the other, the knife with which he apparently performed the deed. The engraving gives a strong impression that the flayed figure is still alive and that skin is a protective but removable covering.35 Becerra’s illustration went on to influence a Marsyas depiction by Melchior Meier from 1581, where the unity between flayer and flayed is dissolved (Fig. 2.5).36 Here Apollo, who holds Marsyas’ skin before a donkey-eared King Midas, takes on the pose of Becerra’s écorché. The actual features of the écorché are assigned to the skinned silen, who lies at his feet. As Marsyas is presented here – perhaps for the first time – completely skinned and faceless, he becomes an anonymous body. In tearing the skin away from the body of muscles his identity is destroyed, he is no longer a recognizable mythological figure, but instead a nameless écorché. Not even Marsyas’ metamorphosis into a river, which will bear his name, is alluded to in Meier’s print. Meier’s engraving makes it plain how essential it is to be in possession of your own skin. In contradistinction to Michelangelo’s Bartholomew and Becerra’s écorché the flayer has at his disposal the skin of the flayed. 34 Benthien, Im Leibe wohnen, pp. 115–16 develops Steinberg’s analysis further in this direction, that skin represents the soul but without taking into consideration the skin/soul antagonism in Michelangelo’s poems and in so doing the opposition of religiously conceptualized soul and socially determined identity. 35 The work of the Spanish anatomist was translated into Italian in 1559. Other illustrations of Becerra are dedicated to the fantasy of dissecting oneself, see Juan Valverde, Anatomia del corpo humano composto per M. Giovan Valverde di Hamusco (Rome by A. Salamanca, 1559), book 3, plate I, fol. 94r and book 4, plate on fol. 108r. See also Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, pp. 112–18. 36 On the engraving see Jürgen Rapp, ‘Ein Meisterstich der Florentiner Spätrenaissance entsteht, Bemerkungen zum Probedruck mit Vorzeichnungen für Melchior Meiers Kupferstich Apollo mit dem geschundenen Marsyas und das Urteil des Midas in den Uffizien’, Pantheon 43 (1985), pp. 61–70. See additionally Peter Volk in the exhibition catalogue Apoll Schindet Marsyas, no. 14, pp. 165–6.

26

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BODILY EXTREMITIES

Gasparo Becerra, ‘Écorché’, in Juan Valverde, Anatomia del corpo humano composto per M. Giovan Valverde di Hamusco (Rome by A. Salamanca, 1559), Book 2, Plate I, fol. 64 (photo: Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice – Foto Toso)

2.5

Melchior Meier, Apollo with the flayed Marsyas and Midas, engraving, 231 x 312 mm, 1581, Munich, Staatliche Graphische Sammlung (photo: Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München)

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The god appears to have heightened his powers through the doubled skin, which he has wrapped around himself. This could also have been the motivation of the Tuscan sculptor Cosini who skinned a body and wore the flayed hide over his shirt.37 Cosini was a member of a brotherhood in charge of criminals condemned to death. He was obviously used to performing dissections. Cosini’s skinning of the hanged delinquent is connected to three different ways of dealing with the corpse. One was the lay brothers performing the last rites for the executed, the second was the interest of anatomists and artists in the corpses as material for dissections, and the third involved magical practices with body parts of the executed. In belonging to these three ‘discourse communities’, Cosini was empowered to cut himself a waistcoat from the skin of the dead, from which, according to Vasari, he expected ‘qualche gran virtù’. In this particular use of the corpse he transgressed the Christian commandments and, as a consequence, his confessional father demanded of him a burial of the skin. Cosini’s case makes clear the various attitudes to body and skin that coexisted in Cinquecento society and the conflicts that could arise from them. Michelangelo himself is active in this field of conflict. Not only, like Cosini, did he have experience in dissection, but he too was a member of a confraternity in charge of delinquents facing the death penalty, although he appears never to have been active in this brotherhood.38 His way of connecting the artistic anatomic sphere to the religious fundamentally distanced him from his Tuscan colleague. Unlike Cosini his synthesis of various spheres was not directly concerned with his own body but with the artistic representation of skin in the Bartholomew fresco, which in turn referred to Michelangelo via the self-portrait. However, here the concern is not with gaining a second skin, as with Cosini, but about the sacrifice of the skin.39 Through the theme of 37 See Vasari-Milanesi, Vite, IV, p. 483: ‘Trasse una notte il corpo d’uno che era stato impiccato il giorno innanzi, della sepoltura; e dopo averne fatto notomia per conto dell’arte, come capriccioso e forse maliastro, e persona che presteva fede agl’incanti e simili sciocchezze, lo scorticò tutto, ed acconciata la pelle, secondo che gli era insegnato, se ne fece, pensando che avesse qualche gran virtù, un coietto, e quel portò per alcun tempo sopra la camicia, senza che nessuno lo sapesse giamai’, cfr. Park, ‘The Criminal and the Saintly Body’, p. 26. 38 See Andrea Carlino, La fabbrica del corpo. Libri e dissezione nel Rinascimento (Turin, 1994), pp. 105–32, on the Arciconfraternita di San Giovanni Decollato. He does not mention that Michelangelo was a member there, see Samuel Y. Edgerton Jr., Pictures and Punishment. Art and Criminal Prosecution during the Florentine Renaissance (Ithaca and London, 1985), pp. 202–10. On Michelangelo’s experience concerning dissections see Vasari-Milanesi, Vite, VII, pp. 268–9. 39 Even regarding how he treated his own bodily skin Michelangelo appears to be quite the opposite of Cosini. Condivi reports that Michelangelo would go without

SKIN AND THE SEARCH FOR THE INTERIOR

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martyrdom, St Bartholomew corresponds to the Christian as well as to the anatomical debasement of the outwardly. What represents here the earthly shell is purely the skin – not the muscular body. The shed skin is positioned against the glorified body of the risen martyr. Amongst other things this dissolving of religious and anatomical perspectives into the body may evidence how Michelangelo’s conception of the body had a massive influence on subsequent artistic generations. Anatomy, for its part, existed in a complex relation to religion. Before anatomical theatres were built, dissections usually took place in chapels or other interior church spaces, which lent the university dissection a religious splendour.40 But the material attitude to the body, of the church and the anatomist, differed greatly. This becomes evident by Andrea Carlino’s study on Michelangelo’s Rome. There the corpses the anatomists dissected came fresh from their place of execution and were therefore enmeshed in meaningful, religious and juridical ritual. The criminal was not condemned to such dissections, as has often been suggested in positing the idea of dissection as ‘post-mortem punishment’. In actual fact the anatomists had to plead to obtain such a body. In Rome the corpse would be lent from Michelangelo’s confraternity, San Giovanni Decollato, which would bury the remains afterwards. However, those facing execution seem to have been particularly fearful of dissection. The reason for this may lie in the complete and public cutting of them into pieces, which was seen as a violation of the personal and familial honour, as argues Katharine Park.41 In contradistinction to bodily changing his boots for a long period and when he did eventually take them off the skin would come off too, peeling like a snake, see Ascanio Condivi, La vita di Michelangelo Buonarotti raccolta dal suo discepolo Ascanio Condivi, ed. Paolo d’Ancona (Milan, 1928), LVII, p. 195. 40 See the opening of the Bolognese Anatomy lecture of 1540 with the words: ‘Sermonem Anathomicum sacrum et diuinum esse, cui animo et mente non minus attendendum sit quam sacrificijs illis ac sacre celebrationi, ostendit Galenus’, in Andreas Vesalius’ First Public Anatomy at Bologna 1540. An eyewitness report by Baldasar Heseler medicinae scolaris together with his notes on Matthaeus Curtius’ Lectures on Anatomia Mundini, ed. and trans. Ruben Eriksson (Uppsala and Stockholm, 1959), p. 44. 41 A close connection between punishment and dissection was recognized by William S. Heckscher in his influential seminal study on the relationship between the practice of dissection and art: Rembrandt’s Anatomy of Dr. Tulp, An Iconological Study (New York, 1958), particularly pp. 97–106. It is possible that dissection in the Netherlands bore more the character of punishment than in Italy; here a comparative study is necessary. Also Carlino, La fabbrica del corpo, in his analysis of the Roman situation of dissection regards it as post-mortem punishment, although his own research material contains arguments which counter this; see ibid., pp 129–32, and 102–5. See in contrast the very subtle analysis of Park, ‘The Criminal and the Saintly Body’, pp. 18–21. On the similarities between execution and dissection and their common concern with honour see Park, ibid., p. 4 and 12 and the article by Florike Egmond in this volume ‘Execution, Dissection,

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punishment and execution, dissection lacked any kind of religious legitimation. The atrocity of capital punishment claimed to procure redemption of the delinquent’s soul; however, this was not expected from anatomical dissection.42 The anatomists were not interested in caring for the souls of the dissected; they frequently did not attend the funeral rites and masses taken for them. Indeed, sometimes they neglected to return the dissected body parts for the burial.43 On the dissection table the executed apparently lost their identity as Christ and sinner and became, in the eyes of the anatomist, material for demonstration. Even if the dissected body made the heavenly order of the body recognizable, he himself gained absolutely no personal value. The loss of a previous identity is also revealed in the language of the anatomists. They were not interested in the name of the executed or in his crime but purely in his suitability for dissection.44 Andreas Vesalius for example recorded his request for a new corpse as follows: Tomorrow we will have a new subject, I believe, they are hanging another from which I intend to show all entrails, veins, arteries and nerves; after which this subject will be far too dried up and withered.45

The anatomy student Baldasar Heseler expressed himself similarly about ‘nostrum subiectum anathome’, who was about to be executed – unconcerned by the fact that the man was being executed for the murder of his own son.46 It appears the anatomists had gained a view of the body so distanced from the juridical perception of the delinquent and his body that they were able to profoundly ignore the biography and acts leading

Pain, and Infamy – A morphological investigation’. See also Alessandro Benedetti, Anatomice, siue Historia Corporis Humani (Venice, 1502), translated by L.R. Lind as ‘Anatomice or the History of the Human Body’, in Lind, Studies in Pre-Vesalian Anatomy. Biography, Translations, Documents (Philadelphia, 1975), p. 83 and M. Roth, Andreas Vesalius Bruxellensis (Berlin, 1892), pp. 480–84. 42 See Adriano Prosperi, ‘Il sangue e l’anima. Richerche sulle compagnie di giustizia in Italia’, Quaderni storici 17 (51) (1982), pp. 959–99, particularly pp. 971–99. 43 See Carlino, La fabbrica del corpo, pp. 113–17 and 125–7. 44 In contrast to the Netherlands where anatomy was more directly linked to the previous execution. In Amsterdam prepared human skins were put on display in the anatomical theatre where it was observed that evildoers harm when they are alive but are useful in death; see Heckscher, Rembrandt’s Anatomy of Dr. Tulp, pp. 98–9. 45 ‘Nam cras habebimus nouum subiectum, credo suspendunt unum alium, in quo interiorum omnium simul uenarum, arteriarum et neruorum anathomiam uobis monstrabo: nam hoc subiectum est nimis exiccatum et corrugatum iam’, Vesalius in the tenth dissection according to Eriksson, Andreas Vesalius’ First Public Anatomy, p. 176. 46 ‘Hoc mane intra lectionem hanc Curtij supendebatur nostrum subiectum anathome, fuit uir ualde robustus musculosus et pinguis, forte annorum 34. fuerat seruus Parasellij’, ibid., p. 70, see also pp. 303–4.

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to his execution and subsequent dissection. But this abstraction from the person himself extended the process of dishonouring that had begun with the proclamation of the verdict, which had already borne with it the loss of his previous social identity.47 Furthermore, through dissection it is even likely they lost their most final identity – that of sinner. In the hands of the anatomist, they were simply skin, flesh and bones.

Boundaries of the self It remains an open question whether, during the Cinquecento skin attained the function of a border of the self. Research over the last few years has given the impression that the borders between the self and the environment in the early modern period were rather weak. Identity was determined via a superordinate system such as family, social position, religion, gender roles or even the constellation of the planets and was not created by the individual, the self.48 Furthermore, the concepts of the skin in the early modern period appear to confirm that people did not consider themselves to be isolated, separate individuals. At the time, prevailing theories on the spread of the plague were founded on the idea that the pestilence penetrated through openings of the skin – eyes, mouth and nose, but also the pores – and poisoned the body.49 This assumption appears to have influenced how 47 See Florike Egmond, ‘Execution, Dissection, Pain and Infamy – A morphological investigation’ in this volume. The Basel anatomist Felix Platter narrates this episode in his autobiography: he publicly dissected the corpse of an executed thief down to the skeleton. One day the dissected person’s mother saw the skeleton and realized it was what remained of her son and was saddened to see him as an anatomical preparation and not buried. Platter emphasized that the bones were in a ‘beautiful casket’ which may rather have reminded the mother of the corpse’s display on the gibbet or wheel, than brought any comfort to the parent. See Felix Platter, Tagebuch (Lebensbeschreibung) 1536–67, ed. Valentin Lötscher (Basel, 1976), p. 353. I am grateful to Norbert Schnitzler for advising me to refer to Platter. 48 See the titles above in note 5. Benthien, Im Leibe wohnen, p. 69–78 is of the view that skin in the early modern period was porous and the body thus considered open, for this she refers to Bakhtin and Norbert Elias. 49 See Consiglio di Marsilio Ficino Fiorentino contro la pestilentia, place and date unknown [Florence, 1481], p. 71: ‘Se tu mi dima[n]di p[er] quali vie entra questo veleno, rispo[n]do, per tutti i pori del corpo, massime p[er] i piu aperti: & quando entra p[er] bocca & naso & polsi, offende presto.’ See also Gioseffo Daciano, Trattato della peste et delle petecchie (Venice by Christoforo Zanetti, 1576), p. 5. As skin was seen as one of the essential mediums for the transference of disease, the attempt was made to implement it in the healing process. By scratching or wounding it by cauterizing, the idea was to create openings from which the miasma could exit the body. See Nelli-Elena Vanzan Marchini, I mali e i rimedi della Serenissima (Vicenza, 1995), p. 107 and Richard J. Palmer, ‘L’azione

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one cared for the skin; a hot bath was considered dangerous, as it would dilate the pores rendering the skin less capable of protecting the body.50 However, openness and the idea of not being separated off is seen as dangerous and threatening to the person and so it follows that a firm border to the outside world and an ability to protect that limit was desired. Also in the numerous representations of flaying the fragility of the skin is crucial. If anatomy tracts mention skin at all, it is noticeable how fleetingly flaying is addressed or referred to.51 Above all, the intense preoccupation with flaying from the middle of the Cinquecento indicates that the notion of a border between the self and the environment may have emerged. However, for the most part it would have not been experienced as something secure and stable, but as something exposed to danger. This tendency is not to be seen in terms of a hard and definite change in paradigm, from an open to a closed body type. It is far more likely that the various forms of understanding of self existed simultaneously. The consciousness of a border probably corresponded with an increased differentiation between the inner and outer, for which signs can be seen at various levels in the sixteenth century. So writings such as Alberti’s ‘Della Famiglia’ urge the elite citizens to elicit the intentions of interlocutors, but to silence their own. This mastery of concealing your own interior is seen by Ronald Weissman as the result of the difficulty Florentine citizens experienced in reconciling the various loyalties to friends, business partners and family members with whom they were closely connected. According

della Repubblica di Venezia nel controllo della peste’, in exhibition catalogue, Venezia e la peste 1348/1797 (Comune di Venezia, Assessorato alla Cultura e Belle Arti, Venice, 1979), p. 107. 50 See amongst others Gerolamo Fracastoro, De Contagionibus et contagiosis morbis et eorum curatione Libri III (Venice, 1546), in the Italian translation by Vincenzo Busacchi, Il Contagio le malattie contagiose e la loro cura (Florence, 1950): ‘Non ti devi riscaldare molto per non aprire i pori e predisporli ad accogliere il contagio’ (p. 104), ‘i corpi dai pori aperti, rilasciati, caldi e umidi, sono i più disposti al contagio che viene di fuori’ (p. 28). See for bathing Georges Vigarello, Concepts of cleanliness: changing attitudes in France since the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 7–27 (original edition: Le propre et le sale, 1985). 51 The anatomist Valverde wove into his descriptions of skin many notes on techniques for removing it. Similarly his colleague Alessandro Benedetti would digress, after a few sentences referring to the skin, to how the worst tyrants would tear the skin from criminals in acts of great torture. See Benedetti/Lind, Anatomice, p. 88 and Valverde, Anatomia, 1559, fol. 37v–38v. See also Nicolo Massa, Liber Introductorius Anatomiae siue Dissectionis Corporis Humani (Venice, 1536), in the English translation by Lind, Studies, pp. 174–253, here pp. 177–80. Francesco Sansovino donates the skin no chapter of its own but appears to describe a flayed body, see L’edificio del corpo humano, 1550.

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to Weissman individualism developed from these conflict situations.52 Similarly, in his essay ‘Inventing Sincerity, Refashioning Prudence: The Discovery of the Individual in Renaissance Europe’, John Martin sees the development of inwardness as a result of the conflict-ridden relationships to the outside world. Here he refers to the discrepancy in the behaviour of courtiers between outward appearance and inner being. To an even greater extent, according to Martin, in Catholic countries Protestants were compelled to conceal their true convictions as a means of survival. At the same time Reformation literature railed against their dissimulatio as perfidy and raised to an ideal the free expression of the heart. In spite of their opposition, the clever assimilation and ethos of sincerity resemble each other in placing the inner and outer world in a conscious relationship. Thus identity is also achieved via separation.53 A differentiated consciousness for the inner is indicated also by the emblem featuring the platonic silen of the Accademici Occulti in Brescia (Fig. 2.3). Their motto ‘intus non extra’ postulates that their true identity is located in the inner and must remain concealed from the outside world. This tension between the inner and the outer has an impact on Michelangelo’s preoccupation with skin. In his poems he describes the fundamental splitting between soul and its earthly sheath. In the fresco (Fig. 2.2) the painter displays only a part of the split self via the selfportrait on the skin. The soul has no direct representation in the picture. It is simply the emptiness of the skin and the glorified body of the martyr that refer to resurrection, which his soul longed for. Michelangelo’s reluctance to represent an expression of the inner, the soul, distinguishes his attitude to flaying from that of his successors. In his adaptation of the motif (Fig. 2.4), Becerra transforms the religious iconography into the anatomic. Thereby in his work the flayed figure is represented not with a new skin but rather as a skinless muscle man. The inner being that has been made visible here is not to be 52 See Weissman, ‘The Importance of Being Ambiguous’, pp. 271–4 and Leon Battista Alberti, I libri della famiglia, from the 1530s, in Opere volgari, ed. Cecil Grayson, 3 vols (Bari, 1960), vol. 1, pp. 1–341. According to Weissman, individualism and the integration into superordinate structures were not inconsistent with one another, but consciousness of self was created directly from the tight net of contradictory loyalties in the urban centres. 53 See Martin, ‘Inventing Sincerity, Refashioning Prudence’, pp. 1323–33. In his paper Martin again asks questions about the evolving of individuality in the early modern period, by distinguishing himself from Burckhardt’s essentialism as well as from Greenblatt’s radical constructivism. What is specific about Renaissance individualism for him is that the ideal of dissimulatio as that of sinceritas exists simultaneously, both favouring the development of inwardness.

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equated with the soul, for it is nothing more than musculature. Nevertheless, in his strange, post-mortal condition, this écorché becomes a kind of profane risen from the dead. He has lost nothing of his vitality through his excoriation; he appears as living dead in permanent display of his skin and body of muscle. The fatality of flaying and the function of the skin to protect and keep the body together have been negated. Meier’s Marsyas engraving and two similar representations (Figs 2.5–2.7) affect a somewhat different impression.54 Here the mythological context itself indicates that Marsyas will die. Even if Marsyas’ pain is underplayed in the prints it remains present in the background. Thus in Meier’s engraving Marsyas’ pose alludes to the agony of the dying. The main theme, however, is the separation of skin from body. Therein Giovanni Stradanus’ engraving of the 1580s follows Meier’s example (Fig. 2.6). Likewise he reveals Marsyas as flayed muscle man. His skin lies like a thick robe of hide spread out on the ground, the face and hair of the hide remain so intact they possess a stronger personal character than the écorché himself. An anonymous artist of around the same period emphasized Marsyas’ nakedness impressively (Fig. 2.7). In this version Apollo has completely stripped Marsyas of his skin. He leans against a tree, a ghoulish muscle man with his scalp tied to the bough above him. His knees pressed together signal the shame of the naked. The exposure of the inner is presented here as a mortal and dishonouring punishment. Thus the Marsyas iconography fundamentally differs to that of Becerra’s écorché, which displays the flayed body in a disturbing exhibitionist gesture. The development of such drastic images of the loss of body limits in these works may correspond to the idea – suggested by Weissman and Martin – that in many areas of life, it was considered essential to conceal one’s inner convictions. The exhibited inner body of Becerra or those of the Marsyas representations, however, do not correspond to the interiority described by Martin. The impenetrable body of muscle gives nothing away about the movement of the soul. Quite the opposite – stripped of skin, displayed without facial features, they appear void of any spiritual aspect. Inwardness requires the outer as opposite pole. The externalized inner loses the quality of that interiority. Probably involuntarily, the works actually put the Vesal programme into question, which claimed for anatomy, to procure knowledge about the body as 54 On Galle’s engraving after Stradanus (Benediktinerstift Göttweig, ca. 1580–1600) see exhibition catalogue Apoll Schindet Marsyas, no. 16, pp. 169–70. The anonymous drawing (Berlin, Staatliche Museen Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Kupferstichkabinett) is dated from 1580–90; it was presumably made in Florence as Meier’s engraving, see the exhibition catalogue Apoll Schindet Marsyas, no. 15, pp. 167–8.

2.6

Anonymous, Apollo with the flayed Marsyas, pen drawing, 246 x 316 mm, 1580–90, Berlin, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Kupferstichkabinett (photo: Jörg P. Anders)

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BODILY EXTREMITIES

Theodor Galle, Flaying of Marsyas, engraving after Stradanus, 179 x 130 mm, c. 1580–1600, Benediktinerstift Göttweig (photo: Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, K.-M. Vetters)

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well as the soul.55 In spite of the enthusiasm with which the inner body is presented, in these representations of flaying the meaning of skin as a protective and identity forming outer layer, without which the ‘inner’ does not exist, is visible.

Paint as skin, skin as paint – Marsyas’ hide What kind of image of inner and outer does Titian create with the Flaying of Marsyas (Fig. 2.1), if, contrary to all other representations, he does not differentiate between skin and flesh? This unusual view cannot be attributed simply to the difference between engraving and oil painting; paintings of the Veronese school displayed the different qualities of skin and dissected musculature quite plainly (Fig. 2.8).56 Titian does not render an insight into the inner body, but presents a kind of many-foldedness of paint (Figs 2.1 and 2.9). One has the impression of gazing into a mysterious coat of unending skin, always unfolding but never revealing a core. What is in fact gained is an insight into Titian’s painting technique: glazed veils of paint, dry or strong impasto strokes without a finishing gloss are layered over each other. The flesh of the flaying Scythes or the pail-bearing satyr is painted no differently. But at Marsyas’ breast Apollo’s knife and the peeled-back skin make it clear to the spectator that he is staring directly at the pulsating fibres. By the very same token this gaze is also directed at Titian’s technique of paint layering. It was common practice in Cinquecento oil painting to acquire a hue from two or three layers of paint. If working on a light surface, the basic layer would feature a light hue covered by a more saturated transparent glaze. Titian adapted and radically extended this technique; he often painted six layers on top of each other, at times even ten or fifteen coats.

55 See the dedication from Vesalius’ De Fabrica, particularly the quote above in note 20. For the relation between the anatomical inner and the spiritual inner see David Hillman, ‘Visceral Knowledge – Shakespeare, Scepticism, and the Interior of the Early Modern Body’, in David Hillman and Carla Mazio (eds), The body in parts: fantasies of corporeality in early modern Europe (New York and London, 1997), pp. 81–105. He suspects, with regard to Shakespeare’s metaphors, that ‘bodily interiority’ and ‘spiritual inwardness’ corresponded extensively with one another (p. 82). 56 Paolo Veronese, Flaying of Marsyas, oil on canvas, 55 x 72 cm, c. 1580s, formerly collection of Crown Prince Ruprecht, Munich, see Detlef von Hadeln, Paolo Veronese (Florence, 1978), fig. 101, cat. no. 203. The attribution to Veronese is uncertain. See also Apollo Flays Marsyas, oil on canvas, 151 x 218 cm, National Museum, Warsaw. Rodolfo Pallucchini attributes it to Carletto Caliari, see ‘Note alla mostra di pittura veneziana a Varsavia’, Pantheon 26 (1968), p. 370.

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BODILY EXTREMITIES

Paolo Veronese (attr.), Flaying of Marsyas, canvas, 55 x 72 cm, c. 1580s, formerly Munich, collection of Kronprinz Ruprecht (photo: Kunsthistorisches Institut Florence)

The reason for such a multitude of layers was that Titian did not leave unpainted space for a figure or detail to be painted in separately, as was customary, but instead covered the entire canvas with the colours of the background upon which he then positioned and painted his figures. Here it becomes evident that under-drawing, for him, played a subordinate role. The objects were not totally defined in advance, but were revised during the process of the painting itself.57 Titian does not depend on clear outlined form, but upon colorito, the handling of paint

57 See, on the painting techniques of Titian and natural science researches of his paintings, Jill Dunkerton, ‘Developments in colour and texture in Venetian painting of the early 16th Century’, in Francis Ames-Lewis (ed.), New Interpretations of Venetian Renaissance Painting (London, 1994), pp. 63–75; Lorenzo Lazzarini, ‘Il colore nei pittori veneziani tra il 1480 e il 1580’, Bolletino d’Arte supplemento 5 (1983), pp. 135–44 and see the essays by Lazzarini and others in the exhibition cataloge Tiziano, pp. 377–400 as well as the overview on new restorations by Giovanna Nepi Scirè, ibid., pp. 109–31.

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2.9

39

Titian, Flaying of Marsyas, detail of 2.1: Marsyas’ breast

influenced by the open brushwork, the layering of paint and the texture of the canvas. This way of painting as process runs contrary to the disegno theory and the primacy it places on the drawing. Michelangelo’s ideal is here equally opposed: form is not freed from the material, but instead created with the application of paint. Its concerns are not with depth but with the many-foldedness of the surfaces. Correspondingly Titian chose a device for his painting, featuring a female bear, who – according to antique tradition – licks her new born into shape (Fig. 2.10).58 In this Titian makes his interest in the surface, 58 The device and its motto ‘ars potentior naturae’ was first published by Battista Pittoni, Imprese di diversi prencipi, duchi, signori, e d’altri personaggi et humani letterati et illustri … con alcune stanze del Dolce che dichiarano i motti di esse imprese, 1568 (first edition 1562). In 1578 the book was published under Dolce’s name as Imprese Nobili et Ingegniosi, see David Rosand, ‘Titian and the Critical Tradition’, in Titian, His World and His Legacy (New York, 1982), p. 16 and p. 36, note 16. There also exists a drawing of a

40

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BODILY EXTREMITIES

Titian’s device, woodcut in Ludovico Dolce, Imprese Nobili et Ingeniose (Venice, 1578) (photo: Biblioteca Universitaria, Bologna)

licking mother bear (National Museum Stockholm NM 499/1863), ascribed to Titian by Hans Tietze, see ‘Unknown Venetian Renaissance Drawings in Swedish Collections’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts 35 (1949), pp. 177–86, here pp. 185–6. Virgil readily referred to the antique commonplace that the bear’s young were licked into form, to serve for his own art; see Suetonius, Vita Vergili, ed. and trans. J.C. Rolfe, vol. 2, pp. 470–3 (London and Cambridge, MA, 1961, Loeb Classical Library) and Aulus Gellius, Noctium Atticarum – The Attic Nights, XVII, x, 2–3, ed. and trans. J.C. Rolfe, vol. 3, pp. 238–1 (London and Cambridge, MA, 1961, Loeb Classical Library).

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the contact and stimulation, clear.59 Like the bear’s tongue the brush touches the, as yet, formless canvas and leaves a pulsing, multi-layered skin colour. Interestingly enough, this motherly licking is the precise opposite of Apollonian flaying. Here the skin is confirmed and enlivened. With both depictions of skin Titian pits not just two attitudes to the body against each other, but also two methods for producing art. The Flaying of Marsyas, like the bear emblem, has an art theoretical dimension. In the mythological painting it is displayed in the confrontation between aulos and lyra. Since antiquity the two musical instruments have represented opposing forms of art: the enrapturing, sensuous music of wind instruments and the harmony of string instruments accompanied by the word. The juxtaposing of these musical instruments implies a reflection on art.60 The apologists of the disegno theory claim Apollo for their own conception of art. He was predisposed for this, not only as god of the muses, but as god of medicine and by extension also of anatomy. But the decisive factor was that Apollo-Sol was a god of light, and the disegno was seen as divine illumination. Cellini’s sketch for the seal of the Florentine Accademia del Disegno represents this view (Fig. 2.11). Titian subtly takes on this disegno allegory in his painting.61

59 That Titian’s paintings appeared to live was hinted at again and again in the Cinquecento, in particular by Pietro Aretino, see for instance Lettere sull’arte di Pietro Aretino, ed. Ettore Camesasca with commentary provided by Fidenzio Pertile, 3 vols (Milan, 1957–60), vol. II, p. 198 (no. XCDIII). Lodovico Dolce connects the appearance of liveliness explicitly with Titian’s deployment of paint, see Lodovico Dolce, ‘Dialogo della Pittura’ (1557), in Barocchi, Trattati, I, p. 183: ‘E certo il colorito è di tanta importanza e forza, che, quando il pittore va imitando bene le tinte e la morbidezza delle carni e la proprietà di qualunque cosa, fa parer le sue pitture vive e tali che lor non manchino altro, che ‘l fiato.’ See also ibid., p. 200. 60 See Emanuel Winternitz, Musical Instruments and their Symbolism in Western Art (London, 1967) and Gentili, Da Tiziano a Tiziano, pp. 15–30 and 114–36. Furthermore music was an important measure of reverence for painting; in contrast to pictorial art music belonged to the category of artes liberales and enjoyed great recognition. Particularly in Venice the relationship between colour and harmony in music was readily indicated. See Vasari-Milanesi, Vite, I, pp. 179–81; Marco Boschini, La carta del navegar pitoresco (Venice, 1660), ed. Anna Pallucchini (Venice and Rome, 1966), p. 324 and Diego Horazio Feinstein, Der Harmoniebegriff in der Kunstliteratur und Musiktheorie der italienischen Renaissance, Ph.D. dissertation (Freiburg, 1977). Painters themselves also referred to music. Veronese in his Marriage of Kana inserted his portraits of famous Venetian painter colleagues as musicians, see Boschini, Breve Istruzione, in BoschiniPallucchini, Carta, p. 755. See also Erasmus Weddingen, ‘Jacopo Tintoretto und die Musik’, Artibus et historiae V/10 (1984), pp. 67–119. 61 See the chapter ‘Der Schatten des Lichtgottes – oder wie man mit Farbe dem disegno heimleuchtet’ in Bohde, Haut, Fleisch und Farbe, pp. 316–25. Amongst others see also

42

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BODILY EXTREMITIES

Benvenuto Cellini, Apollo, seal for the Florentine Accademia del Disegno, pen drawing, 300 x 217 mm, c. 1563, Munich, Staatliche Graphische Sammlung (photo: Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München)

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In flaying, Titian’s Apollo takes Marsyas’ outer form, but it appears as if he – like a sculptor – wants to shape him with his knife. If observed from a disegno point of view Marsyas’ body appears to be undesigned and formless. The great torso is overlong and tells nothing about the positioning of bones and muscles. This is not altered by Apollo’s attempts at forming. With this in mind one can assign to Apollo the principle of form and to Marsyas that of material. But Titian’s way of painting unites both aspects. On the one hand, through the impasto, the open brushwork and the texture of the canvas there is an emerging of a material language of its own. On the other hand, through the energetic brush strokes one sees immediately how Titian has shaped the paint itself. The brush is comparable to the living tongue of the mother bear and at the same time to the forming knife of Apollo. The aggressive impetus with which Titian worked on his figures is registered in this account by Marco Boschini: When, after a long pause, Titian returned to work on a painting he had already begun, … he investigated it with the most precise attentiveness, as if it was a capital enemy, in order to see if he could detect any flaw; and upon detecting some such thing which did not comply with his most select purpose, he treated it as a charitable doctor would treat his sick, and if necessary cut out a swelling or a surplus of flesh, correct the shape of an arm when the form of the bone was not right, and if a foot had taken an unsuitable position, he put it in its place, with no pity for the pain it may endure.62 the connection of Apollo – anatomy – disegno in Vasari’s description of the Porta del Prato, Vasari-Milanesi, Vite, VIII, pp. 527–8. See in particular the art theoretical writings in which the disegno is compared with light: Federico Zuccari, L’idea de’ pittori, scultori e architetti, Turin 1607, in Zuccari-Heikamp, Scritti, pp. 295, 297 and 306. Lomazzo shows in an allegorical presentation of the arts the disegno as a man with a torch in his hand (drawing, 1580, illustrated in Gerhard Wolf-Heidegger and Anna Maria Cetto, Die anatomische Sektion in bildlicher Darstellung (Basle and New York, 1967), p. 430, no. 72). In the accompanying text to the outline of his seal Cellini stated: ‘La inscrizione d’intorno al sigillo è questa: Apollo è sol la Luce, Cosmo [= Cosimo I. de’ Medici, D.B.] è principio à la gran scuola, e Duce. Il gran Pianeta del sole, questo è, sol la Lucerna dell’universo, et gli Antiqui e maggior nostri lo figurarano e dimostrarano per la figura d’Apollo … et così io l’ho messo in disegno parendomi chè la nostra Academia del Disegno sia degna di questa bella Impresa: perchè sì come questo è la vera Lucerna dell’universo, cosi il Disegno è la sola et vera Lucerna di tutte le Azzioni che fanno gli Huomini in ogni professione … .’ See the illustration with the complete text in Peter Halm et al., Hundert Meisterzeichnungen aus der Staatlichen Graphischen Sammlung München (Munich, 1958), p. 53. 62 See Boschini’s Breve Istruzione of 1674, in Boschini-Pallucchini, Carta, p. 711: ‘e quando poi da nuovo vi voleva applicare i pennelli, con rigorosa osservanza li esaminava, come se fossero stati suoi capitali nemici, per vedere se in loro poteva trovar diffetto; e scoprendo alcuna cosa, che non concordasse al delicato suo intendimento, come chirurgo

44

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These corrections, or pentimenti, are in the underlying layers of the painting, fragments of which are recognizable to the naked eye or can be made visible by X-ray.63 Also recognizable in photographs of the painting is that the dark mark on Marsyas’ breast above Apollo’s hand resembles the knife’s pommel, where it most likely had previously been positioned. Today the large dog’s paws are confusing, firstly the hind legs are difficult to discern from the Satiretto’s legs, and secondly the left front leg melts into a human foot, which once would have belonged to Midas.64 Similarly the white material at the top of Midas’ boot blends into the dog’s saliva. Such a metamorphosis of human foot to dog’s hoof has the effect of a satyr game, played by Titian, on the clarity of forms, but actually came about through chemical changes in the layers of paint. Nevertheless, it is not without significance, for through them Titian’s way of working on forms and the transforming of an object is made visible. These transformations are constitutive to Titian’s way of painting. His continual building-up of layers of paint means that the tree from which Marsyas hangs, is painted upon the background over which is painted Marsyas’ flesh and on top of that his hide. Apollo’s knife is, in fact, only a surface phenomenon of Marsyas’ skin. What actually takes effect in Titian’s painting process is the principle of transformation, of metamorphosis. If one takes Ovidian metamorphosis seriously as the formative paradigm of Titian’s method of painting, a new perspective emerges on his dissolved, manyfoldedness way of painting. Thus the metamorphosis offers a prehensile access to his use of paint. An investigation of formally similar works

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 così aggiustata, se un piede nella positura avesse presa attitudine disconcia, mettendolo a luogo senza compatir al suo dolore, e cose simili.’ 63 The Flaying of Marsyas was investigated and restored by Frantisek Sysel – for his friendly help during my stay in Krome˘ríz I would like to thank him again heartily. His results have unfortunately not been adequately published. Amongst other things he has taken cross-section samples and X-rays (some of which have been published by Gentili, Da Tiziano a Tiziano, figs 116 and 117). Information on the appearance of the Flaying of Marsyas in its earlier stages is also additionally available in a copy of Titian’s painting on the Venetian art market, see Wolfgang Prohaska, ‘Concetti anticamente moderni e modernamente antichi. Giulio und die Folgen’, in Fürstenhöfe der Renaissance. Giulio Romano und die Klassische Tradition (Vienna, 1989), pp. 275–300. The copy confirms the discoveries of the X-ray investigation. 64 Gentili, Da Tiziano a Tiziano, pp. 232–4, maintains that the dog and satyr were failed attempts and were painted later by the workshop who disregarded the conception of the master. It is more likely that it was a later idea of Titian’s which he did not work through to completion, which explains the forms’ lack of final definition. For further discussion see Bohde, Haut, Fleisch und Farbe, pp. 280–81. ˆ ˆ

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demonstrates namely that Titian developed his specific method of painting alongside his debate on the body. Relevant to him are paradigms outside the artistic realm – such as, for instance, the incarnation – which describe the transformation of the body.65 In the Flaying of Marsyas, Titian merges the metamorphosis, skin and art of painting so attentively, that they appear like a single phenomenon. Not only are all the objects in the picture subjugated to transformation in the painting process, but even the layers of paint liken to skin. Marsyas’ breast compels the spectator to simultaneously perceive the skin as motif and the impasto brush strokes as painterly event. This close command of form and content is responsible for the painting’s great effect.

The spectator and pain The impression of vulnerable skin is so strong, that often it is overlooked that skin and flesh are only summarily presented and the flayed Marsyas expresses no pain. Paradoxically, however, both these points increase the emotional effect of the painting. The fact that so many things are only hinted at demands the spectator to actively imagine them and awaken his own bodily sensations to make comparison with that which is represented. This applies particularly to Marsyas’ skin: on the one hand the various hues here suggest the appearance of skin, on the other hand the variously shaped impasto implies the skin’s tactile quality. In the transition from the groin to legs Titian imitates the softness of the fur, not only through the white colour, but also with the milky glaze, lying like a tender cloud on the canvas. At the breast he generates an impression of pulsating fibres, in the way the ochre brush-strokes are placed unconnected alongside each other and are confronted with the flowingly painted pink-white veils of paint. Through this intense forming of the painting materials one gains a complex bodily sensorial impression of this skin, which evokes one’s own skin experience: the eyes stroke over the impasto layering of paint, like fingers stroking the undulating contours of a stomach. If the spectator allows himself to be sufficiently stimulated to connect the painted skin with his own experience of skin he then must experience 65 See Bohde, Haut, Fleisch und Farbe, which offers a more systematic attempt, to see the materiality of various paintings as connected with corporeality. On the subject of incarnation see Daniela Bohde, ‘Titian’s Three-Altar Project in the Venetian Church of San Salvador: Strategies of Self-Representation by Members of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco’, Renaissance Studies 15, 4 (2001), pp. 450–73.

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the flaying like an extreme shock. Titian suggestively demonstrates the components which must lead to pain, Apollo’s knife, the trickling blood and the sensitive skin, this collision takes place only within the spectator. In this way Titian addresses the spectator as body. Simultaneously the alleged painlessness of the silen disturbs and provokes contradiction. The little red bows with which Marsyas’ goat legs are attached to the tree are somewhat bewildering. It is most likely that Titian had originally painted ropes and subsequently exchanged them for the red bows, which couldn’t possibly bear the weight of the satyr’s heavy body.66 These peculiar details give the painting a completely unreal character and Marsyas himself no longer takes upon the real essence of flesh and blood. He becomes a painterly experiment with skin and its relationship to paint – about identity and transformation. At the same time, the materiality and concretions of painting oppose themselves to such an allegorical and abstract way of contemplation. On the contrary, Titian emphasizes the sensitivity and tenderness of the skin and moreover makes of this a model for painting in which he can give paint the appearance of skin and bring it to life with his tongue brush. The open brushwork renders Marsyas’ skin – in contradistinction to the other representations of flaying – not as a firm limit, separating inner from outer. Marsyas is neither separated off from the environment or in possession of an inner core. This is why he has no comprehensible identity. As a mythical being he is not an established form of existence, the half-man/half-animal is transformed in an ever-changing, unlimited river. In Titian’s painting Marsyas gives up his identity as silen not first and foremost by the flaying, but rather as he appears far more never to have possessed any defining limits. The obligations of citizens and courtiers of the sixteenth century do not apply to him, he has no identity to produce or conceal.67 This protean ability to transform, or this nonidentity, renders the Apollonian principle of clarity and self-knowledge powerless and leads the hope of the anatomists, to find the truth in the hidden interior, ad absurdum: ‘inner’ and ‘outer’, just as ‘over’ and ‘under’ are not clearly determined. The interpreter’s gaze penetrates this many-layered surface equally little, particularly when it attempts to discover the sheathed truth according to the Platonic paradigm. The Neoplatonic attempt at meaning, perceiving Marsyas’ soul as being freed from the body is deflected by this coloured skin. Titian does not 66

The above mentioned copy of the painting displays ropes (see above note 63). The opened and changeable Marsyas corresponds conspicuously with the grotesque type of the body described by Mikhail Bakhtin. The reversal from above to below is also characteristic of this, see Rabelais and His World (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1968), pp. 318, 370–1 and 412. 67

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just put the conception of self into question, which is constructed via a separating off and divorcing of inner and outer, but also our cognitive model, with which the truth is buried deep in a concealed core. Instead Titian offers the spectator skin and the paint as a means of selfreflection.

CHAPTER THREE

‘Ogni pittore dipinge sé’: On Leonardo da Vinci’s Saint John the Baptist Robert Zwijnenberg Leonardo da Vinci’s painting Saint John the Baptist (c. 1510 – Fig. 3.1) belongs to his late works and is one of his most enigmatic works. Over the years, the painting has evoked mixed feelings about its meaning. For instance, it has been called ‘the effusion of an aging homosexual’,1 and by some contemporary authors the painting has been considered as blasphemous.2 These responses are not surprising, given the many ambiguous and confusing elements of the image. In Leonardo literature, this painting is considered as one of the best examples of a painting in which Leonardo integrated his late scientific knowledge of optics and anatomy with his painterly knowledge of optical phenomena and of movements of the human body.3 Carlo Pedretti therefore declares about Saint John: ‘the nocturnal St John was painted to illustrate an artistic theory, and was therefore intended as a paradigmatic work’.4 Pedretti’s description, however, does not explain the enigmatic character of the painting. Kenneth Clark considered John as Leonardo’s double: ‘the spirit which stands at his shoulder and propounds unanswerable riddles’.5 In this article, I will propose an interpretation of Saint John the Baptist that will make Clark’s lyrical description more

1 Quoted in Martin Kemp, Leonardo da Vinci. The marvellous Works of Nature and Man (London: Dent, 1981), p. 341. 2 See M.A. Lavin, ‘The Joy of the Bridegroom’s Friend: Smiling Faces in Fra Filippo, Raphael, and Leonardo’, in Moshe Barasch and Lucy Freeman Sandler (eds), Art the Ape of Nature. Studies in Honor of H.W. Janson (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1981) p. 210, note 58. 3 Martin Kemp, ‘Leonardo and the Visual Pyramid’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XL (1977), p. 148 and see also Kemp, Leonardo da Vinci, p. 334. 4 Carlo Pedretti, Leonardo. A study In Chronology and Style, reprint edn (New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1982), p. 169. 5 Kenneth Clark, Leonardo da Vinci (Harmondsworth: Penguin Press, 1967), pp. 153–6. See Lavin, ‘The Joy of the Bridegroom’s Friend’, for other interpretations.

ON LEONARDO DA VINCI’S SAINT JOHN THE BAPTIST

3.1

49

Leonardo da Vinci, St John the Baptist, c. 1510, 69.2 x 57.2 cm, Louvre, Paris (photo: Kunsthistorisch Instituut, Amsterdam)

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tangible. First, I will discuss Leonardo’s painting in order to explain why it is so confusing to a fortuitous beholder. In the second section, Leonardo’s response to the Tuscan aphorism ‘ogni pittore dipinge sé’ is discussed, and its consequences to his notions on painting. It will become clear that to Leonardo the depiction of the human body is of crucial importance to his notions of painting. In the following section, Saint John the Baptist is related to a Leonardo drawing that will put the painting in a different light. In the concluding sections, I will take Leonardo’s response to the Tuscan aphorism and my meditations on the drawing as a starting point to a new interpretation of Saint John the Baptist.

Saint John the Baptist? Even a brief examination of the painting will make clear immediately why it is so confusing and difficult to comprehend. John appears from the dark by a light that illuminates him from above.6 His face is a sharp oval with long curly hair falling alongside. The hair is depicted in Leonardo’s characteristic way: it flows like swirling water.7 When we look at the expression on his face and the movement of his mouth, it is not immediately apparent which emotions run through his mind. John smiles in the same way as Saint Anne in Leonardo’s cartoon of Madonna, Child, Saint Anne, and Saint John (c. 1499) – in which Saint Anne also makes the same pointing gesture as Saint John in the painting – and in his painting of Madonna, Child, Saint Anne, and a Lamb (from 1508 onwards).8 John does not have Mona Lisa’s smile, that gives her face a steady appearance and that suggests that she controls her feelings. The smile of John (and of Saint Anne) causes more facial motion and gives the impression of a turbulent state of mind. In any case, he appears much less sympathetic than Mona Lisa, because of his somewhat frenetic smile and his squinting eye. Moreover, because of his squinting, it appears as if he looks at us, but 6 According to Paul Barolsky, ‘The mysterious meaning of Leonardo’s Saint John the Baptist’, Source: Notes in the History of Art, VIII, 3 (1989), p. 12, we have to consider this light in relation to the Gospel according to St John, 1:6–7, where St John the Baptist is described as: ‘There was a man sent from God, whose name was John’ who came ‘to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe’. 7 See for Leonardo’s studies on water and the resemblance he detected between the conduct of water and of hair: C. Zammattio, ‘Mechanics of Water and Stone’, in L. Reti (ed.), The Unknown Leonardo (New York: Abradale, 1990), pp. 190–216. 8 See for a similar conclusion about this smile: Barolsky, ‘The mysterious meaning’, p. 14.

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we are not entirely sure of this. Certainly, he has spotted us, because he points out something to us, but we do not have his undivided attention. He gives the impression of being taken in by matters much more important than we are. His expression seems to be a mixture of irony, fondness for mocking, sensuality and detachment, but also of amazement, bliss and compassion. His face seems not apt to the Holy John. That Leonardo none the less intended to depict Saint John is evident from traditional iconographical elements such as the wooden cross and the animal skin, and also from the pointing finger. However, it is not just his face that problematizes the identity of John. His chubby shoulders and arms seem hardly appropriate to a biblical hermit that leads an ascetic life somewhere in the Sinai Desert. Leonardo’s Saint John’s body does not show signs of such an ascetic life.9 It is not the age of John, but the way that his body is depicted that hinders us from identifying definitively the depicted person as Saint John.10 Perhaps this contradiction between depicted attributes and body explains why some considered the painting as blasphemous. At first sight, it appears that Leonardo gave more attention to John’s face than to his body, until on a closer inspection we realize how complicated and balanced his posture is. With his left arm, he holds up an animal skin that he presses against his body. The fingertips of his left hand push softly into his left chest; that is, he points with his left hand to his heart. His upper body is depicted almost at right angles to the picture plane, to which his right arm runs parallel. Anyone who cares to imitate with his own body the body posture of John, notices that it is easier if one looks up to the wooden cross than to the beholder, as John seems to do. This means that Leonardo depicted John at the very moment that he turned his head to the beholder. The folds in his neck indicate this specific movement of his head. Our understanding of John’s body posture might help to explain the strange expression on his face. Just before the moment that John turned to us, he – looking at the cross – must have experienced something that 9 The differences between for example Donatello’s John sculptures (1430–40) and Leonardo’s John is striking; in the Donatello sculptures the demeanour and features of John display very clearly his ascetic lifestyle. 10 From the Bible is not clear at what age John retreated into the wilderness; he began preaching in public when he was 27 or 28, he died at the age of 30; see H. Kraft, Die Entstehung des Christentums (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1981), p. 10. Friedrich-August Von Metzsch, Johannes der Täufer – Seine Geschichte und seine Darstellung in der Kunst (München: Callway, 1989), p. 45, suggests that it was custom that a preacher retreated into solitude for a period of six years before he began preaching in public.

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has deeply confused him and has filled his mind with incomprehensible emotions, which surfaces in his face. He is too overpowered by his emotions to be able to respond to our presence in a balanced manner. We are witnessing a very intimate and private moment in the life of John (that might partly explain our unease with the painting), possibly the moment when he fully comprehended his role as a precursor of Christ.11 If for this special moment, Leonardo considered the physique of John unimportant, or that Leonardo sought to depict an opposition between mind and body by the plump body of John, I do not dare to say. According to Barolsky, the fundamental ambiguity in the painting is the result of ‘an ambiguity born of the problematic relation in Leonardo’s painting, as in Christianity itself, between the spirit and the flesh, an ambiguity born of Leonardo’s audacious and (dare one say it?) flawed attempt to make visible the divine mystery of the spirit in flesh’.12 In any case, Leonardo has devoted much time and attention to the depiction of the body and its posture as an essential element of the emotions that John radiates.13 He took great care over visual qualities of the skin under different grades of light and over anatomical peculiarities such as the folds in the skin of the neck. The body of John reveals Leonardo’s pleasure in the depiction of a human body. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the body does not seem to fit the biblical ascetic Saint John. It is an intriguing aspect of the painting that on the one hand Leonardo devoted so much painterly attention to the body, while on the other hand the body is a disturbing factor in the story of Saint John the Baptist.

Body and mind The special role of the human body in Leonardo’s art of painting can be explained by his response to the aphorism ‘ogni pittore dipinge sé’, ‘every painter paints himself’. This Tuscan aphorism appeared for the first time in Italian literature between 1477 and 1490, for example, in an anthology of droll stories from the period 1477–79, ascribed to Angelo Poliziano, and some years later in a sermon of Gerolamo Savonarola from 1497.14 11

It could be the moment described in Luke 3:2–3. Barolsky, ‘The mysterious meaning’, p. 15. 13 The pointing gesture of John will be discussed later in this essay. 14 See for a discussion of these examples: Frank Zöllner, ‘Ogni pittore dipinge sé’, in Matthias Winner (ed.), Der Künstler über sich in seinem Werk (Weinheim: VCH, 1992), p. 138 and pp. 142–3. See also André Chastel, Art et humanisme à Florence au temps de Laurent le Magnifique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), pp. 102–5. 12

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Leonardo’s remarks on this aphorism can be found in several of his manuscripts, the earliest remark is from 1492 and the latest from after 1510.15 Several of them entered the so-called Trattato della Pittura.16 This treatise on painting is compiled by Francesco Melzi, a pupil and friend of Leonardo, who after Leonardo’s death copied notes on painting from Leonardo’s manuscripts. Leonardo left behind approximately 6,500 sheets of texts and drawings in notebooks and a collection of loose leaves. These probably represent only a fragment of the original number he bequeathed to Melzi. In general, Leonardo’s notebooks are not elaborate treatises that were meant to be read by others. For the greatest part, the notebooks are filled with fragmentary expositions on a multitude of topics, ranging from well-worn commonplaces to highly original and surprising scientific insights, which he seems to have written in the first place only for himself. Moreover, during his lifetime, his notions and ideas changed considerably.17 That Leonardo over the years did not change but repeated his response to ‘ogni pittore dipinge sé’ might indicate the importance that he attached to his views on this subject. ‘Every painter paints himself’ can be explained in several ways. It could refer to the recognition of a personal style of painting of every individual painter.18 It may also refer to the observation that painters often use stereotypes: a particular type of face or bodily gestures. If we follow this line of thought, most painters have a limited number of means of expression, and this can lead to a lack of variety and dull repetitions in paintings. Complaints about this, for instance about Botticelli, can be found in treatises from the fifteenth century

15 Martin Kemp, ‘Ogni pittore dipinge sé: A Neoplatonic Echo in Leonardo’s Art Theory?’, in Cecil. H. Clough (ed.), Cultural Aspects of the Italian Renaissance (Essays in Honour of Paul Oskar Kristeller) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976), p. 311. 16 Here is used the edition of Heinrich Ludwig, Lionardo da Vinci: Das Buch von der Malerei nach dem Codex Vaticanus (Urbinas) 1270, in drei Bänden, Quellenschriften für Kunstgeschichte und Kunsttechnik des Mittelalters und der Renaissance (Wien: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1882) (‘Lu’ followed by a section number). For the English translation A.P. McMahon, Treatise on Painting (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959) is used (‘McM’). See for Leonardo’s response to the aphorism: Lu 137, 105, 108, 109, 186, 282, 499. Furthermore, I refer to the anthology of Leonardo’s writings by J.P. Richter, The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1883). References to Richter are indicated by a ‘R’ followed by a section number. 17 See for an extensive discussion of Leonardo’s manuscripts and his method of working: Robert Zwijnenberg, The Writings and Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci – Order and Chaos in Early Modern Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 18 See Zöllner, ‘Ogni pittore dipinge sé’, p. 138, and Kemp, p. 314.

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onwards.19 The aphorism can also be explained as a description of the process of artistic creation. The painter realizes in paint the forms that exist in his mind; that is, a painter represents his inner self or soul in paint.20 It is striking that Leonardo only discusses the aphorism in a negative sense, and to him it is certainly not an accurate description of the process of artistic creation. For instance, he writes: ‘The painter who has clumsy hands will make those in his work like his own’ (McM 85). And, ‘if you should be ugly, you would select faces that are not beautiful and you would paint ugly faces, as do many painters, whose painted figures often resemble that of their master’ (McM 276). And, ‘It is a common defect of Italian painters that one recognises the expression and figure of the artist throughout the many figures painted by him’ (McM 273). Elsewhere he speaks of ‘a common vice of painters, to delight in making things similar to themselves’ (McM 438). In Leonardo’s opinion a painter must seek to conquer this ‘massimo diffetto de pittori’ (Lu 108 – 1505/10), if he ever wishes to become a good painter. To reach this goal, Leonardo reveals the cause of this defect: Having often considered the cause of this defect, it seems to me one must conclude that the soul which runs and directs each body is really that which forms our judgement before it is our own judgement. Thus it has developed the whole shape of a man, as it has deemed to be best … This judgement is so powerful that it moves the painter’s arm and makes him copy himself. [McM 86, see also McM 437]

The only way that a painter can overpower this defect is by introspection and by turning to nature: The painter ought to make his figure according to the rule of a natural body, which is commonly thought to be praiseworthy in its proportion. Furthermore, he should measure himself and ascertain in what part his person varies much or little from that already termed praiseworthy. And when he has secured this knowledge, he protects himself through all his study from falling into the same faults in the figures created by him, which are found in his person. [McM 87]21

At the basis of Leonardo’s arguments lies the idea that the soul forms a 19

See for examples: Zöllner, ‘Ogni pittore dipinge sé’, pp. 139–41. See Kemp, ‘Ogni pittore dipinge sé’, p. 312, who considers this a Neoplatonic view; he argues that Leonardo did not adhere to such a view. I will follow Kemp in this conclusion. 21 See for an extensive discussion of these Trattato-sections: Kemp, ‘Ogni pittore dipinge sé’. 20

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body.22 We can trace this idea in literature from the Antique until late in the nineteenth century,23 and it ultimately goes back to Aristotle’s ideas of form and matter, and the close relationship between soul and body.24 From Leonardo’s vocabulary, it appears that he did not adopt this idea directly from Aristotle, but that he received it from the Hippocratic tradition.25 In Leonardo’s reception of this idea, the body is not an object to the soul. The soul needs the body to be able to exist in the world and to enjoy her beauty. The senses of the body prevent that – the body is to the soul ‘a dark prison’ (McM 12). Body and soul are interdependent, and cannot function or exist autonomously from each other.26 In addition, Leonardo considers the sense of sight as the most important sense as it allows the soul to perceive the world and satisfy the soul’s need for beauty.27 This important role of sight has to do with Leonardo’s efforts to raise painting to the level of an ars liberalis. Most of Leonardo’s arguments for this purpose are gathered in the parte prime of the Trattato della Pittura, the so-called Paragone.28 Leonardo’s high appraisal of the sense of sight, the eye, is based primarily on his knowledge of medieval optics.29 To Leonardo, the geometric character of medieval optics was an important reason to assign to visual perception a critical capacity to acquire knowledge. Mathematical lines transport to the eye the images of an object; this ensures that the eye receives as direct and accurate 22 See for instance R. 837, and a fragment from Forster III. 38a (c. 1495) in Carlo Pedretti, The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci, compiled and edited from the original manuscripts by Jean Paul Richter. Commentary, 2 vols (Oxford: Phaidon II, 1977), pp. 234–5. 23 Cf. Georg Braungart, Leibhafter Sinn: der andere Diskurs der Moderne (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1995), pp. 89–107. 24 See W.K.C. Guthrie, Aristotle: an Encounter, A History of Greek Philosophy, VI (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 203–33 and pp. 282–5. 25 See Kemp, ‘Ogni pittore dipinge sé’, p. 315. 26 Cf. Aristotle, De Anima, 403a3–10: ‘It would seem that in most cases soul neither acts nor is acted upon apart from the body, as e.g. in anger, confidence, desire and sensation in general. Thinking, if anything, looks like something peculiar to the soul, but if thought is a sort of imaging, or dependent on imaging, not even that can take place without a body.’ See Pedretti, The Literary Works, II, p. 234. 27 See, among others, Lu 15 and Lu 19. 28 See for a transcription of the Italian text, an English translation, and an extensive commentary: Clarie J. Farago, Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Paragone’. A Critical Interpretation with a new Edition of the Text In the Codex Urbinas, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, Vol. 25 (Leiden: Brill, 1992). 29 See for Leonardo’s knowledge of medieval optics: Kemp, ‘Leonardo and the Visual Pyramid’, pp. 129–49; and Bruce Eastwood, ‘Alhazen, Leonardo and late Speculation on the Inversion of Images in the Eye’, An International Review of the History of Science and Technology from the Thirteenth Century, 43, 5 (1986), pp. 413–46.

