Death, Torture and the Broken Body in European Art, 1300–1650 (Visual Culture in Early Modernity)

<p>Bodies mangled, limbs broken, skin flayed, blood spilled: from paintings to prints to small sculptures, the art of the late Middle Ages and early modern period gave rise to disturbing scenes of violence. Many of these torture scenes recall Christ’s Passion and its aftermath, but the martyrdoms of saints, stories of justice visited on the wicked, and broadsheet reports of the atrocities of war provided fertile ground for scenes of the body’s desecration. Contributors to this volume interpret pain, suffering, and the desecration of the human form not simply as the passing fancies of a cadre of proto-sadists, but also as serving larger social functions within European society. Taking advantage of the frameworks established by scholars such as Samuel Edgerton, Mitchell Merback, and Elaine Scarry (to name but a few), Death, Torture and the Broken Body in European Art, 1300-1650 provides an intriguing set of lenses through which to view such imagery and locate it within its wider social, political, and devotional contexts. Though the art works discussed are centuries old, the topics of the essays resonate today as twenty-first-century Western society is still absorbed in thorny debates about the ethics and consequences of the use of force, coercion (including torture), and execution, and about whether it is ever fully acceptable to write social norms on the bodies of those who will not conform.</p>

Arts & Photography

Decker, John R.

Kirkland-Ives, Mitzi

History & Criticism

Routledge

Hans Memling's Scenes from the Passion of Christ leads the viewer on a long and arduous journey in the space of just under a metre. The panel presents a 'continuous narrative' on a grand scale, offering roughly two-dozen individual episodes from the last week of Christ's life. These scenes are represented in a single contiguous cityscape and the surrounding countryside, and viewers would have followed the narrative recounted across the panel, following the action from station to station along painted roads and pathways, through gateways and portals and implied passageways as pedestrians in their imaginations. This study considers the intersections between narrative art and a range of devotional practices current in the late Middle Ages and early modern period. This body of practices stood in a symbiotic relationship with the visual imagery, informing viewers' interaction with images, which in turn affected their understanding of these other practices. In other words, these images must be understood as part of a broader tradition of ritual and symbolic life. As such, the study offers a valuable re-evaluation of Memling and his art within the religious practice of his times, while opening up some of his most ingenious and idiosyncratic works that are little known by non-specialists.

In the Footsteps of Christ: Hans Memling's Passion Narratives and the Devotional Imagination in the Early Modern Netherlands (Proteus: Studies in Early Modern Identity Formation, 5)

Brepols Publishers

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