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knowledge as possible from an object. That is why Leonardo describes the eye as ‘the prince of mathematics’ (McM 34), and optics as a mathematical science. His description of painting as a mathematical science (McM 1) is based on this concept of medieval optics. A painting can convey scientific knowledge because it can offer to the eye true images. It is therefore possible to see Leonardo’s response to ‘ogni pittore dipinge sé’ as part of a chain of arguments to prove that painting is a science. Considered in this way, his expositions have not a limited significance, as just good advice or a warning to the painter, but they are an element of his endeavour to grasp the essence of painting (and to elevate its social and scientific position). This leads to my first conclusion. To Leonardo, painting can only be understood properly if the special and tight relationship between body and soul is assessed critically. On the one hand, this relationship manifests itself most succinctly when painting a human body. To Leonardo, the depiction of a human body is an activity par excellence to experience the undesired power of this relationship. On the other hand, the depiction of the human body is a decisive act. It reveals if the painter has succeeded in invoking the powers of the soul. The depiction of a human body demands self-inspection and intellectual control of the painter’s mind over the deplorable inclination of the soul to move the painter’s arm and to make a copy of itself. As well as an explanation of the aphorism ‘ogni pittore dipinge sé’, Leonardo considered the tight relationship between body and soul in general as an important element of painting. Again and again in his manuscripts he underlines the importance to painting of the relationship between feelings and outer expression. He considers the body as a locus of emotions and as the most important source for the moving effect of a painting. For instance, he writes: ‘The most important things that can be found in the analysis of painting are the movements appropriate to the states of mind of each living creature, such as desire, contempt, anger, pity, and the like’ (McM 111). Elsewhere, he writes: ‘The good painter has two principal things to paint: that is, man and the intention of his mind. The first is easy, the second difficult, because it has to be represented by gestures and movements of the parts of the body’ (McM 248).30 Painting is in the first place about expressing and evoking emotions, with the human body as its point of focus, and as its basis the tight relationship between soul and body, or inner and outer.31 30 Cf. among others, Lu 180, Lu 185, 189, 285, 286, 294, 296, 297, 298, 325, 368, 370, 373, 376 and 409. 31 Of course, this relationship is important to Renaissance painting as a whole. Leon

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All this underscores my initial assumption that to Leonardo the problems of painting, technical as well as intellectual, become manifest in the act of painting a human body. I will elaborate on this assumption with an analysis of a remarkable drawing of Leonardo, which also holds importance to my interpretation of Saint John the Baptist.

John and an angel Leonardo painted Saint John the Baptist in the same period in which he painted another painting that has been lost, and that we only know from copies: The Angel of the Annunciation (c. 1506–08). From the copies, it appears that there is substantial resemblance between the depiction of the Angel and John.32 It is not strange that Leonardo saw John in connection to the Angel of the Annunciation, since they are both messengers announcing the arrival of Christ.33 Lavin regards this connection between John and the Angel as a possible explanation for the angelic guise of John.34 According to Clark, the frontal pose of Leonardo’s angel was new in the tradition of the depiction of the Annunciation; this pose places the beholder in the position of Maria.35 The visual resemblance between the painting of the Angel and Saint John the Baptist is repeated in one of Leonardo’s drawings.36 It is a drawing from c. 1510–15; this means that it was drawn after The Angel of the Annunciation was painted and after or during painting Saint John the Baptist.37 In this regard, the drawing can be considered perhaps as Leonardo’s meditation on the two paintings (Fig. 3.2). It seems that the drawing displays an androgenic person in his most glorious state. Leonardo obviously did not depict his own body in this drawing. The head, the hair and the right hand are the most elaborated Battista Alberti, De Pictura (1435), described this relationship for the first time; in this treatise he presents a theory of art based on classical rhetoric. 32 See for this relationship, and for illustrations of the copies: Pedretti, Leonardo, pp. 116–17. 33 See for a discussion of the similarities between John and the Angel of the Annunciation: Lavin, ‘The Joy of the Bridegroom’s Friend’, p. 203. 34 Ibid., p. 203: ‘he portrays John in angelic guise’. 35 Clark, Leonardo da Vinci, p. 174. 36 See for dating and an extensive discussion of this drawing: Carlo Pedretti, ‘The Angel in the Flesh’, Achademia Leonardi Vinci, IV (1991), pp. 24–48. 37 Pedretti, Leonardo, pp. 166–7, argues at length that John the Baptist is painted in the period 1508–09. Kemp, Leonardo da Vinci, p. 339, dates the painting circa 1509–10. According to Pedretti, ‘The Angel in the Flesh’, p. 38, the painting is from 1510–15, thus, from the same period in which the drawing ‘The angel in the flesh’ is made; Pedretti does not substantiate this dating.

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Leonardo da Vinci, The Angel in the Flesh, c. 1510–15, 26.8 x 19.7 cm, black coal on paper, private collection, Germany (photo: Kunsthistorisch Instituut, Amsterdam)

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elements of the drawing. The contours of the right arm, the body and the penis are only indicated. Because the person pulls up his garment, he exhibits in an active way his genitals to the beholder. The mirroring of the pointing gesture of the arm and the penis strengthens this impression of confrontation. The person is aware of and reacts to the beholder: he clearly exposes his body. The expression on his face supports his confrontational attitude. He does not have the squinting eye of John, and he appears to look at us more directly than John does, although his gaze seems somewhat withdrawn. Because of his smile his attitude wavers between bête and sardonic. The depicted person has no attributes that immediately identify him unambiguously as a particular character. For instance, he could be Bacchus. This would explain the strange expression on his face: Bacchus is often depicted slightly drunk.38 The androgynous appearance is also consistent with the tradition of Bacchus depictions,39 and in the Dionysian festival, the phallus was an important attribute.40 However, Bacchus’ most important attribute, the thyrsus, is missing. Because of the erect penis, the drawing can also be a depiction of Priapus, in the Italian Renaissance known from Antique poems and Antique statues. However, the androgynous appearance does not belong to Priapus, though Pedretti points to Renaissance treatises in which Bacchus and Priapus are conflated.41 According to Pedretti, the drawing can be considered as an expression of Leonardo’s pagan–Christian syncretism.42 Because of the vital visual resemblance with the painting The Angel of the Annunciation, the figure in the drawing could also be the Angel 38 See for instance Piero di Cosimo’s painting The Discovery of Honey. Piero was a friend of Leonardo. 39 The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature. Compiled and edited by Sir Paul Harvey, Oxford (Oxford University Press, 1937), pp. 147–8: ‘[Bacchus] is frequently represented as a youth of rather effeminate expression, with luxuriant hair, reposing with grapes or a wine-cup in hand, or holding the thyrsus, a rod encircled with wines or ivy.’ 40 Real-Encyclopädie der Classischen Alterthumswissenschaft, Herausgeber A. Pauly (Stuttgart: Verlag der F.B. Meßler’schen Buchhandlung, 1842), zweiter Band, p. 1058: ‘Niemals fehlte bei den fröhlichen Festen der Phallos, dieses alte Symbol der zeugrischen Natur, welcher umgetragen und mit spaßhaft anzüglichen Liedern und Neckereien begleitet wurde.’ Cf. Augustinus, De Civitate Dei, VI.9 and VII.3, who describes and disapproves of the obscenities in honour of Bacchus. 41 Pedretti, ‘The Angel in the Flesh’, p. 42–3. Moreover, Pedretti refers to a depiction of Priapus in Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (l 3 r), and he discusses a drawing in Cesariano’s edition of Vitrivius’ De Architectura from 1521, of an homo ad quadratum with fully erect member and a crown of wine leaves over his long curly hair, who Pedretti identifies as Bacchus. 42 See for this syncretism, and the Renaissance taste for hybrids, such as Hermaphrodites, in which opposites coincide, also Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1958), pp. 158–75.

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of the Annunciation.43 That seems improbable, given the clear sign of sexual titillation and the expression of his face. The drawing could be considered though as Leonardo’s obscene parody of the Annunciation. Instead of the angel that surprises Maria with his message, the drawing displays a feminine youth cheerfully showing his body and conveying a promising message to possibly a pleasantly surprised male admirer.44 In that case, the drawing magnifies and perverts the role of corporeality (the Incarnation) and sexuality (the Immaculate Conception) in the Annunciation. All three interpretations of the figure in the drawing which I have proposed have one aspect in common: the central role of the body. Leonardo achieves this by conceiving the body as the place where opposites can coincide without shattering its natural unity. When Leonardo after or during painting The Angel of the Annunciation and Saint John the Baptist seems to contemplate in a drawing on the figures in the painting, it turns out that what is important to him is not their identity or a religious theme: to Leonardo it all revolves around the depiction of a human body in an extreme mode, beyond the confines of a normal body, with all kinds of references to opposite motives, such as man versus woman, sexual lust and aggression versus bodily and mental innocence. On the back of the drawing, Leonardo wrote three words, astrapen, bronten and ceraunobolian.45 With these originally Greek words, Leonardo refers to the natural phenomena that according to Pliny determine the extremities of painting. In Naturalis Historia, XXXV, 96, Pliny wrote that the Greek painter Apelles was able to paint the unpaintable, namely lightning, thunder and thunderbolts.46 In the same period that Leonardo made this drawing, he began a series of drawings known as the ‘deluge-series’, in which he undertook to depict terrible storms, with heavy rains and wind, lightning and thunder, which with destructive powers moved over countryside and villages.47 43 The most important difference between the drawing and (the copies of) the painting is that in the painting the figure covers the lower part of his body with a veil. The posture of the figure in the painting is almost the same as in the drawing. 44 See for homosexuality in the Italian Renaissance: Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 45 See for an extensive discussion of these words: J.F. Moffit, ‘The evidentia of curling waters and whirling winds: Leonardo’s Ekphraseis of the Latin weathermen’, Achademia Leonardi Vinci, IV (1991), pp. 11–33. 46 See for Leonardo’s knowledge of Pliny: Pedretti, ‘The Angel in the Flesh’, p. 37 and 40. 47 See for the deluge-series: Kemp, Leonardo da Vinci, pp. 319–23. According to Pedretti, ‘The Angel in the Flesh’, p. 40, these drawings might be considered as an emulation of Apelles’ success to paint the unpaintable.

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By quoting the three words of Pliny, Leonardo revealed that he was meditating on the possibilities and extremities of painting.48 This meditation is repeated as well in the drawing of the naughty angel as in the deluge-series. On the basis of the drawing of the angel, and with it in the background Leonardo’s response to the aphorism, we now may conclude tentatively that to Leonardo the ultimate possibility or frontier of painting is to coincide opposites in the natural unity of the human body. To Leonardo, the human body is the place pre-eminently of contradictions. In the next section, I will elaborate this conclusion in the light of a renewed view of the painting Saint John the Baptist.

John, Bacchus, and the painter If we now turn again to Saint John the Baptist we have perhaps a more discerning eye than in a first, open, approach, for the central role of the body in the painting, in spite of the fact that the painting shows less body than the Angel drawing. In addition, after examining the drawing, John’s androgynous appearance is more apparent. At the same time, we notice that in the painting, in contrast with the drawing, the androgynous character is less prominent. In the painting, all clear signs of androgyny are covered by the arm and the leopard skin. We can identify the depicted person by his attributes, the animal skin,49 and the wooden cross,50 as a man and a saint, Saint John the Baptist. However, the depicted body has a strong feminine appearance because of the hair, the face, the roundness of its forms, and the softness of the skin. On the one hand, the painting contains fewer ambiguities than the drawing. On the other hand, the painting is more ambiguous in character because of the concealment of the drawing’s confronting evidence of androgyny and titillation. Leonardo painted a human body that seems to be detached completely from an individual human being;

48

Cf. Moffit, ‘The evidentia of curling waters’, pp. 24–6. According to Pedretti, ‘The Angel in the Flesh’, p. 44, the leopard skin is a traditional attribute of John; he does not substantiate this claim. See for a discussion of the attributes of John, and a survey of John the Baptist depictions in art: Von Metzsch, Johannes der Täufer. Von Metzsch does not mention the leopard skin, he just mentions a ‘Fellkleid’ as one of the attributes of John, as a reference to his role of a hermit. In the Bible (Matthew 3:4), John is described as wearing a raiment of camel’s hair, and a leathern girdle about his loins. According to Lavin, ‘The Joy of the Bridegroom’s Friend’, p. 201, Leonardo’s John wears such raiment of camel. However, the spotted appearance of the depicted skin makes it more likely that it is indeed a leopard skin. See ibid., p. 321, for the divine origin of John’s clothing. 50 See Von Metzsch, Johannes der Täufer, p. 189. 49

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at the same time, however, the depicted figure, Saint John, has a strong personal presence, by his facial expression and gestures. Remarkable in the painting, furthermore, is the pointing gesture of John. To Leonardo, this gesture seems to have a special meaning; it appears also in his The Last Supper (the apostle Thomas) and in his cartoon of Madonna, Child, Saint Anne, and Saint John (c. 1499).51 Because of the close relationship between body and soul, which Leonardo presupposes, gestures and facial expressions cannot be understood as the effect of a casual relationship between inner and outer. In a gesture inner and outer unite. We only can know the inner because it has a surface.52 The body as the surface of the inner, that is the soul, is the gesture of a person’s life in general. A gesture can express the quintessence of that life. It seems that Leonardo considered the pointing gesture of John as a gesture that instantly signifies the essence of his life. In the tradition of representations of Saint John the Baptist, he is mostly depicted with a finger pointing towards Christ or the lamb. Leonardo’s John points upwards. In paintings before Leonardo’s, this upwards pointing is also discernible – as a supporting gesture of the act of speaking – but far less frequent than the pointing finger to Christ or the lamb.53 In Leonardo’s painting, however, John’s gesture is much more powerful than in earlier representations, and, indeed, the most salient feature of the composition. In this way, Leonardo accomplishes a very direct allusion to John’s preaching. In his preaching, John is constantly referring to Christ as someone who comes after him, and transcends him as a human being; Christ as the Son of God transcends the human in general. With his gesture, John indicates his (and our) position in relation to the Sacred, which he pointedly announces.54 John points to something outside our visual field, to something that is literally beyond 51 In the painting Madonna, Child, St Anne and a Lamb (c. 1508 onwards) the gesture does not appear. Leonardo also depicted little Jesus and little John in the two versions of the painting Madonna of the Rocks. 52 It is striking that Leonardo repeatedly writes: ‘truly, painting does not extend beyond the surface by which the body, the figure of any perceptible thing, is feigned’ (Lu 3). See also Lu 6, 9 and 10. 53 See for instance the fifteenth-century reliefs of a preaching John on an altar of Michelozza (Domopera, Florence), and see also Michelozza’s sculpture of John in the S. Annunziata in Florence; Andrea Pisano depicted John with an upwards pointing finger on one of the doors of the Baptisterium in Florence (1330/6). Moreover, a similar pointing John is depicted on a fresco of Pinturicchio (c. 1500, Dom, Siena) and in an altarpiece from 1349/50 (Barna da Siena). See for illustrations: Von Metzsch, Johannes der Täufer, pp. 56, 57, 132 and 133. See also Lavin’s, ‘The Joy of the Bridegroom’s Friend’, conclusion, p. 209, note 51: ‘The complex pose of Leonardo’s St. John the Baptist had thus its genesis in narrative illustration.’ 54 Matthew 3:11–12, Mark 1:7–8, Luke 3:15–18 and John 1:24–28.

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the frame of the painting. However, that something is none the less present. John’s gesture evokes the presence of something that strictly speaking cannot be visualized in paint: the Sacred. As we already observed, we might relate John to the Angel of the Annunciation, and, for his androgynous appearance, also to Bacchus.55 According to Ovid, known to Leonardo,56 Bacchus is ‘a boy, as pretty as a girl’ (Metamorphoses, III, 608), with ‘flowing locks’ (III, 420) and ‘a wand’ (III, 667). The leopard skin can also be related to Bacchus; on ancient coins Bacchus is depicted dressed in a leopard skin or on a chariot pulled by leopards.57 Bacchus lives on the border of untamed nature and civilization. As protector of winegrowing and discoverer of honey, he made an important contribution to human society. Yet satyrs and bacchants, creatures between human and beast, surround him, and his cult is border-crossing in character.58 His female followers behave like men, and they indulge in pleasures far beyond what is culturally supposed as decent. Moreover, Bacchus has not a well-defined identity; he is known by many names (Metamorphoses, IV, 11–17).59 John the Baptist as the precursor of Christ is also a marginal figure. He leads an ascetic life on the border of nature and civilization.60 He is the representative of the last of the six eras, which precede the seventh in which Christ appears. By baptizing, and especially by baptizing 55 Pedretti, Leonardo, p. 168: ‘Leonardo may have wanted to provide his own response to a fashionable philosophy which was aiming at a pagan–Christian syncretism in art.’ 56 Leonardo mentions in Codex Madrid II, 2b, Ovidius’ Metamorphoses, as one of the books in his possession. Cf. Pedretti, The Literary Works, II, p. 321. See also Pedretti, ‘The Angel in the Flesh’, p. 41. 57 Pedretti, ‘The Angel in the Flesh’, p. 44. For example, there is a leopard in Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne. Wind, Pagan Mysteries, pp. 147–57, quotes Condivi in Life of Michelangelo on a sculpture of Michelangelo of Bacchus. According to Condivi Michelangelo’s Bacchus wears a leopard skin on his arm, an animal dedicated to Bacchus, as one that delights in grapes. According to Wind, however, Michelangelo depicted a skin of a leopardus, a hybrid of a lion and a leopard described in Pliny, Naturalis Historia, VIII, xvi. 58 See for these two aspects also the description of Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), Chapter II, of Piero di Cosimo’s paintings, The Discovery of Honey and The Misfortunes of Silenus. 59 Bacchus’ floating identity probably relates to his twofold birth, from his mother as well as from his father. He was saved unborn from the womb of his dead mother; his father completed the pregnancy in his thigh (Metamorphoses, III, 310–13). 60 In connection with the asceticism of John, Von Metzsch, Johannes der Täufer, p. 46, notes: ‘Keine Kultur besteht ohne asketische Disziplin … Ohne Askese entstehen auch kein Eliten.’

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Christ, he performs a transition in time, but baptizing involves also a transition from one condition into a higher, on a corporal as well as on a spiritual level. In baptizing, the body is essential to attain a spiritual transition. Moreover, John denounced the incestuous union of Herod Antipas with his niece and brother’s wife, and was imprisoned, and finally beheaded (an ultimate bodily punishment) for doing so. Consequently, John’s body is central to his role as marginal figure and precursor of Christ. Thus, there are formal grounds to explain how John and Bacchus can conflate into one person.61 In this coincidence, however, opposites occur. Both John and Bacchus perform border-crossing activities. One of Bacchus’ names is ‘the liberator’ (Metamorphoses, IV, 11); John’s activities are also liberating in nature. Still, the immoderateness and the boundlessness of Bacchus are of a complete different nature than John’s. In their border-crossing and liberating activities they are poles apart. Because in his painting, Leonardo departs from the natural unity of the human body, he is able to coincide these opposites in one figure. In the painting the same takes place as in the Angel drawing: opposites coincide in a body, opposites such as personal and suprapersonal, divine and profane, man and woman, pagan and Christian. The body – as the locus of contradiction – is the real subject of the painting, in the same way as of the drawing. This coincidence of opposites bestows on the body in Saint John the Baptist an impression of immoderateness and boundlessness, which we also perceive in Leonardo’s characterization of painting. For instance, in the Trattato della Pittura he writes: … if the painter wants to see beauties with which he will fall in love, he is a lord who can generate them, and if he wants to see monstrous things which may terrify or buffoonish, and be laughable or truly arouse compassion, he is their lord and God. If he wants to generate sites and deserts, shady or cool retreats from hot weather, he makes them appear, and also warm places in cold weather. If he wants valleys, if he wants to discover a great countryside from the high crests of mountains; and if, after that, he wants to see down the horizon of the sea, he is lord to do so; if from the deepest valleys he wants to see the highest mountains or, from the highest mountains the deepest valleys and the seashores. In effect, whatever there is in the universe by essence, presence, or imagination, the painter has it first in his mind and then in his hands, which are of such excellence that in an equal time they 61 See for an extensive treatment of the conflation of John and Bacchus in Renaissance thought and art: Karin Orchard, Annäherungen der Geschlechter. Androgynie in der Kunst der Cinquecento (Münster/Hamburg: Lit Verlag, 1992).

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generate a proportional harmony, as things do in a single glance. [Lu 13 – c. 1492]62

From Leonardo’s response to the aphorism, it appears that to him, the power of the painter to produce and visualize things culminates in the depiction of the human body. We have seen in the drawing of the Angel and in Saint John the Baptist that Leonardo employs the natural unity of the body to coincide opposites on a visual level. Therefore, in the painting itself borders blur and limits are exceeded. In the painting of Saint John, Leonardo demonstrates the immoderate and boundless character of the art of painting. The painting reveals the infinite power of the painter to envision things, as he pleases, as Leonardo explained in the Trattato della Pittura. This conclusion again underlines my initial suggestion that to Leonardo the depiction of the human body is the ultimate goal and limit of painting – as well in an intellectual as in a technical sense. Moreover, we notice that in Saint John the Baptist Leonardo clearly performs the power of his judgement over the powers of his soul. In my opinion, these assessments lead to the conclusion that in Leonardo’s painting the figure of John the Baptist/Bacchus/Angel of the Annunciation in fact represents the person of the painter; while the painting as a whole is a meditation on the activity of painting. In other words: in the painting, Leonardo produced a representation of a painter through the special depiction and coincidence of John the Baptist, Bacchus and the Angel of the Annunciation in one body. By this coincidence in one body, Leonardo represented the revealing and border crossing, as well as the startling and announcing, and the sensuous and sensual character of painting. But who is the painter that Leonardo depicted in Saint John the Baptist?

The painter and the self-portrait Judging from Leonardo’s response to the aphorism ‘ogni pittore dipinge sé’, and bearing in mind my meditations on the drawing of the jolly angel, and my elaboration on John and Bacchus, my final conclusion is that we have to consider Leonardo’s Saint John the Baptist as a selfportrait. But it is not a self-portrait in the usual sense of the word, in which the mimetic quality of the painting, that is, to what degree the 62 Translation from Farago, Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Paragone’, p. 195–7. See also pp. 332–3, for a commentary on this section. Cf. from the same period, Lu 68, R. 1140 and R. 662.

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painting resembles its maker’s face, determines whether it is a selfportrait or not. In that case, Leonardo would have disregarded his own warnings against auto-mimesis. In the usual approach to self-portraiture, the finished painting, the image, is at the centre. In this approach, a self-portrait is in the first place an exploration of the face. Every portrait that resembles its maker is considered as a self-portrait, while it is also presupposed that a selfportrait reflects the inner self of its maker.63 In this standard view of selfportraiture, there is hardly any attention to the activity of painting.64 Yet this activity is more than important. There is no reason to believe that the experience or the invention of the (or a) self, which is represented in a self-portrait, is a datum like the face that the painter has at his or her disposal at any time, preceding the actual activity of painting. It is more likely to suppose that the painter will necessarily use the intellectual and artisanal process of painting to construct an image of his or her self. Leonardo’s painting is a self-portrait in this more embracing, processoriented definition of self-portraiture, in which the activity of painting is at the centre. In this definition of self-portraiture as well, a self-portrait is successful or effective only if the painter succeeds in uniting the experience of the self with his or her exterior – as in the depiction of a gesture.65 As we noticed before, Leonardo incorporated different characters (John, Bacchus, Gabriel) and emotions in the natural unity of a body; this necessarily entails that the inner of this body, the self, is fragmented. Apparently, to Leonardo, the self of the painter is not an unchanging core that can be represented unambiguously, if one tries hard enough. There are just fragments of the self, which can only be represented by external contradictions and opposites. In Saint John the Baptist, Leonardo is none the less able to unite effectively inner and outer because he considers the body as the place par excellence of contradiction.

63 See for instance H. Perry Chapman, Rembrandt’s Self-Portraits. A Study in Seventeenth-Century Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), in which on the first page a fixed number of works are referred to as ‘Rembrandt’s self-portraits’, on the basis of Rembrandt’s depiction of his own face in these works. The remainder of the book is dedicated to show how in these works Rembrandt again and again re-invented his identity: ‘No one demonstrates better than Rembrandt that self-portraiture is more invention than reflection.’ (p. 7). Chapman does not discuss the mimetic concept of selfportraiture that he uses. 64 Michael Podro, Depiction (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988), in Chapter Four (‘Portrayal: Performance, Role and Subject’) emphasizes that with a selfportrait a painter also displays his skill as a painter. Podro speaks about: ‘the logic of selfportrait, the self-presentation through one’s likeness, embodying one’s skill’. 65 Cf. Gottfried Boehm, Bildnis und Individuum (München: Prestel, 1985), p. 233.

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Considering Leonardo’s response to the aphorism ‘ogni pittore dipinge sé’, I concluded that to him painting a human body is the painterly activity per se. Consequently, to Leonardo knowledge of painting and the experience of the limits of painting can only fully arise in painting a human body. In Saint John the Baptist, Leonardo embodies his inner experience as a painter; an experience that can be expressed only in the activity of painting a human body. In this activity of depicting a human body lies not only the essence of paintership, but it also externalizes the inner experience of paintership. With the figure of John/Bacchus/Gabriel, Leonardo renders the immoderate and borderless character of painting. The coincidence of (the characteristics of) these three persons in one body epitomizes the infinite power of the painter to cross borders and to coincide opposites. In Saint John the Baptist, Leonardo’s warning to the painter to defy the powers of the soul to represent its own body is transformed into an act of representation of the intellectual and artisanal experience of the self of the painter. That is to say, we must consider Saint John the Baptist as Leonardo’s intellectual self-portrait.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Repulsive Body: Images of Torture in SeventeenthCentury Naples Harald Hendrix ‘We admire, in the name of truthfulness, an art that exhibits the maximum amount of trauma, violence, physical indignity … For us, the significant moment is the one that disturbs us most’: in her novel The Volcano Lover, Susan Sontag contrasts our modern aesthetics of ‘trauma, violence and physical indignity’ with that of eighteenth-century Naples, dominated by a classicism founded upon Winckelmann’s emphasis on discretion. In the cultural environment of Sir William Hamilton, the novel’s protagonist, the representation of scenes of horror was admired, like the agony of Laocoön made visible in the famous Vatican sculpture, only ‘because it evoked the worst without showing us the worst … It showed suffering with decorum, dignity in the midst of horror.’ In order to avoid the depiction of full horror in scenes like the one of the Trojan priest and his sons, artists whom Winckelmann and Hamilton admired preferred to concentrate on moments preceding the apex of horror, moments that ‘showed people able to maintain decorum and composure, even in monumental suffering’.1 This classicistic aesthetics, aimed at ‘minimizing the pain of pain’, sharply contrasts not only with our contemporary preferences for a ‘maximum amount of trauma, violence and physical indignity’, but also

1 S. Sontag, The Volcano Lover. A Romance (New York: Doubleday, 1992), pp. 295–7. The relationship between pain and beauty in eighteenth-century aesthetic theory is discussed in S. Richter, Laocoon’s Body and the Aesthetics of Pain (Detroit: Wayne University Press, 1992). For a more comprehensive discussion of the representation of the tortured body, see E. Scarry, The Body in Pain (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). On pain in medieval and early modern culture, see K. Schreiner and N. Schnitzler, Gepeinigt, begehrt, vergessen. Symbolik und Sozialbezug des Körpers im späten Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit (Munich: Fink, 1992), esp. pp. 131–46. On horror and disgust in general, see J. Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur. Essai sur l’abjection (Paris: Seuil, 1980); N. Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990), and W. Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

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with a major tendency in Neapolitan art of the preceding, seventeenth century: the depiction of full horror and, consequently, the presence of an aesthetics that focuses on ‘maximizing the pain of pain’. Had the author, in fact, chosen as hero of her novel not the English diplomat and collector of antiquities, but his almost equally famous predecessor Gaspar Roomer, the Flemish merchant and art collector who dominated much of Neapolitan cultural life in the first half of the seventeenth century, she would have come across quite a different artistic taste. In fact, a remarkable part of the huge Roomer collection of eleven hundred pictures consisted of paintings renowned for their crudely realistic depiction of torture and pain, like Jusepe de Ribera’s Apollo and Marsyas (see Fig. 4.1) or Rubens’ Feast of Herod.2 And Roomer’s fascination with naturalism and violence was not an isolated phenomenon. His business associate’s son and successor Ferdinand van den Eijnden continued this line in his own art collection, commissioning for example a series of pictures by Mattia Preti in which the martyrdom of the saints Peter, Paul and Bartholomew was depicted in a particularly dramatic kind of realism, clearly inspired by Ribera. Both the patrons’ and artists’ enthusiasm for the depiction of full horror seems one of the distinguishing characteristics of Neapolitan art of the first half of the seventeenth century. Since this appears to be the expression of an aesthetics of ‘trauma, violence and physical indignity’ that comes very close to the one Susan Sontag considers predominant in our own days, it may come as a surprise that so little attention has been given to this phenomenon in the recent reappraisal of Neapolitan Baroque – a reappraisal that itself, perhaps, can be fully explained only with a view to the similarities between modern and Seicento aesthetics.3 2 An inventory of the Roomer collection was published in 1634 by Capaccio, who had visited it in 1630 (G. Capaccio, Il Forastiero, Naples, 1634, pp. 863–4). During this visit he saw a picture of Apollo and Marsyas by Ribera, which therefore cannot be the one nowadays at the St Martino Museum in Naples, since this painting is dated 1637. Roomer’s collection is discussed in F. Haskell, Patrons and Painters. A Study in the Relations Between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the Baroque (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980, rev. and enlarged edn of 1963), pp. 205–8, and again in his ‘The Patronage of Painting in Seicento Naples’, in Painting in Naples 1606–1705. From Caravaggio to Giordano (cat. exhibition London, 1982), pp. 60–64. For a more detailed discussion see R. Ruotolo, Mercanti-collezionisti fiamminghi a Napoli. Gaspare Roomer e i Vandeneynden (Massa Lubrense: Scarpati, 1982), who dwells on the rather unusual composition of Roomer’s collection (‘va notato come egli, unico fra i grandi collezionisti locali del Seicento, possedesse molti quadri di soggetto profano’, p. 7), which is considered an expression of the merchant’s preference for the popular and the exotic. Cf. also B. Meijer, ‘Collezioni e collezionisti fiamminghi e olandesi in Italia’, Incontri. Rivista di studi italo-nederlandesi, 1 (1984–85), pp. 72–6. 3 Several major exhibitions attest to the increasing attention for the Neapolitan

4.1

Jusepe de Ribera, Apollo and Marsyas, 182 x 232 cm, oil on canvas, 1637, Museo Nazionale di San Martino, Naples

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The rare references to the explicitly ‘horrible’ characteristics of paintings by artists like Ribera and Preti consist, at most, of some reflections on the allegedly violent nature of Neapolitan life,4 or of anecdotal evidence of the disturbing qualities of works, like Ribera’s series of giants which, commissioned by the Amsterdam merchant Lucas van Uffel, apparently caused his wife upon its arrival in 1632 to give birth to a deformed child, and the patron to refuse the paintings.5 This hesitation to address the nature of Neapolitan ‘horror art’ in a more critical manner, can be explained as a reaction to romantic interpretations of the phenomenon that have dominated the popular reputation of artists like Ribera since the start of the nineteenth century.6 Lord Byron’s verses on the painter who ‘tainted his brush with all the blood of all the sainted’, and Théophile Gautier’s similar but more elaborate comments (‘Toi, cruel Ribera, plus dur que Jupiter, / Tu fais de ses flancs creux, par d’affreuses entailles, / Couler à flots de sang des cascades d’entrailles!’ [‘You, cruel Ribera, harsher than Jupiter, from his hollow sides you make flow in streams of blood, by way of horrible cuts, cascades of intestines!’]) set the tone for a psychologically oriented biographical art criticism, which attributed Ribera’s ‘peinture atroce’ to a specific mental condition, product of the painter’s Spanish origins and his tormented private life.7 In order to avoid such simplifications, recent scholarship has preferred to concentrate on documentary research and Baroque: Painting in Naples 1606–1705. From Caravaggio to Giordano (cat. exhibition London, 1982); Civiltà del Seicento a Napoli (Naples: Electa, 1984) (cat. exhibition Naples 1984–85); Pintura napolitana de Caravaggio a Giordano (cat. exhibition Madrid, 1985); Jusepe de Ribera 1591–1652 (Naples: Electa – exhibition Naples–Madrid–New York, 1992). 4 See for instance this comment by Clovis Whitfield in Painting in Naples (1982), p. 22: ‘The environment of Naples offered an ingredient that was never so vividly portrayed elsewhere, and that was violence … the Neapolitans, perhaps because they were more used to the real thing, continued with great enthusiasm along this path … The city was indeed a strange mixture of paura e meraviglia, fear and wonder …’ 5 The episode was recalled by Joachim von Sandrart in his Teutsche Academie der Edlen Bau-, Bild- und Mahlerey-Künste (Nürnberg, 1675) (ed. A.R. Pelzer 1925); cf. also A. Pérez Sanchez and N. Spinosa, L’opera completa del Ribera (Milan: Rizzoli, 1978), p. 103 (and p. 10 for another version of the anecdote). 6 On the French reception of Ribera, see I. Lipschutz, Spanish Painting and the French Romantics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), passim, and P. Rosenberg, (1992), ‘Da Ribera a Ribot, dal naturalismo all’accademismo. La fortuna di un pittore alla ricerca della sua nazionalità e della sua definizione stilistica’, in Jusepe de Ribera (1992), pp. 81–104; on the English reception, see El Greco to Goya. The Taste for Spanish Painting in Britain and Ireland (1981), London (cat. exhibition London, National Gallery, 1981). 7 Lord Byron, Don Juan, XIII (1824); Théophile Gautier, Voyage en Espagne (Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 1981), pp. 471–4.

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on issues of stylistic dependency, neglecting however to advance more convincing interpretations than the romantic one. An inquiry into the intimate nature and context of Neapolitan ‘peinture atroce’ nevertheless seems appropriate. In spite of all the critical embarrassment, the crude realism of Ribera’s art is still viewed and appreciated as one of its most distinguishing features. Moreover, there is sufficient evidence to consider this crude realism not the product of just one painter’s personal taste or psyche, but a manner cherished by an extended and highly sophisticated circle of artists, intellectuals and connoisseurs that comprised the most prominent patrons of Seicento Naples. This not merely included rich merchants like Gaspar Roomer and Ferdinand van den Eijnden, but leading Spanish officials and several viceroys as well. We may indeed assume without much hesitation that a dismissive attitude towards an art that ‘exhibits the maximum amount of trauma, violence and physical indignity’ arose only much later, in the course of the eighteenth century, the period of the Hamiltons and the Winckelmanns. In fact, whenever earlier testimonies on artists like Ribera mention a preference for gruesome scenes, they do so not in order to depreciate this practice but to express admiration for the skilful manner in which the artist has rendered his subject matter: No se deleitaba tanto Ribera en pintar cosas dulces, y devotas, como en expresar cosas horrendas, y ásperas: cuales son los cuerpos de los ancianos, secos, arrugados, y consumidos, con el rostro enjuto, y macilento; todo hecho puntualmente por el natural, con extremado primor, fuerza, y elegante manejo. [Ribera didn’t find as much pleasure in painting agreeable and devout things as he did in expressing horrible and rough things: like bodies of people that are old, dried-up, wrinkled and worn-out, with a skinny and pale countenance; everything as a matter of fact exactly as in life, with extreme skill, expression and elegant manner.]8

To illustrate this unusual predilection for ‘horrendous’ and ‘unpleasant’ images, the author of this commentary, Antonio Palomino, refers to Ribera’s Martyrdom of St Bartholomew (Fig. 4.2), a work that indeed might be considered emblematic of the crude realism cherished by the Neapolitan elite in the 1630s, 1640s and 1650s.9 The picture presents Bartholomew’s body with all the features Palomino mentions: gaunt and consumed, full of wrinkles, emphatically old. We witness the most dramatic moment of Bartholomew’s ordeal, when his torturers start to flay the skin of his right arm. Instead of being rendered in a demure manner, the drama is highlighted in several ways: by the unusual 8 A. Palomino de Castro y Velasco, El Museo pictórico y escala óptica, ed. J. Ceán y Bermudez (Madrid: Aguilar, 1947) (first edn Madrid 1724), vol. I, p. 877. 9 Cf. Jusepe de Ribera (1992), cat.n. 1.28, pp. 165–7.

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Jusepe de Ribera, Martyrdom of St Bartholomew, 202 x 153 cm, oil on canvas, c. 1644, Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona

position of the body suggesting tension between vertical and horizontal forces, by the mirroring dynamics of the brutes’ movements, and by the emphatic chiaroscuro technique that lightens up the saint’s torso, face and arms, those parts of his body where his physical suffering is most

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evident. What, however, makes this huge canvas so particularly disturbing is the fact that the execution of the torture itself is rendered in a rather graphic manner, and that the saint’s eyes are turned towards the onlooker in what may appear as a provocative glance. This picture is by no means exceptional in the oeuvre of Ribera, nor would it be difficult to find similar work by other artists active in Naples from approximately 1630 till 1660. Mattia Preti’s series of martyrdoms, for instance, executed in the late 1650s for Ferdinand van den Eijnden, demonstrate evident analogies with Ribera’s earlier picture: a dramatic positioning of the martyrs, an emphatically chiaroscuro presentation of their unappealing semi-nude bodies, restless dynamism on the part of the brutes, a concentration on the scene during or just before the act of torture.10 There is, however, one significant difference, as Preti’s Martyrdom of St Bartholomew may illustrate. Whereas Ribera represented the saint as looking with a piercing glance outside the canvas towards the beholder, Preti shows the martyr with a glance directed upwards, suggesting resignation and devotion. This less disturbing way of representing Bartholomew seems to be more customary, as is suggested by another version of Ribera himself (Fig. 4.3). Here, he employs all the above-mentioned techniques to dramatize the scene, yet has the saint look upwards with a facial expression of despair mixed with resignation and devotion.11 However, though unusual, Ribera’s more confrontational rendering of a torture scene, directing the protagonist’s glance towards the audience, is not an anomaly in early Seicento Naples. Ribera’s series of giants, the paintings that, according to Sandrart, caused such a tragic distress to Lucas van Uffel’s pregnant wife in 1632, may illustrate the point. They present the nude bodies of tortured mythological figures in a way that emphatically focuses the attention on their suffering. Especially the Prometheus painting, now in the Barbara Piasecka Johnson Collection at Princeton University (Fig. 4.4), not only offers a striking view of the male body, it also illuminates in crude detail the nature of the torture, and expresses in the countenance of the poor giant’s face an emotional transposition of the physical pain.12 A still more eloquent example of this art that ‘maximizes the pain of pain’ is Ribera’s above-mentioned Apollo and Marsyas, of which at least two

10

Cf. Painting in Naples (1982), cat.n. 103–5, pp. 211–13. Cf. Jusepe de Ribera (1992), cat.n. 1.26, pp. 162–3. 12 Ibid., cat.n. 1.42, pp. 184–6; a quite similar iconography can be seen in Ribera’s better-known Tizio, now at the Prado Museum, which until the recent identification of the painting in the Johnson Collection at Princeton was at times mistaken for a Prometheus; cf. ibid., cat.n. 1.41, pp. 184–5. 11

4.3

Jusepe de Ribera, Martyrdom of St Bartholomew, 145 x 216 cm, oil on canvas, c. 1630, Palazzo Pitti, Florence

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Jusepe de Ribera, Prometheus, 194 x 155 cm, oil on canvas, c. 1632, Barbara Piasecka Johnson Collection, Princeton

versions – both from 1637 – have survived (see Fig. 4.1).13 Marsyas’ non-appealing body is represented in an unusual perspective and in the nude, while the beautiful body of Apollo is in part covered. Again, the picture renders the initial and thus most terrible moment of the flaying. 13 The other version is now in the Musée des Beaux Arts in Bruxelles. Cf. ibid., cat.n. 1.58, pp. 208–10; Sanchez and Spinosa, L’opera completa del Ribera, cat.n. 103–4, p. 109.

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We can clearly discern the physical details of the torture. Also in this picture, the most striking feature is the expression of pain and anguish on the face of the tormented satyr, an emotion which is projected onto the spectator: the agonizing Marsyas looks at him directly as if asking for help. The picture, now in the San Martino Museum in Naples, also reveals particularly well an intended, unsettling effect: the figures in the background show reactions of horror and pain similar to those of the spectators, who they in fact mirror and represent (Fig. 4.5). Paintings like these seem to be conceived in order to shock and leave the audience in distress. As such, they show striking similarities with works by modern artists like Marina Abramowicz and Oliviero Toscano that apparently entail analogous effects. They thus might be considered specimens of the aesthetics of ‘trauma, violence and physical indignity’ detected by Susan Sontag in our own day. This view is, however, hardly convincing when considering contemporary testimonies. The predominantly anecdotal reports of the apparently distressing effects of paintings like Ribera’s giants are rather unreliable, and there is no single source available that attests to the intentional nature of such effects. There is, moreover, no reason to believe that there was any substantial opposition to this artistic style in seventeenth-century Naples, a style which was, on the contrary, hugely admired and – as has already been pointed out – eagerly sought-after by leading art patrons. This suggests that in the Neapolitan Seicento the ‘peinture atroce’ of painters like Ribera was neither conceived to leave the audience in distress, nor perceived as such. But how, then, to explain the undeniable use of provocative devices like the graphic depiction of torture and the piercing glances of the victims directed towards the onlookers? And if paintings like these were not conceived in order to leave the audience in distress, what other effect were they supposed to generate? Since contemporary art theory does not address this issue explicitly, a more contextual approach of the phenomenon is called for. After all, although remarkably present in Neapolitan baroque, representations of torture and physical suffering were by no means an artistic phenomenon confined to this particular cultural environment alone. A closer look at this general practice will offer some clues so as to reach a better understanding of its specific Neapolitan version. An overwhelming set of examples makes clear that the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European public was frequently confronted with images of a potentially distressing nature: from the illustrations of capital punishments to the depiction of Christian martyrdom,14 from the 14 For the iconography of executions cf. P. Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering. Executions and the Evolution of Repression: From a Preindustrial Metropolis to the

4.5

Jusepe de Ribera, Apollo and Marsyas (detail), 182 x 232 cm, oil on canvas, 1637, Museo Nazionale di San Martino, Naples

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representations of the Last Judgement and the Triumph of Death by painters like Lucas van Leyden and Pieter Breughel the Elder to the descriptions of colonial atrocities in Bartolomé de Las Casas’ Brevísima relación.15 Reflections on the intrinsic nature and function of such images generally lead to this kind of conclusions: they were conceived in order to produce in the audience – readers and spectators alike – an emotional discomfort that would bring about feelings of pity and outrage (De las Casas), of fear (the iconography of executions) or devotion (the martyr-scenes).16 In this view, the element of horror is part of a moralistic and didactic strategy which uses emotional distress to encourage civic attitudes and religious beliefs amongst the public. As such an instructive device, the use of disturbing images often has been linked to the artistic ideology of Catholicism, and in particular to the writings of some prominent post-Tridentine authorities.17 Combining European Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); S. Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment. Art and Criminal Prosecution during the Florentine Renaissance (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985); L. Puppi, Lo splendore dei supplizi. Liturgia delle esecuzioni capitali e iconografia del martirio nell’arte europea dal XII al XIX secolo (Milan: Berenice, 1990), English version: Torment in art: pain, violence and martyrdom (New York: Rizzoli, 1991). The production of martyrological material in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century is very rich indeed, on the Catholic as well as on the Protestant side: cf. for example Cesare Baronio’s revision of the Martyrologium romanum (Antwerp 1586 and 1589; other contemporary editions Rome 1582, Lyons 1583, Rome 1584); R. Verstegen, Theatrum crudelitatum haereticorum nostri temporis, Antwerp; 1587; A. Gallonio, Trattato de gli instrumenti di martirio, e delle varie maniere di martoriare usate da gentili contro christiani (Rome, 1591); J. Fox, Acts and Monuments of these latter and perillous dayes, touching matters of the Church, wherein ar comprehended and described the great persecutions & horrible troubles, that have been wrought and practised by the Romishe prelates (London, 1563). 15 Cf. Lucas van Leyden’s Last Judgment (1526) in Museum De Lakenhal at Leiden, and Pieter Breughel’s Triumph of Death (c. 1562) in the Prado, Madrid. Published at Seville in 1552, Bartolomé de Las Casas’ Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias was frequentally reprinted and translated; the illustrations by Theodor de Bry first appeared in the Latin version published in 1598 at Frankfurt. 16 Cf. for example S. Ruffino and E. Randone, ‘L’orrido fine del bene’, in Arte, pietà e morte nella Confraternita della Misericordia a Torino (Turin, 1978), pp. 107–43, and Puppi, Lo spendore dei supplizi, passim (particularly the references quoted in note 239 at p. 67). 17 A. Blunt, Artistic Theory in Italy 1450–1600 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940), ch. 8. See also H. Jedin, ‘Entstehung und Tragweite des Trienter Dekrets über die Bilderverehrung’, Theologische Quartalschrift, 116 (1935), pp. 404–29; H.F. von Campenhausen, ‘Die Bildnisfrage in die Reformation’, Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte, 68 (1957), pp. 96–128; H. Jedin, ‘Das Tridentinum und die bildenden Künste’, Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte, 74 (1963), pp. 321–39; P. Prodi, ‘Ricerche sulla teorica delle arti figurative nella Riforma cattolica’, Archivio Italiano per la Storia della Pietà, 4 (1965), pp. 123–212; D. Freedberg, ‘Johannes Molanus on Provocative Painting’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 34 (1971), pp. 229–45; A. Boschloo, Annibale

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traditional concepts like the Gregorian idea of paintings as ‘libri idiotarum’, Thomas of Aquinas’ view of pictures as means ‘ad excitandam devotionem’ and more recent opinions like Ignatius’ incentive to relive on an emotional and sensory level the torments of Christ and the martyrs, Counter-Reformation artists and theorists considered disturbing images of pain and suffering a most effective means to stimulate devotion and to propagate the Catholic faith.18 In late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century art, this aesthetic ideology indeed seems to account for most of the more horrid representations of tormented bodies. Thus, in his discussion of a group of gruesomely depicted martyrdoms produced at Antwerp during the years 1585 to 1610, David Freedberg has demonstrated convincingly that these ‘didactically assertive’ images of horror must be seen in a context of Catholic propaganda during a period (following Alessandro Farnese’s regaining control of the city and preceding the signing of the 1609 Truce) in which the Catholic faith was still under considerable pressure from the outside.19 In this view, horror is tolerated and indeed propagated for the sake of the argument. Its character and intensity depend on the character and intensity of the message it is supposed to convey. The bolder the statement, the more confrontational the horror. This is why the use of distressing effects is found so often in political or religious debates that, especially in early modern Europe, tend to be extremely polemical. And this is also why the application of disturbing images has been frequently linked to the artistic ideology of a defensive post-Tridentine Catholicism. Such an interpretation is, however, hardly convincing where the predilection for horror in Neapolitan Seicento art is concerned. Thus, an obvious objection to this view is that Catholicism was never seriously challenged in Naples. But there is more. Not only does partenopean culture between, roughly, 1630 and 1660 present us with quite a

Carracci in Bologna. Visible Reality in Art after the Council of Trent (The Hague: Staatsuitgeverij, 1974), esp. pp. 121–41; G. Scavizzi, ‘La teologia cattolica e le immagini durante il XVI secolo’, Storia dell’Arte, 21 (1974), pp. 171–213. 18 Cf. for instance this comment on the martyr scenes in Santo Stefano Rotondo in the diary of the rector of the German-Hungarian College at Rome, Michele Lauretano: ‘è cosa che move molto a divotione vedere infinite sorti di tormenti, et tanto gran numero di martiri’ (quoted in L. Monssen, ‘The Martyrdom Cycle in Santo Stefano Rotondo’, Acta ad archaeologiam et artium historiam pertinentia, Series altera, 2 (1982), pp. 175–317; 3 (1983), pp. 11–106; quotation at p. 19, note 22). 19 D. Freedberg, ‘The Representation of Martyrdoms During the CounterReformation in Antwerp’, The Burlington Magazine, 118 (1976), pp. 128–38; quotation on p. 138. For an extensive discussion of an analogous case, see Monssen, ‘The Martyrdom Cycle’.

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remarkable quantity of disturbing images, these pictures also display an unprecedented realism that in style and effect no doubt exceeds similar examples like the ‘horrible’ Antwerp martyrdoms described by Freedberg. Thus, the device to represent the victims of torture as looking, as it were, out of the picture into the eyes of the beholder might easily be defined as confrontational and even provocative. Moreover, an explanation in terms of moralistic and didactic strategies seems unable to account for some of the most prominent expressions of this particular taste in Naples. Think, for instance, of the absence of a political or religious context, as is especially the case with mythological subjects. Even if one could agree which message a picture like Ribera’s Apollo and Marsyas could be supposed to convey to its audience (see Fig. 4.1), it remains unclear why this requires such an overwhelming use of horror effects. Cases like these seem to present a reversal of values: the creating of disgust appears no longer to be a strategy employed to convey an ethical or religious message, but is the message itself. This in turn suggests that Neapolitan Seicento culture nourished a taste for disturbing images which might indicate the existence of an ‘aesthetics of horror’ in its own right, not dissimilar to the fascination with ‘an art that exhibits the maximum amount of trauma, violence, physical indignity’ as Susan Sontag has detected in our own days. Instead of trying to account for this phenomenon by considering it simply an extreme and perhaps even excessive evolution of CounterReformation propaganda art, nourished moreover by a typically Neapolitan predilection for Caravaggism and ‘violent’ Spanish and Flemish art, a more conceptual approach to the problem is now called for. Not only will such an approach offer a better explanation as to why Neapolitan horror art was looked upon with admiration and not with disapproval until at least the mid-eighteenth century. It can also take into account the fact that such a predilection for horrific effects was not limited to painting alone, but can be found in other arts as well, poetry in particular. Indeed, there are compelling arguments to investigate the ‘peinture atroce’ practised by painters like Ribera in the light of poetic theory and practice. This was actually the way in which contemporary and even later critics chose to discuss such paintings, as is wellillustrated by a comment of an eighteenth-century French art historian, Dezaillier d’Argenville. D’Argenville here quotes Boileau’s poetics in order to account for the horrible nature of Ribera’s subjects: Son génie naturel le portait à rechercher les sujets terribles et pleins d’horreur. Dans le profane c’était des Ixions, des Tantales, des Prométhées; dans le sacré, le martyre de saint Barthélémi, de saint Etienne, de saint Laurent, etc.; tableaux qui plaisaient infiniment à la nation Espagnole et Napolitaine. Il faut convenir que ces

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morceaux pleins d’une grande vérité, n’ont contre eux que la férocité des sujets. Mais ‘Il n’est point de serpens [sic], ni de monstre odieux, / Qui, par l’art imité, ne puisse plaire aux yeux; / D’un pinceau délicat l’artifice agréable / Du plus affreaux objet fait un objet aimable’ (Boileau). Peut-être que ce peintre n’eut pas un si grand succès à Rome, où les morceaux d’histoire sainte et profane sont plus recherchés, et où l’on préfère les sujets susceptibles de noblesse et de grâce, à ceux qui n’ispirent que l’horreur et l’effroi. [His natural genius brought him to look for a terrible subject matter full of horror. In the profane this was Hission, Tantalus, Prometheus; in the sacred, the martyrdom of the saints Bartholomew, Stephen, Lawrence, etc.; paintings that gave great pleasure to the Spanish and Neapolitan nations. We have to acknowledge that these pieces full of great truth are not to be blamed but for the ferocity of their subject matter. Yet ‘There is no snake nor hideous monster that, imitated in art, cannot please the eye; with his delicate brush, the agreeable artificer makes from the most terrifying object an amiable one’ (Boileau). Perhaps this painter was not as successful in Rome, where pieces of sacred and profane history are more sought after, and where people prefer subjects full of nobility and grace above those that inspire but horror and dismay.]20

Dezaillier d’Argenville’s quoting Boileau suggests a close affinity between poetry and painting where the use of distressing effects is concerned. The quotation directs us, moreover, to the heart of the matter, since it links the use of horror in Neapolitan Baroque to a traditional topic in poetic theory: Aristotle’s distinction between the contents of a representation and its imitation. As a matter of fact, Boileau’s verses echo a well-known statement from the Poetics on the power of imitation: For the process of imitation is natural from childhood on: Man is differentiated from other animals because he is the most imitative of them, and he learns his first lessons through imitation, and we observe that all men find pleasure in imitations. The proof of this point is what actually happens in life. 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 example, the forms of the most despised animals and of corpses.21

In Aristotle’s view, pleasure can be attained by way of the scene

20 A.J. Dezallier d’Argenville, Abrégé de la vie des plus fameux peintres (Paris, 1762), vol. II, p. 235; an earlier edition was published in 1745. Quoted in: Rosenberg, ‘Da Ribera a Ribot’, p. 83, who considers this comment typical of early eighteenth-century appreciation of Ribera’s art. 21 Aristotle, Poetics, eds L. Golden and O.B. Harrison (Englewoods Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968), p. 7.

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represented, but also as a result of a skilful imitation, even in the case of scenes that are not agreeable in themselves, like the ones quoted in the Poetics: corpses and frightening wild animals. His argumentation is therefore based on the idea of a balance between contents and form, whereby a beautiful representation can compensate for the possibly disagreeable effects of the subject matter it depicts. Aristotle mentions the use of a distressing subject matter only in order to illustrate the power of imitation and, thus, of artistic representation. This can, however, be easily interpreted as an invitation to demonstrate the artist’s skill by representing horrible scenes. We can find this idea in Boileau’s poetics (‘D’un pinceau délicat l’artifice agréable / Du plus affreaux objet fait un objet aimable’), but also in the writings of some of the most prominent Italian art theorists from the late sixteenth century, like Paleotti (1582), Alberti (1585), Lomazzo (1585) and Comanini (1591).22 They all agree with the Greek philosopher that a skilful imitation can compensate for the distressing effect of horror scenes: all art has to create pleasure in the long run, and therefore the disgusting is only acceptable as a device to accentuate the artist’s capacities in creating pleasure, as is eloquently demonstrated by Comanini’s discussion of Giulio Romano’s frescoes in the Palazzo Te: … veggiamo se ’l fine di quest’arti imitanti è ’l diletto o pur l’utile. E se proveremo che sia il diletto, proveremo senza alcun dubbio che questo è ’l fine della pittura, sì come d’arte imitante. Ora, chi non sa gli uomini dilettarsi naturalmente dell’imitazioni e prenderne molto piacere? Lo conferma il principe de’ Peripatetici in quel capitolo della Poetica, dove tratta dell’origine della poesia e delle sue specie, e dice che l’imitare è stato dalla natura inestato negli uomini infin da fanciulli, e che noi tutti siam differenti dagli altri animali ancora in questo, che abbiamo attitudine all’imitazione, e che imitando facciamo acquisto delle prime discipline, e che ciascuno di noi gode delle imitazioni e se ne rallegra. E che questa sia la verità (soggiunge egli), prendasene argomento dalla pittura: poiché noi volontieri miriamo l’imagini ben dipinte di spaventosissime fiere, e di monstri orrendissimi, e di cadaveri, quando non senza molestia, anzi con molto dispiacimento del senso guarderemmo le vere fiere, i veri monstri e i veri cadaveri, come cose communemente da tutti noi abborrite. Mi soviene d’aver veduto a

22 G. Paleotti, Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre e profane (Bologna, 1582); also in Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento, ed. P. Barocchi, vol. II (Bari: Laterza, 1962), pp. 117–509; and partially in Scritti d’arte del Cinquecento, ed. P. Barocchi, vol. II (Turin: Einaudi, 1978), pp. 326–39. R. Alberti, Trattato della nobiltà della pittura (Rome, 1585), also in Barocchi (1962), vol. III, pp. 195–235. G.P. Lomazzo, Trattato dell’arte della pittura, scoltura et architettura (Milan, 1585); also partially in Barocchi (1978), vol. II, pp. 357–8. G. Comanini, (1591), Il Figino (Mantua, 1591); also in Barocchi (1962), vol. III, pp. 237–379.

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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. [… let us see whether the aim of these imitating arts is pleasure or profit. And if we will find that it is pleasure, without any doubt we will find that this is the aim of painting, being an imitating art. Now, who does not know that men are naturally inclined to take pleasure in imitations? This is confirmed by Aristotle in the chapter of his Poetics which discusses the origin and nature of poetry, and says that imitation is something nature has given to men from early childhood on, and also that we differ from all other animals in this respect, and that we have an inclination to imitate, and that by imitating we learn the first abilities, and that every one of us likes imitations and finds pleasure in them. And that this is indeed the truth (he goes on), one may see in painting: because we like to look at good pictures of frightening animals, of horrible monsters, and of corpses, when on the other hand we would look with huge damage and certainly with great disgust at real wild beasts, real monsters and real corpses, as something loathed by us all. I recall having seen in Mantua, in a room in the Palazzo del Tè, the condemned Giants painted by Giulio Romano, crushed and hurt by masses of falling stones and rocks, in positions and forms so strange and horrible, that if someone else would see a similar spectacle in real life he would certainly be horrified and feel great displeasure at such a sight. None the less, because it is imitation and painting, 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.]23

There can be little doubt that at the start of the seventeenth century the concept of a work of art which presents a disagreeable subject in a pleasing manner was familiar and acceptable to Italian art theory. To consider this circumstance a fertile substrate of the later Neapolitan preference for horror-art seems to be entirely legitimate. What remains to be cleared at this point is the question why such a concept could have become popular especially in Naples, and why particularly after about 1630. To account for this peculiar fact, poetry again offers a useful clue. Of central importance here is Giambattista Marino’s religious poem La Strage degli Innocenti, a work which itself not only demonstrates to what kind of poetry the Aristotelian meditation on the nature of artful imitation could lead, but which, moreover, can be seen as a major 23

Ibid., vol. III, pp. 270–71.

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driving force in the spread of an artistic taste that did not recoil from disgust, but made it one of its favourite strategies. Although first published in Naples only in 1632, some seven years after Marino’s death, La Strage degli Innocenti was already conceived during the author’s earlier stay in the city, just before the year 1600.24 Therefore it may be considered a product of the same artistic culture which, at the end of the sixteenth century, had accepted the Aristotelian idea of a skilful imitation employed in order to compensate for the distressing effects of a horrible subject matter. In fact, what strikes most in La Strage degli Innocenti, and especially in its central part – the third Book which describes the massacre itself – is the proliferation of horrible details of torture on the one hand, and the continuous and manifold contrast-strategies on the other: the cruelty of Herod and his executioners is opposed to the suffering and despair of the mothers and their babies; the agony of the children is contrasted with the vitality of their mothers; the beauty of the women stands out against the ugliness of the brutes; the innocence of the victims versus the guilt of the culprits: Una ve n’ha, che del bel fianco ignudo, Misera! e del bel petto e del bel volto, Come può meglio, al caro suo fa scudo, Né soffrir sa, che le sia morto o tolto. Ma le sta sovra uom minaccioso e crudo, Che l’aureo crin s’ha intorno al braccio avolto, E del crespo e fin or le bionde pompe A scossa a scossa le divelle e rompe. [There is one who, with her beautiful naked side, unfortunate woman! and with her beautiful breast and beautiful face, makes as best as she can a shield for her dear one, not knowing whether to suffer him killed or taken away. But over her stands a threatening and cruel man who has wrapped her golden hair around his arm and the curling and fine gold of her blonde splendour jerk by jerk he uproots and breaks.]25

Oppositions like these between a beautiful woman (bel fianco, bel petto, bel volto) and a brutal man (minaccioso e crudo) are rather common in a literary tradition, heavily dependending, as they do, on petrarchistic lyricism. They serve to create a kind of dramatic tension and eventually perhaps a feeling of anxiety. Pleasure is nevertheless accomplished through the correspondence between contrasting aspects, a correspondence that makes the single elements of beauty and distress 24 Cf. Giovanni Pozzi’s reconstruction in G.B. Marino, Dicerie sacre e la Strage de gl’Innocenti, ed. G. Pozzi (Turin: Einaudi, 1960), pp. 445–63, esp. pp. 453–4. 25 G.B. Marino, Strage degli Innocenti (Naples, 1632), now in Marino, Dicerie sacre e la Strage, p. 547, stanza 37.

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come together in a new and more perfect equilibrium. Such a device is also adopted in the well-known image of the children who get killed while suckling their mothers’ breast: Ecco un altro crudel, ch’al primo figlio, Che il sen le sugge, un dardo aventa e scocca, E passa oltre le labra, onde la poppa Già di latte, or di sangue è fatta coppa. [There comes another brute, who throws a dart and hits her first son that sucks her breast; it passes the lips, and makes the nipple, only just before a cup of milk, into a chalice of blood.]26

Here the elements of milk (life) and blood (death) are balanced in an image that, although distressing, can give pleasure because of the correspondence between the negative and the positive components. Since it evokes the two contrasting emotions of pleasure and pain, the image is a conceitful one, and thus produces the ‘meraviglia’ Marino was so fond of. There are, however, some passages in Marino’s Strage where the element of horror seems predominant, and where the balancing with other, less disturbing elements that may compensate for its distressing effect is absent. At one point, for example, the poet describes in considerable detail the action of a soldier who grasps an infant from its mother’s protective arms, spins the baby three times around his head and smashes it against a wall, breaking all its bones: Ella, sí come tronco edera cinge, Al dolce pegno abbarbicata stassi, Ma lui nel piè, lei ne la chioma stringe Sí forte il fier, ch’alfin convien che lassi; Poi con robusta man lo scaglia e spinge Contro il muro vicin fra duri sassi; Pria però che l’aventi e che ’l percota, Tre volte e quattro intorno il rota. A quell’orrenda e dispietata scossa Nel fanciullo tremante e sbigottito Precorsa dal timore è la percossa, Onde morto riman pria che ferito. Al fin, rotto le membra, infranto l’ossa, Steso al suol tutto pesto e tutto trito, Per le labra e le nari in copia grande Con la bianca midolla il sangue spande. [She, just as the ivy clings to a trunk, stays rooted to her sweet charge, but on his foot and her hair squeezes so hard the wild one, that in the end she has to let go; then with a robust hand he hurls the child and throws him against the nearby wall among the hard 26

Ibid., pp. 552–3, stanza 55, vv. 4–8.

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rocks; before he hurls him, however, and before he strikes him, he swings him around three and four times. / At that horrible and pitiless blow, in the trembling and dismayed child the shock itself is preceded by anguish, and dead it is before being hurt. In the end, limbs broken, bones snapped, stretched out on the ground all mashed and chopped, through his lips and nostrils flows in great quantity together with white marrow his blood.]27

The disgusting detail of the baby’s brain and blood streaming out of its mouth and nose has no compensation whatsoever in this passage, so that the effect must be considered one of sheer horror. The only mitigating element is the poetry itself, the beauty of the verses and the conceitful rhetorical devices adopted to describe the horrible scene (precorsa / percossa; morto riman pria che ferito; tutto pesto / tutto trito). In Marino’s poem on the Massacre of the Innocents, horror effects are essential elements in a sophisticated game of equilibrium. They are part of antithetical rhetorical constructions, where elements of beauty are highlighted by contrasting them with unpleasant ingredients. Or they are used autonomously, in order to give the poet an opportunity to show off his ability to make beautiful verses, even when they evoke distressing situations. Obviously, this is a risky kind of poetry. It is easily misunderstood whenever the audience does not grasp the antithetical principle on which it is based. Therefore it has to be realized in a convincing manner, the best guarantee to avoid misunderstanding thus being a skilful poet or artist – a ‘fabro gentil’, as Marino himself emphasizes in the verses he published in 1620 to describe Guido Reni’s earlier version of the Massacre of the Innocents: Che fai, Guido, che fai? La man, che forme angeliche dipigne, tratta or’opre sanguigne? Non vedi tu, che mentre il sanguinoso stuol dei fanciulli ravivando vai, nova morte gli dai? O ne la crudeltate ancor pietoso, fabro gentil, ben sai, ch’ancor tragico caso è caro oggetto, e che spesso l’orror va col diletto. [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.]28 27

Ibid., pp. 547–8, stanzas 38–9. G.B. Marino, La Galleria (Venezia, 1620), now in: idem, Opere, ed. A. Asor Rosa (Milan: Rizzoli, 1967), p. 390. On Reni’s picture of the Massacre, now in the Pinacoteca 28

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Again the repeated oppositions (forme angeliche / opre sanguigne; vita / morte; crudeltà / pietà) underline the central, paradoxical and therefore conceitful idea that pleasure can be produced by disgust: ‘l’orror va col diletto’. This can be accomplished, however, only by a ‘fabro gentil’, an artist able to maintain the right balance between the different, opposing elements. Such an art based on the skills of the poet or painter could not but appeal to artists and patrons interested in bravura. And this is exactly what happened. As a result of the huge popularity of Marino’s sacred poem, before and after its posthumous publication in 1632, the iconography of the Massacre of the Innocents changed considerably, as has been demonstrated by Elizabeth Cropper.29 Artists like Poussin, Stanzione, Testa, Pacecco, Castello and Rubens, impressed as they were by Marino’s audacious combination of beauty and horror, represented the scene in pictures that focused on the contrast between the ugly and the beautiful, between pity and disgust. Such a contrast was accomplished by narrative means, adopting, for example, particular scenes derived from Marino, like Nazionale in Bologna, cf. F. Valli, ‘La “Strage degli Innocenti” di Guido Reni’, Atti e Memorie dell’Accademia Clementina, N.S., 22 (1988), pp. 97–103. On Marino’s poem cf. C. Dempsey, ‘Guido Reni in the Eyes of his Contemporaries’, in Guido Reni 1575–1642 (Bologna: Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1988), pp. 110–13. The English translation in E. Cropper, ‘The Petrifying Art: Marino’s Poetry and Caravaggio’, Metropolitan Museum Journal, 26 (1991), pp. 193–212, quotation at p. 207. 29 E. Cropper, ‘Marino’s “Strage degli Innocenti”, Poussin, Rubens, and Guido Reni’, Studi secenteschi, 23 (1992), pp. 137–66. The relation between Marino’s Strage degli Innocenti and some contemporary paintings on the same subject was pointed out already in A. Belloni, ‘Giambattista Marino e due pittori veronesi suoi contemporanei’, Atti dell’Accademia d’agricultura, scienze, lettere, arti e commercio di Verona, series IV, 4 (1903), pp. 43–63. The evolution of the iconography of the Massacre in Italian Renaissance and Baroque painting, without, however, a specific reference to the impact of Marino’s poem, is also discussed by F. Lamera, ‘La Strage degli Innocenti tra Cinque e Seicento: elementi per una lettura iconografica e compositiva’, Studi di Storia dell’Arte, 4 (1981–82), pp. 87–94, 311–17; cf. also G. LeCoat, The Rhetoric of the Arts, 1550–1650 (Bern and Frankfurt: Lang, 1975), who discusses Marino’s Strage in relation to both Poussin’s painting on the Massacre of the Innocents and Monteverdi’s Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda. On the older tradition cf. L. Kötzsche-Breitenbruch, ‘Zur Ikonographie des bethlemitischen Kindermordes in der frühchristlichen Kunst’, Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum, 11–12 (1968–69), pp. 104–15; H. Maguire, Art and Eloquence in Byzantium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 22–34, and A. Stavropoulou Makri, ‘Massacre des Innocents dans la peinture post-byzantine et son rapport avec l’art italien renaissant’, Byzantion, 60 (1990), pp. 366–81. Some indications on the literary rendering of the theme are to be found in E. Frenzel, Stoffe der Weltliteratur (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1976), pp. 304–7, and in H.H. Borcherdt, ‘Der Bethlehemitische Kindermord und die Rachelklage in der Literatur’, Gottesminne. Monatschrift für religiöse Dichtkunst, 6 (1911–12), pp. 26–40, who discusses in some detail the German tradition from the Middle Ages to the sixteenth century.

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the one of the baby being trod on by its executioner in Poussin’s picture, but also by a more general tension between content and form: between the horror of the episode and the beauty of its representation. Although this kind of tension is of course a quality peculiar to the scene itself, and even the main cause for its appeal, after about 1630 we witness not only an unprecedented popularity of the Massacre episode,30 but also a tendency to exploit this contrast to the full, thus creating a conceitful image capable of producing astonishment and admiration. The decisive role of Marino’s poem in the reorientation of the iconography of the Massacre of the Innocents indicates that around 1630 painters and their patrons were ready to accept his audacious handling of horror as an ingredient in a bravura art based on extreme oppositions and conceived in order to create ‘meraviglia’. This was especially the case in Naples, the capital to which Marino returned in 1625 after a long and successful stay at the court of Louis XIII and Maria de’ Medici in France. At the occasion of the poet’s glorious reentry, several festivities were organized by the leading Neapolitan intellectual and artistic communities in order to honour the poet’s accomplishments. Due to this exceptional attention, Marino’s presence in Naples had immediate and long-lasting effects, especially – as has been demonstrated by Sebastian Schütze – on contemporary debates on artistic imitation.31 Since this was the period in which Marino finished his Strage degli Innocenti, which was well-known even before its posthumous publication in 1632, it seems only logical that discussions on his poetry and aesthetics intensified an already-existing interest in the possibilities of an artistic expression focused on the brilliant representation of the horrible. In such a climate of artistic experimentation, painters like Ribera could develop an interest in the idea of demonstrating their own capacities by creating works of art based on the conceitful combination of beauty and horror, an experiment, moreover, favoured by leading local patrons like Gaspar

30 A. Pigler, Barock-themen. Eine Auswahl von Verzeichnissen zur Ikonographie des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 1974), vol. I, pp. 253–60. On the remarkable increase in literary adaptations of the Massacre episode during the sixteenth and seventeenth century, cf. Borcherdt, ‘Der Bethlehemitische Kindermord’, p. 26. 31 S. Schütze, ‘Pittura parlante e poesia taciturna. Il ritorno di Giovan Battista Marino a Napoli, il suo concetto di imitazione e una mirabile interpretazione pittorica’, in Cropper, E., Perini, G. and Solinas, F., eds, Documentary Culture. Florence and Rome from Grand-Duke Ferdinand I to Pope Alexander VII (Florence: Colloquium Villa Spelman, 1990), (Bologna: Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1992), pp. 209–26; cf. also A. Borzelli, Storia della vita e delle opere di Giovan Battista Marino (Naples, 1927), pp. 259–64, and J. Mirollo, The Poet of the Marvelous. Giambattista Marino (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1963), pp. 92–4.

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Roomer and the viceroys, who warmly welcomed these specimens of a highly sophisticated bravura art in their collections.32 Whenever Neapolitan Seicento art exhibits, to recall once more Susan Sontag’s formula, ‘the maximum amount of trauma, violence, physical indignity …’, it does not do so ‘in the name of truthfulness’. It tries to disturb the audience in the name of art itself. Poets such as Marino and painters like Ribera consciously explore the outer limits of what art is able to accomplish. In showing that a skilful imitation has the power to make even repulsive things attractive, they not only conform to an ancient Aristotelian concept and show off their own qualities, they also emphasize the power of artistic representation as such. They did so not in an apologetic but rather in a polemical way, and probably were well aware of the fact that they were engaging in audacious artistic experiments, experiments that might easily have caused indignation and refusal. This is at least what a final consideration of one of Ribera’s more provocative techniques suggests. Amongst his various canvases on the theme of the Martyrdom of St Bartholomew (see Figs 4.2 and 4.4), only one of the pictures shows the tortured saint glancing piercingly outside the picture towards the audience. In representations of Christian martyrdom that traditionally preferred to give the saints a blissful glance of devotion turned upwards to heaven, this is a highly unusual device. But it is also a device never to be used by Ribera again. Obviously, his exact motives are unknown, but it is not unlikely that in this particular detail we can witness a hesitation on the part of the artist as to how far he could push the limits of an art where ‘l’orror va col diletto’. For it is clear that this device to represent victims of horrible torture looking with eyes full of anguish towards the audience was an extremist expedient that might easily jeopardize the delicate balance between pleasure and disgust. In fact, when in 1660 Ribera’s pupil Luca Giordano painted his own version of Apollo and Marsyas (Fig. 4.6), clearly inspired by his master’s famous example of some twenty-five years earlier, he altered the satyr’s facial expression, apparently in compliance with changing artistic sensibilities, redirecting his glance away from the audience.33

32 J. Clifton, ‘“Ad vivum mire depinxit”. Towards a reconstruction of Ribera’s art theory’, in: Storia dell’Arte, 83 (1995), pp. 111–32, has convincingly argued that Ribera’s Donna barbuta (1642) is to be considered in the same context of artistic experiment. 33 Cf. O. Ferrari and G. Scavizzi, Luca Giordano. L’opera completa (Naples: Electa, 1992), vol. I, p. 32 (ill. XVI), vol. II, pp. 269–70 (cat.n. A128).

4.6

Luca Giordano, Apollo and Marsyas, 206 x 256 cm, oil on canvas, c. 1660, Museo Nazionale di San Martino, Naples

CHAPTER FIVE

Execution, Dissection, Pain and Infamy – A Morphological Investigation1 Florike Egmond The margins, extremities and contours of the human body are of central importance in two phenomena regarded as characteristic of early modern European history: the dramatic public executions, which had their heyday during the period 1450–1800, and the equally spectacular public dissections, which flourished in many European countries from the fifteenth to the late seventeenth century. This essay investigates the similarities between the two while at the same time examining the pertinence of such a comparison. The single immediate connection between public dissections and public executions was the victim. Most bodies which were taken apart in public displays of anatomical skills belonged to men and women who had died shortly before on the scaffold. In itself such a physical trait d’union hardly seems to constitute reason enough for a further investigation of the resemblances between the two phenomena. The differences appear far more significant. After all, public executions pertained to a living human being and were the final consequence of a verdict pronounced after someone had been found guilty of serious crimes; their aim was retribution and deterrence. Public dissections, on the contrary, constituted a scientific exploration of a dead body for the purpose of advancing medical knowledge from which others would, hopefully, eventually profit. That, at least, is what these two public rituals are usually supposed to have been. Such ‘definitions’ are couched in terms of meaning and function, 1 The roots – or should I call them tentacles – of this article go back a long way: to several papers I presented in the course of the 1990s in Amsterdam, Leiden, Utrecht, Boston, London and Bologna. Offshoots and related articles have found their way into various publications to which the footnotes below will point. It is impossible to thank here all those with whom I have had the good fortune and pleasure to discuss these texts and papers. For their comments on various versions of this article I would very much like to thank Peter Mason, Sachiko Kusukawa, Helen King, Marijke Gijswijt, Paul Smith, José Pardo Tomás and Rob Zwijnenberg.

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however, and these two aspects of ritual are notoriously hard to determine for any foreign society.2 If we set out in this essay by deferring judgement on functions and meanings and do not select material for comparison on the basis of (apparently) similar functions or meanings – a method that is tantamount to interpreting historical phenomena first and investigating them afterwards – we may be able to take a fresh look at the ‘phenomenology’ of both practices.3 Here, the suggested basis for a comparison between public executions and public dissections is first and foremost their morphology. For these rituals looked very much alike in some of their main characteristics. Put very crudely, both involved a public display of opening and cutting up human bodies and almost equally drastically affected the cohesion and integrity of the human body. The formal resemblance constitutes the starting point, but the principal reason for this investigation is to discover whether a comparison based on morphological resemblance can actually help us discover further significant similarities between these two phenomena.4 The following inquiries will take us along diverging pathways, leading to Germanic ‘tribes’, nineteenth-century legal history, the punishment of high treason in France, evil ghosts, the meaning of a slap in the face, adultery, incest and rape. Each of these can only be discussed briefly here, but could lie at the beginning of further lines of investigation. The pathways that we will follow are not completely divergent, however, but now and then touch upon each other, allowing a circuitous investigation around the margins of the human body and the complicated issue of the connections between physical and moral integrity. Besides execution and dissection, pain and infamy will prove to be guiding themes during this tour. Publicity links all of them. The first section discusses links between punishment and pain; the second focuses on the standard types of capital punishment in early 2 Cf. Florike Egmond, ‘The cock, the dog, the serpent, and the monkey. Reception and transmission of a Roman punishment’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 2 (1995), pp. 159–92, with further references to anthropological publications on changing interpretations of ritual. 3 See for a similar argument with respect to decisions on appropriate or inappropriate subjects and contexts, Florike Egmond and Peter Mason, The Mammoth and the Mouse. On Microhistory and Morphology (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), Chapter I; and Florike Egmond and Peter Mason, ‘A horse called Belisarius’, History Workshop Journal 47 (1999), pp. 240–52. 4 From a methodological point of view this investigation, much like Egmond and Mason, The Mammoth and the Mouse, has been inspired by Carlo Ginzburg’s attempts at combining morphology and history. For a clarification of why I am looking for similarities and not for differences, see also Egmond and Mason, The Mammoth and the Mouse, pp. 37–9.

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modern Europe and the relation between painful punishment and infamy or dishonour. Connections between the violation of bodily integrity, public punishment, infamy and public dissections in anatomy theatres form the theme of the third and last section. As we go along, following the strands of investigation based upon morphological resemblance, we will repeatedly come across two themes (or perhaps we should regard them as two aspects of one and the same thing) that were to be found at the cutting edge of both early modern public executions and dissections: dishonour and infamy.

Punishment, pain, and chronology The connection between pain and punishment may seem obvious, even if it is not self-evident. It is common knowledge among specialists and non-specialists alike (partly through the wide readership of Michel Foucault’s study Surveiller et Punir) that early modern punishment was extremely painful, and aimed first and foremost at the body. Therefore, one question that has to be addressed in the course of this essay is in which way early modern punishment exactly pertained to the human body: were punishments indeed directed at the body, or was the body a location rather than the objective? The chronology of the connection between public punishment and pain is one of its most interesting aspects. Again largely because of the influential studies by Michel Foucault – and Norbert Elias – it seems to have become common knowledge that the ancien régime differed drastically in this respect from the modern period.5 In the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, new types of punishment behind closed doors replaced older forms of physical punishment which were carried out in public. Whether this was part of a long-term civilizing process that closely intertwined with state formation and increasing sensitivity (as Elias has argued), or of a more dramatic rupture and change in systems of control which focused on mind, soul and morality instead of the body (as Foucault claimed) is irrelevant here. Both grand theories construct – intentionally or not – a dichotomy between a cruel and barbaric past, situated before the late eighteenth century, and a more enlightened, civilized modern period after about 1800. In both theories, physical punishment (as the most drastic of several body-related practices) is one of the yardsticks by 5 See Michel Foucault, Discipline and punish. The birth of the prison (London: Penguin, 1977); orig. Surveiller et Punir. Naissance de la prison (Paris, 1975); and Norbert Elias, Ueber den Prozess der Zivilisation (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2 vols, 1976; 1st edn 1939; English edn The Civilizing Process, Oxford: Blackwell, 2 vols, 1978–82).

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which modernity and civilization can be measured. Finally, both theories take as their principal examples extreme practices which transgress the margins of the human body. The example of drawing and quartering is a case in point. By discussing the case of Damien – who was drawn and quartered in 1757 in Paris for attacking the French king – as a first and prominent example in his Surveiller et Punir, Foucault has turned it into an icon of early modern cruelty. The choice of precisely this punishment could hardly have been more unfortunate or inappropriate, however. Drawing and quartering as a historical practice – as distinguished from a historical idea – has a history limited to a handful of French cases which occurred in the late sixteenth century and the single eighteenth-century case of Damien. All other (mainly English) cases dated earlier than the midsixteenth century either are called drawing and quartering but do not actually consist of it, or belong to the domain of myth and legend, and not to that of historical practice. Elsewhere I have argued that sixteenthcentury French judges may precisely have chosen this punishment because of its antiquated, anachronistic, mythical, ‘barbaric’, and faintly classical character. By seizing upon precisely this punishment as a crucial example, instead of the many forms of capital punishment that were actually carried out all over early modern Europe, Foucault and his followers have repeated the action of the early modern judges in an attempt to distance modern Western society from the barbaric past by means of a violent and drastic rupture.6 The grand theories of Elias and Foucault tell us far more about the considerable influence of nineteenth-century evolutionary models on twentieth-century sociologists and philosophers than about early modern historical phenomena. Above all, they seem to reflect a strong need on the part of both these scholars and their large audiences to create a wide gulf between ‘ourselves’ as civilized Europeans and our cruel forebears. Recognizing this function of their theories does not, of course, invalidate everything Elias, Foucault and many others have stated about punishment or other body-related practices in the past. Yet, for several decades their influence has tended to pull specialist research on crime and punishment away from the early modern period towards

6 If we take the tearing apart of a convict’s body by means of horses to be a central characteristic of this punishment, and disregard all cases in which a criminal’s body was dragged on a kind of sledge to the scaffold (sometimes by a horse) or cut up by the executioner without the intervention of horses, only about twelve cases are known of drawing and quartering for the whole of European history including classical Roman times. See Florike Egmond and Peter Mason, ‘Domestic and exotic cruelties: extravagance and punishment’, Irish Review 24 (1999), pp. 31–52.

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the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – the phase of transition, of growing modernity and declining barbarity.7 By comparison, little attention has been paid to the question of whether the preceding ‘barbaric’ period with its emphasis on painful and public physical punishment was perhaps also a phase instead of merely an unchanging and ‘given’ prehistory of modernity.8 Such information is, in fact, easy to find. Notwithstanding spectacular tales about ordeals and other trials involving water and fire, medieval punishment in Western Europe until the fourteenth or midfifteenth century consisted predominantly of the payment of fines, whether in money, bricks, or other commodities. In a much smaller number of cases convicts were banished or outlawed. Physical punishment, ranging from branding to execution, was relatively rare. This holds true not only of limited regions or groups. It applies to the period from late Roman times onwards, to by far the largest part of the Western European population,9 and covers such well-known ‘barbaric’ societies as the Germanic ‘tribes’.10 This is hardly news to specialists in the history of criminal law or to many medievalists. Yet, the 7 For excellent studies focusing on this so-called transitional period, see Richard Evans, Rituals of retribution. Capital punishment in Germany 1600–1987 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Pieter Spierenburg, The spectacle of suffering. Executions and the evolution of repression: from a preindustrial metropolis to the European experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); V.A.C. Gatrell, The hanging tree, execution and the English people 1770–1868 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); and J.A. Sharp, Judicial punishment in England (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1990). A more recent example of this focus on the ‘rupture’ between old and new is the discussion by Maza of new classifications of punishment during the late eighteenth century: Sarah Maza, ‘The Theater of Punishment. Melodrama and Judicial Reform in Prerevolutionary France’, in From the Royal to the Republican Body. Incorporating the political in seventeenth- and eighteenth century France, Sara E. Melzer and Kathryn Norberg (eds) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 182–97, esp. pp. 192–4. 8 Nor do I know of any comparative research on other phases of increasing severity of penalties. See on the increasing barbarism of penalties in the Roman empire G.E.M. de Ste Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World from the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests (London: Duckworth, 1981), pp. 456–65. 9 For obvious reasons slaves and serfs generally were the only ones excluded. 10 See especially Hermann Nehlsen, ‘Entstehung des öffentlichen Strafrechts bei den germanischen Stämmen’, Gerichtslauben-Vorträge. Freiburger Festkolloquium zum fünfundsiebzigsten Geburtstag von Hans Thieme, ed. Karl Kroeschell (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1983), pp. 3–16 (with further references). See also Esther Cohen, The crossroads of justice. Law and culture in late medieval France (Leiden: Brill, 1993); and eadem, ‘Symbols of culpability and the universal language of justice. The ritual of public executions in late medieval Europe’, History of European Ideas 11 (1989), pp. 407–16. On medieval ordeals see Robert Bartlett, Trial by fire and water. The medieval judicial ordeal (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).

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consequences for the dichotomy barbaric/civilized linked to premodern/modern, as implied by the theories of both Elias and Foucault, seem not to have been fully realized. More important, the question of how or why punishments changed significantly in Western Europe during the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries has to my knowledge been raised only in the context of specialist debate, and not as a key problem that might give us a clue to connections between many other wide-ranging changes during this period. All over Western Europe, blood money, fines and ransom payments were slowly being replaced by corporal punishment during the late fourteenth, fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. For the domain of criminal law and justice there is abundant evidence for the introduction of torture as a means of proof, the invention of baroque forms of punishment and of elaborate additions to older, plainer types of punishment (such as scorching the hands or face of the condemned with burning straw, the use of tar and sulphur, the use of tongs to tear the flesh). During the same period various forms of corporal punishment were introduced from fiction (such as myths and folk tales) into practice.11 Legal historians have connected the introduction of torture and the growing emphasis on physical punishment with the increasing influence of (rediscovered or reinvented) Roman law on the European continent and concomitant procedural changes in criminal law. Of central importance in this line of argument is the transition from accusatorial to inquisitorial procedure in criminal trials, which was linked in turn with the influence of clerical courts, the Inquisition, relations between State and Church in Continental Europe, and with changing relations between public authorities and citizens (or as the case may be, rulers and subjects).12 In a socio-historical context the growing emphasis on corporal punishment has been linked with transformations in the role of the family, the diminishing responsibility of extended families for the actions of their members, and the growth of individual accountability. These developments would have left increasingly less room for blood money and fines, the payment of which depended, after all, to a large extent on 11 This applies, for instance, both to the rare punishment of Säcken (drowning in a leather sack accompanied by a cock, a dog, a snake and a monkey or cat), which was imposed on certain parricides, and to the practice of drawing and quartering as discussed above. See for the former Egmond, ‘The cock, the dog, the serpent, and the monkey’, with further bibliographical references, and for the latter Egmond and Mason, ‘Domestic and exotic cruelties’. 12 In many of these respects developments in England diverged from those on the continent. On this topic see R.C. van Caenegem, Judges, legislators and professors. Chapters in European legal history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

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the sense of responsibility and honour of the leading members of such a family network. As feuding made way for individual duelling, payment of fines by a group was slowly replaced by bodily punishment of the individual. At first, this would have affected only those individuals who were not wealthy enough to pay fines or who lacked a supporting network of kin; often their only possession was their body. In the course of time physical punishment was extended to other social categories as well. In this line of reasoning the intensification of punishment could fit in well with long-term processes such as urbanization, with its supposedly negative effect on kinship ties and concomitant individualization.13 These interpretations are by no means mutually exclusive, and each provides elements that make sense, but both are constricted by their respective disciplinary boundaries. Rather than select the various relevant elements in each theory and glue them together, it seems more interesting to step outside the categories of legal and social history, widen the interpretative context, and take a brief look at the domain of culture.14 It is hard to imagine, for instance, that the increasing emphasis on proof and new definitions of evidence (which manifested themselves in judicial torture and a new value attached to confession) were completely unconnected with the contemporary increase in debate in the natural sciences about observation, experiment, truth, evidence, autopsy, and so on. (Those discussions, by the way, were of central importance to the emergence of public dissection as a scientific event.) It has been argued, for instance, that the introduction of torture should be seen in the context of changing ideas about the relation between pain and truth during this period.15 The early modern preoccupation with the body was, moreover, by no means limited to the field of punishment – as has been argued before and can be documented from many different studies. For instance, during the

13 For various interpretations of the increasing emphasis on physical punishment in the early modern period see, among others, Michael Weisser, Crime and punishment in early modern Europe (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1979); Richard van Dülmen, Theater des Schreckens. Gerichtspraxis und Strafrituale in der frühen Neuzeit (Munich: C.H. Beck Verlag, 1985); Sharp, Judicial punishment, esp. pp. 27–36; Cohen, The crossroads of justice, esp. pp. 159–61; and Trevor Dean and K.J.P. Lowe (eds), Crime, society and the law in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 14 Although these categories – social, cultural, legal – are no more than disciplinary constructions, they have been constraining none the less. 15 See for instance, Katharine Eisaman Maus, ‘Proof and consequences: inwardness and its exposure in the English Renaissance’, Representations 34 (1991), pp. 29–51; cf. Esther Cohen, ‘Towards a history of European physical sensibility: pain during the later Middle Ages’, Science in Context 8 (1995), pp. 47–74.

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fifteenth and sixteenth centuries new and generally more restrictive legislation concerning public order and (sexual) morality in the cities of both Flanders and Northern Italy reflects this preoccupation. New rules were created defining and attempting to repress adultery and rape. The authorities showed an increasing interest in sodomy and prostitution, and in many areas new marriage legislation tried to establish moral and sexual rules besides providing regulations for dowry payments and other aspects of marital property.16 It is not particularly interesting to regard these changes as part of processes of state formation and bureaucratization in the course of which absolutist states in the making aspired to far-reaching forms of bodily control over their subjects.17 Such a way of reasoning adds up to no more than a reductionist type of ‘explanation’ in which politics or state formation is regarded as a more important factor than culture, and in which the rich fabric of interconnected early modern phenomena is reduced and simplified instead of described and analysed. That is by no means the point of this investigation. What does seem clear even from such a brief examination is that an increasing preoccupation with the body can be detected in many different spheres of early modern European society. Such a pervasive phenomenon therefore demands to be studied in a series of overlapping contexts, including legal procedure as well as family history, the history of sexuality, and the study of gesture, dress, medicine and anatomy, legislation on public morality, gender relations, capital punishment and so forth. None of these can in itself be decisive, but each is relevant. This is one of the principal reasons why a discursive tour around the human body guided by morphological resemblances is more appropriate to this subject than a straight course directed at one particular aspect. It would take at least one full-length monograph to follow the whole tour: here we can only trace part of it. 16 Cf. Dean and Lowe, Crime, society and the law, esp. Chapters 5–8; Michael Rocke, ‘Gender and sexual culture in Renaissance Italy’, Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy, Judith C. Brown and Robert C. Davis (eds) (London and New York: Longman, 1998), pp. 150–70, which among many other things describes the change from the relative tolerance of prostitution between 1300 and 1500 to its demarcation and exclusion after 1500; and Sharon T. Strocchia, ‘Gender and the rites of honour in Italian Renaissance cities’, Gender and Society, Brown and Davis (eds), pp. 39–60, esp. pp. 48–9. See also Guido Ruggiero, Binding passions. Tales of magic, marriage and power at the end of the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); and for the Flemish cities L.Th. Maes, Vijf eeuwen stedelijk strafrecht. Bijdragen tot de rechts- en cultuurgeschiedenis der Nederlanden (Antwerp: De Sikkel, 1947). 17 I do not suggest that politics of state formation are irrelevant, merely that there seems to be no reason to accord them more importance than many other aspects of early modern life.

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Physical punishment and dishonour There were many different forms of capital punishment in early modern Continental European practice between 1450 and 1800, but the basic forms and patterns are relatively simple.18 Men could be hanged, broken on the wheel, burnt at the stake, drowned, or garrotted. Women were either garrotted, or died at the gallows, the stake, by drowning, decapitation, or breaking on the wheel.19 Hanging was by far the most usual punishment for men. For women it was either the garrotte or hanging, depending on regional custom. Both male and female convicts were sentenced to hanging for serious (or repeated) crimes of property or violence. In most European countries decapitation was reserved for convicts from the higher social strata.20 Only men (and a few women) who had committed extremely serious crimes of violence combined with robbery or theft were broken on the wheel; it is quite difficult to find any first offenders among them. Fire and water were nearly exclusively imposed on those who had committed so-called exorbitant crimes against religion and morality, the sexual norms, or the dominant political ideology. They had usually been found guilty of witchcraft, heresy, incest, sodomy, bestiality, parricide, or high treason. We may well ask why so many forms of capital punishment were needed. The only answer can be that dead was not simply dead in early modern Europe. The form of death mattered.21 It is striking, moreover, 18 I am limiting myself here to those forms of capital punishment that were executed in practice and could actually be seen by the public. The total range of punishments ‘available’ at the time was much larger, including punishments mentioned in fiction, folklore, laws and legal treatises, all of which shared the characteristic of leading a purely textual existence. 19 This is obviously a simplification; for brevity’s sake I am ignoring regional and temporal variation. For a detailed illustrated overview of Continental European forms of corporal punishment see Wolfgang Schild, Alte Gerichtsbarkeit. Vom Gottesurteil bis zum Beginn der modernen Rechtsprechung (Munich: Callwey, 1980). Cf. Samuel Y. Edgerton Jr., Pictures of punishment. Art and criminal prosecution during the Florentine Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), ranges far wider than its title suggests. 20 As had been established in Roman law by the second century AD. 21 This was not only true of early modern Europe, but also of classical Greek and Roman societies. A considerable literature on this subjects exists. Three excellent studies are Monique Halm-Tisserant, Réalités et imaginaire des supplices en Grèce ancienne (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1998); Eva Cantarella, I supplizi capitali in Grecia e a Roma. Origini e funzioni della pena di morte nell’antichità classica (Milan: Rizzoli, 1991); and Du châtiment dans la cité. Supplices corporels et peine de mort dans le monde antique (Table ronde organisée par l’École française de Rome avec le concours du Centre national de la recherche scientifique. Rome, novembre 1982), (Rome: Ecole Française de Rome, 1984). Two classic studies are Theodor Mommsen, Römisches Strafrecht (Leipzig:

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that this wide range of forms of capital punishment was known all over Continental Europe, while a general consensus among all classes of society seems to have existed about their differences in severity. It would have been extremely helpful if early modern magistrates had ever explained why they regarded breaking on the wheel as a harsher punishment than, for instance, hanging, or why they saw drowning and burning as roughly equivalent to each other. Lacking such explanations, we can only infer the logic – if that is the right term – from the numerous examples themselves.22 A closer inspection of the various forms of capital punishment indicates that their effect on the corporal integrity of the condemned person was a crucial factor in determining their position on the scale of severity. Hanging did not result in fragmentation of the body, but it certainly destroyed its internal cohesion. After the actual execution, the dead body was usually transported to a gallows located at the limits of the judicial territory.23 The body remained there, hanging in chains or ropes in full view of all passers-by, until it disintegrated and the remains fell on the unconsecrated ground of the pit below the gallows. The emphasis on disintegration was even stronger in the case of breaking on the wheel. The convict’s limbs were broken by blows with a heavy metal bar, a wheel or a wooden club. In general the convict had been killed a few moments earlier by a blow to the heart, but sometimes the procedure was reversed in the case of particularly heinous crimes. Often the next step consisted of cutting off the head. The head on a stake would be displayed next to the broken body on the city walls or at the gallows. Death by drowning or fire was even more drastic. In the latter case nothing but the ashes remained, and even these were sometimes Duncker and Humblot, 1899); and Ernst Levy, Die Römische Kapitalstrafe, Ernst Levy. Gesammelte Schriften zu seinem achtzigsten Geburtstag, Wolfgang Kunkel and Max Kaser (eds), vol. 2 (Cologne and Graz: Böhlau Verlag, 1963), pp. 325–78. 22 During the early modern age European continental judges were not required to elucidate their verdicts and only did so in exceptional cases. 23 Most continental towns displayed the dead bodies of executed convicts on or near their territorial boundaries including their city walls – probably for both practical and symbolic reasons (including deterrence and demarcating the boundaries of the local authorities’ powers). For a contemporary representation see Esaias van de Velde, Gallows in a Landscape (1619), illustrated in Dawn of the Golden Age, Ger Luijten, Ariane van Suchtelen, Reinier Baarsen, Wouter Kloek, and Marijn Schapelhouman (eds) (Amsterdam and Zwolle: Waanders, 1993), p. 293 and pp. 668–9 with further references. Graphic descriptions of various forms of capital punishment and of the frightening aspect of rotting corpses on display near sixteenth-century Swiss and French towns can be found in the journal of Felix Platter. For an English edition see Beloved Son Felix. The Journal of Felix Platter a medical student in Montpellier in the sixteenth century, trans. and intro. Seán Jennett (London: Frederick Muller, 1961).

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further obliterated by dispersing them in the air or throwing them into the sea at some distance from the coast. To a modern reader drowning might seem a less aggressive method of killing than burning, but it annihilated the body quite as effectively and prevented it from ever again regaining the earth, as some verdicts explicitly stated.24 Even if the different degrees of severity attributed at the time to the various forms of punishment closely reflected the extent to which these damaged the bodily integrity of the condemned person, this does not necessarily imply that more severe punishments were more painful. In fact, pain does not seem to have been the principal purpose of these rituals at all.25 That, at least, must be the conclusion when we look at some conspicuous and important characteristics of early modern capital punishment that have often been regarded as oddities. None of these can be understood at all in terms of pain. All over Europe physical punishment and maiming as part of the execution ritual went on after the convict had died, and all over Europe the final and very public phase of disintegration at the gallows was a common and integral part of the ritual of punishment. Moreover, in many European countries a dead person could be convicted in court and sentenced to physical punishment.26 Clearly, then, it was not particularly relevant to the ritual

24 Several Dutch capital sentences in cases of sodomy or bestiality dating to the period 1650–1790 explicitly mention that burning the dead body of the executed person or throwing his ashes into the sea would prevent any further contact with the earth inhabited by human beings. Annihilation often even extended to the memory of the crimes that had been committed. Sentences speak of ‘crimes that should not be mentioned’, and in some towns (such as Rotterdam) records and sentences concerning cases of sodomy and bestiality were kept separate from the other criminal records in secret and therefore invisible books. Similar aspects of drowning in the punishment of Säcken are discussed in Egmond, ‘The cock, the dog, the serpent, and the monkey’. 25 That in itself has nothing to do with the question of whether or not early modern Europeans experienced pain differently from modern ones. Clearly, all people involved in these rituals regarded them as extremely painful in every sense of the word. Cf. also Cohen, ‘Towards a history of European physical sensibility’. 26 Best known is the case of suicides. See, for instance, Lieven Vandekerckhove, Van straffen gesproken. De bestraffing van zelfdoding in het oude Europa (Tielt: Lannoo, 1985), esp. pp. 49–74; and Schild, Alte Gerichtsbarkeit, pp. 66–70. Likewise, suspects who died while investigations were being made could be tried, convicted and punished after death. In the Dutch judicial archives I have come across several cases of the posthumous trial and punishment of non-famous persons. A famous case is mentioned by Felix Platter (see note 23 above) in his journal: the real identity of a certain Johann von Binningen was discovered in Basel only after his death. In his former identity as the Dutch painter and sect leader David Joris, his name had been prominent on the lists of wanted political and religious rebels. His corpse was exhumed in Basel, brought to trial, and eventually burned. See Beloved Son Felix, p. 69 and notes. Another famous example from the Netherlands is the case of Gillis van Ledeberch (who was arrested together with Van

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whether punishments were performed upon a dead or a living body or even a thing; therefore pain cannot have been a primary consideration. If pain and cruelty do not begin to explain why the dead could be punished in public rituals all over Western Europe until far into the ‘enlightened’ eighteenth century, nor why corpses were maimed, brutalized, or totally annihilated, this should have implications for the debate about long-term developments in forms of punishment. For it is precisely this persistent – and in all likelihood anachronistic – tendency to regard pain as the most important aspect of punishment that underpins the plausibility of the familiar dichotomy of early modern (= cruel, uncivilized) and modern (= humane, civilized) that we have encountered earlier.27 A brief inspection of some interpretations put forward by (legal) historians as to why dead persons could be convicted and corpses could be punished in the early modern period may help us look for alternatives to ‘pain’ as a prime aspect of punishment. For similar questions have been raised before, especially in the influential German legal historical studies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their interpretation of the punishment of suicides is a case in point. According to Christian doctrine suicide was a crime. That in itself does not make clear, however, why in several early modern European countries suicides were condemned during regular court sessions to be hanged upside down by one leg from the gallows until their bodies fell apart. As several nineteenth-century German legal historians have suggested (in interpretations that crop up again and again in the course of the twentieth century in modified versions), this practice and related destructive types of corporal punishment point to age-old beliefs according to which the intact dead body of an executed convict could continue to pollute and endanger the living; it might even provide a means for the dead to return as an evil ghost. This interpretation thus, interestingly, shifts the focus from punishment (and pain) to conceptions of death and afterlife, religious beliefs, and notions of pollution.28 Oldenbarneveldt, Hugo Grotius and some others for high treason). Ledeberch committed suicide in prison. The coffin with his body inside was hanged from the gallows of The Hague in 1619. See the drawing of this event by Esaias van de Velde and a short description in Luijten et al. (eds), Dawn of the Golden Age, pp. 618–19. 27 Schild, for instance, devotes a whole chapter to ‘Das Problem der Grausamkeit’ (Alte Gerichtsbarkeit, pp. 93–102); one section has the revealing heading ‘Der Grund der Un-Menschlichkeit’. 28 A classic and extremely influential example is the synthetic work by Karl von Amira, Die germanischen Todesstrafen. Untersuchungen zur Rechts- und Religionsgeschichte (Abhandlungen der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, philosophisch-philologische und historische klasse, 31, Abhandlung 3) (Munich: Verlag

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The problem is that there is very little evidence to support this interpretation of destructive bodily punishment, even after more than a century of looking for it. There are indeed indications that the belief in the returning dead intent on harming the living did exist in medieval (and possibly early modern) Europe, and it is fairly clear that pollution was by no means an unimportant concept. For many Europeans the dead did indeed continue to be part of the community of the living – that is, to a certain extent.29 However, the evidence concerning these beliefs is fragmented, relatively scarce, and almost never explicitly connected with the early modern practices of punishment described above. We do not have any proof, for instance, that the public executions of the period 1450–1800 were either explicitly or in larger circles regarded at the time as purification rituals which made use of body magic. The only exception seems to be a belief held at the time by popular culture that attributed magic powers to blood, parts of the dead bodies of the executed and to the noose of the gallows. Contemporary proof is equally scarce for the likewise popular theory that early modern people believed that the upside-down hanging of suicides would prevent their future resurrection. The scarcity of evidence is not the most serious problem, however, with regard to the above-mentioned interpretation. After all, it might be argued that explicitness is not always required, and that the implicit ‘logic’ of the rituals does point towards such beliefs. By that time we are back to square one: the largely unsupported theories of the German legal historians of a century ago. A far more serious objection to these theories is that notions of crime and criminals as polluting elements in society and a belief in the returning dead did not suddenly manifest themselves (or even grow much more prominent) during the early modern period – thus coinciding with the rise of ‘baroque’ forms of bodily punishment. They existed already during the Middle Ages and might even be traced back to classical notions of purity and pollution.30 der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1922). For further references to these German legal historical publications see Egmond, ‘The cock, the dog, the serpent, and the monkey’. Cf. also Donald Kelley, The human measure. Social thought in the Western legal tradition (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1990), esp. pp. 209–57. The work of Dumézil comes to mind as well. 29 See for instance Patrick J. Geary, Living with the dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); but compare the critical remarks concerning the belief in the returning dead in Otto Gerhard Oexle, ‘Die Gegenwart der Toten’, Death in the Middle Ages, Herman Braet and Werner Verbeke (eds) (Louvain: Louvain University Press, 1983), pp. 19–77, esp. pp. 58–65. 30 For an attempt to trace the long-term continuity of a peculiar form of capital punishment and the (possible) connection with pollution, see Egmond, ‘The cock, the dog, the serpent, and the monkey’. On the topic of purity and pollution in the classical period

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Therefore, if such beliefs are used to ‘explain’ the relatively sudden rise of destructive corporal punishment in the early modern age, it becomes very hard to understand why such practices did not (or only rarely) occur in the Middle Ages. Again, the problem goes back to the simplistic binary distinction between a modern age and an undifferentiated (and ‘barbaric’) pre-modern one – the fictional time of age-old beliefs – that is typical of ‘chronocentric’ perceptions of historical change.31 And that takes us back to the historical context in which these (legal) historical theories originated. They presuppose the extreme longevity of popular beliefs which may have originated in Germanic society, or even earlier in a misty Indo-European past, and were part of a concerted effort to discover (or as we would say now, construct) age-old Germanic roots for certain inexplicable customs. As such they were central to the famous nineteenth-century battle in German legal history between Romanists and Germanists – a battle that fit into the particularly heated debate of that period about the identity of the German nation. A century later, they seem to tell us more about nineteenth-century preoccupations than about early modern ones. The interpretative shift away from pain as the crux of punishment to death, afterlife, and pollution may none the less prove fruitful, even if these particular theories cannot be substantiated.32 With these considerations in mind a return to the early modern sources and the clues they provide is called for. We are looking for a concept or notion that helps us understand why early modern European punishment should take place in public, why it focused on the body and why it aimed at various degrees of destruction of bodily integrity (culminating in its total annihilation in the most serious cases), while at the same time disregarding whether the body in question was dead or alive. Such a concept should, moreover, directly or indirectly provide the key to understanding the various forms of bodily punishment, such as the upside-down hanging of suicides. Two concepts (or two different aspects of one concept) seem to fit the bill: honour and shame. It is of crucial importance in this respect that honour, unlike pain, does transcend death. Dead bodies could (and

see especially Robert Parker, Miasma. Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983). 31 For a further discussion of chronocentrism and evolutionary interpretations of historical change see Egmond and Mason, The Mammoth and the Mouse. 32 In spite of the many differences between the present morphological investigation and the nineteenth-century historiographical context with its strongly evolutionist overtones, it is intriguing to see that morphological resemblances lay at the basis of quite a few nineteenth-century investigations as well.

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still can) be violated or dishonoured, and the reputation of the dead can be disgraced.33 That the infliction of dishonour (rather than pain) was a very important aspect – perhaps even the main point – of the ritual of public punishment is most clearly attested by the links between the condemned person, the offence, and the form of punishment: the more disgraceful the crime, the more disgraceful the form of punishment. If a man of good repute killed another man in an open fight, he was usually beheaded – if he was punished by death at all. Beheading was not by coincidence reserved for men and women of good reputation (including ruling princes). To emphasize the relatively honourable character of a beheading, the remains were often allowed to be buried in consecrated ground. A murderer who had lain in ambush or stabbed a victim from behind, on the contrary, could not count on an honourable death: hanging was the usual punishment in such cases and there was no question of a decent burial. The direct link between exceptionally dishonourable crimes like incest, sodomy, parricide, or treason, and highly destructive and disgraceful punishments such as burning, breaking on the wheel, or drowning further confirms this pattern.34 Still, it is easier to establish that these punishments were regarded as disgraceful than to uncover why particular forms of punishment or disfigurements were regarded as more shameful than others. For instance, the fact that upside-down hanging was a punishment mainly reserved (at least north of the Alps) for suicides – who were regarded as committing a sin against God – and for Jews, who were likewise regarded as offenders against Christianity, is significant.35 Since the ordinary form of hanging was already disgraceful, we can only speculate that the inversion of the body and the positioning of the head below the 33 Abuse and dishonour nowadays are more directly associated with sexual abuse and the violation of the bodily integrity of women, but they also apply to the desecration of graves. 34 In many such cases not only the honour of the convicted person was destroyed, but also that of his or her relatives. Their family name might be erased from town records, in some cases their family home was demolished, and often (some of) their possessions were confiscated. 35 For the punishment of suicides see Vandekerckhove, Van straffen gesproken. About the upside-down hanging of Jews (often in the company of dogs that were likewise hanged upside down) as practised from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, see Rudolf Glanz, ‘The “Jewish execution” in medieval Germany’, Jewish Social Studies 5 (1943), pp. 3–26; and the extremely thorough (and illustrated) Guido Kisch, ‘The “Jewish execution” in mediaeval Germany and the reception of Roman law’, L’Europa e il diritto Romano. Studi in Memoria di Paolo Koschaker vol. 2 (Milan, 1954), pp. 65–93. Illustrations can also be found in Schild, Alte Gerichtsbarkeit; and Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment.

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feet led to even further disgrace. And why exactly was it regarded as less dishonourable to lose a head than some limbs? Edgerton suggests that ‘beheading, as a form of legal punishment, symbolizes the taking away of rank, that is the crown. Only members of the upper classes could wear the “crown” in the first place. When they failed in their duties, their peers performed poena capitis upon them, “punishment of the head” – capital punishment.’36 A closer and rather literal minded link with the body politic is also imaginable: was it perhaps deemed appropriate that members of the ruling elite – the head ruling the body of society – and heads of families who had forfeited their leading position should lose their own heads?37 Even if we are not yet able to figure out the why and how of all disfiguring punishments, most of them do make sense when regarded in the context of honour. In a society where the head and headgear were regarded as the embodiment of honour and social status, and where it was felt as both a literal and a symbolic slap in the face if someone knocked one’s hat off, the punishment of cutting off noses and ears, for instance, must have been felt as a particularly painful insult. It might make sense, therefore, to study the whole range of corporal punishments as a kind of guide to the anatomy of honour, and thereby to the as yet only partly understood perceptions and symbolism of the body in early modern Europe.38 Stepping beyond the confines of the European continent we might likewise ask why European forms of physical punishment seem to favour fragmentation, partitioning, disintegration, the removal of bodily extremities, and annihilation. After all, many other ways of killing are and were imaginable.39 Thus far we have established a likely connection between forms of capital punishment and (dis)honour during the early modern period. The likelihood of this connection increases if we take into consideration the whole ritual of punishment. In the course of this ritual we may discern a movement from outside to inside which crossed the boundaries of the human body somewhere in the middle. In this respect the execution itself seamlessly followed upon the preceding trial in court: the shaming process 36

See Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment, p. 128–9, cf. p. 132. With thanks to Peter Mason for this suggestion. 38 On the importance of limbs, liminality, members and dismemberment see Abby Zanger, ‘Lim(b)inal Images. “Betwixt and Between” Louis XIV’s Martial and Marital Bodies’, From the Royal to the Republican Body, Melzer and Norberg (eds), pp. 32–63, esp. pp. 39. 39 Although it suffers from an overemphasis on textuality, see for an interesting contribution to the discussion about bodily fragmentation, David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (eds), The body in parts. Fantasies of corporeality in early modern Europe (New York and London: Routledge, 1997). 37

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had already begun long before the actual execution. It started outside the body with the breaking of the judge’s staff during the pronouncement of the death sentence, which according to contemporary sources represented the rupture of the bonds between the convict and the community, and typified his or her loss of social status, civil rights and identity. In the course of the trial and especially during the pronunciation of the sentence and the ensuing public execution, more and more outward signs of status and prestige were taken away from the culprit. Garments, in particular hats or caps which closely defined social position, were removed; heads sometimes were shaved.40 The condemned person usually appeared at the scaffold bareheaded and wearing only a shirt.41 This process of peeling away layers of social status, identity, respect and honour came ever closer to the skin of the convict. The next step concerned the margins of the body and its extremities. The skin could be marked by branding, whipping, or scorching. Bodily extremities such as noses, ears, or hands might be cut off. By a further move into the body the various forms of punishment more or less drastically destroyed bodily integrity. As we have seen, the most destructive and severe forms of capital punishment ultimately left no bodily remains at all. Such a total annihilation of the body simultaneously implied the annihilation of the personality, honour and social identity of the convict.

Honour, fragmentation, dissection Having highlighted some of the manifold connections between honour and the physical destruction, partitioning and opening of the human body, the step from public punishment to public dissection is not such a big one any more. The two rituals shared a long-term chronology. Both autopsy to determine the cause of death and public executions were known in many different ages (and parts of the world), but in Europe public dissections and elaborate types of public execution had their 40 Rocke describes how in Renaissance Italy ‘adulteresses were often whipped along the streets, in various states of undress and sometimes wearing a defamatory mitre on their heads; occasionally their heads were shaved’ (‘Gender and sexual culture’, p. 158). 41 I know of no actual cases where the victim was naked, which seems to indicate that the removal of marks of social distinction and not nakedness was the point. This point of view is supported by the fact that at least one of the many animals that were formally condemned and publicly executed in Continental Europe from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries (a pig in 1386) was dressed in men’s clothes for its execution. See E.P. Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (London: Faber, 1987), p. 140; and Peter Mason, ‘The excommunication of caterpillars: ethnoanthropological remarks on the trial and punishment of animals’, Social Science Information 27 (1988), pp. 265–73.

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heyday in a more limited period, between 1450 and 1800.42 Besides this temporal connection between the two public performances there was a much more solid and physical one as well. Most dead bodies that were publicly taken apart on the dissecting table in early modern Europe belonged to men and women who had been condemned to capital punishment. Instead of falling apart on the gallows, their bodies were dismantled and literally stripped to the bone. By their very subject matter public anatomy lessons and dissections in theatra anatomica pertain therefore not only to the history of medical research and medical teaching, but also to the history of infamy and punishment (Fig. 5.1).43 These are the most important reasons – but by no means the only ones, as we will discover shortly – why we should envisage the connection between dissection and public punishment as solid and grounded in daily practice rather than as largely metaphorical in character. Foucauldian-inspired discussions of public executions as theatrical performances and of the parallels between discursive styles of control in eighteenth-century drama and public punishment have tended to focus on metaphors and to underestimate the more obvious connections between diverse types of public performance.44 The main reason why executed convicts and not respectable citizens were put on show and dissected in public had everything to do with honour and shame. No person of good repute wanted his or her own body to be thus displayed, and no member of a respectable family wanted his or her relatives or friends to be shown and destroyed in

42 For the history of autopsy and judicial section see Katharine Park, ‘The criminal and the saintly body: autopsy and dissection in Renaissance Italy’, Renaissance Quarterly 47, (1994); and the old but informative Gerhard Wolff, ‘Leichen-Besichtigung und -Untersuchung bis zur Carolina als Vorstufe gerichtlicher Sektion’, Janus 42 (1938), pp. 225–86. 43 The present section about the links between dishonour and public dissection continues an argument propounded in Jonathan Sawday’s inspiring The Body Emblazoned. Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London and New York, Routledge, 1995), especially in the chapter ‘Execution, anatomy, and infamy’, which uses many literary sources; in Park, ‘The criminal and saintly body’, pp. 1–33; and in an art historical context in William S. Heckscher, Rembrandt’s Anatomy of Dr. Nicolaas Tulp. An iconological study (New York: New York University Press, 1958); cf. Mimi Cazort, Monique Kornell and K.B. Roberts, The Ingenious Machine of Nature. Four centuries of art and anatomy (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1996), esp. pp. 79–87. Sawday’s knowledge of non-literary sources concerning the ritual of punishment is rather scanty, and he still seems to underestimate the importance of infamy. 44 On theatrical punishment see Anton Blok, ‘The Symbolic Vocabulary of Public Executions’, in History and power in the study of law. New directions in legal anthropology, Jane F. Collier and June Starr (eds), (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 31–55. On drama and types of authority see Maza, ‘The Theater of Punishment’, esp. pp. 192–7 with further references.

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5.1

A public dissection from Johannes de Ketham, Fasciculus medicine (Venice, 1495)

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disgrace, generally without any chance of a decent burial.45 When we keep in mind that honour, unlike pain, transcends death, to be dissected in public must have been an experience directly comparable with rape or public punishment.46 Precisely because no respectable persons were available for such purposes, increasing medical demand for ‘fresh’ dead bodies led to bodysnatching by medical students as well as to requests to the authorities to provide bodies in a legal way.47 Both medical bodysnatching, which became notorious especially in eighteenth-century Britain, and official regulations to set aside a certain number of executed convicts for medical use, therefore can only be understood against the background of the dishonour and shame entailed by a public dissection. From the late fifteenth century onwards, authorities all over Western Europe began to allow medical societies, faculties and their students a fixed number of recently executed bodies to be used for dissection. Nowhere were such agreements based on ancient privileges or custom. They all originated in ‘new’ legislation proclaimed by fifteenth- and sixteenth-century rulers at the request of the medical organizations. It was not chance, therefore, which determined that the people to be publicly dissected belonged almost without exception to the lowest social classes, to the category of undesirable subjects or marginalized social categories: many of the women had been prostitutes, for instance.48 Nor is it a coincidence that it was explicitly forbidden in many European cities to publicly dissect fellow-citizens; nearly 45 Sometimes the fragmented bodily remains of a (publicly) dissected person were handed over for burial afterwards, but I have no idea whether this was usual, and do not expect it to have been a common practice given the fact that so many of the subjects were convicted criminals whose dead bodies would otherwise have remained unburied. 46 The comparison with rape is relevant in more way than one. Definitions of rape have changed over time; during certain periods early modern European courts did not recognize rape unless the victim could prove that she had cried out loudly enough to be heard, which immediately introduces the aspect of publicity and loss of honour. See for instance Manon van der Heijden, Huwelijk in Holland. Stedelijke rechtspraak en kerkelijke tucht, 1550–1700 (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1998), esp. pp. 140, 157 and 168; and Rebecca Lynn Winner, ‘Defining rape in medieval Perpignan: Women Plaintiffs before the Law’, Viator 31 (2000), pp. 165–83. On changing definitions of rape in Renaissance Italy see Nicholas Davidson, ‘Theology, nature and the law: sexual sin and sexual crime in Italy from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century’, Crime, society and the law, Dean and Lowe (eds), pp. 74–98. And see Guido Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex, Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1985. 47 For Vesalius stealing bodies see among others Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, p. 198; for Felix Platter, see Beloved Son Felix. On eighteenth-century bodysnatching in England see Ruth Richardson, Death, dissection, and the destitute (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989). 48 See for detailed information about Italy in this respect especially Andrea Carlino, Books of the Body. Anatomical ritual and Renaissance learning (Chicago and London:

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everywhere the new regulations specified that the ‘victims’ had to be outsiders.49 We may well ask whether these regulations protected the individual honour of the subjects or the reputation of the city or state.50 The practice of public dissection first and foremost served the ends of the medical profession, and more particularly of a certain section of this profession. Judging from contemporary medical practice one would expect public dissections to have been requested by the guilds of barbersurgeons. Until far into the early modern period it was they who learned their trade in practice and whose business included opening human bodies. According to the usual and fairly strict division of labour which existed in most parts of Western Europe, physicians who learned their trade at universities focused on texts, the inspection of external symptoms, and the prescription of remedies. They did not soil their hands. During the first period of the public dissections in anatomical theatres (roughly fifteenth to mid sixteenth-centuries) a leading physician usually stood at a lectern and read aloud learned (often classical) texts about what was happening below him, while his subordinate – usually a surgeon – took care of the actual opening of the body. This situation changed in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when the physicians themselves began to handle knives, scalpels and body parts. Contrary to expectations, in most European countries it was not the surgeons but the university-trained physicians who requested dead bodies for the purpose of public dissection, even when they themselves did not (yet) touch them with their own hands.51 By increasing their expertise about the internal mechanics of the human

University of Chicago Press, 1999), in particular Chapter 2. This practice also travelled to the New World; an example from Boston (1676) shows that the native Americans formed one of the relevant marginalized categories. See Peter Mason, ‘La leccion anatómica: violencia colonial y complicidad textual’, Foro Hispánico. Revista Hispánica de los Países Bajos (1992), pp. 131–55, here p. 143. 49 See for instance Luigi Lazzerini, ‘Le radici folkloriche dell’anatomia. Scienza e rituale all’inizio dell’età moderna’, Quaderni Storici 85 (1994), pp. 193–233, here pp. 197–202; Sawday, The body emblazoned, a.o. p. 59; and detailed remarks in Jan Rupp, ‘Matters of life and death: the social and cultural conditions of the rise of anatomical theatres, with special reference to seventeenth-century Holland’, History of Science 28 (1990), pp. 263–87; and Just Emile Kroon, Bijdragen tot de Geschiedenis van het Geneeskundig onderwijs aan de Leidsche universiteit 1575–1625 (Leiden: Van Doesburgh, 1911), esp. pp. 53–4. 50 On city honour see Rocke, ‘Gender and sexual culture’, pp. 158–9 and 169. 51 For a different situation in London with a highly active Barber-Surgeon’s Company with its own public dissections, see the very instructive Margaret Pelling and Charles Webster, ‘Medical Practitioners’, in Health, medicine and mortality in the sixteenth century, Charles Wester (ed.), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 165–235, esp. pp. 174–8.

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body while at the same time elevating this practice to the status of science, the physicians would eventually add to their own prestige and drive out the barber-surgeons from the medical market.52 That this was at least sometimes and in some countries a deliberate strategy on the part of the physicians appears, for instance, from the records of the conflicts between the organizations of the physicians and those of the surgeons. In late sixteenth-century London, for instance, the physicians explicitly attempted to prevent the guilds of the barber-surgeons from having their own public dissections, while denying them access to their own performances.53 In this respect too honour was at stake. Serving the purposes of (certain segments of) the medical profession is not the same as advancing medical knowledge. We need to be more specific about what types of (dis)section existed at the time, who wanted them, for what reasons, who participated, and what they entailed. If we start with the question of how much these public displays actually contributed to medical knowledge, the answer should be: very little. Public demonstrations of anatomical skills were not particularly useful in terms of advancing medical knowledge or even medical instruction.54 Even though many newly built public dissecting rooms were constructed like theatres to allow the spectators a better view of what was going on, it must have been impossible for most of them to see the relevant details. Moreover, medical students who wanted to learn more about diagnosing causes of death did not need to study a person whose cause of death was abundantly clear since he or she had just been executed. They needed the bodies of persons who had died because of illness. Dissecting the dead

52 See the excellent J.J. Bylebyl, ‘The school of Padua: humanistic medicine in the sixteenth century’, in Health, medicine and mortality, Webster (ed.), pp. 335–70, who does, however, subscribe to the importance of public dissection to the advance of medical knowledge. On relations between anatomists and physicians as well as professional selfadvertisement, see Roger French, ‘Berengario da Carpi and the use of commentary in anatomical teaching’, in The medical Renaissance of the Sixteenth century, A. Wear, R.K. French and I.M. Lonie (eds) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 42–74; and idem, ‘Natural philosophy and anatomy’, in Le corps à la Renaissance. Actes du XXXe Colloque de Tours 1987, Jean Céard, Marie Madeleine Fontaine and Jean-Claude Margolin (eds) (Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres, 1990), pp. 447–60. On relations between surgeons and physicians during the earlier period see especially M.C. Pouchelle, Corps et chirurgie a l’apogée du Moyen Age. Savoir et imaginaire du corps chez Henri de Mondeville chirurgien de Philippe le Bel (Paris, Flammarion, 1983), esp. pp. 23–37. 53 For rivalries between physicians and surgeons and attempts to exclude various categories of medical practitioners, see Pelling and Webster, ‘Medical Practitioners’, esp. pp. 174–80; see also Antonia MacLean, Humanism and the rise of science in Tudor England (London: Heinemann, 1972), esp. pp. 199–209. 54 Lazzerini (‘Le radici folkloriche’, pp. 212–13) discusses contemporary authors who regarded public dissections as useful for physicians, (natural) philosophers and artists.

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bodies of executed convicts thus served, at most, the study of (relatively) healthy human bodies, not pathology. Even for such purposes, however, a dissection in private, in the house of the professor or a room closed to the public, was much more useful. In many European university towns of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, advanced medical students did, in fact, learn such things during private sessions which were not open to the general public and usually comprised only a small number of people. These sessions might also include the vivisection and dissection of animals, and there is some evidence of vivisection on human beings as well.55 The writings of the Italian anatomist Berengario da Carpi (born 1460) make clear that the distinction between public and private dissection was explicitly made at the time, and that the limited use of public dissections for the advancement of medical knowledge was perhaps more clearly recognized then than now. Following Berengario’s texts, R.K. French describes the distinction between public and private dissections as follows. ‘Public anatomies were the customary university dissections’; the students who attended them were ‘inexperienced scholares’; the function of such dissections was to ‘reinforce in the memory the words of the accompanying text with visual images, or to make clear the shape of organs that could not be adequately explained in words’. Berengario then makes clear ‘that such “common” anatomies cannot show a large number of things, firstly the bones, muscles, nerves, blood vessels and fibrous parts, all of which need special techniques for their demonstration: boiling, maceration in running water, drying’. Speaking of private dissections, on the contrary, Berengario ‘implies that he was dissecting to decide a particular point, like the presence of water in the torcular of Herophilus, or the existence of the Galenic rete mirabile’.56 Public dissections were intended for beginners, therefore,

55 For rumours about vivisection on syphilitic patients in early sixteenth-century Bologna see French, ‘Berengario da Carpi’, p. 45. For evidence of experiments (with poison and antidotes) on Italian prisoners who had been sentenced to death, see Lazzerini, ‘Le radici folkloriche’, p. 200. I am not sure whether such non-public or at most semipublic experiments should be related to the dishonouring rituals of the public dissections. At least some of them seem to be closely connected rather with secrecy and alchemistic experiment or may even be interpreted as some powerful person’s sadistic hobbies. For such practices (including chemical experiment on his – live? – servants) committed by the eighteenth-century Neapolitan Prince Raimondo de Sangro of Sansevero, see Mario Buonoconto, Viaggio fantastico alla luce del lume eterno. Le straordinarie invenzioni del principe di Sansevero (Naples: Alos, 1997). 56 About experiment, observation, and what could be learned at the time from (private) dissection, see French, ‘Berengario da Carpi’. This famous Italian anatomist had been trained in his youth by his father, a barber-surgeon, and above all admired those

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whereas advanced research took place in private. Although private dissections have drawn far less attention in the literature than their public counterparts, anyone who goes through descriptions of the careers of famous early modern physicians will find evidence that they learned at least some of their trade (and in some cases made important discoveries) during such private sessions. Private dissections date back at least to the fourteenth century and they continued to be held during the whole of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During the last decades of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, typical sessions were, for instance, organized in the houses of the famous anatomists and physicians Caspar Bauhin and Thomas Platter at Basel (Figs 5.2 and 5.3).57 The Platter family had a reputation in this respect. When Thomas’ far older halfbrother, the even more famous Felix Platter, studied medicine in Montpellier in the mid-sixteenth century he temporarily solved the problem of the constant shortage of human bodies by arranging with some fellow students to dig up and steal bodies from a nearby graveyard in the middle of the night. They smuggled the bodies into the city of Montpellier and dissected them in secret during the night at the house of a friend without any professors attending.58 Besides the illegal dissections of snatched bodies, and the legal sections on bodies which had been made available by the authorities (either in private or in public), two more types of dissection can be distinguished. Judicial section on the victims of violent crime was generally ordered (or approved) by the authorities, and served mainly to establish the cause of death. It was always done in private.59 Occasionally, the dead bodies of citizens who had died a natural death ‘anatomists who were artifices, craftsmen’. He rejected a ‘purely verbal demonstration of structure’, and insisted ‘on the importance of the senses of sight and touch in anatomy’. All quotations from French, ‘Berengario da Carpi’, p. 44, 58. For similar conclusions about the distinction between public and private dissections, and the limited amount of knowledge that could be gained from the public ones, see Pouchelle, Corps et chirurgie, esp. pp. 140–43. 57 For further examples of non-public dissections see Park, ‘The criminal and the saintly body’; Wolff, ‘Leichen-Besichtigung’; and especially Karen Meier Reeds, Botany in Medieval and Renaissance Universities (New York: Garland, 1991), which contains important case studies about botany and anatomy at the universities of Montpellier and Basel. For The Netherlands (Leiden) see Kroon, Bijdragen, pp. 54–5, and 62, who mentions both vivisection and section on dead animals as well as public and private section on human corpses. 58 See Felix Platter, Beloved Son Felix. On Platter, anatomy, and executions, see also Dieter Hochlenert, Das ‘Tagebuch’ des Felix Platter: die Autobiographie eines Arztes und Humanisten (Tübingen: University of Tübingen, 1996), p. 103. 59 See Wolff, ‘Leichen-Besichtigung’.

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Anonymous, Head of a Swiss Woman, watercolour, University Library, Basel (D11169). She was beheaded in Basel on 14 February 1616 for infanticide and dissected by Caspar Bauhin.

were dissected in private by students and professors without any intervention by the authorities. In such cases autopsy was most likely requested by the relatives of the deceased in order to determine the cause of death.60 Research on these topics, especially by Katherine Park, has 60 For the sixteenth-century Netherlands several examples are known of private autopsies at the homes of the deceased to determine the cause of death. See for instance Harald Deceulaer, ‘“Prêt-à-porter”, gender en gezondheid. De veelvuldige betekenissen

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Anonymous, Head of a Swiss Woman, watercolour, University Library, Basel (D11169). She was beheaded in Basel in 1615 for infanticide and dissected by Thomas Platter.

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brought to light much new information on the longevity of both judicial autopsy and private dissection for private purposes. Starting from a completely different point in time and from different types of questions, her evidence confirms the conclusions of certain medievalists that the much-discussed taboo on opening bodies may never have existed either during the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. Significantly, Park concludes that increasing fears of dissection among sixteenth-century Italians were not related to the practice of opening bodies as such, but to the new phenomenon of public dissections.61 These were apparently regarded as violations of personal and family honour. As we have seen earlier, that was not only the case in Italy. Public dissections were thus unsuited to both innovative medical research and advanced instruction of students. Beyond an elementary level they contributed very little to medical knowledge. As seen from the physician’s perspective, they mainly served as demonstrations of the teacher’s anatomical skills and the physician’s erudition. From the late fifteenth century onwards, physicians used public dissections and the accompanying lectures to demonstrate and highlight their expertise. By implication, these ceremonies should not be studied from the perspective of increasing medical knowledge but first and foremost as a key phenomenon in the representation of medical professionalism and the founding of medicine as a respectable discipline. (That this still needs to be emphasized actually shows how effective early modern medical public relations has been.) From the perspective of the medical faculties and the universities as a whole, public dissections served other, related purposes. Archival documents concerning the history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century universities and in particular of the medical faculties and their anatomical theatres, show that considerations of honour and rivalry (including the competition for students and teachers) with other

van huiszoekingen bij kleermakers en oudekleerkopers in het laat-16de-eeuwse Antwerpen’, in Werelden van verschil. Ambachtsgilden in de Lage Landen, Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly (eds) (Brussels: VUB Press, 1997), pp. 99–126; and cf. Kroon, Bijdragen, p. 62. For dissections in Italian museums see Paula Findlen, Possessing nature. Museums, collecting, and scientific culture in early modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 218–20. 61 Park (‘The criminal and the saintly body’, p. 8) mentions an example from Florence (1486) of a woman requesting autopsy of her own body in her last will, in order to determine the cause of death and if possible take preventive measures for the benefit of her daughters and other women. On the medieval practice of cutting up bodies and burying body parts in various churches see Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, ‘Démembrement et intégrité du corps au XIIIe siècle’, Terrain 18 (1992), pp. 26–32; and Geary, Living with the dead, with further references.

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institutions and organizations – whether guilds of barber-surgeons or other universities – played a considerable part in the decisions of universities to spend large sums of money on the construction of anatomy theatres. In the course of the sixteenth century, the possession of a theatrum anatomicum (and if possible a botanical garden in which plants could be studied for their medicinal qualities but also for more general botanical reasons62) became a point of honour among universities all over Western Europe, Italy and Spain. No self-respecting university wanted to do without one, and no medical faculty liked to miss the opportunity to show off its power and professionalism during ceremonial public dissections, while clarifying its position in the hot debates about medical theory of this period.63 In Leiden with its recently founded (1575) university, public dissections of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries ranked with two other public and ceremonial occasions which likewise represented the university to the outside world: public defences of doctoral theses and inaugural lectures by new professors. All teaching at the university was suspended at the time of a public dissection to enable every student to attend, and in 1614 the board of governors of the university approved a plan to enliven the dissection with flute music, as was customary at the inauguration of a new rector and the defence of theses.64 This was by no means a unique association of ceremonies. Around the beginning of the fifteenth century at the university of Paris, public dissections, like the inauguration of a new dean, and certain other

62 Botanical gardens were created during roughly the same period and, usually, by the same medical faculties. For Montpellier and Basel, see Reeds, Botany. For an excellent study of all facets of the Padua botanical garden, see Alessandro Minelli (ed.), The botanical garden of Padua, 1545–1995 (Venice: Marsilio, 1995). For the University of Leiden, its anatomical theatre and hortus botanicus, see Kroon, Bijdragen; H. Veendorp and L.G.M. Baas Becking, Hortus Academicus Lugduno Batavus 1587–1937 (Leiden: Hortus Botanicus, 1938); and Leidse Universiteit 400: Stichting en eerste bloei 1575–ca.1650, exhib. cat. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, (Amsterdam, 1975). 63 The case of Spain provides a good example. The chronology of the construction of anatomical theatres in Spain was very similar to the Italian one. Before 1600 there were anatomical theatres in Salamanca, Valencia, Zaragoza, Barcelona and possibly Alcalá; the crown in Castile and the city governments in Aragon financed the construction of anatomical theatres, regulated their practices, ceremonies, the admission of the public, and the specific circumstances of the dissections; they clearly connected public dissection with the prestige of both the universities and cities concerned. With thanks to José Pardo Tomás. See José Pardo Tomás and A. Martínez Vidal, ‘Los orígenes del teatro anatómico de Madrid (1689–1728)’, Asclepio 49 (1997), pp. 5–38. Universities were not the only institutions to set up anatomy theatres, but they were by far the most important ones. 64 The plan was never carried out, in all likelihood due to differences of opinion about the costs. See Kroon, Bijdragen, pp. 49–50.

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formal gatherings, were celebrated by banquets, which according to Pouchelle served, among other things, to emphasize and enhance the solidarity of the medical profession.65 The fact that public dissections and anatomy theatres served as symbols of the professionalization and growing prestige of medicine as a discipline becomes even more clear if we take a further look at the ceremony of public dissection, its surroundings and public. As already implied by Berengario’s remark about the elementary level of medical knowledge that could be obtained by attending a public dissection, it was an occasion well suited for a wider audience. In fact, a large part of the audience at public dissections all over Europe consisted not of medical students, physicians, or surgeons, but of lay people, including university dignitaries, magistrates and other members of the local elite, besides people belonging to the local middle classes and sometimes even the working classes and marginal groups. Mainly through the research by Lazzerini and Ferrari, more is known about the Italian situation than about the spectators and surroundings in northwestern Europe.66 Kroon and Rupp have shown, however, that similar crowds of spectators, ranging from the urban patriciate to the local rabble, could be found at the anatomy sessions in the towns of Holland. Most of them must have come as much for the spectacle and entertainment as for the medical information. As seen from the perspective of the public, the anatomy theatres all over Europe shared some of the functions of ‘cultural centres’ like the fair and the Wunderkammer (or the somewhat later public museums), where pleasure, culture, excitement, instruction and entertainment met. They served as rooms of display: what could be seen there were not only dead bodies, the skills of the physicians, or the fashionable dress of some members of the audience, but also collections of natural curiosities (including skeletons and skins of men and animals) and art, which ranged from prints and paintings to vanitas emblems and sculpture.67

65 See Pouchelle, Corps et chirurgie, pp. 139–40. Cf. Mario Biagioli, ‘Etiquette, interdependence and sociability in seventeenth-century science’, Critical Inquiry 22 (1996), pp. 193–238, who rightly discusses the dissection of exotic animals at Versailles in the presence of Louis XIV as a primarily ceremonial spectacle and not as some kind of research session (p. 217). 66 On carnivalesque aspects of public dissections see Giovanna Ferrari, ‘Public anatomy lessons and the carnival: the anatomy theatre of Bologna’, Past and Present 117 (1987), pp. 50–106; and Lazzerini, ‘Le radici folkloriche’. Cf. Findlen, Possessing nature, pp. 210–11. 67 Each anatomical theatre in the Netherlands seems to have had its own character. See Rupp, ‘Matters of life and death’; Kroon, Bijdragen; and especially Th. H. Lunsingh Scheurleer, ‘Un amphithéatre d’anatomie moralisée’, in Leiden University in the

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The 1671 inventory of the anatomical cabinet at Leiden mentions, for instance: the skins of tigers and leopards, the skin of a sloth, an armadillo, an ant-eater, the skin of a sea-horse, the hand of a mermaid, the foot of a sea-monster, a young crocodile from Egypt, the head of an elk, the four feet of an elephant, six stones found in the bladder of a medical professor at Leiden, and the body of a man whose muscles had been made clearly visible.68 Like these ‘curious’ naturalia or artificialia the dissected body was on show: with little individuality left and no honour, it had been reduced to a thing to be gaped at. Are we reminded of the public executions, which likewise united magistrates and the general public, and combined horror and reflection upon mortality, entertainment and learning, music and a display of power? This particular similarity between public dissections and public executions lies not in the bodily presence of the subject (or victim) nor in the more abstract theme of dishonour, but in the aspect of spectacle, curiosity (in both its modern and early modern meaning), conviviality and festivity which both rituals shared. We need not go here into the festive aspects of public executions, which are sufficiently well-known. It is only relatively recently – and mainly for the Italian cities – that the festive character of public dissections has been studied in detail. Italian public dissections, for instance, often coincided with carnival festivities. Masked men and women who were taking part in carnival might enter the anatomical theatre, drink, shout and sing ribald songs, before leaving again to continue their activities elsewhere.69 The situation in Holland has not yet been studied in detail, but it does not seem to have been structurally different from the Italian one in this respect and some of the details that can be gathered from the literature are suggestive. We do not know whether dissections in Holland were planned to coincide with carnival festivities, but in Holland too the whole atmosphere was reminiscent of ceremony and festivity with more than a hint at vanitas and memento mori symbolism. Amsterdam boasted the first public dissection (in 1550) in Holland, which seems to have earned the local inhabitants the nickname mensenvilders (flayers). In its dissecting room the skin of this first (or another) victim of a public dissection was on show until far into the eighteenth century.70 If we may believe a seventeenth century. An exchange of learning, Th. Lunsingh Scheurleer and G. Posthumus Meyjes (eds) (Leiden: Brill, 1975), pp. 216–77. 68 See Kroon, Bijdragen, p. 64. For further information see the literature about Leiden mentioned in notes 62 and 67 above. 69 See Lazzerini, ‘Le radici folkloriche’; and Ferrari, ‘Public anatomy lessons’. 70 For an intriguing essay about the interest in and anatomical investigation of differences in skin colour (especially during the eighteenth century) with a contemporary illustration of several pieces of human skin, see Renato G. Mazzolini, ‘Frammenti di pelle

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chronicler of Amsterdam history, in the nineteenth century during the week of the fair the public was admitted to the dissecting room upon payment of 10 cents; there they could admire the skeletons of two famous thieves (executed during the late seventeenth century) which were dressed up for the occasion.71 Most Dutch anatomy theatres were decorated with fine art and natural curiosities, like the Leiden dissecting room described above. These provided suitable surroundings for a spectacle both festive, gruesome, instructive and pleasurable. With the exception of the excellent study by William Heckscher, such festive aspects of the ceremony of public dissection have for too long been regarded as slightly disreputable and decidedly inappropriate aspects of what were essentially serious occasions.72 As has been shown by Heckscher, Lazzerini and Ferrari, however, they were integral parts of these rituals. Moreover, as is becoming increasingly clear, there is something fundamentally wrong with the whole concept of public dissections as essentially serious investigations for the advancement of medical knowledge. If we accept that the links between festivity and medical instruction, between carnival and public dissection, and between the theatrical and festive sides of both dissection and execution should be taken seriously, the implications should be faced. Since Bakhtin it is no longer uncommon to study the violent and bloody aspects of festivities together with the laughter, jokes and conviviality, as has perhaps been done most in depth by Edward Muir in his study of sixteenth-century carnival, feuding and family honour in Friuli.73 Public dissections and public executions share this aspect of festive violence, and therefore may and even should be studied in the context of the carnival and feasting as well as in that of the history of medical representation or shaming rituals. The ceremonial rituals of violent festivity and the festive violence of public ceremonies have become mutually illuminating contexts: ‘riti paralleli che gettano luce l’uno sull’altro’.74 Keeping in mind the matter of morphological connections and circuitous investigations, this essay might e immagini di uomini (1700–1740)’, in Natura-Cultura. L’Interpretazione del mondo fisico nei testi e nelle immagini (Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Mantova, 5–8 ottobre 1996), Giuseppe Olmi, Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi and Attilio Zanca (eds) (Florence: Olschki, 2000), pp. 423–43. 71 See J. ter Gouw, Geschiedenis van Amsterdam, 8 vols (Amsterdam: Scheltema and Holkema, 1879–93), Vol. V, p. 472. Such visits are reminiscent of the visits that could be made (likewise after payment of a small sum) to the inmates of the Dutch madhouses and houses of correction. 72 Heckscher, Rembrandt’s Anatomy. 73 Edward Muir, Mad blood stirring: vendetta & factions in Friuli during the Renaissance (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). 74 Lazzerini, ‘Le radici folkloriche’, pp. 194 and 223. About rites of passage, (dis)respect towards the dead, obscenities, jokes about cannibalism, distancing behaviour,

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as well have begun as an enquiry into ritual and slaughter, discussing public festivities in the context of dissection and execution. Neither public dissections nor public executions were ‘mere’ festivities of the rather violent kind, however. It is important to emphasize that neither could have taken place without the active involvement of the authorities – who, after all, not only arrested, sentenced and executed, but also provided the physicians with dead bodies, contributed in various ways to the construction of the anatomy theatres, and sanctioned the public dissections with their presence. In both ceremonies the physicians acted hand-in-glove with the magistrates and by that very fact were deeply implicated in the ritual of dishonour inflicted upon the dead.75 During the late eighteenth century and the early part of the nineteenth, some physicians seem to have been so well aware of the dishonouring effects of public dissection and subsequent forms of display upon its victim that they took a stand against such practices. In two lectures which accompanied anatomy demonstrations, the early nineteenth-century Dutch physician, anatomist, and general practician G. Bakker complained (while defending dissection) about the ‘horrible and disgraceful custom’ to display in public the ‘remains of human beings, … our brothers, in the most distasteful finery’.76 By then the heyday of public dissections was already over, most baroque forms of capital punishment had been abolished in a large part of Europe, and the debate about the publicness of physical punishment had begun.77 Up to this point we have mainly taken into consideration textual sources. Visual ones have their own stories to tell and their own evidence and ritual violence among twentieth-century medical students doing their first dissecting work see the perceptive Emmanuelle Godeau, ‘“Dans un amphithéâtre…”. La fréquentation des morts dans la formation des médecins’, Terrain 20 (1993), pp. 82–96. We could even add one more type of ritual: as Cunningham has suggested, it did not matter much whether the public could see any of the anatomical details, since the main thing – as in a religious event – was being there. See Andrew Cunningham, The anatomical Renaissance. The resurrection of the anatomical projects of the ancients (Aldershot: Scolar, 1997). With thanks to Helen King for this information (I have not been able to consult this publication myself). 75 The involvement of anatomists in executions could go so far that the authorities allowed the anatomists’ professional requirements to determine or influence the type of capital punishment to which their future subject was condemned. Pouchelle mentions examples from fourteenth-century Aragon and sixteenth-century Tuscany. See Pouchelle, Corps et chirurgie, pp. 128–9. 76 See G. Bakker, Herinnering aan de waardij en de vereischten van het beroep eenes Heelmeesters en schets van eenen geschiedenis des ontleedkunde in twee redevoeringen (Haarlem: Visscher, 1807), p. 68. There might well be other examples, also in earlier periods. 77 For a discussion of the transition from public to private executions in the United Kingdom and of public reactions, see Gatrell, The hanging tree.

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to contribute. They deserve a separate study, but a few remarks can be made here about some suggestive aspects that link up with the points made earlier. Since the numerous pictorial representations of public and semi-public dissections form a well-known special genre in seventeenthand eighteenth-century painting, we should at least ask ourselves whether these visual representations – totally irrespective of their quality and details, but by the mere fact of their existence – should be regarded as a further continuation of the ritual of dishonour.78 Did they prolong that ritual beyond the time of the dissection itself into the following years and even centuries? There is something to be said both pro and contra. On the one hand, such paintings – most famously Rembrandt’s anatomy by Dr Tulp – followed their own pictorial traditions. In spite of their often extremely ‘realistic’ details, they generally had very little to do with the real-life circumstances of (any type of) dissection.79 On the other hand, the victims of several such anatomy lessons are recognizable individuals – real dead people who in some cases were and sometimes still are known by their individual names – as are the anatomists.80 Depictions of their bodies in the act of being destroyed can easily be regarded as lacking in respect and indeed prolonging the agony of shame. They certainly had the effect of prolonging the spectacle of such ceremonies for centuries.81 Ultimately, this point of view would imply

78 It would take us too far here to discuss other representations of opened bodies as well, which include, for instance, the whole genre of so-called scientific illustration from at least Vesalius’ time on. For an excellent publication with further references see Cazort, Kornell and Roberts, The Ingenious Machine of Nature. 79 For a discussion of the pictorial traditions in the genre of anatomy lessons (focusing on the aspect of the ‘anatomy lesson’ as group portrait, and thus on the honour and reputation of the physicians) see Norbert Middelkoop, ‘“Groote kostelijkke Schilderyen, alle die de Kunst der Heelmeesters aangaan”. De schilderijenverzameling van het Amsterdamse Chirurgijnsgilde’, in Norbert Middelkoop, Petria Noble, Jørgen Wadum and Ben Broos, Rembrandt onder het mes. De anatomische les van Dr Nicolaes Tulp ontleed, exhib. cat. Mauritshuis (The Hague, 1998), pp. 9–38. Cf. Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment, esp. pp. 215–16; and Heckscher, Rembrandt’s Anatomy. 80 In these cases the victim’s individuality was not erased by dissection, which seems to have added merely to his or her notoriety. 81 For good examples see the danse macabre by ‘poor Baccio’s remains’ depicted by Alessandro Allori, in Edgerton, Pictures of Punishment, p. 160; and ‘Smugglerius’, in Cazort, Kornell and Roberts, The Ingenious Machine of Nature, p. 86. Heckscher (Rembrandt’s Anatomy) is one of the few and certainly one of the first art historians to have explicitly gone into the honour and shame aspects of anatomy paintings. Cf. Andrea Carlino, ‘Maria, Sant’Antonio ed altri indizi: il corpo punito e la dissezione tra quattro e cinquecento’, in Le corps à la Renaissance, pp. 129–38; and idem, La fabbrica del corpo. On the different but related theme of defamation by means of pictorial representations see Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment, pp. 91–125; and Gherardo Ortalli, La pittura infamante nei secoli XIII–XVI (Rome: Jouvence, 1979).

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that the early modern artists made themselves accessories of the magistrates, the executioner and the physicians, while modern spectators repeat the voyeuristic acts of the early modern public which attended the dissections. Whether the pictorial representations of public dissections intended to prolong the ritual of dishonour or not, they do unexpectedly offer a visual confirmation of a further parallel between public dissections and public executions. This applies more specifically to the early (fourteenth–sixteenth-century) engravings and woodcuts, however, than to the later and better known (mainly seventeenth-century) paintings of dissections in which we can identify both subjects and physicians. Many of these older representations of dissections and public convictions or punishments show a remarkably similar hierarchical structure. In fact, they are often very hard to distinguish: in some cases it remains impossible to decide whether we are looking at an execution or a dissection.82 In both we regularly find a triangular pattern, with the presiding judge or physician at the top. He is often depicted sitting at a lectern or desk while reading aloud a sentence or medical texts. Edgerton – inadvertently(?) – remarked upon the similarity between these ‘medical’ and ‘judicial’ scenes: ‘this image shows a young professor seated at a high lectern in the centre and presiding like a judge over a cadaver being anatomized by “assistants”.’83 Neither judge nor physician soiled his hands. In the lower half of these pictures, literally ‘below’ the judge or physician, we find the court assistants or executioner in the judicial setting, or the surgeon and his assistants in the medical one. They were the ones who did the dirty work: touching the dead body of the infamous convict with their hands. It is no coincidence that the social position of court assistants was low. In several European countries they combined their job with those of executioner’s assistant and skinner.84

82 See also Sawday, The body emblazoned, pp. 62–5. Edgerton names some of the older representations as the immediate models for the later anatomy paintings (Pictures and Punishment, p. 215). I know too little about representations of Christ and the way their pictorial traditions may have influenced the depiction of both punishment and dissection to go into that theme here. See for instance Cazort, Kornell and Roberts, The Ingenious Machine of Nature, pp. 38, 80. 83 Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment, p. 215, note 51. My emphasis. Edgerton seems unaware of the relevance of his own analogy. 84 At least until the late eighteenth century (and especially in the German-speaking areas of Europe) it was regarded as polluting to touch a convicted felon. Executioners and their assistants had a special (infamous) status and could only marry within their own ranks (which helps explain the existence of several executioners’ dynasties in early modern Europe). For those who were ill, the polluting touch of the executioner could turn into a

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Nor is the resemblance between executioner and surgeon fortuitous. There is abundant evidence of the low social status of surgeons, which can be documented at least from late medieval times onwards. Fourteenth-century French surgeons were, for instance, described as follows: ‘la crainte mêlée de fascination que suscitaient alors les chirurgiens chez leurs contemporains, le mépris où les tenaient les médecins et la médiocrité du statut social de la plupart d’entre eux … un homme de métier souillé par le contact des déchets corporels, celui du sang en particulier.’85 And both executioners and surgeons have been likened to butchers for centuries, both in terminology and in visual representations. The relative hierarchical positions within these representations of the judge/physician on the one hand and of the executioner/court assistant/surgeon on the other hand thus adequately render their relative social positions, status and honour. The final figure in the triangle was the ‘lowest’ of all: the kneeling or even prostrate person of the convict, or the horizontally positioned body of the executed person. Without honour. The resemblance between the representations of the two rituals forms a visual confirmation of what we had been in the process of discovering on the basis of textual evidence. By their involvement in public dissections, for which they had to rely on the magistrates’ willingness to provide them with dead bodies, and by their eagerness to show off and increase their expertise and social status, these physicians (whether unintentionally or not) sided with the authorities, and inflicted a protracted ritual of dishonour on fellow human beings which they would never have inflicted on their relatives or equals. They finished the process of removing all signs of social position and individuality.86 By ‘peeling’ off skin, opening up skulls, and destroying the body’s inner cohesion – by crossing the margins of the body – they wiped out the last healing touch: until far into the eighteenth century, executioners were considered by many to have special healing powers. An intriguing example from the Dutch criminal records concerns a professional criminal (who was later hanged in The Hague) who during the 1790s consulted an executioner on a leg wound he had sustained during an armed robbery. 85 Pouchelle, Corps et chirurgie, pp. 115–29, quotation on p. 115. For the description of a fourteenth-century miniature in a manuscript on surgery assimilating the figure of the executioner and that of the surgeon ‘sur le modèle implicite de la flagellation du Christ’, see p. 127. Cf. M.-C. Pouchelle, ‘La prise en charge de mort; médecine, médecins et chirurgiens devants les problèmes liés à la mort à la fin du Moyen Age’, Archives européennes de sociologie 17 (1976), pp. 249–78. 86 This looks like the process of verbally stripping away individuality and personality to replace them by stereotypical characteristics – ‘negative self-images’ – which can be found in many criminal sentences pronounced during the early modern period. See Florike Egmond, Underworlds. Organized Crime in the Netherlands, 1650–1800 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), Conclusion.

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vestiges of the convict’s honour and identity in what was, ultimately, an extremely drastic act of destruction (Fig. 5.4 – the wooden structure is reminiscent of a scaffold). What is perhaps most shocking about all this is not that it happened at all, but that precisely such acts of destruction served to enhance the prestige and honour of those who engaged in them but made a show of keeping their hands clean. This interpretation may make us look in a different way at the seventeenth-century anatomypaintings. They served – as has been argued convincingly – as the proud group portraits of expert scientists. Again, we should recognize the skilful handling of public relations by members of a profession still on the make. That is reason enough to leave the physicians to their business and once more return to the person who provided the first and most solid connection between the rituals of public punishment and public dissection. We have seen how public dissection fitted seamlessly into the ritual of dishonour which constituted public punishment. From the perspective of the victim’s honour there was very little to choose between losing one’s last vestiges of identity, individuality and physical integrity at the gallows – in full sight of all passers-by – or on the dissecting table during an equally theatrical ritual. Public dissection simply continued the ritual process of punishment, the dishonouring and ultimately destructive movement into the body, which had started with the removal of all outer garments marking the convict’s social position.87 The partitioning of the dead body in both cases clearly demonstrated – in a literal rather than symbolic way – the power of the authorities over life and death. In both cases the dead body was the centre of voyeuristic fascination, horror and carnivalesque entertainment. In both cases no more remained than a small heap of bones, skin, remnants of muscles and organs which lacked any cohesion. The answer to the question of whether these two forms of partitioning the human body were connected by more than their object – the person of the convict – is affirmative. The traits d’union between the two ranged from this solid and physical one to the theme of dishonour and the intimate connection between honour and physical integrity.

87

Cf. Pouchelle, Corps et chirurgie, p. 129.

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5.4

Representation of a partly dissected brain from Charles Estienne, De dissectione partium corporis humani libri tres (Paris, 1545)

CHAPTER SIX

Dissecting Quaresmeprenant – Rabelais’ Representation of the Human Body: A Rhetorical Approach Paul J. Smith Opening the body, opening the text In 1538 the learned printer and publisher Etienne Dolet issued a remarkable eulogy of François Rabelais, whose first two books he was to publish in 1542: Pantagruel (originally published in 1532), and Gargantua (originally published in 1534). The speaker is the corpse of an executed criminal, who looks back in melancholy at his wicked life and well-earned execution in the form of a prosopopoeia (a figure of speech in which an inanimate thing is personified). His only consolation is that his body will be made available to science: he will be dissected by Rabelais, who was a prominent medical practitioner and personal physician of Cardinal Jean du Bellay at the time.1 Etienne Dolet’s poem was probably not only intended to praise the medical qualities of Rabelais. The theme of dissection and opening the body could be an implicit reference to the themes of Rabelais’ books that he was to print. Opening the body in search of deeper wisdom corresponds to the symbolism of the legendary figures Socrates and Aesop, who combined an ugly, deformed body with a hidden, inner wealth. Socrates is mentioned by Rabelais and associated with the silenus, a medicine pot painted with grotesque figures on the outside, but which contains a curative. This comparison between Socrates and Silenus, which goes back to Plato (Symposium 215 a) and to which Erasmus devoted a well-known adage (Adagia III, 3, 1: Sileni Alcibiadis), is used by Rabelais in the prologue of his Gargantua as a 1 The title of Dolet’s poem is Cuiusdam Epitaphium, qui exemplo edito strangulatus, publico postea spectaculo Lugduni sectus est, Francisco Rabelaeso Medico doctissimo fabricam corporis interpretante. The text can be found in Marcel De Grève, L’Interprétation de Rabelais au XVIe siècle (Geneva: Droz, 1961), pp. 43–4.

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symbol for the act of reading and interpreting (the title of Dolet’s poem, also contains the word interpretante): the reader should not stop at the low, physical, literal layer of interpretation of the text, but should open up the text in order to arrive at a higher, spiritual, metaphorical meaning. The comparison of the opening of an unsightly body with the act of interpretation is expressed even more clearly in the foreword to an anonymous French collection of Aesopian fables from 1548, that is evidently inspired by Rabelais’ Prologue to Gargantua: Dear Reader, the name of the Author and the title of this book are only externals, they have made you judge this work coldly, so that you have held it in scorn and mockery until now. May it be so, I bet that when you thought of the name of Aesop you thought only of a person parodied in every way, and introduced to make people laugh; and as for the word ‘fable’, you took it to be but falsehood and absurdity. Now if you abandon the bark and taste the fruit inside, if you forget the outside of the bottle and taste the precious wine inside, if you leave the body of Aesop there and diligently contemplate the vivacity of his spirit, not heeding that word ‘fable’ as you had understood it before, you come to contemplate the image of truth.2

Bodily presence in Rabelais More generally, Dolet’s poem demonstrates the extreme forms of physicality which are omnipresent in Rabelais’ work, and which I review here in their most salient forms by way of illustration and to set my subject within a more clearly defined context. This physicality is already expressed in the first chapter of Pantagruel, the first book to be published, in the attention that is paid to excrescences (excroissances) in the bodies of Pantagruel’s ancestors, who tucked into a good many ‘great medlars’ in the days of Abel and Cain. Some swelled up in the stomach, others in the shoulders (‘they grew so hunchbacked that they were called Montifers, as if to say Mountain-bearers’), others in the penis (‘so that theirs was wonderfully long, big, stout, plump, verdant, and lusty in the good old style, so that they used it as a belt, winding it five or six times around their body’), or in the testicles, nose or ears.3 2 Cited by Gianni Mombello, Le raccolte francesi di favole esopiane dal 1480 alla fine del secolo XVI (Geneva-Paris: Slatkine, 1981), pp. 55–6. Mombello also makes the connection with the Prologue of Gargantua. 3 I have made use of the edition of Rabelais’ Oeuvres complètes, ed. Mireille Huchon (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1994). Where possible citations are from the English translation of Rabelais’ Complete Works by Donald M. Frame (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

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In contradistinction to these bodily excrescences are the forms of mutilation. The spectre of castration appears twice at the beginning of Gargantua – each time as a wish uttered by a woman, but immediately retracted. Gargamelle, the future mother of Gargantua, calls to her husband Grandgousier while she is in the agony of giving birth: ‘… But would to God you cut it off!’ ‘What?’ said Grandgousier. ‘Hah!’ said she. ‘You really are a fine one! You know what I mean.’ ‘My member?’ said he. ‘By the nanny-goat’s blood! If you see fit, bring me a knife!’ ‘Ah!’ said she, ‘God forbid! God forgive me! I don’t say that in earnest.’4

After Gargantua is born and is threatened by his nurses, who are impressed by his member, the following joke is made: ‘… My word, then, I’ll cut it off.’ ‘Huh, cut if off!’ said another. ‘You’d hurt him, Madam; do you go cutting their things off children? He’d be Sir No’tail.’5

Mutilation also appears in connection with Epistemon, who ‘had his head chopped off’ (a pun in the French which has ‘la couppe testé’ instead of ‘la teste coupée’), which affords Epistemon the unexpected opportunity to travel to the Underworld. Or Captain Tripet, who – nomen est omen – dies because his tripes are removed. These belong to a long series of absurd deaths, of which many examples could be given: the Parisians who drown in the flood of urine that Pantagruel produces; the enemies who besiege the monastery of brother Jean – they are clubbed to death by the monk in a veritable comédie de la cruauté covering no less than three pages: For some, he beat their brains out, for others he broke arms and legs, for others he dislocated the vertebrae of the neck … If anyone tried to get away in flight, he made that one’s head fly into pieces by rupturing the lambdoidal suture. … And if anyone was so seized by rashness that he tried to resist him face to face, there he showed the strength of his muscles, for he pierced right through the interior mediastine and the heart … Some died without speaking, others spoke without dying. Some died speaking; others spoke dying.6

This scene of dismemberment is echoed throughout the work. For 4 5 6

Rabelais, Complete Works, p. 19. Ibid., p. 31. Ibid., pp. 67–8.

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instance, Rabelais recounts how the legendary bohemian poet François Villon plays a bloody trick on brother Tappecou by frightening his mare and making her bolt. Tappecou becomes entangled in the stirrups: So he was dragged flayass by the filly, who kicked out against him harder than ever, always multiplying the kicks against him, and was straying off the road in her fright through the bushes, hedges and ditches. With the result that she quite bashed in his skull, so that the brains fell out near the Hosanna Cross; then came the arms, in pieces, one here, one there, likewise the legs; then she made one long carnage of the bowels; so that when the filly reached the monastery, all she bore of him was his right foot and the entangled shoe.7

Birth in Rabelais is as absurd as death. Gargantua is not born through the usual channel: since his mother was administered ‘a restringent so horrible that all her sphincters were contracted and tightened up to such a point that you could hardly have pried them open with your teeth’, the child seeks an alternative exit: ‘By this mishap were loosened the cotyledons of the matrix, through which the infant sprang up into the vena cava; and, climbing up by the diaphragm up above the shoulders, where the said vein divides in two, took the route to the left, and came out through the left ear.’8 The contact with the outside world and with other bodies by means of the different bodily orifices often assumes perverse forms. The vagina (defined as ‘this manifest solution of continuity’) appears in an absurd light in Chapter 15 of Pantagruel, entitled ‘How Panurge teaches a very new way of building the walls of Paris’, in which Panurge proposes to surround Paris with a city rampart made of women’s genitals, because they are the cheapest form of building material. The theme of the mouth is the basis of well-known episodes, such as the chapter on the pilgrims who are swallowed by Gargantua and manage to survive by crawling into a hollow tooth, or the episode of the journey of discovery that the narrator Alcofrybas Nasier (an anagram of François Rabelais) undertakes in Pantagruel’s mouth, where he discovers a ‘New World’. Thematically linked with the bodily orifice is what emerges from it in literally gigantic quantities: trumpeting farts, piss and shit, sweat and tears. To conclude with a particularly tasteless example from Pantagruel: in answer to the question of why sea water is salty, the reply is that the world is a big body; the seas are the sweat of the earth, and sweat is always salty – as the narrator claims: ‘which you will say is true if you will taste your own – or else that of the poxies when they make them sweat – it’s all one to me.’9

7 8 9

Ibid., p. 466. Ibid., p. 20. Ibid., p. 141.

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It is not difficult to expand this list of bodily extremities with numerous other examples. From the perspective of the categories listed above, the human body is seen not as a static, perfect, complete, closed, integral whole, but as a ridiculous, moving organism, subject to excrescence, opening, mutilation and decay. The humour of Rabelais’ work lies to a large degree in its challenge to the serious, classical picture of the human body.10 Readers’ reactions show that this humorous plethora of physicality has not always been appreciated over the centuries. That was the case among Rabelais’ contemporary readers, who reacted strongly to his work but – remarkably enough – little if at all to that physicality.11 Since French classicism, however, with its aesthetic of bienséance, readers like La Bruyère and Voltaire have responded to the excessive physicality of Rabelais’ work. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was very common to issue Rabelais’ work in bowdlerized form.12 Readers from the postmodern era, who have grown accustomed to a good deal, also feel uneasy and are not sure how to handle all that physicality. My own qualifications like ‘tasteless’ or ‘absurd’ are a sign that classicist or Victorian standards of decency are still with us today. The examples mentioned so far concern the extremities of the human body as an object of description; they do not illustrate, at a meta-level, the extremities of that description itself. The rest of this article will concentrate on this meta-discursive aspect of the description.

Quaresmeprenant: the carnival context Rabelais’ Fourth Book, published in 1552, relates the marvellous voyage of the giant Pantagruel and the rogue Panurge on their quest for the oracle of the Divine Bottle. This book contains a very detailed description of a monstrous figure called Quaresmeprenant (Fastilent in the translation by Frame). This character is described (Rabelais uses the terms ‘anatomisé et descript’) in four chapters by

10 See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, tr. Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968). Bakhtin interprets Rabelais’ physicality (with its emphasis on the lower bodily functions and the open body) in terms of the popular tradition of carnivalesque reversal. The main objection that has been raised to this interpretation is that this reversal is not confined to popular culture (in reaction to official culture), but is also – above all – situated in an intellectual upper stratum. 11 See De Grève, L’Interprétation de Rabelais au XVIe siècle. 12 Cf. Richard Cooper, ‘Le véritable Rabelais déformé’, in Paul J. Smith (ed.), Editer et traduire Rabelais à travers les âges (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), pp. 195–220.

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Xenomanes, one of Pantagruel’s companions, whose name means ‘lover of what is strange or foreign’. Chapter 29 lists ‘ses vestemens, ses aliments, sa maniere de faire, et ses passetemps’; Chapter 30 describes his internal body parts; Chapter 31 describes his external body parts; and Chapter 32 his ‘contenances’. The descriptions in Chapters 30 and 31 are in fact a long list of 77 plus 64 parts of the body, in which each part is compared with an object. Chapter 32 presents a summary of 36 (pseudo-)activities of Quaresmeprenant, partly in list form. The opening sections of Chapters 30, 31 and 32 can serve to illustrate this: Chapter 30: ‘Fastilent has (or at least in my time had)’, said Xenomanes, ‘as for his inward parts, a brain comparable in size, colour, substance, and vigour, to the left ballock of a male handworm. The The The The

lobes thereof, like an auger. veriform excrescence, like a croquet mallet. membranes, like a monk’s cowl. optic nerves, like a mason’s tray.’

Chapter 31: ‘Fastilent’, said Xenomanes as he continued, ‘as regards his outward parts, was a little better proportioned except for the seven ribs he had over and above the common form of humans. Toes he had like a virginal on an organ. Nails, like a gimlet. Feet, like a guitar. Heels, like a mace. Soles of the feet, like a crucible. Legs, like a lure.’ Chapter 32: ‘It’s a natural wonder’, said Xenomanes as he went on, ‘to see and hear of the state of Fastilent. If he spat, it was basketfuls of wild artichoke. If he blew his nose, it was little salt eels. If he cried, it was ducks with onion sauce. … A strange case: he worked doing nothing, he did nothing working. He had eyes open sleeping, slept having his eyes open … He laughed as he bit, bit as he laughed … He bathed on top of high steeples, dried himself in ponds and streams. He fished in the air and there caught decuman crayfish. He went hunting in the depths of the sea and there found ibexes, wild goats, and chamois … ’

This description of Quaresmeprenant should first of all be set in the immediate context of the Fourth Book. The episode forms a thematic unit with that of the monstrous whale (‘physetère’) and that of the Andouilles and the Saucisses, the living sausages that the travellers encounter. To be precise, the whale episode is at the exact centre of the

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Fourth Book (Chapters 33 and 34, out of a total of 67).13 The two other episodes are grouped around this centre, and the opposition between Quaresmeprenant and the Andouilles is thematically and stylistically emphasized. Quaresmeprenant is a passive character, and this is expressed in a monotonous repetition of the same syntactic structure each time; the Andouilles stand for the chaotic, which finds expression in an extremely varied, almost chaotic style. This descriptive mimetism is very typical of Rabelais. For instance, the actions of characters who are bored during a period without any breeze are described in a monotonous series of sentences sharing the same syntactic structure. The storm scene, on the other hand, is couched in a turbulent style which ably expresses the atmospheric turbulences.14 The context can be qualified as carnivalesque. As his name indicates, Quaresmeprenant stands for Lent, while the Andouilles stand for Mardi Gras (Shrove Tuesday). Rabelais is here following a long literary and pictorial tradition of the allegorical battle between Lent and Carnival, as represented not only in the work of Brueghel, but also in the Lean Kitchen and the Fat Kitchen of Jan Steen and many others.15 Quaresmeprenant is a fish-eater, an emaciated, phlegmatic and melancholy person characterized by lethargy and apathy, while the Andouilles (whose essence is sausage and mustard) are sanguine and choleric. They take the company of travellers by surprise, while Quaresmeprenant is a threat in the background (in fact, he is absent from the scene as a character; only his description is present). The whale is neither flesh (Carnival) nor fish (Lent), and thus forms the trait d’union between the two opposites. Rabelais’ religious satire depends on this thematic opposition.16 As an Erasmian humanist, he is caught between the hammer and the anvil, 13 This was first pointed out by Edwin Duval and Gérard Defaux. See the latter’s edition of the Quart Livre (Paris: Livre de Poche (Bibliothèque classique), 1994), pp. 96–9 and Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s ‘Quart Livre de Pantagruel’ (Geneva: Droz, 1998), Chapter 3. 14 Cf. Paul J. Smith, Voyage et écriture. Etude sur le ‘Quart Livre’ de Rabelais (Geneva: Droz, 1987), pp. 86 ff. 15 The most comprehensive study of this is Samuel Kinser, Rabelais’s Carnival. Text, Context, Metatext (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 16 My interpretation does not take into account the recent analysis by Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s ‘Quart Livre de Pantagruel’. Duval sees Pantagruel as the personification of the Pauline caritas, who, in contrast to his companions brother Jean and Panurge, tries to reconcile the two opposite forms of anti-caritas, Quaresmeprenant and the Andouilles: ‘In every episode the hero intervenes gently and inconspicuously, not only to reconcile hostile antagonists but to correct the various forms of anticaritas he finds in each island, supplementing caritas when it is deficient, supplying it when it is absent’ (p. 97).

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between fox and hound (in the words of his characters). Popish Rome, that propagates useless activities such as fasting, is mocked in the person of Quaresmeprenant, while Calvinist Geneva is ridiculed through the Andouilles and the Saucisses (Rabelais points out the phonetic similarity between ‘Suisses’ and ‘Saucisses’). As so often in Rabelais, this thematic opposition is problematic: what is the connection between Calvin and Carnival? Moreover, it is ambivalent: the Andouilles (symbol of Carnival) are expressly confused with the ‘anguilles’, Lenten eels.17 This theme is also reversible: after all, the Sausages are emblems of the easygoing, fat Papish life, while the emaciated Quaresmeprenant could refer to the strict and dogmatic attitudes of the Calvinists. This polysemy is not only thematic;18 it also affects the literary discourse itself, as we shall see.

Quaresmeprenant: some literary theoretical aspects If we examine the Quaresmeprenant episode in itself, we have to discuss some theoretical aspects of the description as a form of literary discourse. If an unfamiliar or monstrous creature is to be described adequately (that is, clearly and convincingly for the reader), the object in question has to be broken down into recognizable parts (the metonymic aspect of the description). These individual parts are described as visually as possible, which in practice means that each one is implicitly or explicitly associated with something that is familiar to the reader (the metaphoric or analogic aspect of the description).19 Interpretation of a descriptive text in Rabelais boils down to the interpretation of the metonymic and analogic mechanism of the 17 See Barbara C. Bowen, ‘Lenten Eels and Carnival Sausages’, L’Esprit créateur 21 (1981), pp. 12–25. On the ‘Lenten elements in the Andouilles and … Carnival elements in Quaresmeprenant’, however, see Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s ‘Quart Livre de Pantagruel’, p. 68, n. 4: ‘These are not an indication of “the doctrinal confusion which accompanies religious discord” (Bowen) …, but simply a graphic illustration of the essential equivalence of “Judaism” and the “flesh”, of observationes carnales and carnis.’ 18 In her edition of the Oeuvres complètes, Mireille Huchon suggests (p. 1539) that Rabelais is punning on the two meanings of the name Quaresmeprenant: 1. the etymological meaning ‘he who fasts’ (Quaresmeprenant is then the personification of Lent), and 2. the meaning that was conventional in the sixteenth century: the three days prior to Ash Wednesday. 19 For a theoretical justification of the metonymic and metaphorical aspects of literary description, see Philippe Hamon, Introduction à l’analyse du descriptif (Paris: Hachette, 1981). See also my ‘Description et zoologie chez Rabelais’, in Y. Went-Daoust (ed.), Description-écriture-peinture (Groningen: 1987), pp. 1–20, an article that adumbrates the present one.

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description. Questions that arise from a metonymic perspective concern the scope, the sequence of the list, and the nature of the parts listed. Questions that arise from an analogic perspective concern explaining the comparison in terms of the nature of the images used, the so-called comparants (a term in French stylistics used to distinguish between the comparé or object of comparison, and the comparant or object with which the comparé is compared). As an example of a more or less normally structured description, let us take Rabelais’ description of a tarandus: ‘A tarande is an animal the size of a young bull, with a head like a stag’s, a bit bigger, with remarkable horns, broadly branched; its feet forked; its coat as long as a great bear’s; its hide a little less hard than the body of a cuirass.’20 This description, which is indirectly based on Pliny the Elder,21 can be found near the beginning of the Fourth Book. It sets a bench-mark by which the reader can gauge whether and to what extent other descriptions are different. The comparants are here the size of a young bull, the antlers of a stag, the coat of a bear, and the hardness of a cuirass. All of these comparants refer to what is near at hand and familiar, and all but one of them refer to the familiar animal world. An important point is representability, that is, the extent to which Rabelais’ description makes it easy to imagine the animal: it can be recognized without any difficulty in the illustration of the tarandus to be found in the zoological work of Conrad Gesner from 1555 (Fig. 6.1). With these general theoretical premises at the back of our mind, we can now proceed to examine the description of Quaresmeprenant more closely. It contains a medical component, which has been excellently analysed by Rabelais critics, especially Marie Madeleine Fontaine, and a literary rhetorical side which has been neglected by the critics so far.

Medical aspects of Quaresmeprenant Both Dolet’s eulogy, referred to at the beginning of this article, and the medical vocabulary of the passages cited above, confirm the influence of the world of medicine on Rabelais’ work. The term used by Dolet, fabrica corporis, is topical, because it occurs in the title of Vesalius’ bestknown anatomical work. That work was critical of Galen and Galenism, as it was represented in France by, among others, Sylvius (the 20

Rabelais, Complete Works, pp. 440–41. Marie Madeleine Fontaine, ‘Une narration biscornue: le tarande du Quart Livre’, in François Marotin and Jacques-Philippe Saint-Gérand (eds), Poétique et narration. Mélanges offerts à Guy Demerson (Paris: Champion, 1993), pp. 407–27. 21

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6.1

Tarandus, from Conrad Gesner, Historia animalium, 1555, woodcut

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mentor and later opponent of Vesalius, and a close acquaintance of Rabelais). Rabelais is well informed about the subject, because his publications include a scholarly edition of Galen’s commentaries on the Aphorisms of Hippocrates. The description of Quaresmeprenant must be set in the state of medical knowledge at the time, including the controversy regarding the authority of Galen. It is noteworthy here that Rabelais knowledgeably touches on several disputes without taking sides. As Marie Madeleine Fontaine notes: ‘l’un des fils directeurs de Rabelais est … de prendre ses distances avec tout débat dès qu’il devient débat d’école’. She therefore regards the episode of Quaresmeprenant not as a satire on the medical profession, but ‘comme une manière de la vivre de l’intérieur dans des difficultés, étant bien entendu que le rire matérialise à la fois la suspension du jugement et le besoin de résolution’.22 If we take a closer look at this topicality of the description of Quaresmeprenant,23 the first feature to note is that the general sequence (first internal, then external) is that of dissection. In the practice of dissection the internal parts of the body are examined first because they are the first to decay. The dissection of the internal body parts usually takes place from bottom to top, starting at the stomach and ending with the brain. This can be seen clearly in the official section reports of the time, such as that of the crown prince François who died prematurely in 1536.24 Rabelais begins his description of Quaresmeprenant the other way round, for he starts with the brain and passes from there to the lower part of the body. He then proceeds to describe those parts that are present all over the body, such as the bones and the blood, and ends up at the head again with the ‘facultés de l’âme’: memory, understanding, judgement, imagination, and so on, which in the medical theory of the day were all conceived to have a fixed and demonstrable place in the head. The sequence of the description of the external parts of the body is not based on the practice of dissection, but on an anatomical description. In this case it is even more obvious that the customary order has been reversed. It is usual to start with the head and end with the feet, 22 Marie Madeleine Fontaine, ‘Quaresmeprenant: l’image littéraire et la contestation de l’analogie médicale’, in James A. Coleman and Christine Scollen-Jimack (eds), Rabelais in Glasgow (Glasgow, 1984), pp. 87–112, here p. 90. 23 The following remarks draw mainly on Fontaine, ‘Quaresmeprenant’, Huchon, Oeuvres complètes, and Roland Antonioli, Rabelais et la médecine (Geneva: Droz, 1976). 24 V.-L. Saulnier, ‘La Mort du dauphin François et son tombeau poétique’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 6 (1945), pp. 53–7 (cited by M. Huchon, Oeuvres complètes, pp. 1541–2).

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while Rabelais begins with Quaresmeprenant’s toes and ends with his hair. This reversal could indicate not that Rabelais was opposed to the customary order of dissection and anatomy, but that Quaresmeprenant himself is an unnatural creature. This interpretation is confirmed by the end of the episode, in which Quaresmeprenant is compared with the monstrous progeny of Antiphysie, anti-nature. The children of Antiphysie all walk on their head because this makes them correspond better to the original Platonic comparison of the human being with a tree. Plato’s Timaeus contains the comparison of the human being with an inverted tree: the hair corresponds to the roots, the legs correspond to the branches. So if a person stands on his head, according to the fallacy of Antiphysie, he is closer to nature, and can be compared with an upright tree. Marie Madeleine Fontaine has demonstrated that Rabelais pokes fun at many other controversial aspects of the medicine of his day. The medical terminology that he uses makes striking use of a wide variety (learned terms of diverse provenance are mixed with French terms, and often with popular ones), in contrast to the medical practitioners of his day, who argued for more terminological uniformity and less ambiguity. Fontaine also mentions Rabelais’ comic allusion to the well-known ‘mistakes of Galen’. The mention that Quaresmeprenant has seven ribs at the start of Chapter 31 is an indirect allusion to the contemporary discussion of Galen. Galen states that the breastbone consists of seven parts. Vesalius’ dissection leads him to declare that it has only one part; according to Vesalius, Galen based his information on the section of a monkey. Charles Estienne arrives at a total of three, and attributes the seven to a different way of performing a section. Sylvius, finally, arrives at a total somewhere between two and six, but not seven; he attributes the difference to physical dissimilarities between the people of Galen’s time and those of his own day. The seven ribs in Rabelais are not only a comic reference to this discussion, but they could also be supposed to indicate that Quaresmeprenant is a sort of ape, half-human and halfanimal. This interpretation is supported by Pantagruel, who remarks that he does not know whether Quaresmeprenant should be called a man.25 To turn from the metonymic to the analogic side of the description, we land in the middle of the debate on Galen and the analogic structure of his anatomy. Many sixteenth-century medical practitioners tried to break with the use of analogy in anatomical description in one of two ways: by trying to produce a description without comparisons, or by

25

Rabelais, Complete Works, p. 507.

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making use of illustrations (those in Vesalius are the best known). However, there were also physicians like Sylvius who remained loyal to the analogic manner of description because they believed that the illustrations would stop their colleagues from conducting autopsies and acquiring practical experience of their own. How is the description of Quaresmeprenant to be situated in this discussion? At first sight the comparants do what they are supposed to do, that is, they provide a picture of the parts of the body in question. Attention has been drawn to the medical realism of the analogies. The best-known example of this is a curious study by the physician Le Double, Rabelais anatomiste, published in 1899. Following the scientific positivism of his day, Le Double tries to demonstrate that each comparison is realistic, and he visualizes this with numerous illustrations (Fig. 6.2). In doing so, as Fontaine has demonstrated, Le Double sometimes misunderstands the comparants, and in other cases he lapses into anachronism (‘si jamais Rabelais voyait “les crémastères comme raquette”, encore faudrait-il que ce fût une raquette de jeu de paume en 1552, et non une raquette de volant en 1899, ou un battoir à tapis’). So Rabelais suggests medical precision, but actually seems to indicate that analogic description as practised by the Galenists does not work, certainly not when it is applied to excess, as in the description of Quaresmeprenant. However, this does not mean that Rabelais implicitly opted for illustrations, as can be shown from a more literary rhetorical perspective. If Rabelais has a standpoint on this, it is implicit. In the debate on the use of medical analogies and medical illustrations, Rabelais opts for mediocritas, the intermediate position of common sense.26

Quaresmeprenant in rhetorical perspective Let us begin by stating that, generally speaking, the description is rhetorical rather than medical. One of the most prominent rhetorical manuals, the Rhetorica ad Herennium,27 which used to be assigned to

26 This is in line with my interpretation of the zoological discourse in Rabelais, on which see my ‘Aspects du discours zoologique dans le Cinquième Livre’, in Franco Giacone (ed.), Le Cinquiesme Livre […] (Geneva: Droz, 2001), pp. 103–13. 27 According to Mireille Huchon, Oeuvres complètes, p. 1235, Rabelais was acquainted with the Rhetorica ad Herennium, and the Prologue to Pantagruel is a direct satire on it.

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Various ‘things’, drawings from Le Double, Rabelais anatomiste, 1899

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Cicero, distinguishes between effictio (the physical portrait of a person) and notatio (the description of the character traits as they are expressed in the person’s actions): Portrayal (effictio) consists in representing and depicting in words enough for recognition of the bodily form of some person, as follows: ‘I mean him, men of the jury, the ruddy, short bent man, with white and rather curly hair, blue-grey eyes, and a huge scar on his chin, if perhaps you can recall him to memory’. This figure is not only serviceable, if you should wish to designate some person, but also graceful, if fashioned with brevity and clarity (breviter et dilucide). Character Delineation (notatio) consists in describing a person’s character by the definite signs which, like distinctive marks, are attributes of that character.

The author continues by presenting a very detailed example of the description of the actions of someone who pretends to be rich. He then goes on: ‘Character Delineations of this kind which describe the qualities proper to each man’s nature carry very great charm, for they set before our eyes (ponunt ante oculos) a person’s whole character.’28 This distinction between effictio and notatio runs through the description of Rabelais’ protagonist Panurge in Chapter 16 of Pantagruel (‘Of the ways and dispositions of Panurge’), and, as Mireille Huchon has demonstrated, the character descriptions in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron.29 As far as Quaresmeprenant is concerned, the physical description in Chapters 29, 30 and 31 belongs to the effictio, while the account of the contenances of Quaresmeprenant in Chapter 32 belongs to the notatio. Rabelais’ text contains a number of elements singled out by the author of the Ad Herennium, but in a more or less perverted form. For instance, a sequence is suggested in the brief physical description of the character: first of all a general impression (corresponding to the information contained in Chapter 29); then a description of the hair, eyes and chin, that is, from above to below. This sequence, which is only incipiently present in the text of the Ad Herennium, is regulated in detail in later manuals, such as the medieval descriptio puellae, whose prescriptions can be found, for example, in Geoffroy de Vinsauf’s Poetria Nova.30 The reversal of this sequence in

28

Cited from the edition and translation by Harry Caplan (Cambridge, MA: Loeb,

1954). 29 Mireille Huchon, ‘Définition et description: le projet de l’Heptaméron entre le Caméron et le Décaméron’, in Marcel Tetel (ed.), Les visages et les voix de Marguerite de Navarre (Paris: Klincksieck, 1995), pp. 51–65. 30 See, for example, Edmond Faral, Les arts poétiques du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle … (Paris: Champion, 1923), pp. 74 ff.

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the description of Quaresmeprenant must therefore be set not only in a medical but also in a literary rhetorical tradition. Another important element in the passages from the Ad Herennium concerns the ideals of brevity and clarity. Rabelais perverts them both: the required clarity is only apparent, as we have already seen from a medical perspective. As for the ideal of brevity, it is all the more evidently perverted, a fact which is emphasized all the more by the typographic form of the list. Both ideals play a role in a genre that lies at the foundation of Rabelais’ novel: the writing of history. An important text in this respect is the historiographical treatise How to write history by Lucian of Samosata (second century AD). This work contains formulations of a number of rules, including brevity and clarity, which a good writer of history should observe. A historian may not get lost in endless summaries of matters that are irrelevant to his purpose. Rabelais derived a lot from this work, both in serious form and in parody. When he perverts the rules for the writing of history, he is actually doing what Lucian himself did in his True History. In this work, which narrates a marvellous voyage, Lucian fails to observe the rules that he formulated himself. He does so in order to criticize bad historiography. Rabelais’ Fourth Book proceeds in the same fashion and makes use of the same procedures. Many examples could be cited: besides the exaggerated declarations of speaking the truth and the other forms of authentification (procedures that are closed to a good writer of history, or which may only be used with the greatest caution), it is above all the stylistic ideals of brevity and clarity that are made fun of by Rabelais.31 Another point that emerges from the passage from the Ad Herennium concerns the expression ponunt ante oculos. This concerns a concept in classical rhetoric: evidentia, that is, the imaginative force of the description, which presents the object described so vividly to the reader that he can imagine it as if he sees an illustration of reality.32 The effictio and the example given logically concern a person who is not present but is re-presented in words that make him visible. 31 On these forms of Lucianism in Rabelais, see esp. Huchon, Oeuvres complètes, p. 1216. The lack of brevity in the description of Quaresmeprenant has another effect too, which can be found in every one of Rabelais’ lists: the quantity of elements listed leads the reader to hesitate all the time between the whole and its parts, between the interpretation of the countless details and the overall interpretation of the cumulative description as a whole. On this effect on the reader, which is comparable to the effect that the composite paintings of Arcimboldo or Brueghel’s works have on the viewer, see Smith, ‘Description et zoologie’, p. 8. 32 The terms hypotypose and enargeia are also found. The Rhetorica ad Herennium (p. 404) refers to demonstratio.

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145

Flying fish, from Pierre Belon, La nature et diversité des poissons, 1555

It is above all this evidentia that is comically perverted in the description of Quaresmeprenant. One way in which this is done is by means of the comparants, which are unconventional in that they do not clarify or specify the comparés. Their effect is instead one of concealing and mystifying, because the comparé (the navel, for example) is compared with a disparate object (a hurdy-gurdy). It is as difficult for the reader to imagine something like this as it is to imagine ‘cranial sutures, like the seal ring of a papal fisherman’.33 Sometimes the arbitrary character of the comparison is emphasized because the comparant is chosen on grounds of homophony alone: ‘Les fauciles [forearms], comme faucilles [sickles]’. Usually, however, the comparison is a redundant tautology because it confirms what is already known. For instance, when Rabelais compares the morphology of Quaresmeprenant’s lung with a cope, or that of his heart with a chasuble, the reader who makes an effort can imagine something. But the information he is given does not tell him anything specific about Quaresmeprenant’s lungs or heart, because all lungs and hearts look like copes and chasubles. The obfuscatory effect of the comparants or their tautology undermines any form of evidentia a priori. This undermining character emerges clearly if one compares the description of Quaresmeprenant with other descriptions of people and animals in Rabelais. If we recall the description of the tarandus, the animal can be visualized and the description corresponds to the illustration in Conrad Gesner’s Historia animalium. The same applies to other real animals, such as the flying fish: Rabelais’ description corresponds to the illustration in Pierre Belon’s La nature et diversité des 33

Rabelais, Complete Works, p. 505.

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poissons (1555) (Fig. 6.3). The descriptions of most of the characters can also be visualized; the reader’s impression of the figures of Panurge and frère Jean will correspond roughly to the famous illustrations produced by Gustave Doré in the nineteenth century. None of this is true of Quaresmeprenant: it remains impossible to imagine him, even though the precision with which he is described suggests that he ought to be representable. Rabelais is here applying a comic procedure that he often uses in descriptive passages. Generally speaking, the longer and more precise the description, the greater the description’s representability, in other words, the greater the stimulus to the reader to imagine or illustrate the described object, or to imitate the described action in some other way. But if the reader applies this generally valid principle to the descriptive passages in Rabelais, he will be surprised. To cite two examples: several pages of Pantagruel contain a long description of a philosophical dispute between Panurge and Thaumaste, an English scholar, in gesture. The gestures are described with almost mathematical precision, and the reader is invited to mimic them. A reader who takes up the invitation, however, soon realizes that he is making all kinds of obscene gestures. To take another example, the Fifth Book contains a very full account of a game of chess. Here too it is tempting to represent the game, in other words to play it out. Several attempts to do so have been made in the past which got as far as twenty moves on each side. However, if the text is strictly compared with these interpretations, it turns out that some tricks have been going on: certain moves are skipped for convenience’s sake, and certain other moves are assumed for the same motive to be mistakes on Rabelais’ part. Rabelais’ game of chess has been examined by the Dutch philologist and chess expert C.F.P. Stutterheim, but in his reconstruction of the game Stutterheim did not get further than three moves on each side. Replaying the game inevitably reaches an impasse, in spite of the precise account that Rabelais seems to provide.34 These descriptive examples of the language of gesture and the game of chess (and many others could be cited) indicate that evidentia in Rabelais often contains an aporia, a paradoxical moment that has been deliberately introduced by Rabelais. This is also true of Quaresmeprenant. Every attempt to visualize him is doomed to failure, whether one thinks of the illustrations by Le 34 C.F.P. Stutterheim, ‘Cassamus, Pantagruel en het spel der koningen’, in Eer is het lof des deuchts. Opstellen over renaissance en classicisme aangeboden aan F. Veenstra (Amsterdam, 1986), pp. 296–304, and Paul J. Smith, ‘Het schaakballet bij Rabelais’, Bzzlletin, 233 (1996), pp. 20–26.

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Double, or the half-hearted attempts of Gustave Doré to capture him in an image. The comparisons that Rabelais specialists have made with contemporary pictorial examples are inadequate too: Quaresmeprenant does not resemble the carnivalesque figures of Hieronymus Bosch or Brueghel, or the fantasies of François Desprez, illustrator of Les songes drolatiques de Pantagruel, or the composite portraits of Arcimboldo, or the geometric figures of Giovanbattista Braccelli (1607).35 The many failed attempts to bring the evidentia to life show that we are faced with an essential characteristic of Rabelais’ text which, while calling for an interpretation, blocks any unambiguous interpretation. In the last instance, then, the anatomy of Quaresmeprenant should be read metadiscursively as a humorous reflection on the possibility – and above all the impossibility – of medical and literary description.

35

Interpretation of Fontaine, ‘Quaresmeprenant’.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Reading New World Bodies Peter Mason Introductory remarks: object and strategy Commenting on the sudden upsurge of interest in the body in the late 1980s, André-Marcel d’Ans suggested that, with the death of structuralism and psychoanalysis as a human science, we were thrown back on what was left – the essential part – now that the grand abstractions which were once thought to govern our behaviour had collapsed.1 But among the flood of publications on the body that have appeared in the last ten years or so it has been stressed again and again that our relation to both our own and other bodies is a mediated one, passing through concepts like self, identity, integrity and symmetry. Even though we are all given one at birth, the body is not a given: it is something that we endlessly reinvent, day by day, contact by contact, touch by touch. It is definitely and definitively marked by culture. At the same time, we have witnessed the proliferation of terms like invention, reinvention, deconstruction, framing, reframing, and so on, which have become part and parcel of the contemporary vocabulary of cultural history and criticism. Culture, it seems, can be bent to accommodate all these practices. The body, which seemed to have become so tangible and irreducible to d’Ans, has in the meantime become so enmeshed in talk that its very corporeality has been undermined or lost altogether. For instance, in an influential 1995 essay that reviewed much of the literature at that date, Caroline Bynum wrote: ‘… body or embodiment is an aspect of many conversations we are now having – including conversations about death – and was part of many such conversations in the European past’ (emphasis added)2 – the body reduced to a subject of academic conversation; or, as Heidegger succinctly put it, ‘Die Sache ist so, weil man es sagt’.3 Amid all this, there is a term whose simplicity is deceptive – reading. 1 André-Marcel d’Ans, ‘Corps et culture. Le débat’, La Quinzaine Littéraire, 514 (1988), pp. 29–30. 2 Caroline Bynum, ‘Why All the Fuss about the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective’, Critical Inquiry, 22, 1 (1995), pp. 1–33, here p. 12. 3 M. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer Verlag, 1953), p. 168.

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The primary, ‘literal’ meaning of reading is with reference to the written word, but in recent years, helped along by the Writing Culture school of anthropology,4 as well as the anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s notion of a culture as an ensemble of texts, we have grown used to the idea that if culture is something that is written, it must be something that can be read too. Midway between the precisely identifiable written text and the far more elusive notion of ‘culture’ lies the image. Images too, it has been argued, can be read, since they are ‘texts precisely in that they constitute a network of discursive practices, albeit visually shaped’.5 There is a danger of reductionism if the visual is reduced to the status of a semiotic practice.6 Indeed, it was Jacques Derrida who issued a timely warning against precisely this hazard: ‘It was never our wish to extend the reassuring notion of the text to a whole extra-textual realm and to transform the world into a library by doing away with all boundaries … we sought rather to work out the theoretical and practical system of these margins, these borders, once more from the ground up.’7 Since then the appearance of works like Mieke Bal’s Reading ‘Rembrandt’ – a study of the discursive aspects of the image in Rembrandt – and its complement Images Littéraire, ou Comment lire visuellement Proust – a study of visuality in literature – indicates the possibility of a parallel study of text and image without the need to reduce one to the other.8 4 Though the ‘linguistic turn’ in anthropology is much older, in certain quarters it has come to be associated with the influential Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, James Clifford and George E. Marcus (eds) (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of Caifornia Press, 1986). 5 Mieke Bal, ‘Light in Painting: Dis-seminating Art History’, Deconstruction and the Visual Arts. Art, Media, Architecture, Peter Brunette and David Wills (eds) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 49–64, here p. 52 n.8. At the end of the first chapter of his Behind the Picture. Art and Evidence in the Italian Renaissance (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), Martin Kemp notes: ‘The reader may have noticed that I have not once used the word “reading” with respect to visual images’ (p. 30). This avoidance is clearly motivated by Kemp’s distaste for what he calls ‘the academic field sports of semiotics, structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstruction and reception theory’ (p. 4). As we shall see, however, the reading of visual images is not such a novelty as he implies; the idea of reading a painting goes back at least to the seventeenth century. 6 This is Kemp’s objection: ‘accounts of the act of “reading” have been used as part of a strategy to designate pictures as texts in such a way as to suppress the peculiarity of the visual experience’, Behind the Picture, p. 30. 7 Jacques Derrida, ‘Survivre’, Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986), p. 128. 8 Mieke Bal, Reading ‘Rembrandt’: Beyond the Word–Image Opposition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); eadem, Images Littéraires, ou Comment lire visuellement Proust (Montreal: XYZ, 1997). I have singled out these works by Mieke Bal not only for their own importance but also because she provides incisive and lively discussions of a good many of the theoretical points at issue.

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The point of intersection of these contemporary themes of the human body and of visual reading/writing might be summed up in the questions: Can one read a body? If so, just how does one go about reading a body? Is it peculiar to the cultural world of Europe? At times the comments on non-European cultures offered by ethnographers and anthropologists can help to sensitize us to what is specific to European culture. For instance, in a discussion of the villagers of Cancuc in the mountainous region of Altos de Chiapas, South East Mexico, Pedro Pitarch notes how, in the work of diagnosis carried out by these Tzeltal specialists, their task of reading which particular words have entered the body of a person and are causing an affliction implies a ‘textualization’ of the body. He contrasts this with the common European practice of referring to a text as though it had a body (capital, footnote, and so on) and (rather over-schematically) concludes: ‘If we Europeans “corporealise” the text, the Tzeltales “textualise” the body.’9 What are the implications of this use of the metaphor? More particularly, are there earlier precedents for its extended use? The centre of gravity of the present article lies in the New World in the sixteenth century, that extreme place and extreme situation in which the attempts of one human body to understand another ran up against the most extreme obstacles.10 Its focus is on how New World bodies were read by Europeans in the sixteenth century – though we should not forget that those native bodies were themselves changing in the course of that same century, under the influence of European microbes, European food and European sexual contacts; native perceptions of those changes certainly did not run parallel to European perceptions of them.11 The interpretative practices of European observers (and actors) like Columbus will be situated within forms of interpretation that were practised at that time on the European continent. 9 Pedro Pitarch, ‘El mal del texto’, Sustentos, aflicciones y postrimerías de los Indios de América, Manuel Gutiérrez Estévez (ed.) (Madrid: Casa de America, 2000), pp. 137–56, here p. 155. 10 This view of the clash between European and native American cultures as one marked by extreme alterity was first put forward by Tzetvan Todorov in his La Conquête de l’Amérique. La question de l’autre (Paris: Seuil, 1982) (on p. 12 he refers to the discovery of America, or rather of the Americans, as ‘the most astonishing encounter in our history’). His theses are further developed and qualified in Peter Mason, Deconstructing America. Representations of the Other (London and New York: Routledge, 1990) and idem, ‘Pretty vacant. Columbus, conviviality and New World faces’, The Anthropology of Love and Anger. The Aesthetics of conviviality in Native Amazonia, Joanna Overing and Alan Passes (eds) (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 189–205. 11 Manuel Gutiérrez Estévez, ‘La colonización del cuerpo. El otro en las aflicciones mayas yucatecas’, Sustentos, aflicciones y postrimerías de los Indios de América, Manuel Gutiérrez Estévez (ed.), pp. 87–106.

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So much for the object of study of the present article. Its strategy is based on a fundamental mistrust of cultural histories which fail at the same time to reflect on their own premises.12 In other words, how is one to engage in an archaeology of reading the body without ending up caught in a simplistic dichotomy between what we do now and what they did then, or between what we do here and they do there – the familiar chronocentric or ethnocentric terms of the split between self and other? The strategy followed here is to approach a past century not from the present but from a different period in the past. Hence sixteenthcentury material is tackled not by way of an implicit contrast with the late twentieth century, but via a third party that is other to both the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries – the notion of reading bodies as theorized and applied by the great French theoretician, aesthetician and painter Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665). Of course, there is no historical connection between Poussin and Columbus or the other sixteenth-century adventurers to the Americas. All the same, it may prove useful to compare and contrast the views on ‘reading’ bodies by an artist born in the last decennium of the sixteenth century with those practised by Columbus and his contemporaries at the beginning of the same century, although it should be clear that the use to which Poussin is put in this article is heuristic rather than historical. I ‘read’ him here as I read the works of Michel de Certeau, Louis Marin and other thinkers, and not as a representative of his own time.13 It is hoped that the introduction of this ‘third man’ will have a destabilizing influence and will help to avoid a lapse into the familiar binary structures that characterize so much writing in history and anthropology. And if the present text is itself destabilized in the process, tant pis or tant mieux.

‘Lisez l’histoire et le tableau’ One of Poussin’s biographers, André Félibien, records a discussion with the painter in which Poussin stated: ‘Just as the twenty-four letters of the alphabet are used to form our words and to express our thoughts, so the forms of the human body are used to express the various passions of the 12 For a good discussion of some of these issues by a philosopher, see M. MoodyAdams, Fieldwork in Familiar Places (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 13 Compare the emphasis on the study of art as disclosing the prehistory of our present experience of a work of art in Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993), p. 52.

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soul and to make visible what is in the mind.’14 Hence if a painter creates a portrait of Alexander, for instance, a viewer should be able to recognize from the rendering of the face (les traits du visage) that it is Alexander, who has the qualities that are given him. It is interesting to note that Poussin expresses this theory of the relation between inside and outside in terms of the letters of the alphabet; though he does not actually use the verb ‘to read’, this reference to letters implies the metaphor of reading. But can one ‘read’ a face as one reads letters of the alphabet? And if so, how is one to go about it? Poussin offers some clues in a letter to Paul Fréart de Chantelou, the most important of his patrons in France, dated 28 April 1639, in which he announces that he is dispatching the painting La Manne to Chantelou, and gives him precise instructions on the kind of frame required by the painting to match its colours.15 The frame is not just a physical frame, but it also provides the limit within which consideration of the picture is situated. At the end of the letter, Poussin specifies how the painting is to be hung: ‘Before hanging it, it should be framed. It should be placed a little above eye-level …’ The letter also contains an explanation of the disposition of the figures in the painting: If you will remember the first letter which I wrote you,16 about the movements that I proposed to give to the figures, and, if at the same time, you will look at the painting, I think you will easily recognize those who are languishing [from hunger], those who are struck with amazement, those who are taking pity on their companions and performing acts of charity … Read the story and the picture [lisez

14 Nicolas Poussin, Lettres et propos sur l’art, textes réunis et présentés par Anthony Blunt (Paris: Hermann, 1989), pp. 196–7. For the original orthography of Poussin’s correspondence see Correspondance de Nicolas Poussin, Charles Jouanny (ed.), Archives de l’art français, nouvelle période, tome V (Paris: F. de Nobele, 1911). 15 Note that the recipient of the letter is not in a position to see the painting, which is elsewhere; on the other hand, as we shall see below, when Poussin instructs the viewer to ‘read’ the painting, he simultaneously refers the viewer as a reader to a (hi)story which is elsewhere. Analysis of the subtle play of presence and absence in Poussin’s letter would go beyond the confines of the present article. 16 This letter is no longer extant, but compare the following remarks in a letter to Jacques Stella preserved by André Félibien (Poussin, Lettres, p. 37; Bellori, Félibien, Passeri, Sandrart, Vies de Poussin, édition présentée et annotée par Stefan Gerner, Paris: Macula, 1994, p. 169): ‘I have found a certain distribution … and certain natural attitudes which show the misery and hunger to which the Jewish people had been reduced, and also the joy and happiness which came over them, the astonishment which had struck them, and the respect and veneration which they feel for their lawgiver, with a mixture of women, children, and men, of different ages and temperaments – things which will, I believe, not displease those who know how to read them (ceux qui les sauront bien lire)’ (emphasis added).

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l’histoire et le tableau] so that you can judge whether everything is appropriate to the subject. And if, after having considered it more than once, you derive some satisfaction from it, please let me know without hiding anything, so that I can enjoy having satisfied you the first time that I have had the honour to serve you. Otherwise I am prepared to make any sort of compensation, begging you to consider that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. [emphasis added]17

Poussin distinguishes between ‘l’histoire’ and ‘le tableau’. It is hard to imagine what the injunction to ‘read the painting’ can refer to if not to the subject matter of the painting – the Israelites gathering the manna. In that case, ‘read the (hi)story’18 cannot refer to the same activity too (unless Poussin is needlessly repeating himself).19 The use of the same verb ‘to read’ in both cases implies that one can read a painting just as one can read a story; the presence of the copula between the two implies that Poussin is referring to two separate activities. So what are these two acts of reading that Poussin proposes? Since we know from the title of the painting that its subject is the divine gift of manna to the Israelites during the exodus from Egypt, the injunction to ‘read the story’ would seem to be a reference to the Bible. However, as Bätschmann has pointed out,20 the invitation to compare the picture with the text is surprising since none of the passions depicted by Poussin in his painting is mentioned in Chapter 16 of the book of Exodus. In fact, there is no single text which can be used to explain the painting (Fig. 7.1). The figural group on the left, for example, in which a young woman gives the breast to her mother and refuses it to her child, known as Caritas Romana, was frequently represented in ancient sculpture and was revived in the sixteenth century. Its textual basis, however, is not the Bible, but the chapter on filial piety in Dictorum factorumque memorabilium libri V by the Roman historian Valerius

17

Poussin, Lettres, pp. 44–6. Whether one translates ‘histoire’ as ‘story’ or ‘history’, the result is the same: Poussin is referring to a source that is a textual narrative. 19 In view of the parallels between writing and the visual arts drawn by theorists like Alberti and further developed by Rudolph Agricola (cf. P. Mack, ‘Agricola’s use of the comparison between writing and the visual arts’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute, 55 (1992), pp. 169–79), it might be suggested that ‘l’histoire’ should here be taken in the sense of Alberti’s historia. However, the emphasis in the Italian texts lies on the power of the visual arts as a didactic resource to convey what words cannot so clearly express, a function very different from Poussin’s concerns; they were written almost two hundred years before the date of the painting of La Manne; and they do not furnish precedents for Poussin’s bold notion of reading a painting. 20 Oskar Bätschmann, Nicolas Poussin: Dialectics of Painting, trans. Marko Daniel (London: Reaktion, 1990), pp. 114–15. 18

7.1

Nicolas Poussin, Les Israélites recueillant la manne dans le désert, oil on canvas, 149 x 200 cm, 1639, Louvre, Paris (photo: RMN)

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Maximus (fl. AD 14–30). Other figures in the painting – the nursing mother, the old man raising his arms, the fighting boys – go back to the ideal types of classical sculpture (Niobe, Seneca and The Wrestlers), although, as Le Brun pointed out, it was the proportions, not the poses, of these classical statues which Poussin followed.21 The painting thus contains themes drawn from different periods – the Old Testament and the world of ancient Rome.22 There is nothing particularly strange about this, for, as David Carrier has argued, ‘a painting can unparadoxically represent events of two different times’.23 This was certainly the case in the 1630s. Not only are there parallels in the visual arts, but the notion of prefiguration in scriptural exegesis of the time also implied that all pre-Christian history was refigured in the mode of the New Testament. The gathering of the manna was thus a prefiguration of the Eucharist, and to the ancient Roman and Old Testament temporalities of the painting we can add the temporality of the Christian era. Not only is the subject of the painting itself characterized by multiple temporalities, but the act of reading the painting is a plural one too. As Poussin explains in his letter, this act of reading is not accomplished once and for all. Chantelou is asked to consider it ‘plus d’une fois’. There is thus a temporalization of the act of reading, as one reading succeeds another in time. Where are we supposed to start reading the painting? Poussin makes it clear in the letter to Chantelou that reading starts on the left,24 for ‘the 21

Anthony Blunt, Poussin (London: Pallas Athene, 1995), p. 230. Already in the seventeenth century, critics were disturbed by the presence of the figural group in the left of the painting as it seemed to disturb the unity of action: if the Israelites had now received the divine gift of manna, why does this figural group not yet appear to be aware of the fact? In an attempt to rescue the unity of action, Dowley has argued that the painting depicts the moment at which the manna has only started to fall; it begins to fall on the right, and is slowly spreading from the right to the left, so that it has not yet reached the Caritas Romana group (F.H. Dowley, ‘Thoughts on Poussin, time, and narrative: The Israelites gathering manna in the desert’, Simiolus, 25, 4 (1997), pp. 329–48). Despite this rather forced attempt to preserve the verisimilitude of the painting, Dowley still admits that ‘the simultaneity of all the components … does not exclude their serving as signs or references to other events or moments’ (p. 345). 23 David Carrier, Principles of Art History Writing (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), p. 192. Although Carrier does offer a brief discussion of La Manne (pp. 110–13), his discussion of multiple temporalities is contained in his chapter ‘When Is the Painting’ (pp. 179–99), which is largely devoted to Poussin’s two paintings of Arcadian shepherds. 24 Dowley, ‘Thoughts on Poussin, time and narrative’, p. 335, claims that ‘a text has a sequential order in one direction left to right, in contrast to a picture which can be “read” from any direction, and can represent its meaning all at once to the perception of the observer’. Poussin explicitly states that this picture cannot be read from any direction and that it cannot represent its meaning all at once to the perception of the observer. 22

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seven figures on the left will tell you everything that is written (écrit) here and the rest are in the same vein (de la même étoffe)’ (emphasis added). Besides the clues on how to read the painting contained in Poussin’s letter to Chantelou, we can also gain some idea of how we are supposed to (re-)read the painting from the work itself. Here I quote from the admirable discussion of this painting by Louis Marin: This group [the Caritas Romana] is observed by a standing figure who is the first figure on the left of the whole painting and the first in the group of seven figures on the left … He sees, he contemplates, he is amazed at the miracle of human charity which is only astonishing because it transcends the natural order of maternal love (the mother for the son) in the piety and love of the daughter for her mother. He sees, he contemplates, he is amazed at this act of human charity displayed on the scene of the painting, in the left foreground, as the spectator will see, contemplate, be amazed at the miracle of divine charity which is the fall of manna displayed and represented in the painting as a whole. In other words, this figure in the left foreground represents amazement … but also Chantelou, the spectator of the painting as a whole, as it shows him the passionate modality of the gaze that he will or should bring to bear on the painting.25

The figure on the left in the painting, then, adopts the point of view of the observer in front of the painting: the relation of depth between observer and canvas is lateralized.26 What he reads is the expression of human emotions through ‘the alphabet of gesture’.27 And yet another temporal dimension is added to the painting: the temporal place of the spectator. We can extract three rules of reading from this brief discussion of Poussin’s La Manne. First, reading involves a process of temporalization, that is, reading entails re-reading. Second, there is a starting point, in this case on the left, just as literature written in the Western alphabet presupposes that the reader will commence on the lefthand side of the page. Poussin is opposed to the notion that the eye might be allowed to wander over the canvas at random; on the contrary, his precise instructions on the nature of the frame and on how the painting is to be hung are intended to ensure that the eye of the observer is not distracted or confused.28 Third, reading according to Poussin 25

Louis Marin, Sublime Poussin (Paris: Seuil, 1995), pp. 28–9. On the lateralization of depth in Poussin’s work see Louis Marin, Détruire la peinture (Paris: Galilée, 1977), p. 71. 27 Blunt, Poussin, p. 223. As Blunt points out (p. 155), La Manne was Poussin’s first attempt to apply Leonardo’s theory of the expression of the human emotions by gesture, on which see Rob Zwijnenberg’s essay in this collection. 28 The perils of what lies in store for those who disregard Poussin’s precise injunctions 26

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involves the rhetorical figure of synecdoche: once you have read the seven figures on the left of the painting, the rest is in the same vein. In likening the lineaments of the human body to the letters of the alphabet, Poussin tied his figurative use of the metaphor of ‘reading’ to the literal process of reading. His injunction to read ‘the story and the painting’, however, goes further than this by severing its literal tie to reading. Reading a painting is not the same as reading a text.

Intermezzo: reading for illiterates Poussin was not the first to apply the metaphor of ‘reading’ to the gestures of the human body. To take an example from close to Columbus’ time, early in the sixteenth century St John, Bishop of Rochester (1469–1535), made an elaborate comparison of Christ’s scourged and crucified body with the leaves of a book that could be read by the faithful, every mark made on it by scourge, thorn or nail a letter conveying meaning;29 hence the need to arrive at a precise number of the wounds inflicted on the crucified Christ – 5,466 according to some, 6,666 according to others30 – in order to match them in the various forms of imitatio Christi. The same conceit appears in Chapter 36 of the Specchio della Croce by Domenico Cavalca (1270–1342), who draws a parallel between Christ crucified and a book; the black and red letters, for example, correspond to Christ’s bruises and wounds.31 Already in the thirteenth century a certain Philip, Abbot of Clairvaux, made use of the metaphor in his life of Elisabeth of Spalbeek. Elisabeth herself has left us no writings, but Philip claims to have witnessed Elisabeth’s stigmata and her periodic re-enactment of the Passion story in her family home with his own eyes. His comment on this is as follows: ‘For now this illiterate can be gauged from Judith Bernstock’s recent Poussin and French Dynastic Ideology (Bern: Peter Lang, 2000). By deliberately adopting an eccentric angle from which to view the painting, she is led to detect the letters ‘IMM’ and ‘REP’ in the headdress of the young woman in the right foreground of the painting (p. 242). Her parsing of this cryptic message as a reference to the ‘immortal republic’ is as far-fetched as her general interpretation of La Manne as a celebration of the birth of the dauphin in 1638 – a puzzling thesis in the light of the date of 1637 that is generally accepted for the commencement of the painting – but no less far-fetched than any of the other speculations advanced on every one of the 502 pages of her book. 29 Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Mutilation and Meaning’, in The body in parts, D. Hillman and C. Mazzio (eds) (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 221–41, here p. 223. 30 See Jean-Pierre Albert, ‘Le corps défait. De quelques manières pieuses de se couper en morceaux’, Terrain, XVIII (1992), pp. 33–45, here p. 36. 31 Georges Didi-Huberman, Phasmes. Essais sur l’apparition (Paris: Minuit, 1998), pp. 149–51.

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man or woman can read, not in parchment or documents, but in the members and the body of this girl, as a vivid and unmistakable Veronica, a living image and an animated history of redemption, as if he or she were literate.’32 We find a similar use of language in Jacques de Vitry’s Life of Marie d’Oignies: ‘Thus the holy grace of the Spirit was reflected in her face from the fullness of her heart, so that many were spiritually refreshed by her appearance, moved to tears by her devotion, and, reading the unction of the Spirit in her face as if they were reading from a book, they knew what virtue came from her’ (emphasis added).33 The notions of literacy and illiteracy are fused in the medieval Irish Book of the Invasions of Ireland (Lebor Gabála Érenn) in the following passage on the transmission of lore from the oral tradition: ‘… it was written upon their knees and thighs and palms, so that it is corrected in the hands of sages and righteous men and men of learning and historians, and is upon the altar of saints and righteous men from that day to this; so that the authorities stitched all knowledge down to this.’ This obscure text has been interpreted to refer to the dictation of his story at various times to the various saints by Túán mac Cairill: ‘The account of the saints absorbing and incorporating the oral traditions which are passed down to them is conflated with the literal inscribing of the story on vellum, and the result is an image of the saint as book and the saintly skin as manuscript.’34 Two remarks on these citations. First, in all three cases, this form of ‘reading’ takes the place of conventional reading. In the first case, it is actually opposed to conventional reading: it is the illiterate who reads in this way. In the second case, reading the face of Marie takes the place of reading a book. And in the third, the saints’ bodies are only metaphorically folios. Second, in the first two examples a privileged position is given to the face. This is explicit in the case of Marie d’Oignies, but it is implied in the case of Elisabeth of Spalbeek as well through the allusion to Veronica for, according to legend, when St Veronica offered Christ her veil to wipe the sweat from his brow, the divine face became imprinted on the fabric or sudarium.35 Hence although the first citation refers to

32 Walter Simons, ‘Reading a saint’s body: rapture and bodily movement in the vitae of thirteenth-century beguines’, in Framing Medieval Bodies, S. Kay and M. Rubin (eds) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 10–23, here p. 11. 33 Ibid., p. 15. 34 Charles W. MacQuarrie, ‘Insular Celtic Tattooing: History, Myth and Metaphor’, in Written on the Body. The Tattoo in European and American History, Jane Caplan (ed.) (London: Reaktion, 2000), pp. 32–45, here p. 41. 35 See esp. Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant l’image (Paris: Minuit, 1990), pp. 224 ff.

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the ‘members and the body of this girl’, the allusion to Veronica evokes the face and the lessons to be learned from repeated contemplation of it. Through concepts like the liber mundi or Book of the World,36 one could delve even further back into the archaeology of the figurative use of ‘reading’, but that would take us even further away from the sixteenth century. Now the time has come to narrow the focus of our inquiry in time and to reconsider some cases of sixteenth-century ‘reading’ in the New World against the background of these (proto-)theories of reading.

Reading disfigurement Columbus presents the following picture of a Ciguayo Arawak whom he encountered near Las Flechas, towards the end of the first voyage, on 13 January 1493: ‘The admiral says that he was more ugly in appearance (acatadura) than any whom he had seen. He had his face all painted with various colours; he wore all his hair very long and drawn back and tied behind, and then gathered in meshes of parrots’ feathers, and he was as naked as the others.’37 This man was different from the natives Columbus had already met, and in Columbus’ eyes he was uglier than the others. What conclusion does he draw? ‘The admiral judged that he must be one of the Caribs who eat men.’ To confirm this deduction, Columbus redefined the neighbouring gulf that he had seen the day before as open sea; in that case, he had now reached an island, and since it was known that the anthropophagous Caribs lived on an island, his hypothesis was confirmed. By the time of the fourth voyage, Columbus has become more adept at drawing snap conclusions: ‘I came across other people who ate men: the ugliness of their features (gesto) shows it.’38 ‘Gesto’, like ‘acatadura’ above, refers to facial expression. But unlike the divine image that infused the faces of Elisabeth of Spalbeek and Marie d’Oignies, or the noble facial expression that conveyed the qualities of Alexander in Poussin’s example, the face is here the privileged seat of information about a figure endowed with subhuman qualities. The stress on the head as an index of humanity was a standard part of medieval thinking about the human form.39 True to his medieval

36 See Chapter XVI of Ernst Robert Curtius, Europäische Literatur des lateinischen Mittelalters (Bern, 1948). 37 Cristobal Colón, Textos y documentos completos, prólogo y notas de Consuelo Varela (Madrid: Alianza Universidad, 2nd edn, 1984), p. 141. 38 Colón, Textos, p. 326. 39 John B. Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge,

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forebears, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, author of one of the earliest histories of America, warns of the dangers of striking native Americans on the head – their skulls are so thick that a sword can be broken on them. He proceeds: ‘And as they have thick skulls, they likewise have a bestial and evil (mal inclinado) understanding.’40 The violence of this form of direct reading is undisguised. It is not just the face itself which is open to interpretation, but the hair too. In the Letter to Luis de Santangel, Columbus contradicts claims that the Plinian monstrous races are to be found in the Americas: ‘So far I have not come across monstrous men on these islands.’ However, he makes an exception for the island of the Caribs, ‘which is populated by a people who are held on all the islands to be very fierce, who eat human flesh. They have many canoes, with which they travel to all the islands of India, steal and take what they can. They are no uglier than the rest, except that they have the habit of wearing their hair long like women …’ (emphasis added).41 This passage contradicts Columbus’ statement earlier the same year that the Caribs were uglier than the rest; this discrepancy is absent from the letter to the Sovereigns of 4 March 1493 announcing the discovery, where the reference to their ugliness has been replaced by the statement that they go about naked like the others.42 But both the letter to Santangel and the letter to the Sovereigns agree on comparing the long hair of the Caribs to that of women. Behind this detail of men with women’s hair emerges the spectre of gender confusion, and this confusion is compounded by the introduction of the Amazon-like women of the island of Matinino who behave like men. Anthropophagous Carib males and warriorlike females exert a mutual attraction on one another, not only in Columbus’ text but in the situation he imagines to exist in the Caribbean, for the description of the Caribs in the Letter to Santangel is immediately followed by

MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 181 cites the fourteenth-century Peter of Abano on monstra: ‘You know that it is to be seen especially in the form of the head if an animal ought to be said to belong to our race.’ The earliest physical description of Columbus himself, the one provided by Angelo Trevisan in 1501, describes him as ‘CRISTOPHORO Columbo zenoveze, homo de alta et procera statura, rosso, de grande inzegno et faza longa’ – Angelo Trevisan, Lettere sul Nuovo Mondo. Testo critico, introduzione e note a cura di Angela Caracciolo Arico (Venice: Albrizzi Editore, 1993), p. 29. 40 See the proem to Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Historia General y Natural de las Indias, Part I, Book V. 41 Colón, Textos, p. 145. 42 Margarita Zamora, ‘Christopher Columbus’s “Letter to the Sovereigns”: Announcing the Discovery’, in New World Encounters, Stephen Greenblatt (ed.) (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 1–11, here p. 8.

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reference to the ‘women of Matinino’ with whom the Carib males have intercourse.43 It is also relevant in this connection that women, particularly old women, were believed to show a particularly keenly developed taste for human flesh.44 Columbus’ logic of deduction based on his observation of a Ciguayo Arawak is summed up by Hulme as follows: ‘The native was different from those already met, and ugly to boot, therefore he was a man-eating Carib.’45 Cannibalism might be supposed to render the features of its practitioners ugly, but the reverse position – that people who are ugly are therefore cannibals – is untenable. Columbus’ logic of deduction is a non sequitur, for there is nothing in the man’s appearance, especially in view of Columbus’ own confusion on whether the Caribs are ugly or not, to justify the conclusion that the Admiral draws. What he assumes – like Poussin – is a connection between inner nature and outer appearance. But what he cannot prevent – unlike Poussin – is that this process will run wild. Lacking the rigidity of the frame which forms the limit of reading according to Poussin – a frame which, as we saw, is both the physical frame of the painting and the conceptual framework within which it is produced and ‘read’ – Columbus’ ‘wild hermeneutic’ lacks direction. It might be objected that the contrast drawn here between Poussin and Columbus is due to the fact that one wrote texts and the other painted pictures (although Poussin wrote – and painted – texts as well). However, the same contrast could be established within the field of writers of texts alone. Only a few years after Poussin painted his La Manne, the antiquary Lorenzo Pignoria added an appendix to Vincenzo Cartari’s Le imagini colla sposizione degli dei degli antichi, with woodcut illustrations by Filippo Ferroverde, to draw the parallel between the world of the Americas and the world of ancient Egypt. For instance, in one woodcut he compared the Egyptian Horus with an idol from Florida, and in another he saw parallels between the Egyptian sacred baboon and a Taino idol or zemi from the Greater Antilles.46 It was this conceptual framework which prevented the comparisons from 43 See Peter Mason, ‘Continental Incontinence. Horror vacui and the colonial supplement’, in Alterity, Identity, Image. Selves and Others in Society and Scholarship, R. Corbey and J. Th. Leerssen (eds) (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991), pp. 151–90. 44 See Bernadette Bucher, La sauvage aux seins pendants (Paris: Hermann, 1977). On the theme in Jean de Léry, see Chapter XV of his Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Bresil autrement dite Amerique (Geneva, 1578). 45 Peter Hulme, ‘Columbus and the Cannibals: A Study of the Reports of Anthropophagy in the Journal of Christopher Columbus’, Ibero-Amerikanisches Archiv, Neue Folge, 4, 2 (1978), pp. 115–39, here p. 131. 46 See Peter Mason, The Lives of Images (London: Reaktion, 2001), Chapter Five.

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running wild. Almost a century later, the Jesuit Joseph-François Lafitau, author of a large-scale two-volume work entitled Moeurs des sauvages amériquains comparées aux moeurs des premiers temps (Paris, 1724), continued to systematically compare the practices of native Americans (Lafitau had spent five years in Canada among the Algonquin, Huron and Iroquois) with those of antiquity.47 This scheme was his frame: if he encountered a Brazilian maraka or a North American chichikoué, he compared them with ancient instruments like the Egyptian rattle of Anubis. Moreover, the same process took place at the visual level: in the engravings to his work, artefacts from the New World were compared and contrasted with artefacts from the Old World.48 Like Poussin’s frame, Lafitau’s frame compels the reader to follow a certain direction: from the New World to the Old. Columbus’ hermeneutic, by contrast, lacks direction because it lacks a frame.

From writing to engraving The spectre of men with long hair like women opens up the alarming possibility that effeminization might have gone even further in the New World. We can gauge some of the responses to this from the reactions of the conquistadores to the practice of the berdache. In a study of the institution of the berdache in the Americas,49 Trexler argued that it contains three distinct elements: the sodomization of one male by another, the dressing of the sodomized male as a woman, and the violent nature of this practice of subordination. The relation between the first two admits of two possible causalities: is the transvestite subjected to sodomization because of his female dress, or is he dressed as a female because he is sodomized? Both cases can be found in the historical record: Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, for example, offers an eyewitness account of the berdache as practised in Cueva (Panama) in 1526: after penetrating a boy, his master went on to dress him as a girl. On the other hand, a so-called Chichimeca, captured and executed in 1530, confessed to having 47 For a fuller discussion of Lafitau, see Peter Mason, Infelicities. Representations of the Exotic (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), Chapter Five. 48 Many of the latter were taken from Bernard de Montfaucon’s L’Antiquité expliquée et representée en figures in five volumes, published in Paris five years before Lafitau’s work. 49 Richard Trexler, Sex and Conquest. Gendered Violence, Political Order, and the European Conquest of the Americas (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995); cf. Peter Mason, ‘Sex and Conquest. A Redundant Copula?’, Anthropos 92 (1997), pp. 577–82; Trexler, ‘Rejoinder to Mason’, Anthropos 93 (1998), pp. 655–6; Mason, ‘Reply to Trexler’, Anthropos 94 (1999).

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dressed as a girl from childhood in order to attract active homosexual clients.50 The issue of the alleged prevalence of sodomy in the Americas formed a bone of contention between Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo and the defender of the native Americans, Bartolomé de las Casas. While they were agreed that cross-dressing was widespread, they diverged on the question of whether its prevalence should be taken to imply the prevalence of sodomy. No doubt it was easy for Europeans who conventionally associated cosmetics with women to assume that all Indians were sodomites,51 but accusations of sodomy must often have been based on no more than the presence of men in women’s dress performing certain non-sexual female activities. It is interesting to note that in the last quarter of the sixteenth century the debate was being conducted in the same terms in a completely different context, that of the conventions of the Elizabethan stage in England. In a heated controversy that was conducted primarily through a pamphlet war, the question of the wearing of female clothing by male actors was vigorously debated. Would male actors who wore female clothing gradually become effeminized by it, as if clothes had a quasimagical ability to convert the nature of the person who wore them? Or did the vice precede the clothing, with the theatre offering a pretext for male homosexuals to indulge in their vice?52 As in the case of Columbus, the reversibility of the argument is due to a lack of direction. Since it is unlikely that many of the Iberians actually witnessed acts of sodomy, most of their claims are no more than allegations based on deductions, as they deduced sexual practices from appearances. Some observers were cautious in drawing such inferences. Jean de Léry, for instance, notes the use of the word tyvire, ‘bugger’, as a term of abuse, from which ‘one can conjecture that this abominable sin is committed among them’, but he underlines the fact that this is mere surmise by adding the words ‘for I affirm nothing’.53 Not everyone was so cautious. Take the notorious case of the forty or so transvestites torn to pieces by mastiffs on the orders of Vasco Núñez de Balboa in Quaraco province, Panama, in 1513. According to our source, Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, the ‘evidence’ of their sodomy consisted of nothing more than their female dress and the reports of neighbours.

50

Trexler, Sex and Conquest, pp. 90–91. Ibid., p. 67. 52 See Laura Lavine, Men in Women’s Clothing. Anti-Theatricality and Effeminization, 1579–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 53 Jean de Léry, Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil, Edition établie par Frank Lestringant (Montpelier: Max Chaleil, 1992), p. 166. 51

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The issue had far-reaching political ramifications. Transvestism, however reprehensible it might be, was not a just title of conquest, but if the indigenous civil authorities were tolerating sodomy, this gave the Iberians the right to intervene. On the other hand, if it could be shown that ‘the Incas were Limpid of the Nefandous Sin and of Other Dirtinesses that are Found in other Princes of the World’, as Cieza de Léon attempted to show, this too could prove useful to Iberian attempts to legitimate their actions through an appeal to the Inca past. Moreover, the argument that women’s interests were damaged by sodomites – Cieza de León could not understand why men went in for sodomy when they had access to beautiful women – could also be used by the Europeans to profile themselves as defenders of women and castigators of the men who maltreated or neglected them. How observers ‘read’ native bodies could therefore have profound implications for how they acted towards or on those same bodies. One of the most sinister expressions of this attitude towards native American bodies can be found in the biographical portrait of Francisco Pizarro by the French cosmographer André Thevet. Cynically, he claims that the conquistadores would have been shrouded in obscurity had they not made a name for themselves by their feats during the conquest. This does not mean to say, he hastily adds, that the Europeans gained their skills from these Americans. On the contrary, he holds that: ‘these peoples served them merely as paper, bronze, or marble upon which to inscribe the immortal memory of their deeds’.54 As Lestringant drily comments, ‘a topical metaphor with particularly sinister consequences!’.55 This transition from reading to inscription and engraving has a close affinity with the practice of punitive tattooing, often on the face, which has classical Greek and Roman roots. In the ninth century, the saints Thedorus and Theophanes had twelve lines of iambic verse tattoed on their foreheads as a punishment for committing idolatry.56 Characteristically, this form of punishment is not absent from the pages of the Marquis de Sade’s La Nouvelle Justine either: each of the monks of the convent of Sainte-Marie-des-Bois carved on the shoulders or buttocks of his victim the punishment to which she was 54 André Thevet, Les vrais pourtraits et vies des hommes illustres (Paris, 1584), f. 374v. 55 Frank Lestringant, Le Huguenot et le Sauvage (Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres, 1990), p. 236 n. 5. 56 See C.P. Jones, ‘Stigma: Tattoing and Branding in Graeco-Roman Antiquity’, Journal of Roman Studies LXXII (1987), pp. 139–55, and Mark Gustafson, ‘The Tattoo in the Later Roman Empire and Beyond’, in Written on the Body, Caplan (ed.), esp. p. 20.

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sentenced,57 and it is but one step away from Kafka’s monstrous machine in In the Penal Colony. But there is no need to move away from the Americas to Central Europe to find other examples of this work of inhuman engraving. In a letter to the Council of the Indias, Vasco de Quiroga wrote: ‘They are branded on their face and their skin is engraved with the initials of the names of their successive owners; they are passed from hand to hand, and some have three or four names, in such a way that the faces of these men who were created in the likeness of God have been transformed into paper by our sins.’58

Heterology and tautology Reading according to Poussin, it may be recalled, involved a process of temporalization. Furthermore, it had a directionality, a starting point, and it was guided by the confines of the frame. If we compare this with how European travellers to the New World in the sixteenth century interpreted what they saw, we can note a reversal of these terms which would delight a structuralist. First, there is no temporalization involved. Columbus’ succinct ‘I came across other people who ate men: the ugliness of their features shows it’ combines perception and interpretation in a single moment. The act of reading is instantaneous. Second, there is no directionality, starting point or frame, in other words, no privileged point of access. An ugly facial expression, the wearing of a female item of clothing, the wearing of long hair, the use of the single word ‘bugger’ – each of these is enough to lead the observer to draw an immediate conclusion. In contrast to the multiform bodies that Poussin likened to the twenty-four letters of the alphabet, these bodies have simple forms. They are taken to be immediately legible and transparent. Given the lack of a privileged starting point, the observer can single out any item for comment in an arbitrary fashion. This is because, within the European imagination, many of the alleged characteristics of the native Americans were symptoms of the same thing: whether they engaged in non-conventional sexual practices, wore non-conventional dress, or ate non-conventional food, the message was the same on each occasion: they failed to draw the correct distinctions between edible and 57

D.A.F. de Sade, Oeuvres II (Paris: Editions de la Pléiade, Gallimard, 1995), p. 806. Cited in Tzvetan Todorov, La Conquête de l’Amérique, p. 143; cf. Peter Mason, ‘De la ponctuation. Réflexions sur quelques races pliniennes’, in Les monstres dans l’imaginaire des Indiens d’Amérique latine, textes réunis par Edmundo Magaña, Circé 16–19 (Paris: Lettres Modernes, 1988), pp. 161–72. 58

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inedible, between nudity and dress, between appropriate sexual partners and promiscuity. What they lacked was the ability to discriminate, and it was this inability that served as a marker of their lack of civilization.59 The rhetorical form taken by Poussin’s hermeneutic, as we have seen, is that of the pars pro toto, of the part for the whole. The rhetoric practised by Columbus and his contemporaries is of a different kind – tautology.60 The alleged primitiveness of the native Americans is ‘read off’ from – their observed primitiveness. Each symptom of that primitiveness conveys the same message, namely that they are primitive. So this hermeneutic of the other ends up as a tautology of the same. Moreover, this transparency is in fact an opacity,61 for the simple act of revelation fails to reveal anything that was not already ‘known’.62 The act of interpretation, then, presents itself as a tautological movement in which the meaning of what is observed is immediately laid bare in its transparency as the common condition of native American peoples. Yet precisely in the production of an imaginary ‘savage’, in its failure to genuinely engage the other (de Certeau’s project of heterologies), this tautological hermeneutic runs up against an opaque, unreadable body.63 In concentrating on the signs they produce as a reality in their own right (for the message they convey is the same each

59

See Peter Mason, ‘Sex and Conquest’. Tautology characterizes another aspect of the personality of Columbus, namely his casting of himself as the divine instrument in the eschatological plot of providential history in which the revelation of the ends of the earth coincides with the ends of time. See Djelal Kadir, Columbus and the Ends of the Earth: Europe’s Prophetic Rhetoric As Conquering Ideology (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1992). 61 On opaqueness as the result of translation in the work of Jean de Léry and André Thevet, see Peter Mason, ‘On Producing the (American) Exotic’, Anthropos 91, 1 (1996), pp. 139–51 and idem, ‘The Song of the Sloth’, in Re-verberations. Tactics of Resistance, Forms of Agency in Trans/cultural Practices, Jean Fisher (ed.) (Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Akademie Editions, 2000), pp. 20–31. 62 In a certain way, this form of production of knowledge that is at the same time a non-production recalls Michel de Certeau’s classic discussion of Jean de Léry’s Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Bresil autrement dite Amerique. In a chapter entitled ‘Ethno-graphie. L’oralité, ou l’espace de l’autre: Léry’, Certeau set out to demonstrate that the structure of Léry’s work is that of a return to a single source of production by reducing the other to the same: Michel de Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), p. 237. 63 For this ambivalent representation of the captive, compare Stephen Greenblatt’s discussion of the Eskimos taken captive and brought to England in the 1570s by Martin Frobisher (who was following a precedent set by Columbus) in Marvelous Possessions. The Wonder of the New World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 112. On visual representations of the same Eskimos, see Florike Egmond and Peter Mason, ‘“These are people who eat raw fish”: contours of the ethnographic imagination in the sixteenth century’, Viator XXXI (2000), pp. 311–60. 60

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time), Columbus and the European observers of native America invest their intellectual capacity in the sign at the expense of its referentiality. In this process, the sign itself becomes dense and opaque.64 And it becomes easy to follow Peter Hulme in concluding that, if Columbus’ ‘understanding’ was based on the answers he wanted to hear, on the expectations that he brought with him, then the inescapable conclusion is that ‘the supposed “communication” between European and native was in effect a European monologue’.65

64 On ‘le signe opacifié’, see Michel de Certeau, La Fable mystique XVIe – XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), pp. 200–8. 65 Hulme, ‘Columbus and the Cannibals’, p. 119.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Physicians’ and Inquisitors’ Stories? Circumcision and CryptoJudaism in Sixteenth– Eighteenth-Century Spain José Pardo Tomás And on those who have changed their way of life he said: You will find no rest among the gentiles and your life will hang in the balance … for, although they have mixed completely with the gentiles, they will find no rest or repose among them, since they will always insult and humiliate them.1

These words of Ytzhak ’Aqedat in the book Devarim Ki Tavo have been cited many times by investigators of Jewish history. The long and often tormented history of the Jews forcibly converted to Christianity seems to convey a special prophetic value on these words; and it is known that Judaism understands more about prophecies than practically any other religion. However, I have begun with this quotation to propose a slightly different reading. In my opinion, these words were anything but prophetic, at least from the point of view of their immediate historical context. In fact, they were written in Venice, one of the few cities in the West which offered a haven for Sephardim who had refused to convert to Christianity and had abandoned their territory of Sepharad, the Iberian peninsula; on the other hand, these words were written around 1573, after the experience of several generations of Sephardic men and women who, after converting to Christianity, had tried to become integrated into gentile society, and when many of them had suffered the consequences of this attempt, while others had attained their objective. Thus, on the one hand, we can consider that, without a doubt, Ytzhak wanted to warn his co-religionists that it would be of no use to ‘change their way of life’, that they would always continue to be stigmatized and maltreated by the gentiles, that integration was a chimera, and that the

1 Ytzhak ’Aqedat, Devarim Ki Tavo (Venice, 1573), p. 262a; cited by H. Graetz, Geschichte der Juden (Berling: Arani-Verlag, 1998), vol. 8, p. 317; also in Haim Beinart, Los conversos ante el tribunal de la Inquisición, Barcelona, Riopiedras, 1983, p. 13, n. 3.

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persecutions of the Inquisition seemed to be an excellent argument in its favour; but, on the other hand, that insistent warning, both by him and by other Jewish writers of his day, was perhaps because it was exactly during those years in the last third of the sixteenth century that integration into Christian society had taken place irreversibly in many cases, the inquisitorial persecutions – after decades of terrible repression – had been considerably decreasing for years, and that relative success was the real cause for concern on the part of Jewish thinkers who feared that it might have destructive effects on the clusters of crypto-Jews who managed to stay on within the frontier of the kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula, and even on the members of the Sephardic communities in exile. The fact is that it is not very easy to evaluate the results of the attempt at integration that many of the converts of the Iberian peninsula had been engaged in after the terrible pogroms of the late fourteenth century, throughout the fifteenth century, and, under even stronger compulsion, during the first half of the sixteenth century. It is equally difficult to evaluate the extent of clandestine Jewish practices during the three centuries of inquisitorial persecution. They are two sides of the same problem, which, moreover, is not easy to solve, first, because of the risk of distortion which inevitably results from a unilateral reading of the inquisitorial or Hebraic sources, and second, because the more or less confessional historiographical traditions underlying the ignorance – or neglect – of one of these two types of sources, on either side of the debate, have created a series of distorted visions that are still deeprooted today,2 in spite of the light thrown on the issue by several outstanding recent scholars.3 It is not my intention to launch new general interpretations of this problem here; it is reconsidered here because the context of the 2 Although the discussion has been going on for decades, it has not died down. For a brief and excellent account of the debate up to the 1970s see: Yosef Hayin Yerushalmi, From Spanish court to Italian ghetto Isaac Cardoso. A study in seventeenth-century Marranism and Jewish apologetics, 2nd edn (Washington: University of Washington Press, 1981), pp. 30–42. The actuality of the debate can be gauged from the various reactions to Benzion Nettanyahu’s polemical The Marranos of Spain: from the late 14th to the early 16th century, according to contemporary Hebrew sources (Ithaca, NY, London: Cornell University Press, 1999). 3 For recent contributions the reader is referred to three monographs that we regard as indispensable and which go beyond the debates mentioned on both sides: Jaime Contreras, Sotos contra Riquelmes. Regidores, inquisidores y criptojudíos (Madrid: Anaya-Muchnick, 1992); Pilar Huerga, En la raya de Portugal. Solidaridad y tensiones en la comunidad judeoconversa (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad Salamanca, 1994), and Yosef Kaplan, Judíos nuevos en Amsterdam. Estudio sobre la historia social e intelectual del judaísmo sefardí en el siglo XVII (Barcelona: Gedisa, 1996).

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integration or non-integration of the convert – a complex matter that is open to discussion – is the necessary framework for the aspect which will be considered in the following pages: the existence of cases of clandestine survival of the practice of circumcision among certain clusters of Jewish conversos in the Iberian peninsula from the last decades of the fifteenth century to the first of the eighteenth century. Of course, they formed a very small minority, and the survival of the practice, as we shall see, presents discontinuities within that period; no doubt, too, the phenomenon in question can be considered as something marginal within the complex social history of the conversos in the modern era; it may even be declared non-existent, the product of the pathological inquisitorial imagination. But none of these is a reason for us not to view the problems as interesting and worthy of consideration. Whether real or imaginary, circumcision was present in the collective representations that new converts to Christianity and old Christians formed of themselves and of others; whether real or imaginary, the secret sign on this peculiar ‘extremity’ of the masculine body continued to allow the maintenance of mechanisms of social control and the legitimization of policies of racial segregation; whether real or imaginary, the figure of the retaxado (the word is found in many contemporary sources) conditioned the relations of the new converts to the old Christians and their relations with one another. Another aspect that is interesting in this context is the fact that, at times, the decision on whether this phenomenon really existed or not lay in the hands of clearly circumscribed bodies of professionals: physicians and surgeons. As experts, they could intervene at different moments and under different circumstances. On the one hand, they had access to the manipulation of the body, and especially to those parts of the body that were normally hidden from the view of the majority of people. This power gave them a relatively wide capacity to intervene, and not exclusively to determine the nature of a visible manipulation, but also to perform it. On the other hand, they could find themselves in juridical situations in which, as experts, their diagnosis could save or condemn a person; and sometimes when they were in the position of victims, their knowledge could provide them with convincing arguments in their own defence. Finally, their scientific discourse could offer an ‘objective’ support to the racial prejudices of the majority of the community and legitimize that discrimination with arguments that had the appearance of being technical and thus ‘neutral’. Taking this all into account, therefore, I shall propose a type of approach to this question that is practically without parallel within conventional notions of the social history of medicine.

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The invisibility of the Sephardic Jew Present-day reflection on the physical stereotype created by anti-Semitic racism in the course of the last two centuries often forgets that it has not always been the same. If the archetype of the Sephardic Jew in writings from the end of the seventeenth century to the ethnological literature of the late nineteenth century, as Sander Gilman reminds us,4 is his black skin, or if the illustrated physiognomy of a Camper or a Lavater considered a determinate shape of the nose to be unmistakably Jewish, we must not commit the mistake of anachronistically projecting these representations onto other historical contexts.5 At the time of the decision to expel the Jews from Spain (1492) or to forcibly convert them in Portugal (1497), there was no archetypical physical representation of the Jew based on determinate facial characteristics, skin pigmentation or the shape of the nose. In Sepharad, a Jew was, before and above all else, a retaxado, that is, a circumcised man: that was the sign of difference. In all other respects his body was indistinguishable from that of a Christian. This difficulty of identifying a Jew, in a situation which offered Jews forced conversion to Christianity as the only means of being allowed to remain in their own country, turned the fact of circumcision, which had always been an essential element of difference accepted and imposed by themselves, into a diacritical sign which was now dangerous, had to be kept strictly secret, and which, one may suppose, led the vast majority of conversos, from a pure desire to survive in the face of Inquisitorial persecution, to abandon it starting with the post-1492 generation, at least in those territories ruled by the Catholic Monarchs: Castilia, Aragon and, a little afterwards, Navarra. The situation in Portugal, however, was appreciably different from the start, because what was decreed in 1497 was a compulsory and general conversion without the option of choosing exile for those who wanted to maintain their religion and were thus always less inclined to abandon their practices, including the practice of circumcision. On the other hand, as the Portuguese Inquisition did not get under way until the decade 1530–40, the situation of the Portuguese conversos was very different from that of their Spanish counterparts.

4 Sander Gilman, The Visibility of the Jew in the Diaspora: Body Imagery and Its Cultural Context (Syracuse: Syracuse University), pp. 5–7. 5 The Dutch anatomist Peter Camper (1722–89), author, among other works, of Dissertation physique sur les différences réelles que présentent les traits du visage chez les hommes (Utrecht: Wild & Altheer, 1791); and the German Johann Caspar Lavater (1741–1801), whose Physiognomische Fragmente (Leipzig, 1775), originally published in German, soon circulated all over Europe in French, English and Latin translations.

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Before this whole process, however, conversos and Jews had coexisted for practically a century since the mass conversions that followed in the wake of the pogroms of 1391. This was the cause of many conflicts and of an almost permanent hostility on the part of the old Christians towards the other two communities. It also triggered tensions and conflicts between conversos and Jews as well as among the conversos themselves, as some favoured open confrontations with their former coreligionists while others maintained close contacts with them. It is in the latter sector that we find evidence for the maintenance of the practice of circumcision. This provoked continual complaints from the old Christians and assimilated conversos, who were responsible for constructing an anti-Semitic image in which the crypto-Jewish practices were presented as being much more extensive than they really were, and where circumcision was specifically singled out from the first as the most incontrovertible sign of the ‘falseness’ of the converso. There are ample testimonies of the maintenance of a continuous climate of alarm in this respect. For example, in 1413 the city of Valencia sent a delegation to the king, consisting of En Joan Suau and Micer Berenguer Clavell, doctors in law, to convey alarming news about the activities and practices of the Valencian conversos. The fourth item in their list of five accusations was: ‘most serious is that they secretly circumcised their male babies’.6 Irrespective of the degree of truth contained in these complaints, they certainly created a very tense climate among the three communities and led to situations which were often terrifying and ended up by involving various social agents, including physicians and surgeons. They were called in by the various parties to confer legitimacy, as experts, on certain cases that, depending on how they were presented, could be connected with the religious practices of the individuals or, simply, with pathological processes or congenital malformations affecting that part of the masculine body. The following example took place a few years after the complaint by the gentlemen of Valencia. The wife of the converso Guillem Sancho, a craftsman from Barcelona, gave birth to a child on 22 September 1437. It was her fifth child, but the previous four had all died, not even living long enough to be baptized. To avoid a repetition of this, under the threat of being accused of not baptizing their children, this family of conversos who were known to be such by everyone insisted on having the baby baptized without delay. The midwife who had been present at 6 The letter from the Valencian representatives is dated 13 March 1413. It has been published in Agustí Rubio Vela, Epistolari de la València medieval. II. 1412–1478 (Barcelona-Valencia: Institut interuniversitari-Abadia de Montserrat, 1998), p. 331.

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the birth, who also came from a family of conversos, told the parish priest that the baby was a girl because she had not found any ‘sign of balls nor of a member’. The baby was christened Eulalia. But after returning home and undressing the child, the midwife found ‘a little piece of flesh on top like a fleece and on the head there was a little thing like a pine-kernel’. Faced with this uncertainty, the parents decided to call in the master in medicine Francesc de Gualbes (another converso), who declared that Eulalia was male. When the parish priest who had baptized her was consulted, he considered that it was necessary to repeat the ritual. However, a problem arose when the physician noted that the child’s member lacked a prepuce; this provoked the indignation of the priest, who refused to carry out the baptism. However, the precarious state of health of the baby got the better of the priest’s scruples, and he agreed to carry out the baptism in extremis, this time christening the child Nicolau. Nicolau, aka Eulalia, lived a further five days. Three days after the death of the baby, ‘somebody’ informed the Episcopal tribunal about the case (there was no Inquisition in Catalonia at this time), accusing the parents, midwife and physician, who were all conversos, of trying to hide the fact that they had circumcised Nicolau and involving the parish priest by pressurizing him to baptize the child. Guillem Sancho, the father, was imprisoned, and the priest and midwife were interrogated a few days later. On 3 January 1438, the judge ordered the exhumation of the body of Nicolau-Eulalia and its examination by two masters in medicine, Pere Pau and Gabrial García, who ‘examined its genitals. And saw the evidence that on the membrum naturale there was a sort of small prepuce, that is, in the skin of the head of this member. It was a natural defect and had not been done by hand like an infant incompletely circumcised.’ Guillem Sancho was released two days later.7 These births with ‘natural circumcisions’ or other atypical forms of the external masculine genitals occurred then, as now, in a very small percentage of cases. However, in a context like that, a single case was enough to bring about consequences which went far beyond those directly affected by that rare condition and which no doubt helped to strengthen the conviction, expressed for centuries in numerous Christian medical works, that many Jews were born already circumcised, as if it were a sort of acquired racial trait.8 However, on the other hand, to

7 The case was published, although accompanied by an interpretation that is not very satisfactory from our point of view, by Josep Hernando y Àngels Ibáñez, ‘El procés contra el convers Nicolau Sanxo, ciutadà de Barcelona, acusat d’haver circumcidat el seu fill (1437–1438)’, Acta historica et archeologica Medievalia, 13 (1992), pp. 75–100; here pp. 80–5. 8 As Sander Gilman reminds us (‘The indelibility of circumcision’, Koroth, 9 (1991),

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claim that it was a defect from birth was one way to try to remove the suspicion of the judges and inquisitors, especially if one could count on the complicity, or the readiness not to implicate themselves, of certain experts – physicians, surgeons or midwives – who were prepared to certify that this was the case in their technically objective opinion. Logically enough, it is very difficult to find explicit examples of those strategies, above all those that follow a tacit acceptance of a principle in some ways like ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’,9 which does not alter the fact that some cases lead us to suspect its existence. Let us consider one of them.10 When the Inquisition was just commencing operations in Spain, Francisco Remírez, a converso who lived in Burbáguena, a town in the Kingdom of Aragon, was denounced to the tribunal as a retaxado. After being brought before the inquisitor, the defendant recounted a long story. Around 1424, soon after his birth, his parents went to a canon in Daroca to declare that they had two sons – Francisquico and Galacianico – and that they had both been born circumcised ‘by nature’. Midwives, neighbours and relatives were summoned to make statements, and they all concurred in declaring that the two brothers had been born that way. At this, they summoned a notary who took down all these statements in writing. Soon afterwards, however, the parents of the two brothers were accused of being crypto-Jews and were imprisoned in the Aljafería, the prison of Zaragoza, where the boys were examined by various doctors, both Christians and Jews (it should be borne in mind that these events took place half a century before the expulsion of the Jews), who unanimously agreed that the circumcision was natural. This fact, as Francisco stated many years later to the inquisitor, was recorded in various documents bearing the royal seal to prevent the children from suffering any inconvenience when they grew up. The problem was that Francisco swore that he had lost those documents in which the physicians certified that the absence of a

pp. 806–17, here pp. 810–14), in the seventeenth century this idea appears to have been universally assumed and, from then on, there is a long history of descriptions of Jews born already circumcised by nature. Cf. too Otto Horch and Horst Denkler (eds), Conditio Judaica: Judentum, Antisemitismus und deutschsprachige Literatur vom 18 Jahrhundert bis zum ersten Weltkrieg (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1988). 9 As is known, this principle was formulated with regard to the attitude of the US Army on the existence of homosexuals within its ranks, but it can certainly be applied to similar situations in the past; see, for example, Karma Lochrie, ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Murderous Plots and Medieval Secrets’, GLS. A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 1 (1995), pp. 405–17. 10 The archival documents on this case were published by Encarnación Marín, ‘Relación judeoconversa durante la segunda mitad del siglo XV en Aragón: nacimientos, hadas, circuncisiones’, Sefarad, 41 (1981), pp. 273–300; here pp. 298–300.

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prepuce on his member was by birth and was not the product of a ritual circumcision. As could be expected, the inquisitor ordered a reexamination, this time by a physician and a surgeon summoned by the Holy Office itself. Their opinion was completely opposed to what their colleagues had decided fifty years earlier: the suspicion, in their view, that Francisco had been circumcised was grounded. There is evidence of other cases of similar allegations and where physicians and surgeons are called in. Sometimes the verdict is favourable to the conversos under suspicion, sometimes it is not. A few months before the decree on the expulsion of the Jews, Luis de Heredia, from Calatayud, another town in the Kingdom of Aragon, declared before the Inquisition that neither he nor his father nor his brothers had been circumcised, but that his brother Francisco ‘had a defect in his member occasioned by a growth’. When the inquisitors ordered his examination, however, he was obliged to admit that he had been circumcised as a child and that the operation had been conducted by a Jewish physician. It is worth transcribing his account of how he found out about this at the age of eight or nine, when his mother told him the story: Mother, the boys call me notched. What has been done to my member? [His mother replied:] Son, your grandfather Luis de Heredia brought some Jews to his house called master Juçe Toriel, physician, master Salamon Avayut, surgeon, and Huda Moreno, shoemaker; and said master Juçe Toriel, in the presence of said Jews and of your grandfather, circumcised you and drew a little blood from your member, gave you the name of Jaquobiquo and gave you four reales, and you were four or five years old when they circumcised you.11

Be that as it may, everything seems to indicate that these cases, which are strictly contemporary with the first years of inquisitorial activity and slightly prior to the moment of the expulsion, soon disappeared completely from the Spanish scene, though not from the Portuguese one, as we shall see below, because of the singular nature of the process of converting the Jews there. The implantation of the Inquisition in Castilia and Aragon between 1478 and 1482 and the decree to expel those Jews who were not prepared to be converted that was promulgated ten years later modified the way of life of the conversos in a profound way. The repressive efficacy of the Holy Office during the most terrible decades of its activity, the loss of the groups of Jews with the strongest religious convictions through the expulsion, and the fear and desire to survive of those who decided to stay, appear to have led to the progressive 11

Ibid., pp. 293–4.

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disappearance of these practices of clandestine circumcision. Although many families of conversos maintained other practices that were less risky, to mark the masculine body with a sign that was so easily identifiable and which had attracted the accusation of ‘falseness’ by the old Christians in the previous century seemed too absurd. On the other hand, as the Hebraic sources show, some rabbis in the Sephardic diaspora were understanding towards the abandonment of this perilous rite. Some, like Rabbi Joseph Moses Trani in his Responsa, went so far as to criticize those who, through having clandestinely circumcised their sons in enemy territory, risked their lives and those of their families.12 The Jews of Sepharad had thus acquired the invisibility necessary for survival in their own country. In this respect, the biblical tradition itself offered food for thought concerning the decision on whether to abandon the practice of circumcision or not, both for the Jews who had decided to stay on in Spain after the decree of expulsion of 1492 and to embrace Christianity publicly, and for their Portuguese counterparts who were obliged to become converts in 1497 without the option of exile. It should be remembered that the people of Israel abandoned the practice of circumcision during the exodus from Egypt – they were considered impure as a result. Upon arrival in the promised land, they all underwent the rite of circumcision.13 No doubt the parallel between this situation and the submission of the Marranos to Christianity was used in all of the rabbinical – and non-rabbinical – discussion of the legitimacy or illegitimacy of non-circumcision in hostile territory.14 On the one hand, the vast majority of the anussim – those who continued to practice their Judaism in clandestinity – abandoned circumcision, at least in sixteenth-century Spain. The terrible repression unleashed in the first years of the Inquisition systematically attacked the practice of clandestine circumcision, which had been maintained at first

12 Cited by Yosef Kaplan, From Christianity to Judaism. The Story of Isaac Orobio de Castro (New York: Published for the Littman Library by Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 335–6. 13 As Émile Junes reminds us, ‘Étude sur la circoncision rituelle en Israël’, Revue d’Histoire de la Médecine Hébraïque, 6 (1953), 16: pp. 37–56; here p. 56, citing Joshua 5:2–9, at the beginning of the fortieth year after the exodus from Egypt, the children of Israel, led by Joshua, who had succeeded Moses, crossed the Jordan and entered the Promised Land. At their first camp in Gilgal, Joshua circumcised them all with stone knives at the Hill of the Foreskins to renew the pact with Yahweh, which had been broken during the years of wandering in the desert when they had failed to circumcise the newborn. 14 Yosef Kaplan, ‘Wayward New Christians and Stubborn New Jews: the Shaping of a Jewish Identity’, Jewish History, 8 (1994), pp. 27–41.

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and was still often practised at a later age on adult males or even on old men, as can be seen from the records of the trials in Ciudad Real in 1484 and after.15 Anti-Semitic Spanish tracts of the period, well represented by Alonso de Espina’s Fortalitium fidei, assigned a crucial place to denouncing the clandestine practice of circumcision and the obsessive denunciation of the incompatibility between circumcision and Christianity clearly highlighted the priority of eradicating the practice at any price.16 This is the era of the process of typification of the cryptoJewish practices by the Christian authorities aimed at their severe repression; the Hispano-Christian idea that circumcision is the baptism of the Jews no doubt stems from this; the obsession with this recognizable ‘body sign’ therefore emerges at the same time as the birth of the converso as such. The Christian theologians and canonists were not slow to find precedents for their project, falling back on a reinvented legal tradition. For instance, they had recourse to the medieval compilation of laws Fuero Juzgo which condemned to death a Christian who had circumcised his son.17 The retaxados, the ‘Jews with the sign’ (judíos de señal) – terms which appear in the charges and in the trials of conversos in Castilia at the end of the fifteenth century – must have realized that their days were numbered. However, ritual circumcision continued to form a firmly rooted part of general collective representations, both among the old Christians, who were continually encouraged to remember how to distinguish a crypto-Jew hiding in their midst, and among the new Christians, whether they were voluntary or forced converts, because for some of them the presence of the prepuce was a serious offence to the faith of their ancestors which they now had to keep buried (and gradually impoverished), and because for all of them any genital problem involving the loss of skin, flesh or any other visible damage was a danger. Physicians and surgeons knew the complaints or damage that could arise from the removal of the prepuce for medical reasons, as well as the thousand ways in which the simulation of this damage could be adopted. They therefore continued to be essential, and it was not necessary to wait until being hauled before the inquisitorial court before submitting to their examination. This special position gave them a determinate social power and, whether as accomplices of the inquisitors or as allies of their patients, they knew how to use the situation to their own advantage. 15 See Records of the trials of the Spanish Inquisition in Ciudad Real, ed. with intro. and notes by Haim Beinart, Jerusalem, Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1977. 16 Haim Beinart, Los conversos, p. 22. 17 Fuero Juzgo, XII, II, 17.

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This situation explains the appearance, at least as early as the first years of the sixteenth century, of a type of notarial document that makes us realize to what extent it was necessary to maintain an attitude of preventive defence towards a practice – clandestine circumcision – which actually seems to have been abandoned.18 Anyone affected by any lesion or infirmity which entailed surgical treatment of his male member did not hesitate to summon physicians, surgeons, neighbours and relatives around his bed to act as witnesses, before a notary, of the intervention he was about to undergo so that all would certify with their signature that the intervention was carried out for medical reasons and no others. This document was to be converted into a passport to freedom from suspicion, if it was not lost, as poor Francisco Remírez claimed had happened to his. Above all, however, that operation carried out in the home in the view of all, especially of the neighbourhood, was in itself a passport of fundamental orthodoxy. We thus find ourselves faced with a situation which may seem paradoxical. In theory, ritual circumcision among the Spanish crypto-Jews had disappeared, and the juridical role that physicians and surgeons had played in earlier generations should have lost its meaning. On the contrary, the maintenance of an ‘imaginary circumcision’ not only prevented them from losing their importance, but it also provided them with an even greater power to intervene, even independently of their possible juridical interventions.

Circumcision in the surgical treatises of the sixteenth century With their surgical interventions carried out in full view of the public, with their opinion endowed with notarial truth in the protocols or declarations before the legal authorities, physicians and surgeons could guarantee that a circumcision had been carried out for therapeutic reasons or that a determinate appearance of a male member had been caused by a congenital disorder or by a pathological process, and not by a ritual intervention. They were therefore able to provide a passport to the invisibility of the converso, just as they could lead to his

18 We know of various examples of this type of notarial document, published in two works which, however, fail to grasp their historical significance properly: Gustavo García Herrera, ‘La más antigua noticia escrita sobre un acto quirúrgico en la ciudad de Málaga’, in Actas del I Congreso de Historia de la Medicina Española (Madrid-Toledo: Sociedad Española de Historia de la Medicina, 1963), pp. 387–93; and José Gómez-Menor, ‘Dos casos de circuncisión terapeútica y otros datos sobre médicos toledanos de los siglos XVI y XVII’, Cuadernos de Historia de la Medicina Española, 14 (1975), pp. 191–207.

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condemnation. On the other hand, the technical expertise of the surgeons (at the time physicians were hardly ever accustomed to personally handling the body of an ill person) could even facilitate the simulation of a ‘normal’ masculine body if occasion provided. Since the time of Celsus, in the Roman era, surgical techniques were known for re-implanting the prepuce or for simulating it.19 Even the New Testament echoes this practice, as can be seen in some of the Pauline epistles to the converted communities of the Hellenic world in contact with clusters of Jews.20 A lot had changed since those early days of Christianity, but their descendants in the Iberian peninsula continued to have problems with prepuces, whether their own or other people’s, even after they had been freed from the presence of the Jews in the legal sense. Given the peculiar position of the surgeons in this matter, it is hardly surprising that the surgical literature of the day contains explanations of all types of problems affecting the prepuce, sometimes with a level of sophistication far above that of similar treatises written in other settings where the ‘problem’ of the converso did not arise, in spite of the fact that they all set out from the same tradition. This is not to say that we find explicit references to the question, which would have been unthinkable in printed surgical literature, subjected to the usual restrictions and which generally circulated in the vernacular and not in Latin, thereby making it accessible to a wider reading public. The general treatises on surgery, the most extensive type of surgical literature, started out from a group of late medieval texts, and although they copied their structure and content, they introduced certain novelties. On the question of circumcision, what had been determined as the essential content by the late medieval transmission was expounded clearly and succinctly by Guy de Chauliac, the fourteenth-century Occitanian surgeon who wrote the most successful surgical manual, translated into numerous languages and which retained its success for a long time after the introduction of printing: According to the law of the Jews, Muslims and others, circumcision is very beneficial provided it is done properly. The glans penis is held by the root and, once it has been aroused, the prepuce is stretched as much as possible with the nails, taking care not to cut the glans. Once the skin has been cut off, the bleeding is staunched 19 Aulus Cornelius Celsus, who flourished in the middle of the first century AD, wrote De Medicina Libri Octo; the whole of §25 of book VII is dedicated to the description of the two commonest kinds of simulation: the manual stretching of the skin covering the shaft until it covers the glans again; or the grafting of a piece of skin from the pubis. 20 For example, in 1 Corinthians 7:18: ‘Is any man called being circumcised? Let him not become uncircumcised. Is any called in uncircumcision? Let him not be circumcised.’

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with a red powder, or it is cauterized, and it heals like any other wound.21

But surgery developed considerably during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and even though the manuals and treatises remained strongly rooted in the Galenic tradition, their content was expanding. We can see how the brief chapter that Guy de Chauliac dedicated to the operation of removing the prepuce grew longer in several Spanish manuals, and the cure recommended in this case became involved in one of the key debates of Renaissance surgery: the use of cauterization to cicatrize certain wounds. The Spanish university surgeons Bartolomé Hidalgo de Agüero and Juan Fragoso, two of the most outstanding representatives of the new Spanish surgery of the sixteenth century, represented the two positions in this debate. Both treatises contained a chapter describing the operation of circumcision, for therapeutic reasons of course, but they both mention ritual circumcision in passing. The Sevillian Hidalgo de Agüero published his Avisos particulares de syrurgía contra la comun opinión in 1584. This work was a compilation of various maxims on the new surgical methods, including the twentieth which declared that there was no need to cauterize ‘any prepuce that is cut off’. Two years after the publication of this work, the Complutensian Juan Fragoso responded harshly in the second edition of his Chirurgia universal to Hidalgo’s recommendations. With regard to the twentieth, his response was: ‘to teach that there is no need to cauterize a prepuce that is cut off, even though it is mortified, is so contrary to reason that I cannot imagine on what it is based’. Hidalgo replied to this criticism in the 1604 edition of his treasury of true surgery (Thesoro de verdadera Cirugía): … we declare that the cure should be carried out without it [cauterization] because it is a horrible and ghastly ultimate remedy … and because the scab, if it is removed, usually takes a lot of flesh with it … It is thus possible to cure a diseased prepuce without cauterization. Although it was a precept of Galen, use and experience have now taught us a different doctrine.22

Though marginal to the specific dispute on the use of cauterization and the excellent defence of experience against the criterium of authority, 21 We cite from the earliest printed edition known to us: Guy de Chauliac, Inventari o collectori en la part cirurgical de medicina (Barcelona: Pere Miquel Librater, 1492), p. 248. 22 Edition consulted: Bartolomé Hidalgo de Agüero, Thesoro de la verdadera Cirugía y vía particular contra la común opinión, con la qual se hace un perfecto cirujano (Barcelona: Sebastián de Cormellas, 1624); the first edition is: Thesoro de la verdadera Cirugía (Sevilla: en casa de Francisco Pérez, 1604), which reproduced Fragoso’s criticisms and Hidalgo’s replies to them.

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which could have made Hidalgo de Agüero a leading figure in the socalled scientific revolution if he had concentrated on stars instead of prepuces, both surgeons mentioned ritual circumcision. Hidalgo confined his remarks to a succinct version of the text of Chauliac cited above: ‘that part [the male member] also has a skin covering its head, which is called the prepuce or foreskin. This is what the Hebrews cut off in accordance with their law. It serves to cover the gland or head and enhances the pleasure of the sexual act.’23 The claim that the prepuce ‘enhances the pleasure of the sexual act’ is apparently new. The Sevillian surgeon leaves it at that, but his opponent and colleague Juan Fragoso has more to say: The head of this member is called the prepuce or foreskin and it is the skin that the Hebrews remove when they circumcise. Its principal use was to enhance the pleasure of the women: for this reason Jewish, Turkish and Moorish women are more subjected to the Christian slaves than to the men of their own nation … The circumcision of this part, which involves cutting off all the prepuce, has two purposes: one is for the observance and compliance or ceremony of the law, as was done in the past and as the Moors still do; the other is as a remedy for any disease or mortification. I am not concerned with those who practise circumcision in conformity with the religion and customs of certain peoples, but with those whose prepuce grows black and putrefied.24

The simple mention of ‘sexual pleasure’ becomes much more in Fragoso’s text. Although he stated that it was not his intention to discuss ritual circumcision, in passing, as someone who disapproves of the practice, he had already echoed a commonplace of Christian antiSemitic propaganda, thereby conferring on it a ‘scientific’ legitimation from being reflected in a treatise of this type: the statement on the capacity of the Christians to please women sexually precisely by means of that piece of skin that ‘the others’ (Jews, Moors and Turks, in this case) did not have; and in passing, took for granted the marital infidelity of Jewish, Moorish and Turkish women, who found with Christian slaves the pleasure that their husbands were incapable of procuring for them. As far as we have been able to reconstruct it, Fragoso’s reference comes from Gabriele Falloppia, the famous professor of anatomy and surgery in the university of Padua, the brilliant successor to Vesalius.

23 Bartolomé Hidalgo de Agüero, Thesoro de la verdadera Cirugia (Barcelona: Sebastián de Cormellas, 1624): VII, 18, p. 426; in the antidotary that accompanied the work, Hidalgo provided a prescription of ‘water to relax the retracted and swollen prepuce’, ibid., p. 284. 24 Edition consulted: Juan Fragoso, Chirurgia universal (Alcalá: en casa de Juan Gracián, 1607); the citation is from I, 17, p. 18.

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Falloppia’s treatise De decoratione, published for the first time in 1560, includes a chapter on ‘the correction of a short prepuce’ and the consideration of the precept of circumcision as a divine command to the Jews to prevent them from being distracted by the pleasures of the flesh and to make them serve their God better.25 Few scholars have devoted any attention to this commonplace. One of those who has, Winfried Schleiner, is more concerned to consider to what extent Falloppia tries to respond to the divine precept of circumcision by two options: the reduction of sexual pleasure that circumcision is supposed to entail, or the reduction of the risk of contracting infections like the lues gallica, as the Paduan called it.26 Schleiner thus fails to comment on the other part of the Falloppian passage referring to the pleasure that women derive from the prepuce and the consequences that this entails for the relations of ‘infidel’ women with their husbands and with Christian slaves. It is precisely this aspect that attracts the attention of Fragoso who, curiously, does not pay any attention to the first part of Falloppia’s comments. Be that as it may, it should be emphasized that the surgical literature offered a prestigious support to these kinds of ideas which thereby acquired scientific legitimacy. Of course, this is not the only case in which medical discourse served to legitimize representations of the ‘other’ based on alleged physical inferiority that was taken to be evident and beyond discussion. It is worth recalling here that, without leaving the explanatory framework of Galen, for many centuries Christian physicians offered a scientifically impeccable explanation of the ‘fact’ (which they did not call into doubt) that many Jewish males menstruated.27 But we must return to our prepuces. 25 Specifically on this aspect see Thomas W. Laqueur, ‘Amor Veneris vel Dulcedo Appeletur’, in Fragments for a history of the human body, Michel Feher (ed.) (New York: Zone, 1989), vol. 3, pp. 91–131, here p. 115 n. 80, where he cites from the De decoratione although he attributes it to ‘someone writing in Fallopius’s name’; other scholars, such as Schleiner, follow later editions of Falloppia, but the original can be dated without question to 1560, which explains the reference to Fragoso. We have consulted: Gabrielle Falloppio, Opera genuina omnia (Venetiis: Apud Io. Antonium & Iacobum de Franciscis, 1606), which includes ‘De decoratione’ in vol. III and chap. IX; the passages in question appear on pp. 119 ff. 26 Winfried Schleiner, Medical Ethics in the Renaissance (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1995), p. 137 with nn. 73–4 , and pp. 340–41. 27 During the preparation of this chapter, a short work appeared by John L. Beusterien, ‘Jewish Male Menstruation in XVIIth century Spain’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 73 (1999), pp. 447–56; unfortunately, the author is badly informed on the interpretative framework of Galenist medicine, which gave rational coherence to such a belief, and on his own sources, which he handles essentially through George Mariscal, Contradictory Subjects: Quevedo, Cervantes and Seventeenth Century Spanish Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 42–5. The reader interested in this subject should read Beusterien’s article with extreme caution or consult the work of Mariscal

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No matter how brief or indirect it might be, the explanation of the mechanism of circumcision, the mention of the existence of ritual circumcision, including the classical forms of simulating the prepuce, maintained their presence in the text. And every reader could absorb it in his own way, since it is a well-known fact that not everyone reads the same text in the same way. What interests us here, at any rate, is to point out how circumcision had not disappeared from the surgical manuals nor from the collective imagination of inquisitors and old Christians; nor, of course, from that of the new Christians, who were patently reminded of their ‘marked’ origin by the outbursts of social tension that were periodically revived by the persecutions and the persistence of the statutes of purity of blood in a great many Iberian institutions.28

Clandestine circumcision and circumcision in the diaspora: the reality of the practice in the seventeenth century The problem, however, was not just one of survival in the imagination; it was not just a question of physicians’ and inquisitors’ stories. There was something more, since there is documentary evidence that the practice of ritual circumcision had not disappeared completely from the peninsular scene, no matter how much the first generations of the Spanish conversos had abandoned it after the expulsion from a simple desire to stay alive. There is a double explanation for the fact that new cases of circumcised males can be found in the territory of the Iberian peninsula from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the first decades of the eighteenth. On the one hand, one should bear in mind the different situation of the Portuguese conversos, which led to the existence in the Portuguese kingdom of clusters of crypto-Jews who were much less inclined to integration; moreover, during the period of dynastic union of all the peninsular kingdoms (1580–1640), there was a massive exodus of Portuguese conversos to Castilia, both for economic motives and to directly. The interesting study by Sander Gilman, The Case of Sigmund Freud: Race and Identity at the Turn of the Century (Baltimore, 1993), is still the best treatment of the subject to date, although he does not specifically tackle the context of the Iberian peninsula. 28 The so-called statutes of purity of blood became generalized in the course of the sixteenth century in various civil and religious institutions of the Spanish monarchy, including universities and religious congregations; they were used to exclude persons who were unable to produce a genealogy of pure Old Christian blood. The best study of the question is still Albert Sicroff, Les controverses des statuts de ‘pureté de sang’ en Espagne du XVe au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Marcel Didier, 1979).

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escape the Portuguese Inquisition which, paradoxically, was harsher than its Spanish counterpart in repressing clusters of crypto-Jews during that period. On the other hand, ever since the beginning of the seventeenth century, the creation of communities of Sephardic Jews in the south of France, in some Italian territories (mainly in Venice and Livorno, the main gateway to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany), in several German cities (principally Hamburg) and above all in Amsterdam implied a communication route with the clusters of crypto-Jews south of the Pyrenees and, for many of their members, an attractive temptation to start a new life as Jews, far from the clutches of their persecutors. These two factors led to cases of clandestine circumcision among Portuguese conversos in different parts of the peninsula, on the one hand, and cases of people who fled to the Jewish communities in northern Europe, on the other, where they were confronted with having to decide whether to circumcise themselves and their sons. To make matters even more complicated, some of these circumcised Jews in Burdeos, Hamburg or Amsterdam returned to Iberian territory and sometimes had the ill fortune to fall into the hands of the inquisitors. The latter found themselves once again faced with the evidence of the retaxado, his attempts to attribute his condition to medical problems or congenital malformations, and with the necessity of having recourse to physicians and surgeons to decide whether or not ritual circumcision had taken place. It is therefore understandable that, at least from 1635, if not before, the Suprema, the central council which controlled the Holy Office from Madrid, ordered all the tribunals of the Inquisition to have the physicians and surgeons who worked for them to conduct a systematic examination of all those accused of Judaism to establish whether or not they had been circumcised.29 It is these expert reports provided for the inquisitors by the physicians and surgeons that constitute the most direct evidence for the existence of what, even if only for a minority, was still a persistent phenomenon. Only three cases will be discussed here: one of a clandestine circumcision in the peninsula, another of a circumcision carried out on a male adult in exile, and one of the many cases in which it is impossible for us to decide whether it was a matter of ritual or medical circumcision. They have been chosen because they are very illustrative of similar other cases and because their protagonists, besides being relevant figures in the history of European Judaism or Spanish medicine and science from the generations in ascendancy between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were also physicians. This presents us with the figure of the physician on one side 29 This instruction was repeated in the same terms in 1662; we have found a manuscript copy of them both in Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, Ms. 854, p. 60.

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and the inquisitorial scene on the other: as expert witness and, in the dock, as victim.30 The first case is that of Isaac Orobio de Castro, an important philosopher and polemical Jewish thinker, who died in Amsterdam in 1687. He was born some seventy years earlier in Bragança, in the north of Portugal, had been christened with the name of Baltasar Alvares de Orobio, and had been forced to flee to Castilia when he was still very young with his whole family, which had seen how the Portuguese Inquisition was trying and condemning many of its members on charges of crypto-Judaism. Around 1640 we find him in Málaga. By now Baltasar is a young doctor who writes and publishes a text on the plague epidemic which had attacked this Andalusian city where he exercised his profession. But a few years later, someone denounced him to the Inquisition and in 1654 he was taken prisoner and taken to the inquisitorial prison of Seville, in the district of Triana on the banks of the Guadalquivir, whereupon the inquisitors did not hesitate to have him examined by the physicians and surgeon of the tribunal on 9 September 1654: An inspection was carried out by the physicians and surgeon of this Holy Office, who gave evidence on oath that at the tip of the prepuce on the lower right and on the outside there was a scar with clear loss of tissue, and on the lower part outside at the root of the frenulum of the same male member there was another scar with loss of tissue, and on the head of the glans on the right there was another longitudinal scar in the surface of the tissue of the member, so that, in their solid opinion concerning a person so suspicious, it is the Judaic rite of circumcision.31

In spite of this judicial evidence, Baltasar Alvares escaped capital punishment by claiming that his parents had subjected him to the rite soon after birth and by demonstrating his willingness to have been and to be a good Christian. However, he was sentenced to several penances and to long imprisonment, but soon afterwards he took advantage of the lack of vigilance of the inquisitors in Seville to flee the city. He managed to reach the south of France, and not long afterwards settled in Amsterdam under the name of Isaac Orobio de Castro.32 Other Portuguese conversos (no doubt most of them) did not dare to 30 For a more detailed treatment of this theme see José Pardo Tomás and Àlvar Martínez Vidal, ‘Victims and Experts: Medical Practitioners and the Spanish Inquisition’, in Coping with Sickness: Medicine, Law and Human Rights, John Woodward and Robert Jütte (eds) (Sheffield: EAHMH Publications, 2000), pp. 11–28. 31 Archivo Histórico Nacional (Madrid), Inquisición, leg. 2987, f. 2r. 32 The best personal and intellectual biography of Orobio de Castro is that by Yosef Kaplan, From Christianity to Judaism.

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circumcise their sons in clandestinity and so, when the majority chose the path of exile in order to profess their Jewish faith freely, they had to face up to adult circumcision. We have found many cases in Amsterdam, Hamburg, Toulouse or Livorno, but will confine ourselves here to a single one, once again chosen because of the importance of the subject in the history of European Judaism in the seventeenth century and because he was a physician. Isaac Cardoso was a Jewish physician established in Verona in the Serenissima Republica of Venice. He was born in Beira in Portugal (one of the regions with the largest number of clusters of conversos) and grew up in Castilia in the early years of the seventeenth century under the name of Fernando Cardoso. He achieved a certain reputation there as physician and as a poet at the court of Philip IV. When the Spanish political situation changed around 1640 and the omnipotent minister Olivares, the most important protector of the Portuguese families of conversos, fell from power, Cardoso decided to leave the country and to set out for the Veneto to live there as a Jew. He adopted the name of Isaac and wrote various works on medicine and natural philosophy. No doubt, however, he owes his importance within the world of Judaism to the fact that in 1671 he published Las excelencias de los Hebreos in Amsterdam in his native tongue. The fifth of these excellences contains one of the most enthusiastic panegyrics of circumcision. But, in the middle of Cardoso’s evocation of the spiritual pact between the Jews and Yahweh symbolized by circumcision, we find a description of the pain it involves, which, we may conjecture, is connected with the personal experience of circumcision carried out on an adult: … because it is not a light wound in the leg, or an easy cauterization in the arm, but a difficult and painful affair, and no one would decide to undergo it unless he were moved by great zeal and the knowledge that he was embracing the law of the Lord; and that is why it is carried out at the tender age of eight days, because the pain is less, which increases with age, when a man is seized by fear and anticipates things before they occur.33

The third case to be mentioned here has another physician as its protagonist. Born in Murcia from a family of Portuguese conversos, he did not choose to go into exile in order to profess the faith of his ancestors, but, after undergoing an inquisitorial trial at two different periods in his life, he opted for assimilation within the Christian society that he saw emerging:

33 Isaac Cardoso, Excelencias de los hebreos (Venice, 1679), p. 349. Cited by Yosef Hayin Yerushalmi, From Spanish court to Italian ghetto, p. 202.

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His name is Diego López Zapata, he is a physician, and the best student in Madrid, and the other physicians dislike him because of his arrogance. He is a Portuguese Jew and I would like you to hear him talking about the law of Moses, because he speaks well and is an intelligent and practical man. He browbeats us into going to the physicians for us to declare that he is potent and able to marry, in spite of his not having a male member, because it has been cut. He bases his argument on this text of Galen: homo sine membro generare potest. And he added that said Diego is small in stature, quite sturdily built, dark-skinned, with a light coloured face, black eyes, a big nose and mouth, wavy brown short hair, slightly hunchbacked, aged about thirty.34

In the course of various interrogation sessions in September and October 1691, Francisco Gabriel Valenzuela, a twenty-year-old held captive in the prison of the Inquisition of Logroño, was hurling this and other accusations against the doctor Diego Mateo Zapata (1664–1745), who was detained in Madrid on 6 December 1691 on the charge of being a crypto-Jew. Valenzuela stated that he had been a student ‘of grammar and art’ and had helped his uncle Tomás as a confectioner. His parents, he believed, had had some problems with the Inquisition in Naples and Rome ‘for superstitious or Jewish matters’, but ‘they got off without a sentence’. He had been in Livorno, Genoa, Marseille and other parts of France and had had dealings ‘with Moorish and Jewish heretics’, but ‘only in connection with his business’. Valenzuela declared that he had known Zapata in Madrid, about eighteen months earlier (that is, around March 1690), in the house of another physician of Portuguese origin, Doctor Arias Silveira, from whom he had heard about the state of Zapata’s genitals and his attempts to obtain a certificate from his medical colleagues testifying to his ability to procreate. Soon after being detained in Madrid, Zapata was transferred to the prison of Cuenca, a small town with its own tribunal of the Holy Office. As soon as he had entered the prison on 21 January 1692, Zapata was examined by Joseph de Torralva, a physician, and by Gerónimo Andrés, a surgeon, both connected with the Holy Office, who issued the following statement: ‘The prisoner has been circumcised, but it may be for medical reasons, as he has many scars and has lost a lot of the flesh of the member, more than the ritual requires.’35 A year later Zapata left prison leaving the case suspended because they could not find enough evidence to continue pressing charges. For almost thirty years, the life of Diego Mateo Zapata passed in an apparently normal way, and the activity of the physician in the circles of 34 35

Archivo Diocesano, Cuenca [hereafter ADC], Inquisición, exp. 6955 ff. 3v–4r. Ibid., f. 29r.

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the court in Madrid earned him a very high reputation due to the role that he played in various scientific debates connected with the introduction of the supposed theoretical foundations of modern medicine at the time. In various publications Zapata defended the use of quinine, the demonstration of the circulation of the blood, with all the physiological consequences it entailed, the anti-Galenic theoretical justification of the use of chemical medicaments such as medicines containing antimony, and the corpuscular theories of Cartesians and Gassendians against the furious attacks that the most traditionalist Aristotelians kept publishing, both in Spain and elsewhere in Europe. What is more, Zapata was the main protagonist in the foundation of what can be considered as the first modern scientific institution in Spain at the time, the Royal Society of Medicine and Other Sciences in Seville, of which he was a founder member in 1699 and became president a few years later. Although his converso background, the inquisitorial trials of his parents and relatives as well as his own trial barred his entry to the privileged position of the royal physicians, his reputation among the progressive groups, his intellectual energy, and his unquestionable skill as a practising physician acquired him a considerable reputation, which enabled him to benefit from a dense network of patients from the court hierarchs and aristocrats and to reach the position of house physician of the Duke of Medinaceli, one of the most prominent members of the Castilian nobility of his day.36 His reputation and contacts, however, did not stop an inquisitorial commissary from appearing on his doorstep in Madrid at dawn on 1 March 1721 with a prison order against Zapata and another for the confiscation of all of his property. New accusations had been levelled against him which agreed in labelling him as a conspicuous crypto-Jew, a member of a Jewish community in Madrid, which was supposed to be well organized, and to have been active in it for more than a decade.

36 The basic references on the figure of Zapata and the so-called novator movement are still the classic study by Vicente Peset, ‘El doctor Zapata (1664–1745) y la renovación de la medicina en España’, Archivo Iberoamericano de Historia de la Medicina, 12 (1960), pp. 35–93; and the equally classic chapter by José María López Piñero in his Ciencia y técnica en la sociedad española de los siglos XVI y XVII (Barcelona: Labor, 1979), pp. 403–33. More recently, we have tried to contribute some new documentary evidence and interpretations in a number of articles co-authored with Àlvar Martínez Vidal: ‘In tenebris adhuc versantes. La respuesta de los novatores españoles a la invectiva de Pierre Régis’, Dynamis, 15 (1995), pp. 301–20; ‘El Tribunal del Protomedicato y los médicos reales (1665–1724): entre la gracia real y la carrera profesional’, Dynamis, 16 (1996), pp. 59–89; ‘Los orígenes del teatro anatómico de Madrid (1689–1728)’, Asclepio, 49 (1997), pp. 5–38.

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This time the evidence was apparently stronger and better founded. Zapata’s trial dragged on for more than three years, during which he remained incommunicado in prison and was subjected to interrogations which, following the sophisticated judicial technique of the Holy Office, attempted not only to get him to denounce himself, but also to obtain evidence to accuse other alleged accomplices and co-religionists. When the results of all these interrogations proved to be meagre, Zapata was tortured. On the rack he confessed many things under torture. Although he admitted having been initiated into the faith of Moses by his mother, Clara Mercado, who had been tried and condemned by the Inquisition of Murcia and had been imprisoned for several years in the prisons of the Inquisition while her son Diego was still a child, he never admitted having been circumcised for religious reasons. At the end of each of the torture sessions, the physician and surgeon of the tribunal examined the prisoner to inspect the seriousness of his wounds on the rack and to decide whether or not the torture should continue. Once the inquisitor had put a stop to the torture, when Zapata was asked to ratify his confession he retracted it, claiming that his admission of guilt had been dictated solely from fear of torture. Finally, in January 1725, the inquisitors pronounced sentence and sentenced him to abjure his errors for being ‘highly suspect’ of having followed the law of Moses, to be imprisoned perpetually with penances, to be exiled far from the court for ten years, to wear a penitent’s gown, and to receive two hundred lashes at an auto-da-fé. The application of this corporal punishment required a fresh expert examination by the physician and the surgeon who were at the service of the tribunal at the time. The physician, Agustín Aragonés, and the surgeon, friar Lorenzo Navarro, declared: ‘he completely lacks the testicles and scrotum and most of the male member because of an illness that he suffered in childhood, but … there is no impediment to any physical work, even heavy work’.37 A lot can be said about the different facets of the life of this person, above all since we have at our disposal a large number of unpublished documents from the complete transcription of his two inquisitorial trials. Our objective here, though, is to take the continuous references to the state of Zapata’s genitals as a case in which the consequences of a probable clandestine practice of circumcision, carried out in very precarious conditions, could occasionally involve additional problems such as castration. In fact, as the case of Zapata shows, the existence of castration was more than a fantasy in the minds and bodies of some men in the Iberian peninsula, both those who underwent clandestine

37

ADC, exp. 7065, f. 320r.

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circumcision resulting in complications, whether due to the lack of skill of a bungling surgeon or to a mistake on the part of a skilled one, and those who postponed the moment of intervention until they found themselves in exile, as we have seen in the case of Cardoso. Moreover, the events described above all enable us to see clearly how, time and again in the course of the development of an inquisitorial trial, the expert advice of the physician and surgeon become an essential part of that very trial. Time and again the body of the victim is scrutinized by these court officers who deliver their verdict to the inquisitorial judge. The suspicion of circumcision is present from the start of the trial; the deliberate ambiguity of the experts allows the maintenance of the ‘burden of proof’ on the defendant and it only disappears (at least in the judicial rhetoric of the judgement) when sentence has been passed and the defendant has been condemned. It is necessary to stress that it is only then that it is unambiguously stated that the victim’s genitals are in the state they are ‘because of an illness that he suffered in childhood’. In fact, we find ourselves confronting another aspect, although one that has not received much attention, of an interesting problem of interpretation with behind it a long (and probably interminable) hermeneutic debate on the value of the inquisitorial sources as evidence for the crypto-Judaic practices of the Portuguese and Spanish Marranos. What should be made clear is that, in the final instance, it makes little difference whether or not Zapata’s injuries really were the consequence of complications resulting from a clandestine circumcision. What is important is that, in this case and in others, this is what many people believed, and the judgement of a physician and a surgeon of the Inquisition was deliberately equivocal as long as the trial continued; only after sentence had been passed condemning him as a crypto-Jew did it become possible to admit explicitly the possibility that the lesions might have had some other cause. And, in spite of the theoretically iron secrecy of the Inquisition, this ended up becoming public knowledge, which enabled the fact to be put to a variety of uses, even though it is unlikely that it would have won approval. Let us consider an example of what happened to the same Zapata. The literature generated by the scientific and medical debates of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in Spain and in the neighbouring countries (though not always at the same tempo) occasionally reveals a rhetoric that is very remote from the current standards of scientific language which, though we often forget it, are relatively recent. The licentiate Luis Espinardo, a physician, published a text entitled La nueva medicina triunfante at the beginning of 1691, only a few months before Zapata’s first detention. It begins by telling the

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reader how a work by Zapata published the year before in Madrid under the title of Verdadera apología en defensa de la medicina racional had come into his hands, and goes on: Knowing that, since he [Zapata] was castrated, was supposed to have come to court to devote himself to music rather than to medicine, I purchased the book … And seeing the shameless way he speaks, the author (I said to myself) resembles the race and it could be said to his face (if the barefaced have one) what Seneca said: qualis vir, talis oratio (everyone always speaks as he is) … This capon would have been better employed in directing his satires against the person who bungled his circumcision.38

Contrary to what may appear at first sight, neither the tone nor the content stand out for their singularity. We are too used to seeing the scientific controversies of the seventeenth century treated as a pure history of ideas embodied in equally ideal texts. Then, as today, scientific controversy was plunged into a determinate context and directed by a conjuncture of interests more complex than mere ‘scientific reason’; the language, rhetorical and stylistic tricks were a part of that conjuncture. In the case that concerns us here, the aggressiveness of Zapata’s opponent, which included insults and accusations like the ones we have reproduced here, was not an isolated case. On the contrary, other writers repeated them in subsequent years, while Zapata (a relentless polemicist, in spite of everything, who demonstrated a tenacity worthier of Sisyphus than of a court physician) kept going into print to disseminate his opinions and theories.39

The circumcision of the new Jews: history and memory from outside the Sepharad As we have seen in the case of Isaac Cardoso, it is not by chance that the most enthusiastic defenders of circumcision and the most heterodox of its critics (including Benito Espinosa, better known as Baruch Spinoza) were ‘new Jews’ who had arrived in the communities in northern Europe from Sepharad, where they, their parents or grandparents, had lived as Christians and among Christians, had received a Christian education, and had been obliged to practice the Christian religion. Present-day historians of these north European Sephardic communities, among

38 Luis Espinardo, La nueva medicina triunfante y venida del segundo Mesías en la real y verdadera Circulación de la Sangre (Valencia, s. l. 1691); pp. 1–2. 39 On this person see J. Pardo Tomás, Historia de Diego Zapata (1664–1745): médico, polemista y marrano (in press).

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whom Yosef Kaplan is no doubt the most prominent,40 attribute much importance to the originality – and to the tensions and conflicts that it involved – of the problem posed to Judaism by the incorporation of these new Jews and their way of understanding the religion and lifestyle of its people. As far as circumcision is concerned, there is no doubt that the converso world-view ended up by attributing a sacramental value to circumcision similar to that of baptism among the Christians, a value that it had never had within Judaism. This special syncretism of the religion of the conversos had serious consequences for the spiritual and religious life of the European Jews. Circumcision and the burden of symbolic or real meanings that the memory of the centuries of ‘captivity’ alongside the Christians in the Iberian peninsula had shaped came to form a central part of the problems of self-identity of the Jews, among whom religious identity could not always be superimposed on top of other identities prompted by social solidarity, national awareness or other factors. As Yosef Kaplan states, it is necessary to underline ‘the centrality of the ritual of circumcision in the western Sephardic diaspora and its great importance in determining the boundaries of Jewish identity among its members’.41 This idea of ‘centrality’ seems to be right on the mark, because it can be claimed that, even though it led to appreciably different phenomena, the rite of circumcision was always at the heart of the question of crypto-Judaism in the Iberian peninsula. On the other hand, we find spiritual leaders of the Nation (as the Jews of Iberian origin were very often called in the documents of the period), such as D’Aguilar, rabbi of the community of Bayonne in the middle of the seventeenth century, defending a sort of minimalistic way of Jewish life (as Kaplan calls it), including the justification or at least toleration of non-circumcision on the part of the conversos who, as adults, were arriving on the other side of the Pyrenees. But we can also find Sephardic leaders who were absolutely intransigent and were not slow to formulate arguments in defence of circumcision with a sacramental tone that is closer to Christianity, as was the case of the denunciations made by Rabbi Jacob Sasportas in London in 1664 and aimed at those Jews from Sepharad who refused or hesitated to be circumcised. These removals from the community sometimes went

40 See, for example, Yosef Kaplan, ‘The Portuguese Community of Amsterdam in the 17th Century. Between Tradition and Change’, in Society and Community, A. Haim (ed.), Jerusalem, 1991, pp. 141–71; and ‘The Portuguese Community in 17th Century Amsterdam and the Ashkenazi World’, in Dutch Jewish History, J. Michman (ed.) (Jerusalem, 1989), vol. II, pp. 23–45. 41 Yosef Kaplan, ‘Wayward New Christians and Stubborn New Jews: the Shaping of a Jewish Identity’, p. 31.

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beyond words. Barely six years after the intervention of Sasportas, the Jew Diego de Mezquita arrived in London, and obtained permission to undergo the ritual for himself and his sons; a few years later, after the death of Diego, it was discovered that he had never been circumcised, and the leaders of the London community refused to allow his burial beside his co-religionists.42 In Spain and Portugal they were examined by the inquisitorial physicians to see whether they were retaxados, and within the new communities they were examined again to see if they had sealed the pact with Yahweh. In one way or another, the fantasy of the absence or presence of that tiny little piece of skin on their genitals never left them. This requires us to raise the question of the circumcision of the Sephardim in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries within a context which is much wider than the peninsular geography and the inquisitorial sources, although it remains essential to take them both into consideration as well. In this sense, the treatment of the question of the ‘marks’ of Jewish identity in different historical contexts is revealing. For example, in the case of the Dutch Jews in the eighteenth century, where it is a question both of their identification by Christians and of distinguishing within the Jewish community itself between the poor Ashkenazi majority and the wealthy Sephardic minority, Jewish identity was sought in physical stereotypes or modes of dress rather than in the issue of circumcision.43 On the other hand, if we turn to an a priori more different historical context, that of the German Jews in the twentieth century, we see how the question of circumcision occupies pride of place again.44 In both cases, the fundamental difference with regard to the problem of the survival of crypto-Judaism in the Iberian peninsula from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century lies in the fact of being converso itself, the burden of clandestinity of the bodily mark, the risk of maintaining it in practice, and the strategies to hide it in a society which is engaged not in a persecution aimed at rapid extermination, but in a

42

Ibid., pp. 33–4. Florike Egmond and Peter Mason, The Mammoth and the Mouse. Microhistory and Morphology (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), pp. 83–99. 44 Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Mutilation and Meaning’, in The Body in Parts. Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (eds) (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 221–41. 43

Acknowledgements The research on which this chapter is based was carried out as part of the research project DGES PB96-0761-C03-02 and funded by the Spanish government. In addition, I would like to thank Manuel Martí and Ferran Argilés for inviting me to

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policy of oppression, silent persecution and systematic discrimination, in which the important role played by the Christian surgeons and physicians offer a wide range of possibilities.

discuss a first version at the Gandia Universitat d’Estiu in the summer of 2000. I am also grateful for the generosity of the three readers who made various comments and suggestions at various stages of the gestation of this text: Florike Egmond, James Amelang and Peter Mason; the latter is also responsible for the English translation. Of course, any errors that remain are my own, but any virtues that my article may have are due in large measure to these five persons.

CHAPTER NINE

The Expression of Pain in the Later Middle Ages: Deliverance, Acceptance and Infamy Esther Cohen Introduction The study of historical attitudes towards pain is a very new field, related to the focus upon the human body as an important part of human life in the past.1 Most of the work done has been informed by modern perceptions of pain that saw it as an opponent, to be vanquished. Until little over a century ago, the existence of pain was accepted as a given. It could, if necessary, be eased by various means, but nobody saw any reason to try and eradicate it in any and all pain situations. It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that pain, like microbes, came to be constructed as a disease that ought to be eradicated and perceived as evil by definition. Before, what one could do when faced with pain – if one was properly inculcated in the expected modes of behaviour – was to react according to the required norms governing the person and situation. Perhaps the greatest revolution in Western attitudes towards pain is the transition from attempts at controlling behaviour to attempts at controlling sensation. The idea that pain ought to be suppressed lies at the basis of modern anaesthesia and analgesia. Analgesic techniques go back for millennia, but early attempts at pain alleviation were intrinsically different from 1 For antiquity, see Peregrine Horden, ‘Pain in Hippocratic Medicine’, in Religion, Health, and Suffering, John R. Hinnells and Roy Porter (eds) (London: Kegan Paul, 1999), pp. 295–315; for the early modern period, see Jean-Pierre Peter, ‘Connaissance et oblitération de la douleur dans l’histoire de la médecine’, in De la Violence (Paris: Editions Odile Jacob, 1996), pp. 367–92. Very little has been written about medieval ideas of pain outside the purely medical realm. See Fernando Salmón, ‘Academic Discourse and Pain in Medical Scholasticism (Thirteenth-Fourteenth Centuries)’, in Medicine and Medical Ethics in Medieval and Early Modern Spain: An Intercultural Approach, Samuel S. Kottek and Luis García-Ballester (eds) (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1996), pp. 136–53. In a more general vein, see Esther Cohen, ‘The Animated Pain of the Body’, American Historical Review, 105 (2000), pp. 36–68.

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modern ones. They were based on the premise that pain ought to be assuaged only when it became harmful, not because people disliked it. There was no reason to treat pain as a separate problem otherwise. In contrast, modern analgesia maintains that pain should be mitigated for the patient’s comfort, and not only for his or her cure. In other words, modern Western society places an independent value upon the freedom from pain. Within this context, it is not surprising that the history of pain, as recently written, is largely the history of eradication, not of culturally inculcated responses. Perhaps the most telling work in this sense is Roselyne Ray’s History of Pain.2 The bulk of Ray’s book is devoted to modern anaesthesia and the surrounding debates. The chapter concerning the Middle Ages is five pages long (pp. 55–60), and subtitled ‘A World to Investigate’. The author’s concluding question is indeed indicative of her conflation of the history of pain with the history of its avoidance: ‘We do not know … what people actually did in the Middle Ages when they were suffering.’ In the context of her work, the question must be interpreted as ‘what people actually did [in order to alleviate the pain] in the Middle Ages when they were suffering.’ My aim is different. In the first place, we do know a great deal about what means were adopted to ease pain in the Middle Ages. Practically all medical texts, especially the popular ones, suggested pain-killing procedures ranging from drugs to phlebotomy. Given the fact that medieval medical and popular practitioners went to considerable lengths in order to alleviate pain, its avoidance must have been important to their patients. Though the efficacy of these means is hard to verify, the one thing we can do is indeed inquire quite literally what people did when they were suffering in the Middle Ages. Did they resort to painkillers? Did they cry out? Did they restrain themselves? Did they write about it, complain about it, glory in it, seek it? It is impossible to generalize about ‘people in the Middle Ages’ of all orders, social strata, and genders, over a period lasting one thousand years. Undoubtedly, different norms applied to different groups and different situations. Most obviously, behavioural standards for men and for women diverged. What might be permissible to a man in the public arena would be considered immodest in a woman. Extravagant expressions of pain on the part of women might have been discounted as a cultural construct reflecting no genuine reality, a ‘female wile’. Just as church fathers disapproved of the excessive artificial grief expressed by professional female mourners in unrestrained gesticulations, stressing 2 Roselyne Ray, History of Pain, trans. L.E. Wallace and J.A. and S.W. Cadden (Paris: La Découverte, 1993).

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that such behaviour was typical only of lower-class women,3 other arbiters of women’s behaviour might have criticized overt expressions of pain as unsuitable. Conversely, given the prevalent belief in feminine weakness, certain displays of pain expression might have been tolerated in women rather than men. This difference of norms was based upon perceptions of the physiological and spiritual differences between the sexes. According to Galen’s humoural theory, women were cold and humid, men hot and dry. According to the book of Genesis, woman was created by derivation from man, had led him into sin and has received the pains of childbirth as punishment. According to Romance poetry, women suffered from a greater sensitivity to pain than men. For the most part, the distinction was perceived as hierarchical, with women being inferior (physically as well as spiritually) to men. Their greater weakness was sometimes seen as a source of added vulnerability to certain diseases and additional pain. On other occasions, the assumption was that, though suffering physically no more than men, women’s moral weakness was apt to lead them into overt expressions of pain where a man would better control his actions. To complicate matters further, it is not enough to speak of pain. Just as no sufferer and no viewer of suffering is without context, thus no pain is without context. Be it illness, martyrdom, or childbirth, every pain has its cultural as well as its medical etiology, which will dictate the prescribed approach. For example, the pangs of illness may legitimately be soothed and cured, but labour pains are the wages of sin, and must therefore not be assuaged. The context will dictate not only expectations, but also actual behaviour. As anthropologists of pain have noted, the same people will express or suppress their pain very much according to the social circumstances, voicing their anguish much more loudly in the hospital or the dentist’s chair than outside those locations. Within the historical context, martyrs in the arena were able to tolerate their pain with equanimity not because they were immune, but because their faith dictated such a display. Within the wide typological range of medieval pain situations, I have distinguished three main types. First, there were the involuntary pains of 3 See, for example, Johannes Chrysostomos (1857–68), In Ioannem Homiliae, No 62, in Patrologiae cursus completus, series Graeca, J.-P. Migne (ed.), 166 vols (Paris: Montrouge, 1857–68), cols 341–8: cols 346–7: ‘There is this sickness among women, that they show off in mourning and weeping, baring their arms, disheveling their hair, scratching their cheeks; some do it out of pain, others to show off, and others bare their arms in a spirit of indecency … What are you doing, O woman? In the middle of the market-place, tresses unbound and clothes torn, you emit great cries, you dance around … Indeed, better-class women do not dishevel their hair or bare their arms.’

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physical illness. Within these situations feeling pain, expressing it and wishing to be rid of it were both acceptable and legitimate for men and women alike. Secondly, there were those situations in which pain was acceptable, even honorable. Those were the situations in which people voluntarily sought pain rather than relief: martyrdom and war are the most common situations. Feeling pain was a badge of honour, a test successfully taken, and the sufferers did not seek alleviation. In situations involving honour, masculinity was an important attribute. Women who withstood such tests were often classified as viragines. A sub-category within this type are ascetic practices of self-inflicted pain. Those who engaged in them not only accepted and withstood pain, but actively sought it. Here, too, the attitude towards women ascetics was ambiguous, a mixture of admiration for their ‘virile’ capacity and indignation that they should undertake such feats despite the oftenexpressed disapproval of male authorities. Finally, there were times when pain was involuntary and dishonourable. In this category come all the corporal punishments inflicted upon criminals of various types. The pain in these cases was a badge of infamy, not of honour. We lack the information, though, to determine women’s reactions under those circumstances. Women were very rarely punished in public, and their behaviour did not merit recording. The only certainty is that their physical punishments, other than executions, were mostly similar to those of men. Obviously, the distinction is entirely in the eye of the beholder. While women would undoubtedly class labour pains as involuntary pain, preachers might cheerfully label them punishment, pointing out that the Virgin Mary, clean of all sin, suffered no labour pains when bearing Christ.4 Similarly, the pain attendant upon punitive mutilation was a badge of shame in normative society, but there are some indications that in the world of criminals it was viewed as a test of courage and fortitude and the ability to resist judicial torture without confessing was often seen as proof of hardiness.5 If one is to believe jurists discussing the problem of extracting evidence from hardened criminals, the latter must 4 Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, Adelgund Führkötter and Angela Carlevaris (eds), 2 vols, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 43 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1978), Vol. 2, pp. 336–7; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Thomas Gilby (ed.), 10 vols (London: Blackfriars, 1964–68); Pt. 3, q. 35, a. 6; Miri Rubin, ‘The Person in the Form: Medieval Challenges to Bodily “Order”’, in Framing Medieval Bodies, Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (eds) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), p. 114. 5 Antoine Lecoy de la Marche, Anecdotes historiques, légendes et apologues tirés du recueil inédit d’Etienne de Bourbon, dominicain du XIIIe siècle (Paris: Renouard, 1877), pp. 444–5; J.-Th. Welter, La Tabula exemplorum secundum ordinem alphabeti (Toulouse: Occitania, 1927; repr. Geneva: Slatkine, 1973), pp. 36, 112, 117.

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have approached their torture very much in the spirit of early Christian martyrs going to the arena – as an athletic competition where fortitude would win the day.6 Consequently, the description of behavioural norms is coloured by the narrator’s point of view. It is therefore necessary to distinguish between those who described behaviour under pain – hagiographers, poets, or chroniclers – and those who wrote manuals for the manipulation of pain, such as physicians and jurists. The former centred upon descriptions of pain and reactions, while the latter were interested in causes and effects. The bias existed in both types, but in a different form. Medical or juridical writings tacitly assumed a manipulator’s bias, which was therefore tangential to the writer’s main concerns. By contrast, subjectivity could well form the central theme of a narrative text. But in any case, upon those rare occasions in which we find the sufferer’s own words, they are highly likely to differ from the standardized account of the observer.

The involuntary pain of illness The evidence concerning pain of illness comes mainly from two types of sources available in significant amounts from the eleventh century onwards. Medical writings discuss, albeit laconically, general pain phenomena. Collections of thaumaturgic miracles, an extremely popular and profuse genre during the later Middle Ages, deal with each individual case of illness apart. In addition, literary sources occasionally describe various pain situations, including illnesses. What characterizes this type of suffering is its organic but involuntary character. Sufferers did not identify with their pain in any way. Though it came from within the body, it formed no part of the self, and was perceived as an alien force that attacks and tortures. It is described in the texts as an enemy one must vanquish or tolerate by distancing it from the ego.7 If the enemy proved too strong for the sufferers, they sought external help in the form of physicians, surgeons, or saints. 6 H. Duplès-Agier (ed.), Registre criminel du Châtelet de Paris du 6 septembre 1389 au 18 mai 1392, 2 vols (Paris: Techener), Vol. 2, p. 155; Piero Fiorelli, La tortura giudiziaria nel diritto comune, 2 vols (Milano: Giuffré, 1953–54); Vol. 1, p. 216. See also Jodocus Damhouder (1562), Praxis rerum criminalium (Antwerpen: J. Beller, 1562), bk. 38, ch. 19: ‘Atque inter huiuscemodi subinde reperies (expertus et ex propria ipsorum confessione loquor) qui sese mutuis suppliciis in nemoribus excarnificant, et ad omne tormentorum genus forti animo perferendum docent, exercent, et obdurant.’ 7 Jean-Claude Schmitt, ‘Religion et guérison dans l’Occident médiéval’, in Historiens

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Medical literature did not deal with behavioural norms but it did pay some attention to varying levels of suffering arising from physiological sex differences.8 This variation could arise either from different levels of sensitivity to pain, or from additional exposure to sex-related illnesses. In attributing a greater share of suffering to women for obstetric and gynaecological reasons, medical writings did not unanimously assume that women suffered more than men because of their greater sensitivity. In theory, the contrary might be true: pain was usually perceived as attracting a plethora of humours and heat. Galen had already noted that pain attracts humours to the painful spot, a statement repeated by Avicenna and cited by several late medieval surgeons (John of Mirfield, Guy de Chauliac, William of Saliceto among others).9 Jean de SaintAmand, citing Galen in his Concordanciae, summed up this attitude: ‘Matter is attracted to the member in which pain exists.’ ‘Pain attracts to the spot in which sickness occurs more matter than it drains.’ ‘All pain stimulates and attracts matter.’10 At the same time, the convergence of humours in the painful spot exacerbates the pain, and is liable to have dangerous side-effects: ‘Acute humours concentrating in a certain spot or swelling an apostheme cause pain.’11 Either way, surgeons strongly recommended the evacuation of humours as a sedative measure. It was commonly advised in medical texts to resort to phlebotomy as a painkiller. Again Jean de Saint-Amand: In the greatest pain no medicine is more perfect than total evacuation of all matter. He himself (i.e., Avicenna) said that concerning the most acute aposthemes and the highest fever, and note that he says ‘in greatest pain’: this is done, because it is feared that extreme pain might weaken the virtue, so that in pain that is et sociologues d’aujourd’hui (Paris: CNRS, 1986), p. 135; David Bakan, Disease, Pain, and Sacrifice (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1968), pp. 73, 76. 8 Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 13–165. 9 ‘The pain is itself the cause of attracting the worst of the humours’, John of Mirfield, Surgery [part IX of his Breviarium Bartholomaei], ed. and trans. J.B. Colton (New York: Hafner, 1969), p. 217; William of Saliceto, Chirurgia, trans. P. Pifteau (Toulouse: St. Cyprien, 1898), ch. 23, pp. 325–31; Guy de Chauliac, Inventarium sive Chirurgia Magna, Michael R. McVaugh (ed.), 2 vols (Leiden: Brill, 1997), Vol. 1, p. 64; for a review of the literature, see Pedro Gil-Sotres, ‘Derivation and Revulsion: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Phlebotomy’, in Practical Medicine from Salerno to the Black Death, Luis García-Ballester et al. (eds) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 110–55. 10 ‘Materiae attrahuntur ad membra in quibus accidit dolor.’ ‘Dolor attrahit ad locum infirmum incisum materiam plus quam evacuat.’ ‘Omnis dolor stimulat et attrahit materiam.’ Johannes de Sancto Amando, Concordanciae, ed. J.L. Pagel (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1894), pp. 86–8. 11 ‘Acuti humores qui currunt ad locum aliquem aut apostema distendens faciunt dolorem’, ibid.

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not extreme one must not perform a phlebotomy, nor extract matter until the pain is sedated (this according to Avicenna).12

Petrus Hispanus in his Liber de flebotomia advises the procedure for a variety of aches and pains, not restricting it to ‘maximus dolor’.13 Women are, according to Galen’s traditional humoural theory, by nature cold and humid. The lack of heat would thus only help desensitize pain, while the processes of menstruation discharge superfluous humours from the body.14 They therefore might have been seen as having their own built-in pain-killing mechanism. Following the tenets of medieval physiology, women’s constitution might have been viewed as more resistant to pain than the male body. Interestingly enough, medical texts – including those dealing with gynaecology – do not draw this inference. As noted above, women were decidedly not viewed as more insensitive to pain than men. The question why physicians and surgeons did not draw such conclusions from their own theories and observations is in itself thoughtprovoking. The likeliest explanation is that medical perceptions and theories are never divorced from societal views; all other realms of knowledge and expression viewed women as both weak and sensitive. To attribute – in the face of hagiography, literature, poetry and theology – immunity and insensibility to women would have run counter to all the mental frameworks of medieval physicians. No more than Sigmund Freud centuries later were they capable of divorcing female physiology from female societal roles. Consequently, medieval physicians suppressed the inferences of the humoural theory in favour of the overall cultural view.15 Thus, rather than dealing with the issue of sensitivity, gynaecological writings concentrated upon female pain phenomena, insisting that

12 ‘In maximo dolore nulla medicina perfectior quam evacuatio usque ad defectionem, i.e. ad totius materiei evacuationem. Idem dicit [that is Avicenna] in acutissimo apostemate et de febre peracuta et nota quod dicit in maximo dolore: hoc enim tunc fit, quia timetur ne dolor maximus prosterna virtutem, quia in dolore non maximo non debet fieri flebotomia nec etiam diverti materia, quousque dolor sedetur (secundum Avicennam)’, ibid. 13 Petrus Hispanus (1451), Libro della flebotomia (Venice, 1451; London, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine), ms. 617. 14 Nevertheless, women too underwent phlebotomy from time to time. For medical views of women’s constitution and complexion, see Danielle Jacquart, ‘La morphologie du corps féminin selon les médecins de la fin du moyen âge’, Micrologus 1 (1993), pp. 81–98; Claude Thomasset, ‘Le corps féminin ou le regard empêché’, Micrologus 1 (1993), pp. 99–114; Monica H. Green (2000), ‘From “Diseases of Women” to “Secrets of Women”: The Transformation of Gynecological Literature in the Later Middle Ages’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30 (2000), pp. 5–39. 15 This attitude was far from monolithic or universal. Lectures in gynaecology dwelt

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women were more exposed to pain than men. Medical literature distinguished a number of afflictions affecting women only. Such is the case of uterine suffocation, a condition caused by excessive dryness or menstrual retention. Its symptoms are the wandering of the womb upwards, so that it presses upon the diaphragm, causing symptoms remarkably similar to epilepsy. The illness affected mostly virgins and widows, noted the physicians, since the lack of sexual activity caused dryness. Though eventually causing total insensibility, fits of uterine suffocation were often described as dolor matricis, first causing acute abdominal pain. Women were thus seen as more subject to painful sensations by virtue of their sex.16 The most notable situation within the category of involuntary pain pertaining only to women is childbirth. In this case, medical writings concurred completely with lay and religious literary evidence. Though the pains of labour must not only be patiently born as Eve’s penalty, they were also allowed full vent. No woman, regardless of her status, was usually described as bravely holding back her cries during labour. To the contrary, early modern evidence shows that it was considered unnatural, even blameworthy, for a woman not to scream during labour.17 ‘No pain, barring death, is comparable to the suffering of a woman in labour, nor is there any solace [comparable] when she is delivered of a beautiful child’, claims Nicole Bozon in his exempla.18 Nobody ever questioned the reality of labour pains. Medicine, both learned and popular, suggested some means of alleviation for the pains of labour, such as baths, fumigations, coral (the pain-killing properties of which Galen had already extolled), oils, herbs and even snakeskin.19 Most of them,

far more on the dangers of the female anatomy than on its fragility and sensitivity. See Helen R. Lemay, ‘Some Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century Lectures on Female Sexuality’, International Journal of Women’s Studies 1 (1978), pp. 391–400. 16 ‘Ad dolorem matricium per abstinentia viri contingent. Saepe viduis virginibusque … fit dolor et malitia … scilicet et … matricis suffocatione contigunt pneumata’ Cleopatrae ad Deodatam liber de morbis mulierum, in Opuscula Medicinae (14th c.) (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale), nouvelles acquisitions latines, ms. 603, fol. 54ro; Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference, passim; Monica H. Green, ‘Female Sexuality in the Medieval West’, Trends in History 4 (1990), pp. 127–58; eadem (1994), ‘Documenting Medieval Women’s Medical Practice’, in García-Ballester et al., Practical Medicine from Salerno to the Black Death, pp. 322–52. 17 Ulinka Rublack, ‘Pregnancy, Childbirth and the Female Body in Early Modern Germany,’ Past and Present 150 (1996), pp. 84–110. 18 Nicole Bozon, Les contes moralisés de Nicole Bozon, frère mineur, publiés pour la première foix d’après les manuscrits de Londres et de Cheltenham, P. Meyer and L. Toulmin-Smith (eds) (Paris: Didot, 1889; London: Johnson, 1994). 19 Sylvie Laurent, Naître au moyen âge. De la conception à la naissance: La grossesse et l’accouchement (XIIe–Xve siècle) (Paris: Le Léopard d’Or, 1989), pp. 186–90.

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though, were geared to make the delivery quick and safe, but not necessarily less painful. By contrast, physicians sometimes recommended means of treating post-partum pains. An anonymous thirteenth-century gynaecological text, attributed partly to Trotula does so, and so does Jehan Sauvage.20 The physical reality of sex differences was transmuted into generalities in scientific writings. ‘Woman’ was an ideal type, divorced from the reality of status and situation. Literature took partially the same stance, applying stereotypes to imagined situations. Women were perceived as exposed to more pain than men, and as voicing that pain – at least in childbirth – permissibly and uninhibitedly. This indulgence, however, did not extend to illnesses unrelated to sex. Individual case histories originating from physicians’ pens are exceedingly rare.21 For descriptions of illnesses one must turn from the human to the superhuman healer – the thaumaturgic saint. Collections of miracula publicizing the powers of different saints were an extremely popular genre throughout the Middle Ages. Local scribes at shrines had been recording miracles long before formalized canonizations. Often, the miracles were recorded on the spot, thus providing us with first-hand eyewitness evidence.22 Thaumaturgic miracles provide an insight into

20 De secretis mulierum, de Chirurgia et de modo medendi libri septem, in Salvatore de Renzi (ed.) Collectio Salernitana, 5 vols (Napoli: Filiatre-Sebezio, 1852–59), Vol. 4, pp. 16, 20; Jehan Sauvage (second half of the 14th century), La nouvelle physique attraite de plusieurs autheurs par Maistre Jehan Sauvage de Picquigny. Secrets de medecine pour traiter maladies du corps humain (Paris: Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal), ms. 3174, fol. 49vo; Claude de Tovar (1973, 1974), ‘Contamination, interférences et tentatives de systematisation dans la tradition manuscrite des recéptaires medicaux français: le recéptaire de Jean Sauvage’, Revue d’Histoire des textes 3 (1973), pp. 115–91; 4 (1974), pp. 239–88. 21 The literature of medical consilia, which is supposed to deal with case histories, is very often generalized and impersonal; the cases (whose reality is doubtful) are often merely an excuse to write an opinion concerning the treatment of specific diseases. 22 This section is based upon the following miracle collections: Auguste Bouillet (ed.), Liber miraculorum Sancte Fidis (Paris: Picard, 1897; René Poupardin (ed.), ‘De translationibus et miraculis Sancti Filiberti’, in Monuments de l'histoire des abbayes de Saint-Philibert (Noirmoutier, Grandlieu, Tournus) (Paris: Picard, 1905); Hariulf, Textus gestorum ecclesiae Centulensis (Chronique de St.-Riquier), Ferdinand Lot (ed.) (Paris: Picard, 1894); Clovis Brunel (ed.), Miracula Sancti Privati (Paris: Picard, 1912); Anon., ‘Sanctae Catharinae virginis et martyris translatio et miracula Rotomagensia saec. XI’, Analecta Bollandiana 22 (1903), pp. 423–58; William of Canterbury, Miracula Sancti Thomae Cantuariensis, in Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, 7 vols, James C. Robertson (ed.) (London: Rolls Series, 1875–85, repr. 1965), Vol. 1; Benedict of Peterborough, Miracula Sancti Thomae Cantuariensis in Robertson (Rolls Series, 1875–85), repr. 1965, 2; Miracula Sancti Gibriani (1863–1925), in Acta sanctorum quotquot toto orbe coluntur, 62 vols (Brussels: Société des Bollandists

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many questions which the history of professional medicine cannot answer. How did people behave in situations of extreme pain? How were they expected to behave, and under what circumstances? Were the norms governing private and public behaviour very different from the modern ones? Did gender also influence one’s behaviour and were women allowed more latitude in voicing anguish? There is ample evidence in miracula literature that all people in unsolicited pain situations often found their pain unbearable, expressing it quite vociferously and uninhibitedly. In situations of illness, requesting help from either physician or saint, people did not hesitate to give voice to physical anguish. Without any stigma attached to their behaviour, men groaned and cried when seeking a cure. Nor are there any social distinctions, for at a shrine ill knights could complain as loudly as peasants. Though trained to bear without murmur battle injuries, they could quite volubly complain of their pains while seeking a cure from a saint. The key element in these situations was power as opposed to powerlessness. The saint had power, the ill did not, and their feebleness placed them all on an equal footing vis-à-vis the powerful. In a classic situation of appealing for the aid of the potens – a situation one might well encounter also in other social contexts – one assumed the prescribed stance of a humble petitioner. All power was relative, and the ill, regardless of gender or status, were seekers after the power of grace. Under these circumstances, one must consider the source of the texts and the authorial bias involved. How did registrars at shrines regard the ‘patients’? What was the most important factor for the shrine to contrast and record – illness and cure, or pain and relief? For clearly, the choice of what was recorded did not belong to the sufferers. Scribes would usually choose whatever most glorified their patron saint and expressed saintly power to contemporary audiences. This factor is clearest in early collections, dating from the late tenth and early eleventh centuries. While thaumaturgic miracles appear, they do not occupy nearly as much space as they do in later collections. Most miracles are punitive, showing the saint’s power over noblemen either too stingy or too grasping, or over simple thieves from the shrine. The proportion of thaumaturgic miracles in these collections ranges from one-half to none.23 1863–1975), May 7, pp. 609–40; Acta Sanctae Francescae Romanae (1863–1925), in Acta sanctorum, March, Vol. 2, pp. 89–101; Miracula Sanctae Colettae (1863–1925), in Acta sanctorum, March, Vol. 1, pp. 580–96; Anon. (1951), ‘Liber miraculorum sancti Ludovici OFM’, Analecta Franciscana (Firenze: Quaracchi, 1951) Vol. 7, pp. 275–331. 23 Pierre-André Sigal, ‘Un aspect du culte des saints: le châtiment divin aux XIe et XIIe siècles d’après la littérature hagiographique du Midi de la France’, in La religion populaire en Languedoc, Cahiers de Fanjeaux (Toulouse: Privat, 1976), Vol. 11, pp. 39–60.

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Health and thaumaturgic powers achieved paramount importance in the twelfth century. From then on, sanctity was defined in popular eyes as the power to perform miracles of healing. Or at least, so the scribes would have us believe, for the proportion of visions, punished enemies and recovered objects shrinks to insignificance. The main business of twelfth-century saints was health.24 From the thirteenth century onward, the function of alleviation was added to healing. Late medieval collections speak far more often of the patient’s suffering and its surcease, though making no distinction between men and women. Some collections describe people suffering from ‘intense pain’ or ‘such a headache that she could neither see, nor open her eyes, nor govern herself’.25 Though the evidence comes mostly from the registrar’s pen, on very rare occasions we have the voice of the suffering male miraculé who himself recounted his medical history. As might be expected, the element of pain looms much larger on these occasions. Centuries earlier, when Gregory of Tours began his miracle collections with personal experiences and reminiscences, he was most voluble in describing the sufferings caused by his dysentery and headache, and their miraculous cure at the hands of St Martin.26 But after the sixth century the convergence of writer and miraculé became almost extinct, so that firstperson records of pain and illness remain a rarity. Such narratives, or their approximation, begin appearing once more in the eleventh century. Bernard of Angers, who recorded the miracles of St Foy of Conques, was normally extremely matter-of-fact concerning the sufferings of his saint’s miraculés. However, he sounded remarkably different when his brother was involved: ‘he suffered such severe and horrible torture of his body … that he sustained a tremendous visible contortion of his joints with

24 Pierre-André Sigal, ‘Maladie, pèlerinage et guérison au XIIe siècle: Les miracles de saint Gibrien à Reims’, Annales E.S.C., 24 (1969), pp. 1522–39; Sarah Chennaf and Odile Redon, ‘Les miracles de saint Louis’, in Les miracles, miroirs es corps, Jacques Gélis and Odile Redon (eds) (Saint-Denis: Presses de l’Université de Paris VIII-Vincennes, 1983), pp. 53–86; Ronald C. Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England (London: Dent, 1977). 25 Bartholomaeus quidam nomine, patiebatur tam intensissimos dolores corporis cum assiduo vomitu, quod erat jam proximus morti.’ ‘Jacobella quaedam nomine, cum per multum tempus passa fuisset intensissimum dolorem in genu sinistro …’ Acta Sanctae Francescae Romanae (1863–1925), p. 100; ‘Huga uxor condam Guillelmi Andree, … dolorem vehementissimum in capite paciebatur in tantum quod videre non poterat, nec oculos aperire, nec seipsam regere’, Anon., ‘Liber miraculorum’, Vol. 14, p. 3. 26 Gregorius Turonensis (1885), Libri de virtutibus sancti Martini episcopi, ed. B. Krusch, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum 1 (Hanover: Hahn, 1885), bk. II, ch. 1, p. 16.

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pain and horror … ’ Bernard, praying to his patron saint for a cure, added a stipulation: ‘Save my brother, I pray. And so that I should not doubt that he has recovered thanks to you, please make it so that by tomorrow this intolerable pain should be eased.’ Indeed, the prayer was efficacious: ‘the same day, no more than two hours later, that atrocious storm of pain, sedated, was conquered’.27 During the second half of the twelfth century, the prior of St Frideswide’s church in Oxford sent the entire story of his illness and cure by St Thomas to Canterbury. Instead of excerpting or rewriting it, the scribe Benedict of Peterborough simply included the narration verbatim in his collection. Thus we have the entire story, starting with one abscess on his leg: ‘Abscesses had emerged underneath and outside, so that I could hardly touch them without great pain …’, continuing with an unending series of abscesses which made it impossible for him to stand, causing him acute and constant pain: ‘In addition, tumors almost the size of a thumb swelled and broke, emitting a great deal of pus; this was not a cure, but a torture. Later the abscesses erupted on both feet, so that I could not put my shoes on or take them off without great pain.’ At first phlebotomy helped, but later no human medication could aid him: ‘I understood the illness to be chronic and incurable by human means’. When preaching in Oxford on a feast day he was unable to stand, ‘I excused myself from standing because of the said pain, and spoke sitting down’; by Easter he was incapable of officiating at all. Eventually he went to Canterbury and prayed at Thomas’ tomb, with a resultant cure.28 The prior’s narrative is remarkable: first, the detailed description of his abscesses, their development and bursting; obviously to him each and every one was a separate agony. Second, and even more significantly, he insistently dwells in almost every second sentence upon the continuous torment of physical pain accompanying his illness, 27 ‘… inciderat jam in tam graves corporis horribilesque cruciatus … ut immanis artuum contorsio visibus humanis cum dolore pariter et horrorem incuteret … Redde fratrem, obsecro. Et ne per te convaluisse dubitetur, fac precor ut infra crastinum diem hac intolerabilis passio allevietur … Tam valida tamque efficax santae martyris statim affuit intercessio, ut in eadem die non ut reor plus duabus horis excursis, illa atrocium dolorum tempestatis sedata conqueverit’, Bouillet, Liber miraculorum Sancte Fidis, bk. II, ch. 13. 28 ‘Emergebant etiam apostemata et infra et extra, ita quod vix sine magno dolore ea tangere valerem … Praeterea surgebant vesicae, ad grossitudinem fere pollicis implebantur, rumpebantur puris plenitudinem emittentes; nec ad remedium hoc, sed ad tormentum. Postremo duo super pedem eruperunt apostemata, ut non minimo dolore imponerem pedem in calceamentum vel extraherem … Intellexi morbum esse chronicum, nec posse humana manu curari … praetendebam excusationem standi pro dolore praedicto, et sedens loquebar’, Benedict of Peterborough, Miracula Sancti Thomae Cantuariensis, bk. 2, ch. 52.

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making it impossible for him to fulfil his obligations, and upon the gradual receding of pain when the healing process (begun by holy water from the shrine) took place: ‘I sensed the diminution of the pain and the decrease in the swelling … the next day … I felt the pain recede even further and the swelling greatly abate.’29 Self-descriptive pain was invariably more intense than that viewed by another. When it comes to illness, there is no difference between the descriptions of men and women. Both were driven mad with pain and begged for surcease, and both were properly grateful for their cure. The only difference is that no woman has left such a graphic description of her pain as some men did. Though there is no lack of self-descriptive women’s writings, the voice of the ill woman is silent on the whole. Female mystics were highly voluble when it came to describing the pains they shared with Christ, but all Julian of Norwich, for example, would say about the near-mortal illness that brought about her first visions was ‘The maste payne that I felyd was schortnes of wynde and faylynge of lyfe.’30 Biographers of Angela of Foligno and Colette of Corbie told of their illnesses, but the saints themselves remained silent on the subject.31 In contrast to late medieval expressiveness of both action and description, high medieval accounts evidence the premium attached to self-control. Disapproval of uncontrolled expressions of anguish surfaces in the descriptions of people whose behaviour resembles the actions of madmen. A young man brought to St Thomas’ shrine in a fainting fit, upon being revived with holy water ‘turned over on his side, rolled, and cried out; he arose often, but could not stand because his step was unstable; he fell down on his face, thrown against the stones ... you might think him mad, who was being healed’. A child with a stone stuck in his ear ‘began to hurt so acutely, that he suffered from bodily contortions, screaming and weeping as though insane’. In one case, a woman is recorded as literally having lost her mind from pain.32

29 ‘… minoratum sensi dolorem et relaxationem inflationis … In crastino … dolorem amplius sedatum et inflationis majorem relaxationem sensi’, ibid. 30 Julian of Norwich, A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich, Edmund Colledge and James Walsh (eds) (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1978), p. 209. 31 Angela of Foligno, Il libro della Beata Angela da Foligno, Ludger Thier and Abele Calufetti (eds) (Grottaferrata: Edn Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1985), p. 346; Miraculae Sanctae Colettae (1863–1925), p. 580. 32 ‘Vertebat se in latera, volutabatur clamans; resurgebat saepius, sed gradu instabili stare non poterat: corruebat in faciem, allidebatur ad petram, malo suo venisse videbatur; insanire putares, quem virtus divina sanabat. ‘coepit igitur puer vehementer angustiari, et quasi quandam mentis insaniam clamoribus et ejulatibus et corporis volutatione fateri’,

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The recorder’s sensitivity and the patient’s expressiveness were dictated by contemporary norms, and – at least when facing the saint – these norms were akin for men and women throughout the later Middle Ages. The ‘equality’ of men and women in face of illness and death can be seen in the body language of pain reflected in iconography. The same gestures of pain are attributed equally to men and women. Both use the standard gesture of a hand lifted to the face, or a bowed head.33 While the new attitudes did not affect theoretical medicine, they did affect practical medical writings. By the fifteenth century, physicians were paying far more attention to pain, describing it in extravagant, superlative terms. Jehan Sauvage notes concerning a simple throat inflammation (sesquinancie), ‘ceste dolour ocist tantost la personne quel surprint fort’.34 The use of sedation for various pains and aches was expanded to many diseases which earlier physicians might have treated with no regard to the pain.35 French physicians began using the word mal with its negative connotations, rather than the more neutral doulour, while the use of peine with its punitive connotations disappears from medical texts altogether. Learned consilia begin devoting space to the treatment of pain, and treatises on the subject proliferated.36 Thus, while generalized stereotypical descriptions assumed different standards of male and female behaviour under pain, the individual cases and the reality of illness draw a much more complex picture. Sex and gender were only two variables. Far more important were status, situation, and changes over time. Being female provided an excuse for contravening the canons of proper behaviour laid down for all only in particularly female situations. What was permissible at the shrine to all was not permissible in one’s normal surroundings, if one’s status forbade such demonstrations of sensibility; and what was frowned Benedict of Peterborough Miracula Sancti Thomae Cantuariensis, bk. II, ch. 9; bk IV, ch. 22. 33 Moshe Barasch, Gestures of Despair in Medieval and Early Renaissance Art (New York: New York University Press, 1976), pp. 57–68; François Garnier, Le langage de l’image au moyen âge, 2 vols (Paris: Le Léopard d’Or, 1982), Vol. 1, pp. 127, 149 and passim. 34 Sauvage, La nouvelle physique, fol. 24vo. 35 An anonymous fourteenth-century tractate suggests phlebotomy even for pain in the eyes. Anon. (14th c.), Tractatus de egritudinibus oculorum ex dictis sapientibus veteris compillatus … (Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal), ms. 1024 [Traités de Medicine], fol. 204vo. 36 N. de la Framboisière, Nicolai Abrahami Frambesarii Veromandui doctoris medici consultationum medicinalium libri tres (Paris: Sonnius 1595), fols. 134vo–136ro; J. Fernel, Johannis Fernelii Ambiani, archiatri, doctoris Parisiensis consiliorum liber, cui accesserunt responsa quaedam clarorum medicorum parisiensium (Lyon: Soubron & des Pres, 1597), pp. 11–115; Peter, ‘Connaissance et oblitération’, p. 377.

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upon in the twelfth century was accepted without comment a hundred years later.

Voluntary acceptance of pain When pain attacked, people could react in several ways. Western culture, however, knew also situations in which pain was freely welcomed or accepted. Martyrs welcomed their passions, warriors their battle wounds, and mystics their imitation of Christ’s agony. Under these circumstances, it is only to be expected that codes of behaviour should be different, and that these differences should also apply to gender distinctions. It is not merely a question of honour, for women too had honour, but of virtus. The ability to tolerate pain with equanimity was often seen as virtus in the original sense of the word: a quality pertaining to men. The pain in question here is undoubtedly an external force, though its voluntary acceptance tends to integrate it far more within the sufferer’s identity than the pain of illness. And yet, the basic vocabulary remained the same: one could either remain silent or scream, and the same perceptions of gender and sex differences operated here too. The attribution of fortitude to women martyrs was somewhat ambivalent. For late antique Christians, martyrdom was agon – a contest, and a very public one at that. The very fact that they stood witness to their faith in the arena and suffered for it without recanting already signified victory. Under those terms, women could ‘compete’ as successfully as men. The martyrdoms of numerous women testify to this fact. St Perpetua, facing her own martyrdom, dreamt that she had been transformed into a man, an athlete ‘stripped for the contest’.37 All the same, one of the most eloquent martyrologists (and future martyr), Cyprian of Carthage, marvelled at their ability to withstand pain: ‘stronger than their sex would lead us to suppose’.38 The ability, therefore, was seen as a normally male attribute. Indeed, there is a subtle difference between the description of male and female martyrs. Late antique martyrologists recorded two distinct attitudes towards physical pain. On the one hand, some martyrs were described as totally impervious to torture. They were so completely absorbed in their 37 Brent D. Shaw, ‘The Passion of Perpetua’, Past and Present 139 (1993), pp. 3–45; idem, ‘Body/Power/Identity: Passions of the Martyrs’, Journal of Early Christian Studies 4 (1996), pp. 269–312. 38 Letter to Rogatianus, in Le martyre dans l'antiquité chrétienne, A.G. Hamman (ed.) (Paris: Migne, 1990), p. 90.

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communion with Christ that they sensed neither pain nor fear.39 But most martyrs were not perceived as immune to pain, but as able to bear it with a fortitude born from awareness of their exalted destiny.40 The accounts of firmness and self-control displayed by martyrs far outnumber those of miraculous trances. The different reactions to martyrdom are where the gender distinction lies embedded. While male martyrs could be either impassible or steadfast, woman martyrs were invariably impassible rather than steadfast. They were said to have survived the pain of martyrdom entirely in a miraculous fashion. Possibly, late antique authors, while firmly believing in the possibility of female sanctity, found it harder to stomach the female virtus of impassivity. For a woman to be able to display fortitude was contrary to her nature. This attitude left two possibilities: one was masculinization, as Perpetua saw it, and the other was immunity from pain. It was easier to accept miraculous insensitivity than miraculous change of female nature. ‘Stronger than their sex would lead us to suppose’ they might be, but not quite as strong as men. Heroic male impassivity survived in hagiography until the twelfth century, probably influencing the secular warrior creed of the period. The pain of battle wounds, purely male and notably absent from chivalric literature, was less prestigious than martyrdom, but obeyed the same rules. Here the element of virtus was unquestionably paramount. The heroes of the chansons de geste were utterly and unquestioningly impassive. They suffered grievous injuries without uttering so much as a single word of complaint. Wounded, bleeding to death, they worried about their souls, their victories, or their revenge, but not about the state of their bodies. The best-known example is the death of Roland, in which the hero, severely mutilated, provided the first example of the good Christian death. Though he does remark that he is wounded, Roland’s main concern is with making a confession prior to dying.41 The role of pain in chivalric literature is somewhat different from its role in martyrdoms. The human body and its pain were quite literally the arena in which the battle of good and evil was fought in martyrdoms, here pain was merely incidental to victory. The pain of 39 For example, Rufinus, of Aquileia, Historiae Ecclesiasticae libri duo, in J.P. Migne (ed.), Patrologiae Latinae cursus completus, 221 vols (Paris, 1844–64), Vol. 21, p. 504; Herbert Musurillo (ed. and trans.), The Acts of the Christian Martyrs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 67, 123–5. 40 Eusebius Pamphilus, The Ecclesiastical History, 2 vols, with Engl. trans. by Kirsopp Lake (1), and J. Oulton (2) (London: Loeb Series, 1965), bk. 6, ch. 41, art. 14. 41 La Chanson de Roland, Cesare Segre (ed.), M. Tyseens (trans.) (Geneva: Droz, 1989), pp. 206–13.

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wounds was not ardently sought and welcomed, as martyrdom often was, but it was still an accolade, and the impassivity displayed upon the infliction of this pain was the hallmark of knightly identity. The equation of pain displays with weakness and fortitude with power, with its concomitant implications concerning women, was destined to be reversed in the later Middle Ages. It was closely connected with the emergence of pain self-infliction as a significant trait of lay piety. Before the thirteenth century, this phenomenon was intrinsically tied to monastic ascetic practices, and common to both men and women.42 In this context, self-infliction was undoubtedly a manifestation of power over one’s body, but the strict Western monastic control robbed this power of the theatrical dimension so common in the late antique Middle East.43 Late medieval holy men and women, however, were often either Mendicants or Tertiaries, living within lay society, and their contests of pain and power were visible to all.44 Though the earliest visible signs of the preoccupation with the suffering and death of Christ belonged to a man (St Francis), women played a very special role in this type of religiosity. It is not merely that they joined men in using their bodies to experience and show (by means of stigmata, for example) Christ’s agony. As Caroline Bynum has shown, after 1200, scholars increasingly argued that the female body, in particular, could be an instrument to communicate religious concepts and feelings.45 A great movement of female mystics developed. Those women used their bodies as a means of a two-way communication, both with Christ through their shared pain sensations, and with their audiences through the physical performance of those feelings. Here the theatrical element of power display was far greater than in the case of traditional ascetic practices. To wield the whip upon one’s back or roll in nettles, as many male and female mystics did, would undoubtedly leave marks. To meditate upon Christ’s passion and thus induce bodily scars was a far greater feat of self-induced pain. These were the marks

42 Giles Constable, Attitudes Toward Self-Inflicted Suffering in the Middle Ages, Ninth Brademas Lecture (Brookline, MA: Hellenic College Press, 1982). 43 Peter Brown, ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity’, Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971), pp. 80–101. 44 Aviad M. Kleinberg, Prophets in their Own Country: Living Saints and the Making of Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), pp. 21–39; Gábor Klaniczay, ‘Legends as Life-Strategies for Aspirant Saints in the Later Middle Ages’, in his The Uses of Supernatural Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 95–110. 45 Caroline W. Bynum, ‘The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages’, in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, M. Feher et al. (eds) (New York: Zone Books, 1989), Vol. 1, pp. 160–219.

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of miraculous suffering. The fact that late medieval mystics begged for visible marks of their pain without having physically to inflict it shows an awareness of the power that lay in their bodily sensations. Though male as well as female mystics received the grace of pain upon their prayers, it is no coincidence that, with the exception of St Francis, all other cases of stigmatization belong to women.46 The attitudes of late medieval female mystics towards pain provide us with a rare insight, for here we hear the almost unique voice of the suffering women in their own words. Granted, mystics can hardly be taken as representative of all women in all pain situations, but their words are nevertheless remarkable. Reading the letters of St Catherine of Siena, for example, one gains an impression of a woman intoxicated and exalted with pain. Her identification with her sufferings is absolute. Body, soul and sensations are united in one passionate quest for the mystical experience. This is born out by her biographer, Raymond of Capua, who stresses time and again that Catherine begged God for suffering, partly as a means of identifying with Christ and partly in order to save others the pain of Purgatory.47 Catherine was not unique in this wish. Angela of Foligno, ‘wished that all my limbs might suffer a death unlike his passion … a more vile death’.48 Julian of Norwich ‘desyrede a bodylye syght, whare yn y myght have more knawinge of bedelye paynes of oure lorde our savyoure … for I wolde have beene one of thame and suffrede with thame.’49 Numerous other late medieval women mystics voiced similar desires, and several of them were granted their wish in a visible form. It seems that very great pain was not only internally felt, but also extruded itself. A sick nun in Ghent suffered such a headache that the back of her head ‘boiled like a pot on fire’ and her eyes, full of fire too, almost popped out of her head.50 Pain assumed a visible form coming out of the body. When it came to the absolute internalizing and identification between self and pain, women undoubtedly led the way. It

46 André Vauchez, La Sainteté en Occident aux derniers siècles du moyen âge (Rome: École française de Rome, 1981), pp. 108–9; P. Debognie, ‘Essai criqitue sur l’histoire des stigmatisations au moyen âge’, Etudes carmélitaines, 21 (1936), pp. 22–59; Gábor Klaniczay, ‘I modelli di santità femminile tra i secole XIII e XIV in Europa Centrale e in Italia’, in Spiritualità e lettere nella cultura italiana e ungherese del basso medioevo, S. Graciotti and C. Vasoli (eds) (Firenze: Olschki, 1995), pp. 75–109. 47 Raymond of Capoua, Vie de Sainte Catherine de Sienne, E. Cartier (trans.) (Paris: Sagnier, 1853), pp. 174–8. 48 Elizabeth A. Petroff, Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 213. 49 Julian of Norwich, A Book of Showings, p. 202. 50 Miracula Sanctae Colettae, p. 591.

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was a means by which living women became living saints, one of their few avenues of self-expression and performativity. Why were women more capable of seeking and identifying with Christ’s pain than men? Caroline Bynum has treated the subject extensively, and her insights stand unchallenged. Women’s religious experience was to a great extent physical, connected not only with pain, but with food and eroticism as well.51 But in addition to understanding women’s bodies and their views of those bodies, one must try and understand also women’s attitude towards their pain. The very fact that women were less bound than men by codes of honour forbidding open expression of physical pain made it more possible for them to seek overt pain and overt pain articulation. Furthermore, by virtue of their ‘gift for suffering’, attested even by male theologians, they could use their feelings and sensations the better to identify with the suffering Christ. Possibly, too, the perception of women’s closer association with pain because of their physical nature played a role in their leading ascetic practice. As early as the twelfth century, Hildegard of Bingen stressed that mothers, having experienced the pain of childbirth and the grief of losing a child, made excellent candidates for religious life in widowhood, and were as worthy as virgins.52 The knowledge of pain compensated for the loss of innocence. This new validation of pain led to a totally new rapprochement of the male and female experience. Theoretically, thirteenth-century men seeking pain could have embraced the option of martyrdom simply by adopting an option not available to women – a Mendicant missionary career. Nevertheless, many men chose the ‘female’ option of identifying with Christ through self-mortification and meditation, rather than through missionary activity and martyrdom. In some cases these mystics clearly pointed to their mothers as the guiding influence in their search for pain.53 Women with the power of pain could equal men, even show them the way. Iconography is once more a good mirror of the change in attitude. In high medieval iconography, tortured martyrs appear all serene and composed, while the damned in hell are twisted and extravagantly gesticulating. The ultimate difference was between those who

51 Caroline W. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 52 Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, pt. 1, vision 2, ch. 24, p. 30. 53 See Richard Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984), p. 93, concerning the formative influence Heinrich Suso’s mother had on him. St Colette was equally influenced by her mother’s piety; see Miracula Sanctae Colettae, p. 561.

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vanquished pain and those who had succumbed to it. Late medieval paintings, however, show the agony of Christ and his martyrs openly, their faces twisted in anguish and fear. The same is true for deathbed scenes of the laity.54 The changing fortunes of female pain reflect the fluctuation in attitudes towards pain in general. For behind the perception of martyrdom, war, or asceticism, lies a deeper feeling towards pain and its relationship with power. Is it a mark of human frailty or of divine strength? Does it befit people of certain status or gender, or is it shameful? The attribution of pain to women – and the privilege of expressing pain granted to them – fluctuated in time according to the scale of value attributed to different kinds of pain.

Involuntary pain and punishment Some types of pain were sought and welcomed, but criminals undergoing physical punishment were in a different category, closer to the ill than to the holy. Punitive pain infliction is an old and almost universal human institution. In the West, it was strongly connected with dishonour, even infamy. Early medieval law codes reserved execution for the unfree and whipping for the infamous. With the evolution of public criminal law, the correlation of physical punishment and low status lost some of its power. Nevertheless, throughout the Middle Ages it is hard to find noblemen whipped naked through the city streets for theft. Even when executed, they were beheaded, a far less shameful ending than the hanging inflicted upon more plebeian criminals.55 Punitive pain infliction was closely tied to public rites of humiliation as retribution: publicly conducted whipping, mutilation, and branding were the most common forms. Until the fifteenth century, the main aim of these practices was degradation and alienation more than pain infliction, but in early modern times pain as a retributive tool did take over. Public executions, hitherto ceremonies of recantation and petitioning for absolution, became scenes of pre-execution torture. Unlike the capital sentence, it served no societal preventive end. The offender was about to die in any case, and the additional pain was no more than society’s revenge rather than any sort of deterrent or prevention.56 54

Alberto Tenenti, La vie et la mort à travers l’art du XVe siècle (Fleury, 1983), pp. 54–71. Esther Cohen, The Crossroads of Justice: Law and Culture in Late Medieval France (Leiden: Brill, 1993), pp. 181–201. 56 Esther Cohen, ‘Justice and Pain in the Sixteenth Century’, paper presented at the Eighteenth International Congress of Historical Sciences (Montreal, 1995). 55

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The increased use of pain is visible also in the use of torture as another judicial practice. This procedure, born in the late twelfth century and practiced until the eighteenth, was based upon a system of proofs that saw in the culprit’s confession the ultimate evidence, and was therefore prepared to use all means possible to extract it. It was a truthfinding mechanism, not a punishment, but it was applied only to suspects with a certain pre-existent weight of evidence against them. In other words, only the potentially guilty were liable to judicial torture, meant to extract confessions of guilt, thereby hinting at a retributive association. Other than the technicalities of evidence, there is a deeper perception in the use of torture. It is not that medieval jurists were unaware that physical coercion would elicit a confession from all and sundry. Rather, the use of torture derived from the same awareness that had previously relied upon ordeals: namely, that the human body and its sensations was the locus of truth. While the ordeal revealed only guilt or innocence, torture was a far more flexible tool, capable of bringing the truth to light. In fact, the tortured body was also a battlefield of wills between judges and suspects. The latter knew that withstanding two torture sessions without confessing could gain one freedom for lack of proof. As one notorious criminal had said, it was always possible to find a doctor to reset dislocated or broken arms, but nobody has yet mended a neck broken in hanging.57 Judicial writings are full of stories concerning hardened criminals so used to withstanding torture that they practically slept through it.58 Others spoke of the use of magic incantations or drugs endowing the same criminals with temporary impassibility. One gains the impression that a lack of avowal was only further proof of the suspect’s hardened criminal nature. It was not guilt or innocence that was to be established by torture: this decision had already been taken at an earlier stage, when the judges decided that they had sufficient evidence to send the suspects to torture. What was to be elicited was the truth of the actions that had brought about that same guilt. In a travesty of martyrdom, criminals too sought impassibility for their duel with a hostile judicial authority. Not trusting in a higher authority to shield their sensations, they either trained themselves to withstand pain or used drugs. The martyrs’ impassibility was proof of their truth, the criminals’ only hid the truth, and pain was the touchstone that revealed it. This attitude would also go far in explaining the growth of pain 57

Fiorelli, La tortura givdiziaria, Vol. 1, p. 21. Ibid., Vol. 1, p. 126, citing Odofredus: ‘Quidam sunt ita duri in questionibus, quod ibi dormiunt.’ 58

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infliction in punishment. In addition to retribution, pain had a salutary effect upon the condemned person’s soul, completing what repentance and confession had earlier achieved. What punishment criminals took on earth they would be spared in Purgatory. The religious element of pre-execution confession and remorse became increasingly important at the same time that the pain element became more insistent in executions. But none of this was affected by sex. Other than the pregnant, no woman was spared either torture or execution by reason of her sex. Nevertheless, usually women’s capital penalties were different from men’s. They were either burned, drowned, or buried alive where men were hung or beheaded. But the reason was not connected with pain infliction. It was largely grounded in age-old apotropaeic beliefs rather than in any ideas concerning pain. These beliefs, that certain types of dead might come back to injure the living, concern specifically those who died before their time, those whose bodies remained unburied, and those who had been quarrelsome in their lives. Bodies of dead criminals, left to rot on the gallows, possessed in addition magical maleficent properties. The bodies of dead women criminals were even more dangerous than those of their male counterparts, and the only sure way of preventing the return of the menacing dead was to dispose completely of the body.59 It was only in the sixteenth century, the period of increased punitive activity, that hanging women became more common, as an extra mark of dishonour.60 Symbolism of status was far more significant. Noblemen could be drowned or beheaded, but never hung. Considerations of pain did not enter into these customary executions, whereas honour played a major part in them. Similarly, almost all corporal non-capital penalties – whipping, branding, the pillory – were never applied to people of noble status. By contrast, among the non-noble, they were inflicted upon both sexes indiscriminately. The infliction of pain in judicial torture favoured a different type of status: the clergy were exempt from it, the nobility were not. The Grand Master of the Templars was as savagely tortured as any thief or murderer.61 Women and men were both liable to judicial torture. Judges were advised, in cases with more than one suspect, to torture women first ‘because the man has greater constancy and will take longer to confess, and the woman will do so faster, for her heart is sudden and 59

Cohen, The Crossroads of Justice, pp. 94–9. J. Gessler, ‘Mulier suspensa: à délit égal peine différente?’, Revue Belge de philologie et d’histoire, 18 (1939), pp. 974–88. 61 M. Michelet (ed.), Procès des Templiers, 2 vols (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1841), passim. 60

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inconstant’.62 There was no difference in the methods applied to nonpregnant women and to men. The law abstained from inflicting pain upon women only for functional considerations, but saw no reason to do so because of their nature. To the contrary: their very amenability to torture made them excellent candidates for the investigation of truth. The body degraded was devoid of gender identity, but not of status. Legal sources rarely speak of any punitive gender distinctions, nor do they articulate the reasons when there were some differences. What counted was the degree of infamy, not the sexual identity of the object of punishment. The impression one gains is that pain as punishment was viewed primarily as a degradation, not a physical sensation. Honour had gradations and nuances, some of them adapted to gender differences. But there was no such thing as a relative dishonour, and there was no gender difference when it came to infamy. The increased use of pain in judicial proceedings, from inquisition to execution, was contemporary with the growing preoccupation with pain in the realm of mystical religiosity and with the growth of pain expressivity as a normative form of behaviour outside the sickroom. The turning point was the thirteenth century. St Francis, who thanked the surgical instrument that was about to cause him pain, and who received the stigmata, lived through the formative years of the inquisitorial procedure and the attendant use of torture. Women ascetics who whipped themselves daily must have seen other women undergoing the same ordeal involuntarily in the streets of town. The growing use of judicial pain was not a sign of brutalization; it was merely the other side of the coin of the sprituality of pain.

Conclusion The transition from the impassivity of the chivalric code to the overt search for suffering, from denial of pain to its validation and expression, was a momentous change in the history of European sensibilities, 62 Tractatus de tormentis sive de indicijs et tortura [attributed to] Guido de Suzaria, in Decimum volumen tractatuum e variis iuris interpretibus collectorum (Lyon, 1599), 85ro–90ro, arts 22–23; [attributed to] Bartolus of Sassoferrato (1615) Repetitio super materia quaestionum sive torturarum, in Omnia quae extant opera …, 11 vols (Venice: Iuntas, 1615), Vol. 10, p. 250; Albertus Gandinus, Tractatus de maleficiis, in Hermann Kantorowicz, Albertus Gandinus und das Strafrecht der Scholastik (Berlin: Guttentag, De Gruyter, 1926), Vol. 2, pp. 158–9; Baldus de Periglis, De questionibus et tormentis tractatus, in Tractatus diversi super maleficiis, nempe Do. Alberti de Gandino, Do. Bonifacii de Vitalini, do. Pauli Grillandi, do. Baldi de Periglis, Do. Jacobi de Arena (Lyon: Iacobus Iunta, 1551), p. 688.

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affecting fields as disparate as mysticism and law, medicine and theology. Furthermore, it made other distinctions fade into relative insignificance. The differences of gender and status norms of expressivity, as well as the importance of the immediate societal context, became blurred in the face of the new, universal norms. The origins of the phenomenon are hard to determine, since in almost all areas the evidence first appears in the early thirteenth century. It grew within the fast-expanding urban milieu of the period, the same landscape that formed mystics, mendicants, preachers, as well as university-trained lawyers, and physicians. Population density and geographic mobility, both typical of late medieval towns, allowed for the quick dissemination of ideas and the imitation of behavioural norms. It is no coincidence that the two salient geographic foci of expressivity lie in the heavily urbanized areas of northern Italy and the Low Countries. It is thus possible to situate the new norms squarely within the urban mentality. Their followers were no martyrs, for orthodox martyrdom was a scarce commodity in the late medieval West,63 nor knights. If they aspired to nobility, it was in the form of land-ownership, not warfare. They therefore had little use for behavioural norms based upon heroic status. Furthermore, they were often faced with a new type of hero or – more often – heroine. The local living saint, who performed dramatic feats of asceticism meriting the amazement and awe of all classes and genders, often lived within the town. At the same time, these heroines had no inhibitions about expressing pain vocally and physically. The spectacle of physical punishment throughout the streets and squares of the town added to the ubiquity of pain expressions. Finally, these same burghers were those who hired physicians and required their help. If sick patients, already conditioned to the validity of complaint, demanded pain alleviation and were prepared to pay for it, they were likely to receive it. By the same token, causality reverts upon itself: if saints had begun the process, they ended up acquiescing with its adoption in lay circles by adding pain relief to their thaumaturgic powers, just as physicians did. Behavioural norms still allowed women more latitude than men in voicing their pain, but the range of pain situations was wide enough to accommodate a variety of expressions. Pain thus became at one and the same time more respectable as a religious experience, and more common as a judicial tool. All of these changes affected both genders. But given the difference in behavioural norms for men and women, they were bound to affect them 63 Heretics, though, might well have considered those of their numbers burned for their beliefs as martyrs. Unfortunately, we know too little of the views of heretics concerning their own martyrdom and its behavioural norms before the sixteenth century.

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differently. In so far as women were more closely identified with pain than men, either through childbirth, mysticism or executions, this translation of pain into the public domain probably ended by approximating the male to the female experience, or at least approximating the expression of experience. Possibly, the greater latitude allowed men in this realm legitimized also women’s pain expression to a greater degree.

NOTES *Earlier versions of this paper were presented at various fora. I am grateful for the comments upon these occasions, and to Mayke de Jong and Moshe Sluhovsky for their careful reading of the final draft.

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Index (Note: Page references to illustrations are shown in italic.) Abramowicz, M. 77 Accademici Occulti, Brescia 17, 18, 33 Adler, K. 2 n. 3 adultery 99, 110 n. 40 Aesop 129–30 afterlife 103–4, 105 Agricola, R. 153 n. 19 Albert, J.-P. 157 n. 30 Alberti, L.B. 32, 56–7 n. 31 Alberti, P.F. 21 n. 23 Alberti, R. 21 n. 23, 83, 153 n. 19 Albertus Gandinus 217 n. 62 Alcibiades 16 Allori, A. 21 n. 23, 124 n. 81 Amazons 160–61 Ames-Lewis, F. 38 n. 57 Amsterdam 121–2, 184, 185, 186 anaesthesia 195–6 analgesia 195–6 analogic aspect 136–7, 140–41 anatomy analogy in 140–41 and discovery 5 and flaying 11, 15, 16, 20, 25, 32, 33–7 and metaphysics of the interior 20–22 and religion 28–31 see also dissection anatomy theatres 118–22 Andouilles 134–6 androgyny 57, 59, 61, 63 Angela of Foligno 207, 212 animals as comparants 137, 142, 145 public execution of 110 n. 41 vivisection and dissection of 114 Anne, St 50 anthropology 149, 150 Antiphysie 140

antithetical principle 87–8 Antonioli, R. 139 n. 23 Antwerp martyrdoms 80, 81 Anzieu, D. 11 n. 3, 14 n. 6 Apelles 60 Apollo 10, 14–17, 25–8, 27, 36, 37, 41–4, 46, 69, 70, 74–6, 78, 81, 90, 91 aporia 146 Aquinas, St Thomas 80, 198 n. 4 Arcimboldo, Giuseppe 147 Aretino, P. 41 n. 59 Aristotle 55 Poetics 82–3, 84 artefacts 162 art history 3 artistic creation, process of 54 ascetic practices 198, 211–13, 217, 218 Aulos 41 autopsy 108, 116–18, 141 Avicenna 200–201 Aycock, D.A. 5 n. 6 Baarsen, R. 101 n. 23 Bacchus 59, 63–5 Bagliani, A.P. 118 n. 61 Bakan, D. 200 n. 7 Bakhtin, M. 31 n. 48, 46 n. 67, 122, 133 n. 10 Bakker, G. 123 Bal, M. 149 Baldus de Periglis 217 n. 62 baptism 63, 172–3, 177, 192 Barasch, M. 48 n. 2, 208 n. 33 Barocchi, P. 21 n. 23, 22 n. 26, 83 n. 22 Barolsky, P. 50 n. 6, n. 8, 52 Baronio, C. 79 n. 14 Bartholomew, St 10, 11, 13, 22–5, 28–9, 33, 69, 72–4, 75, 82, 90

222

INDEX

Bartlett, R. 96 n. 10 Bartolus of Sassoferrato 217 n. 62 bathing 32 Bätschmann, O. 153 Battaglia, S. 11 n. 4 Bauhin, C. 107, 115 bear emblem 39–41, 43 Becerra, G. ‘Ecorche’ 25, 26, 33–4 Becking, L.G.M. Baas 119 n. 62 beheading 100, 101, 106–8, 116, 117, 131, 214, 216 Beinart, H. 169 n. 1, 177 n. 15, n. 16 Belloni, A. 88 n. 29 Belon, P. 145, 145 Benedetti, A. 30 n. 41, 32 n. 51 Benedict of Peterborough 203 n. 22, 208 n. 32 Benthien, C. 11 n. 4, 25 n. 34, 31 n. 48 Berchorius, Petrus 24 n. 31, n. 32 berdache 162–3 Berengario da Capri 116, 120 Bernard of Angers 205–6 Bernstein, C.M. 21 n. 22 Bernstock, J. 157 n. 28 bestiality 100, 102 n. 24 Betussi, G. 19 n. 16 Beusterien, J.L. 182 n. 27 Biagioli, M. 120 n. 65 birth 132 monstrous 1 pain of childbirth 197, 198, 202–3, 213, 219 Biven, B.M. 11 n. 3 blasphemy 48, 51 Blok, A. 109 n. 44 blood 86, 87, 104 circulation of 188 purity of 183 blood-letting 196, 200–201, 206, 208 n. 35 Blunt, A. 79 n. 17, 155 n. 21, 156 n. 27 Boccaccio, G. 19 n. 16 bodily integrity 9, 93, 94, 101–2, 105, 108, 127 body politic 107 body snatching 1, 111, 115 Boehm, G. 66 n. 65 Bohde, D. 15 n. 9, n. 10, 41 n. 61, 44 n. 64, 45 n. 65

Boileau, N. 81–2 Borcherdt, H.H. 88 n. 29, 89 n. 30 borders see boundaries Borzelli, A. 89 n. 31 Bosch, Hieronymus 147 Boschini, M. 41 n. 60, 43 Boschloo, A. 79–80 n. 17 botanical gardens 119 Botticelli, Sandro 53 Bouillet, A. 203 n. 22, 206 n. 27 boundaries crossing of 4–8, 63, 64–5, 67, 107, 126 of the self 31–7, 46–7 Bowen, B.C. 136 n. 17 Bozon, N. 202 Braccelli, Giovanbattista 147 Braet, H. 104 n. 29 Bragadin, Marcantonio 10 branding see engraving, on human body Braungart, G. 55 n. 23 bravura art 89–90 Breen, Q. 19 n. 18 Breughel, Pieter 79, 147 brevity 144 Broos, B. 124 n. 79 Brown, A. 13 n. 5 Brown, J.C. 99 n. 16 Brown, P. 211 n. 43 Brueghel, Pieter see Breughel, Pieter Brunel, C. 203 n. 22 Brunette, P. 149 n. 5 Bucher, B. 161 n. 44 Buonarroti, M. 22 n. 26 Buonoconto, M. 114 n. 55 Burckhardt, J. 11–12, 14 n. 7 burial 28, 106, 111, 118 n. 61, 193, 216 burning at the stake 100, 101–2, 106, 216 Busacchi, V. 32 n. 50 Bylebyl, J.J. 113 n. 52 Bynum, C.W. 148, 211 n. 45, 213 Byron, Lord 71 Cadden, J. 200 n. 8, 202 n. 16 Cadden, S.W. 196 n. 2 Caliari, C. 37 n. 56 Calufetti, A. 207 n. 31 Calvinism 136

INDEX

Camesasca, E. 41 n. 59 Camper, P. 171 cannibals 159, 160, 161, 165 Cantarella, E. 100 n. 21 Capaccio, G. 69 n. 2 Caplan, J. 158 n. 34 Cardoso, Isaac 186, 191 Las excelencias de los Hebreos 186 Caribs 159, 160–61 Caritas Romana 153–5, 156 Carlevaris, A. 198 n. 4 Carlino, A. 28 n. 38, 29, 30 n. 43, 113–14 n. 48, 124 n. 81 carnivals 121–2, 135–6 Carrier, D. 155 Carroll, N. 68 n. 1 Cartari, V. Le imagini colla sposizione degli dei degli antichi 161 Cartier, E. 212 n. 47 castration 131, 189–90 Catherine of Sienna, St 212 Catholicism 79–80, 136, 171 see also Inquisition cauterization 180 Cavalca, D. Specchio della Croce 157 Cavalieri, T. 24 Cazort, M. 111 n. 43, 124 n. 78, 124 n. 81, 125 n. 82 Ceán y Bermudez, J. 72 n. 8 Céard, J. 7 n. 10, 113 n. 52 Cellini, B. 21 n. 23, 41, 42, 43 n. 61 Celsus, A.C. 179 Cetto, A.M. 43 n. 61 Chapman, H.P. 66 n. 63 Chastel, A. 52 n. 14 Chennaf, S. 205 n. 24 chess game 146 chiaroscuro 73, 74 Chichemecas 162–3 childbirth, pain of 197, 198, 202–3, 213, 219 chivalric code 210–11, 217 chronocentrism 105, 151 Chrysostomos, J. 197 n. 3 Ciardi, R.P. 21 n. 23 Cicero 142 Ciguayo Arawak 159, 161 circumcision

223

of Sephardic Jews 170 adult 186 documentary evidence of, in seventeenth century 183–91 ‘new Jews’ 191–4 as sign of false conversion 171–9 in surgical treatises of the sixteenth century 178–83 Ciudad Real 177 clarity 144 Clark, K. 48, 57 Clifford, J. 149 n. 4 Clifton, J. 90 n. 32 Clough, C.H. 53 n. 15 Cohen, E. 96 n. 10, 98 n. 13, n. 15, 102 n. 25, 195 n. 1, 214 n. 55, n. 56, 216 n. 59 Cohn, S.K. 13 n. 5 Coleman, J.A. 139 n. 22 Colette of Corbie 207 Colledge, E. 207 n. 30 Collier, J.F. 109 n. 44 Colonna, V. 24 colorito 38–9 Colton, J.B. 200 n. 9 Columbus, Christopher 150, 151, 157, 159–62, 165–7 Comanini, G. 83–4 Comes, N. 19 n. 16 comparants 137, 141, 145–6 comparés 137, 145 Condivi, A. 23, 28–9 n. 39 Constable, G. 211 n. 42 contrast-strategies 85–6, 88–9 Contreras, J. 169 n. 3 conversations, body as aspect of 148 Cooper, R. 133 n. 12 Corbey, R. 161 n. 43 core 6–7, 37, 46, 47, 66 corporal integrity see bodily integrity corporal punishment see punishment criminal law, changes in 97 Cropper, E. 88, 89 n. 31 cross-dressing see transvestism cultural analysis 1–4 cultural changes 98–9 Cunningham, A. 123 n. 74 curiosity 5 Curtius, E.R. 159 n. 36

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INDEX

Cyprion of Carthage 209 da Calcar, G. 21 n. 22 da Carpi, B. Isagogae breves 20 Daciano, G. 31 n. 49 Damhouder, J. 199 n. 6 Damien 95 d’Ancona, P. 23 n. 29 d’Ans, A.-M. 148 Dante Alighieri Paradiso 17 n. 14 Danti, V. 21 n. 23, 22 n. 25 Davidson, N. 111 n. 46 Davis, M.D. 22 n. 25 Davis, N.Z. 12 n. 5 Davis, R.C. 99 n. 16 Dean, T. 98 n. 13, 99 n. 16, 113 n. 46 death sentence 107–8 Debognie, P. 212 n. 46 de Bonsignore, G. 19 n. 16 de Bry, T. 79 n. 15 decapitation 100, 101, 106–7, 131, 214, 216 de Certeau, M. 151, 166, 167 n. 64 Deceulaer, H. 116 n. 60 de Chauliac, Guy 179–80, 181, 200 de Espina, A. Fortalitium fidei 177 defamation 124 n. 81 Defaux, G. 135 n. 13 deformity 1, 71 De Grève, M. 129 n. 1, 133 n. 11 de Gualbes, F. 173 de Heredia, Luis 175 de Ketham, J. 110 de la Framboisière, N. 208 n. 36 de Las Casas, B. 163 Brevisima relación 79 de Léry, J. 163, 166 n. 61, n. 62 dell’Anguillara, A. 19 n. 16 Dempsey, C. 88 n. 28 Denkler, H. 174 n. 8 de Pensa, C. 19 n. 16 de Quiroga, V. 165 de Renzi, S. 203 n. 20 de Ribera, Jusepe 71–7, 81–2, 89–90 Apollo and Marsyas 69, 70, 74–7, 78, 81 giants paintings by 71, 74, 77

Martyrdom of St Bartholomew 72–4, 75, 90 Prometheus 74, 76 Derrida, J. 149 de Sade, Marquis La Nouvelle Justine 164–5 descriptio puellae 143 descriptive mimetism 135 Desprez, François 147 de Tovar, C. 203 n. 20 de Vitry, J. 158 Dezallier d’Argenville, A.J. 81–2 di Cosimo, P. 59 n. 38, 63 n. 58 Didi-Huberman, G. 157 n. 31, 158 n. 35 discretion 68 disease pain as 195 transmission of 31–2 disegno 21–2, 39, 41–3 disfigurement, reading of 159–62 dishonour physical punishment and 94, 100–108, 125–7, 198–9, 214, 216, 217 public dissection and 29, 109–11, 118, 123–7 dismemberment 131–2 dissection 1, 4, 5, 11 by artists 21–2 metaphorical meaning of 7, 129–30 of oneself 25 n. 35 private 113–18 public 92–4 aim of 92 authorities’ involvement in 123, 126 contribution to medical knowledge 113–18, 122, 139, 140 cultural changes and 98 and dishonour 29, 109–13, 118, 123–7 festive character of 121–3 medical professions involved in 112–13, 125–6 objections to 123 and public punishment 28–31, 108–11, 127 as public relations exercise 118–21, 126–7

INDEX

regulations concerning 111–12 spectators at 120 visual representations of 123–7 d’Oignies, Marie 158 Dolce, L. 39 n. 58, 40, 41 n. 59 Dolet, E. 129–30, 137 Donatello 51 n. 9 Doré, G. 147 Douglas, M. 5 n. 6, 6 Dowley, F.H. 155 n. 22, n. 24 dowry payments 99 drawing and quartering 95, 97 n. 11 drowning 97 n. 11, 100, 101–2, 106, 216 Dunkerton, J. 38 n. 57 Duplès-Agier, H. 199 n. 6 Dutch Huizinga Research Institute and Graduate School of Cultural History 4 Duval, E.M. 135 n. 13, n. 16, 136 n. 17 Eastwood, B. 55 n. 29 eating disorders 1 Edgerton, S.Y. Jr. 28 n. 38, 79 n. 14, 100 n. 19, 107, 124 n. 79, n. 81, 125 effictio 143, 144 Egmond, F. 6 n. 7, 29 n. 41, 31 n. 47, 93 n. 2, n. 3, 95 n. 6, 97 n. 11, 102 n. 24, 104 n. 28, n. 30, 105 n. 31, 126 n. 86, 166 n. 63, 193 n. 43 Egypt 161–2, 176 Elias, N. 31 n. 48, 94, 95, 97 Elisabeth of Spalbeek 157–9 engraving, on human body 164–5, 214, 216 Episcopal tribunal 173 Epistemon 131 Erasmus 19 n. 18, 129 Eriksson, R. 29 n. 40, 30 n. 45 Eskimos 166 n. 63 Espinardo, Luis La nueva medicina triunfante 190–91 Espinosa, Benito (Baruch Spinoza) 191 Estévez, M.G. 150 n. 9, n. 11 Estienne, C. 128, 140 Eucharist 155

225

Eusebius Pamphilus 210 n. 40 Evans, E.P. 110 n. 41 Evans, R. 96 n. 7 evidentia 144–7 excrescences 130 executioners 125–6 executions, public 92–4 aim of 92 and dishonour 100–110, 125–7, 214, 216 dissection following 28–31, 108–11, 127 festive character of 121, 122–3 forms of 95, 97 n. 11, 100–102, 106–7, 214, 216 hierarchy involved in 125–6 ritual of 107–8, 122–3 visual representations of 125–7 ‘fabro gentil’ 87, 88 face, ‘reading’ of 152, 158–60, 165 Fallopia, G. 181–2 De decoratione 182 family network 97–8 Farago, C.J. 55 n. 28, 65 n. 62 Faral, E. 143 n. 30 Farnese, A. 80 Fastilent see Quaresmeprenant Feher, M. 2 n. 1, 182 n. 25, 211 n. 45 Fehl, P. 15 n. 9, n. 11 Feinstein, D.H. 41 n. 60 Félibien, A. 151, 152 n. 16 female mystics 207, 211–12, 219 Fernández de Oviedo, G. 160, 162–3 Fernel, J. 208 n. 36 Ferrari, O. 90 n. 33, 120, 121 n. 69, 122 festivities 121–3 Findlen, P. 118 n. 60, 120 n. 66 fines 96, 97–8 Finucane, R.C. 205 n. 24 Fioravanti, L. 20 n. 22 Fiorelli, P. 199 n. 6, 215 n. 57, n. 58 fire, death by 100, 101–2, 106, 216 Fisher, J. 166 n. 61 flaying 10–11 anatomy and 11, 15, 16, 20, 25, 32, 33–7 identity and 16, 25–37 passim of Marsyas 7, 10, 11, 12, 14–20,

226

INDEX

25–8, 27, 34, 35, 36, 37–47, 69, 70, 74–7, 78, 81, 90, 91 of St Bartholomew 10, 11, 13, 22–5, 28–9, 33, 69, 72–4, 75, 82, 90 Florentine Accademia del Disegno 41, 42 flying fish 145, 145–6 Fontaine, M.M. 7 n. 10, 113 n. 52, 137, 139, 140, 141, 147 n. 35 forza del levare 22 Foucault, M. 94, 95, 97 Fox, J. 79 n. 14 Foy of Conques, St 205–6 Fracastoro, G. 32 n. 50 fragmentation, punishments involving 107 see also dissection Fragoso, J. 180–82 Frame, D.M. 130 n. 3, 133 Francis, St 211, 212, 217 François, crown prince 139 Fréart de Chantelou, P. 152, 155–6 Freedberg, D. 79 n. 17, 80, 81 Freedberg, S.J. 15 n. 9 French, R.K. 113 n. 52, 114 Frenzel, E. 88 n. 29 Freud, Sigmund 201 Friedman, J.B. 159–60 n. 39 Friuli 122 Frobisher, Martin 166 n. 63 Fuero Juzgo 177 Führkötter, A. 198 n. 4 Galen 137–9, 140, 180, 182, 187 humoural theory of 197, 200–201 Galle, T. 34 n. 54, 35 Gallonio, A. 79 n. 14 Ganz, P. 22 n. 24 Garcìa-Ballester, L. 195 n. 1, 200 n. 9, 202 n. 16 Gargamelle 131 Gargantua 131, 132 Garnier, F. 208 n. 33 Gatrell, V.A.C. 96 n. 7, 123 n. 77 Gatto, A. 10 n. 2 Gautier, T. 71 n. 7 gaze 16, 37, 46, 59, 156 Geary, P.J. 104 n. 29 Geertz, C. 149 Gélis, J. 205 n. 24

Gellius, Aulus 40 n. 58 gender confusion 160 see also transvestism Gentili, A. 14 n. 8, 41 n. 60, 44 n. 63, n. 64 Geoffroy de Vinsauf Poetria Nova 143 Germanists 105 German legal history 103–5 Gesner, C. 137, 138, 145 Gessler, J. 216 n. 60 gesture language of 146, 156 of pain 208 pointing 51, 58, 61–2 Gilby, T. 198 n. 4 Gilman, S. 171, 173 n. 8, 183 n. 27 Gil-Sotres, P. 200 n. 9 Ginzburg, C. 5–6, 17 n. 14, 93 n. 4 Giordano, L. Apollo and Marsyas 90, 91 Glanz, R. 106 n. 35 Godeau, E. 123 n. 74 Golden, L. 82 n. 21 Gómez-Menor, J. 178 n. 18 Graciotti, S. 212 n. 46 Graetz, H. 168 n. 1 Grandgousier 131 Grayson, C. 33 n. 52 Green, M.H. 201 n. 14, 202 n. 16 Greenblatt, S. 14 n. 6, 157 n. 29, 166 n. 63, 193 n. 44 Gregory of Tours 205 Guido de Suzaria 217 n. 62 Guthrie, W.K.C. 55 n. 24 gynecological writings 201–3 Haim, A. 192 n. 40 hair, human 160, 165 Hall, M.B. 23–4 Halm, P. 43 n. 61 Halm-Tisserant, M. 100 n. 21 Hamilton, Sir William 68–9 Hamman, A.G. 209 n. 38 Hamon, P. 136 n. 19 hanging 100, 101, 103–7 passim, 216 Harrison, O.B. 82 n. 21 Harvey, P. 59 n. 39 Haskell, F. 69 n. 2 head, human 159–60 Heckscher, W.S. 29 n. 41, 30 n. 44,

INDEX

109 n. 43, 122, 124 n. 79, n. 81 Heidegger, M. 148 Heikamp, D. 21 n. 23, 43 n. 61 Heller, T.C. 12 n. 5 heretics 218 n. 63 Herod Antipas 64 Herod the Great 85 Herophilus 114 Herrera, G.G. 178 n. 18 Heseler, B. 30 Hidalgo de Agüero, B. 180–81 Hildegard of Bingen 198 n. 4, 213 Hillman, D. 2 n. 2, 6 n. 9, 37 n. 55, 107 n. 39, 157 n. 29, 193 n. 44 Hinnels, J.R. 195 n. 1 Hippocrates 55, 139 Hochlenert, D. 115 n. 58 Hodges, D.L. 5 n. 5 homosexuality 48, 60, 174 n. 9 honour 9, 105–6, 107, 108, 109–11 112, 113 pain as badge of 198 of universities 118–19 see also dishonour; virtus Horch, O. 174 n. 8 Horden, P. 195 n. 1 Huchon, M. 130 n. 3, 136 n. 18, 139 n. 23, n. 24, 141 n. 27, 143, 144 n. 31 Huerga, P. 169 n. 3 Hulme, P. 161, 167 identity 5, 7, 9 dissection and loss of 126–7 Jewish 192, 193 punishment and loss of 108 skin and 11–14, 16, 25–37, 46–7 Ignatius Loyola, St 80 illiteracy 158 illness, involuntary pain of 197–8, 199–209 illustrations, use of 124 n. 78, 141, 146–7 images, visual 149 imitation, power of 82–5, 89, 90 Immaculate Conception 60 impassivity 210, 217 impasto 45 Incarnation 45, 60 incest 64, 100, 106

227

infamy see dishonour Inquisition 97, 169, 171, 173–7, 184–90, 193, 217 integrity see bodily integrity interior anatomy and metaphysics of 20–22 Michelangelo and 22 Platonic satyr and 16–19 skin concealing 22, 32–7, 46–7 Irish Book of the Invasions of Ireland (Lebor Gabála Érenn) 158 Iswolsky, H. 133 n. 10 Jacquart, D. 201 n. 14 Jean, Brother 131, 146 Jean de Saint-Amand 200–201 Jedin, H. 79 n. 17 Jennett, S. 101 n. 23 Jesus Christ 62, 63–4, 157, 158, 198 identification with pain of 80, 207, 209–14 Jews physical stereotypes of 171, 193 Poussin’s painting of 152–7 punishment of 106 Sephardic 168–70 clandestine circumcision of see circumcision John, St, Bishop of Rochester 157 John of Mirfield 200 John the Baptist, St see Leonardo da Vinci Jones, C.P. 164 n. 56 Joris, David (Johann von Binningen) 102 n. 26 Jouanny, C. 152 n. 14 judicial autopsy 115–18 Julian of Norwich 207, 212 Junes, É. 176 n. 13 Jütte, R. 185 n. 30 Kadir, D. 166 n. 60 Kafka, F. In the Penal Colony 165 Kantorowicz, H. 217 n. 62 Kaplan, Y. 169 n. 3, 176 n. 12, n. 14, 185 n. 32, 192 Kaser, M. 101 n. 21 Kay, S. 2 n. 3, 158 n. 32, 198 n. 4 Kelley, D. 104 n. 28 Kemp, M. 21 n. 22, 48 n. 1, n. 3, 53

228

INDEX

n. 15, 54 n. 20, n. 21, 55 n. 25, n. 29, 57 n. 37, 60 n. 47, 149 n. 5, n. 6 Kemp, W. 21 n. 24 Ketelsen, T. 22 n. 24, n. 25 Kieckhefer, R. 213 n. 53 Kinser, S. 135 n. 15 Kisch, G. 106 n. 35 Klaniczay, G. 211 n. 44, 212 n. 46 Kleinberg, A.M. 211 n. 44 Kloek, W. 101 n. 23 Koerner, J.L. 151 n. 13 Kornell, M. 109 n. 43, 124 n. 78, n. 81, 125 n. 82 Kottek, S.S. 195 n. 1 Kötzsche-Breitenbruch, L. 88 n. 29 Kraft, H. 51 n. 10 Kristeva, J. 68 n. 1 Kroeschell, K. 96 n. 10 Kroon, J.E. 112 n. 49, 115 n. 57, 116 n. 60, 119 n. 62, n. 64, 120, 121 n. 68 Krusch, B. 205 n. 26 Kunkel, W. 101 n. 21 labour pains 197, 198, 202–3, 213, 219 La Cava, F. 23 n. 27 Lafitau, J.-F. 161–2 Lake, K. 210 n. 40 Lamb, W.R.M. 17 n. 12 Lamera, F. 88 n. 29 Laqueur, T.W. 182 n. 25 Laurent, S. 202 n. 19 Lavater, J.C. 171 Lavin, M.A. 48 n. 2, 57, 61 n. 49, 62 n. 53 Lavine, L. 163 n. 52 Lazzarini, Lorenzo 38 n. 57 Lazzerini, Luigi 112 n. 49, 113 n. 54, 114 n. 55, 120, 121 n. 69, 122 Leach, E. 5 n. 6, 6 LeCoat, G. 88 n. 29 Lecoy de la Marche, A. 198 n. 5 Le Double, A.F. Rabelais anatomiste 141, 142, 146–7 Leerssen, J. Th. 161 n. 43 Leiden 119, 121, 122 Lemay, H.R. 202 n. 15 Lent 135–6

Leonardo da Vinci ‘deluge series’ of drawings by 60–61 The Last Supper 62 Madonna, Child, Saint Anne, and a Lamb 50, 62 n. 51 Madonna, Child, Saint Anne, and Saint John 62 Madonna of the Rocks 62 n. 51 Saint John the Baptist Ch.3 The Angel in the Flesh (drawing) compared with 57–61 The Angel of the Annunciation compared with 57 illustration 49 Leonardo’s notions on painting and 52–7, 64–5 St John’s body in 50–52, 61–5 as a self-portrait 65–7 Trattato della Pittura 53, 55, 64–5 Lestringant, F. 164 Levy, Ernst 101 n. 21 liber mundi 159 licking 39–41, 43 Liebert, R.S. 23 n. 27 liminal 6 Lind, L.R. 30 n. 41, 32 n. 51 Lipschutz, I. 71 n. 6 Lis, C. 118 n. 60 literary studies 2–3 Lochrie, K. 174 n. 9 Lomazzo, G.P. 21 n. 23, 43 n. 61, 83 Lonie, I.M. 113 n. 52 Lot, F. 203 n. 22 Lowe, K.J.P. 98 n. 13, 99 n. 16, 113 n. 46 Lucian of Samosata How to write history 144 True History 144 Ludwig, H. 53 n. 16, 54, 55 n. 27, 56 n. 30, 62 n. 52, 64 Luijten, G. 101 n. 23, 103 n. 26 Luis de Santangel 160 Lyra 41 Mack, P. 153 n. 19 MacLean, A. 113 n. 53 MacQuarrie, C.W. 158 n. 34 Maes, L.Th. 99 n. 16 magic 104, 216 Maguire, H. 88 n. 29

INDEX

Maier, B. 21 n. 23 Makri, A.S. 88 n. 29 Marchini, N.-E. V. 31 n. 49 Marcus, G.E. 149 n. 4 marginal 5–7 Margolin, J.-C. 7 n. 10, 113 n. 52 Marguerite de Navarre Heptaméron 143 Marín, E. 174 n. 10 Marin, L. 151, 156 Marino, G.B. La Strage degli Innocenti 84–9 Mariscal, G. 182 n. 27 Marotin, F. 137 n. 21 marriage legislation 99 Marsyas, flaying of 7, 10, 11, 12, 14–20, 25–8, 27, 34, 35, 36, 37–47, 69, 70, 74–7, 78, 81, 90, 91 Martin, St 205 Martin, J. ‘Inventing sincerity, refashioning prudence’ 13 n. 5, 33, 34 martyrdom 23, 29, 33, 69 pain of 72–4, 75, 77, 79–81, 82, 90, 197, 198, 199, 209–10, 213–14, 218 masculinity 198 Mason, P. 3 n. 4, 6 n. 7, 93 n. 3, 95 n. 6, 97 n. 11, 105 n. 31, 112 n. 48, 150 n. 10, 161 n. 43, n. 46, 162 n. 47, n. 49, 165 n. 58, 166 n. 59, n. 61, n. 63, 193 n. 43 Massa, N. 32 Massacre of the Innocents 84–9 maternal influence 213 Matinino 160–61 Maus, K.E. 98 n. 15 Maza, S. 96 n. 7, 109 n. 44 Mazzio, C. 2 n. 2, 6 n. 9, 37 n. 55, 107 n. 39, 157 n. 29, 193 n. 44 Mazzolini, R.G. 121 n. 70 McMahon, A.P. 53 n. 16, 54, 55, 56 McVaugh, M.R. 200 n. 9 medical knowledge dissection and 113–18, 122, 139, 140 literature describing state of 139–41 medical profession

229

division of labour in 112–13, 125–6 representation of professionalism of 118–21, 126–7 writings by see medical texts see also physicians; surgeons medical terminology 140, 208 medical texts circumcision in 178–83 pain in 199–203, 208 medicines 188 Medinaceli, Duke of 188 Meier, M. Apollo with the flayed Marsyas and Midas 25–8, 27, 34 Meijer, B. 69 n. 2 Melzer, S.E. 2 n. 3, 96 n. 7, 107 n. 38 Melzi, F. 53 Mendelsohn-Martone, L. 22 n. 24 menstruation 182, 201 meraviglia 89 Mercado, Clara 189 metamorphosis 44–5, 46 metaphors 1, 2, 7–8, 109, 129–30, 136–7, 140–41 of reading see reading metonymic aspect 136–7 Meyer, P. 202 n. 18 Meyjes, G.P. 121 n. 67 Michelangelo St Bartholomew (in Last Judgement) 10, 11, 13, 22–5, 28–9, 33 Michelet, M. 216 n. 61 Michman, J. 192 n. 40 Midas, King 15, 25, 27, 44 Middelkoop, N. 124 n. 79 midwives 172–4 Migne, J.-P. 197 n. 3, 210 n. 39 Milanesi, G. 21 n. 23 Miller, F.J. 10 n. 1 Minelli, A. 119 n. 62 miracles 199, 203–8 Mirollo, J. 89 n. 31 missionaries 213 Mitchell, W.J.T. 23 n. 27 Moffit, J.F. 60 n. 45, n. 48 Mombello, G. 130 n. 2 Mommsen, T. 100 n. 21 Monssen, L. 80 n. 18, n. 19 monstrous births 1

230

INDEX

Moody-Adams, M. 151 n. 12 mouth 132 Muir, E. 122 multiple temporalities 155 Muraro, M. 21 n. 22 museums 120 musical instruments 41 Musurillo, H. 210 n. 39 mutilation 131–2, 198, 214 Naddaff, R. 2 n. 1 Naples, images of torture in Ch.4 Nasier, Alcofrybas 132 Nehlsen, H. 96 n. 10 Nettanyahu, B. 169 n. 2 Neumann, J. 15 n. 9, n. 10, 17 n. 14 New Testament 155, 179 Noble, P. 124 n. 79 Noé, V. Enzo 22 n. 26 Norberg, K. 96 n. 7, 107 n. 38 notarial documents 178 notatio 142–3 novator movement 188 n. 36 Oexle, O.G. 104 n. 29 ‘ogni Pittore Dipinge Sé’ 50, 52–7, 65, 66 Old Testament 153–5, 176, 197 Olni, G. 122 n. 70 opacity 166–7 opposites, coincidence of 64–5 optics, medieval 55–6 oral tradition 158 Orchard, K. 64 n. 61 ordeals 215 orifices 31–2, 132 Orobio de Castro, Isaac 185 Ortalli, G. 124 n. 81 Ost, H. 15 n. 9, 17 n. 14 ‘other’ representations of 182 Oulton, J. 210 n. 40 Overing, J. 150 n. 10 Ovid Metamorphoses 10, 14, 19 n. 16, 63, 64 Pagel, J.L. 200 n. 10 pain 9, 34 alleviation of 195–6, 205, 218 of circumcision 186

expression of, in later Middle Ages 196–219 context of 197, 208–9, 218 gender differences in 196–7, 200–204, 207–14, 216–19 in iconography 213–14 involuntary pain and punishment 198–9, 214–17 involuntary pain of illness 1978, 199–209 urbanization and 218 voluntary acceptance of 198, 209–14 of martyrdom 72–4, 75, 77, 79–81, 82, 90, 197, 198, 199, 209–10, 213–14, 218 maximizing the pain of 68–9, 74–7, 90 minimizing the pain of 68 and punishment 94–9, 102–3, 198–9, 214–17 spectator and 45–7, 74, 90 see also torture paint, as skin 37–45 painting, ‘reading’ of 152–7, 161 Paleotti, G. 83 Pallucchini, A. 41 n. 60, 43 n. 62 Pallucchini, R. 37 n. 56 Palmer, R.J. 31–2 n. 49 Palomino, A. 72 Panofsky, E. 63 n. 58 Pantagruel 130, 131, 133–4, 140 Panurge 132, 133, 143, 146 Park, K. 20 n. 19, 29, 109 n. 42, n. 43, 116–18 Parker, P. 14 n. 6 Parker, R. 105 n. 30 parricide 100, 106 pars pro toto 166 Passes, A. 150 n. 10 Paster, G.K. 2 n. 2 Paul, St 69 Pedretti, C. 48, 55 n. 22, 57 n. 32, n. 36, n. 37, 59, 60 n. 46, n. 47, 61 n. 49, 63 n. 55, n. 56, n. 57 ‘peinture atroce’ 71–2, 77, 81 Pelling, M. 112 n. 51, 113 n. 53 Pelzer, A.R. 71 n. 5 penis 58–9, 130

INDEX

see also circumcision pentimenti 44 Perini, G. 89 n. 31 Perpetua, St 209 Pertile, F. 41 n. 59 Peset, V. 188 n. 36 Peter, St 69 Peter, J.-P. 195 n. 1, 208 n. 36 Peter Martyr d’Anghiera 163 Petroff, E.A. 212 n. 48 Petrus Hispanus 201 Philip, Abbot of Clairvaux 157–8 phlebotomy 196, 200–201, 206, 208 n. 35 physicians involved in circumcision 170, 173, 174–5, 177–9, 184–91, 193, 194 involved in dissection 112–14, 118, 125–7 see also medical profession Pico della Mirandola, G. 19 n. 18 Pifteau, P. 200 n. 9 Pigler, A. 89 n. 30 pillory 216 Piñero, J.M.L. 188 n. 36 Pitarch, P. 150 Pittoni, B. 39 n. 58 Pizarro, Francisco 164 Plato Symposium 16–19, 129 Timaeus 140 Platter, F. 31 n. 47, 101 n. 23, 102 n. 26, 111 n. 47, 115 Platter, T. 115, 117 Pliny 60, 63 n. 57, 137 Podro, M. 66 n. 64 poetry 81–90, 197 pointing gesture 51, 58, 61–2 Pointon, M. 2 n. 3 Poirier, M.G. 22 n. 25 Poliziano, A. 52 pollution 103–5, 125–6 n. 84 ponunt ante oculos 144 Porter, R. 195 n. 1 Posèq, W.G. 23 n. 27 post-partum pains 203 Pouchelle, M.C. 113 n. 52, 114 n. 56, 120, 123 n. 75, 126 n. 85, 127 n. 87 Poupardin, R. 203 n. 22

231

Poussin, N. 88–9 human body ‘read’ by 151–2, 161, 165, 166 in La Manne 152–7 power, pain and 204, 214 Pozzi, G. 85 n. 24 prefiguration 155 Preti, M. 69, 71, 74 Martyrdom of St Bartholomew 74 Priapus 59 Prodi, P. 79 n. 17 Prohaska, W. 44 n. 63 prosopopoeia 129 Prosperi, A. 30 n. 42 prostitution 99, 113 punishment and dishonour 94, 100–108, 125–7, 198–9, 214, 216, 217 dissection and 28–31, 108–11, 127 pain and 94–9, 102–3, 198–9, 214–17 ritual of 107–8, 122–3 of suicides 103–7 passim see also executions, public puns 136 Puppi, L. 79 n. 14, n. 16 purity 104 of blood 183 Puttfarken, T. 22 n. 24 Pythagorism 17 n. 14 Quaresmeprenant, description of 133–4 context of 134–5 carnivalesque 135–6 literary theoretical aspects of 136–7 medical aspects of 137–41 in rhetorical perspective 141–7 quinine 188 Quint, D. 14 n. 6 rabbis 176, 192 Rabelais, François bodily presence in works of 130–33 Fifth Book 146 Fourth Book 133–47 see also Quaresmeprenant, description of

232

INDEX

Gargantua 129–32 Pantagruel 129–32, 141 n. 27, 142, 146 Randone, E. 79 n. 16 rape 99, 113 Rapp, J. 15 n. 9, n. 11, 17 n. 14, 19, 20, 25 n. 36 Ray, R. History of Pain 196 Raymond of Capua 212 reading 148–9 of disfigurement 159–62 heterology and tautology in 165–6 of human body 150–51 by Poussin 151–7, 161, 165, 166 for illiterates 157–9 of visual images 149 Rechcigl, M. Jr. 15 n. 9 Redon, O. 205 n. 24 Reeds, K.M. 115 n. 57, 119 n. 62 Reformation 33 religion anatomy and 28–31 concealment of 33 see also Jews crimes against 100 disturbing images to promote 79–81 satire on 135–6 Rembrandt 66 n. 63, 149 Anatomy by Dr Tulp 124 Remírez, Francisco 174–5, 178 Reni, G. 87 resurrection 24, 33 retaxados 170, 171, 174, 177, 184, 193 rete mirabile 114 Reti, L. 50 n. 7 Rhetorica ad Herennium 141–4 rhetorical constructions, antithetical 87–8 rhetorical perspective, Quaresmeprenant in 141–7 Richardson, R. 111 n. 47 Richter, J.P. 53 n. 16, 55 n. 22, 64 n. 62 Richter, S. 68 n. 1 ritual of punishment 107–8, 122–3 Roberts, K.B. 109 n. 43, 124 n. 78, n. 81, 125 n. 82

Robertson, J.C. 203 n. 22 Rocke, M. 60 n. 44, 99 n. 16, 108 n. 40, 112 n. 50 Roland 210 Rolfe, J.C. 40 n. 58 Romanists 105 Romano, G. 83–4 Rome, ancient 155, 179 Roomer, Gaspar 69, 72, 89–90 Rosa, A. Asor 87 n. 28 Rosand, D. 39 n. 58 Rosenberg, P. 71 n. 6, 82 n. 20 Roth, M. 30 n. 41 Royal Society of Medicine and Other Sciences, Seville 188 Rubin, M. 2 n. 3, 158 n. 32, 198 n. 4 Rublack, U. 202 n. 17 Ruffino, S. 79 n. 16 Rufinus of Aquileia 210 n. 39 Ruggiero, G. 99 n. 16, 111 n. 46 Ruotolo, R. 69 n. 2 Rupp, J. 112 n. 49, 120 Säcken 97 n. 11, 102 n. 24 St Frideswide’s Church, Oxford, prior of 206–7 Saint-Gérand, J.-P. 137 n. 21 Salmón, F. 195 n. 1 Sanchez, A.P. 71 n. 5 Sancho, Gwillem 172–3 Sandler, L.F. 48 n. 2 Sansovino, F. 20 n. 21, 32 n. 51 Sasportas, Jacob 192–3 satyrs 16–19, 63 see also Marsyas, flaying of Saucisses 134, 136 Saulnier, V.-L. 139 n. 24 Sauvage, J. 203, 208 Savonarola, G. 52 Sawday, J. 2 n. 2, 20 n. 19, 25 n. 35, 109 n. 43, 112 n. 49, 125 n. 82 Scarry, E. 68 n. 1 Scavizzi, G. 80 n. 17, 90 n. 33 Schapelhouman, M. 101 n. 23 Scheurleer, Th.H.L. 120–21 n. 67 Schild, W. 100 n. 19, 102 n. 26, 103 n. 27, 106 n. 35 Schleiner, W. 182 Schmitt, J.-C. 199 n. 7 Schnitzler, N. 68 n. 1 Schollen-Jimack, C. 139 n. 22

INDEX

Schreiner, K. 68 n. 1 Schupbach, W. 20 n. 21 Schütze, S. 89 scientific illustration 124 n. 78 Scirè, G.N. 38 n. 57 sculpture 22, 43, 120, 153–5 Segre, C. 210 n. 41 self-control 207, 210 self-portraits 23–5, 28, 65–7 self-presentation 9 Sephardic Jews see Jews shame see dishonour Sharp, J.A. 96 n. 7, 98 n. 13 Shaw, B.D. 209 n. 37 shrines 203–4, 207, 208 Sicroff, A. 183 n. 28 Sigal, P.-A. 204 n. 23, 205 n. 24 sight, sense of 55–6 Silenus 17–19, 33, 129 Silveira, Arias 187 Simons, W. 158 n. 32 skin 8, Ch.2 differences in colour of 121–2 n. 70, 171 functions of 11 and identity 11–14, 16, 25–37, 46–7 Michelangeloís conception of 22–5, 28–9, 33 paint as 37–45 see also flaying; interior smiling 50, 59 Smith, P.J. 133 n. 12, 135 n. 14, 136 n. 19, 141 n. 26, 144 n. 31, 146 n. 34 Socrates 16–17, 19, 129 sodomy 99, 102 n. 24, 106, 162–4, 165 Solinas, F. 89 n. 31 Soly, H. 118 n. 60 Sontag, S. 68, 69, 77, 81, 90 soul body formed by 54–5, 56, 62, 67 freeing of 16, 17, 19, 24, 30, 33, 46, 216 nature of 20 Spierenburg, P. 77 n. 14 Spinosa, N. 71 n. 5 Spinoza, Baruch (Benito Espinosa) 191 squinting 50–51, 59

233

Starr, J. 109 n. 44 Steinberg, L. 23 Stella, J. 152 n. 16 stereotypes 53–4, 203, 208 stigmata 211–12, 217 Stradanus, G. 34, 35 Strocchia, S.T. 99 n. 16 Stuttenheim, C.F.P. 146 Suetonius 40 n. 58 suicides 102–3 n. 26, 103–7 passim Suprema 184 surgeons involved in circumcision 170, 174, 175, 177–85, 187, 189–90, 194 involved in dissection 112–13, 119, 125–6 see also medical profession surgical treatises, sixteenth century 178–83 sweat 132, 158 Sylvius 137–9, 140, 141 syncretism 59, 63 n. 55 synecdoche 157 Sysel, F. 44 n. 63 Tappecou, Brother 132 tarandus 137, 138, 145 tattooing 164 tautology 166–7 Tazi, N. 2 n. 1 temporalization 155, 165 Tenenti, A. 214 n. 54 ter Gouw, J. 122 n. 71 Tertullian 24 n. 31 Tetel, M. 142 n. 29 Thaumaste 146 thaumaturgic miracles 199, 203–8 theatrical performances 109, 163 Thedorus, St 164 thematic opposition 135–6 Theophanes, St 164 Thevet, A. 164, 166 n. 61 Thier, L. 207 n. 31 Thomas, St 206, 207 Thomasset, C. 201 n. 14 thyrsus 59 Tietze, H. 40 n. 58 Tietze-Conrat, E. 21 n. 22 Titian 20, 22 device chosen by 39–41

234

INDEX

Flaying of Marsyas 11, 12, 15–20, 37–47 Todorov, T. 150 n. 10, 165 n. 58 Tomás, J.P. 119 n. 63, 185 n. 30, 191 n. 39 Tomasi, L.T. 122 n. 70 torture 1, 5, 7, 16, 17, 32 n. 51, 189 ability to resist 198–9, 209–10, 213–14, 216–17 gender and 216–17 images of, in Naples Ch.4 introduction of 97, 98 purpose of 214–16 Toscano, O. 77 Toulmin-Smith, L. 202 n. 18 Trani, J.M. Responsa 176 transformation 44–5, 46 transvestism 162–4, 165 treason 100, 106 Trexler, R. 162 Tripet, Captain 131 truth 98, 215 Túán mac Cairill 158 Turner, V. 5–6 n. 6 Tyseens, M. 210 n. 41 Tzeltales 150 universities 11, 118–22 uterine suffocation 202 vagina 132 Valencia 172 Valenzuela, Francisco Gabriel 187 Valerius Maximus 153–5 Valli, F. 88 n. 28 Valverde, J. 25 n. 35, 26, 32 n. 51 van Caenegem, R.C. 97 n. 12 Vandekerckhove, L. 102 n. 26, 106 n. 35 van den Eijnden, Ferdinand 69, 72, 74 van der Heijden, M. 111 n. 46 van de Velde, E. 101 n. 23, 103 n. 26 van Dülmen, R. 98 n. 13 van Ledeberch, G. 102–3 n. 26 van Leyden, L. 79 van Suchtelen, A. 101 n. 23 van Uffel, L. 71, 74 Varchi, B. 22 n. 24, n. 26 Vasari-Milanesi, G. 21 n. 23, n. 24, 22, 23, 28, 41 n. 60, 43 n. 61

Vasoli, C. 212 n. 46 Vauchez, A. 212 n. 46 Veendorp, H. 119 n. 62 Veneziano, A. 21 n. 23 Venice 168, 184, 186 Verbeke, W. 104 n. 29 Veronese, P. 37, 38, 41 n. 60 Veronica, St 158–9 Verstegen, R. 79 n. 14 Vesalius, A. 30, 111 n. 47, 140, 141, 181 De humani corporis fabrica 20, 37 n. 55, 137–9 Vesal programme 34–7 Vico, E. 21 n. 23 Vidal, A.M. 119 n. 63, 185 n. 30, 188 n. 36 Vigarello, G. 32 n. 50 Villon, François 132 Virgil 40 n. 58 Virgin Mary 198 virtus 209, 210 vivisection 15, 114 Volk, K. 14 n. 7 Volk, P. 25 n. 36 von Amira, K. 103 n. 28 von Binningen, Johann (David Joris) 102 n. 26 von Campenhausen, H.F. 79 n. 17 von Hadeln, D. 37 n. 56 Von Metzsch, F.-A. 51 n. 10, 61 n. 49, n. 50, 62 n. 53, 63 n. 60 von Sandrart, J. 71 n. 5, 74 Wadum, J. 124 n. 79 Wallace, L.E. 196 n. 2 Walsh, J. 207 n. 30 wars 198, 210 water 50, 60 Wazbinski, Z. 21 n. 23 Wear, A. 113 n. 52 Webster, C. 112 n. 51, 113 n. 53 Weddingen, E. 41 n. 60 Weisser, M. 98 n. 13 Weissman, R.F.E. 12 n. 5, 32–3 Welter, J.-Th. 198 n. 5 Went-Daoust, Y. 136 n. 19 whale, monstrous 134–5 wheel, breaking on 100, 101, 106 whipping 1, 211, 214, 216, 217 Whitfield, C. 71 n. 4

INDEX

William of Canterbury 203 n. 22 William of Saliceto 200 Wills, D. 149 n. 5 Wind, E. 17 n. 14, 59 n. 42, 63 n. 57 Winner, M. 52 n. 14 Winner, R.L. 111 n. 46 Winternitz, E. 41 n. 60 witchcraft 100 Wolff, G. 109 n. 42, 115 n. 57, n. 59 Wolf-Heidegger, G. 43 n. 61 Woodward, J. 185 n. 30 Writing Culture school 149 Wunderkammer 120 Wyss, E. 14 n. 8, 17 n. 14, 19 n. 18 Xenomanes 134 X-ray investigations 44

235

Yerushalmi, Y.H. 169 n. 2, 186 n. 33 Ytzhak ‘Aqedat Devarim Ki Tavo 168 Zammattio, C. 50 n. 7 Zamora, M. 160 n. 42 Zanca, A. 122 n. 70 Zanger, A. 107 n. 38 Zapata, Diego Mateo 187–91 Verdadera apologÌa en defensa de la medicina racional 191 Zimmerman, S. 12 n. 5 Zöllner, F. 52 n. 14, 53 n. 18, 54 n. 19 Zuccari, F. 21 n. 23, 43 n. 61 Zwijnenberg, R. 53 n. 17, 156 n. 27