Is There an Iconography of Violence?
Properly speaking, violence does not comprise a subject of premodern European art. This statement will at first sound counter-intuitive. After all, many of the canonical subjects medieval artists were expected to treat were tales of human aggression, conflict, combat and destructiveness; remembrances and forewarnings of disasters natural and supernatural, worldly and otherworldly; visions of wounding, torture and dismemberment; parables of suffering, abjection and pain.
That the salvation narrative informing the Middle Ages' whole repertoire of devotional and liturgical arts revolved around the torture-execution of Jesus; that it ended in the explosive violence of apocalyptic confrontation and devastation, the unimaginable destruction of the world, the reign of Antichrist, the wrathful return of Christ, and the consignment of the damned to that great, terrifying factory of pain - these were the indelible lineaments of the Christian European world-picture down to the industrial era. Everywhere one looks, violence seems to be visually threaded through the whole fabric of medieval life and imagination. While secular chronicles and the luxury arts adorning castle and court narrated battles both historical and legendary, casting them as heroic epic, fantasies of sacrilegious violence by demons, Jews, witches and macabre armies of the dead danced through the popular imagination. Even ordinary housewives couldn't keep their innate combativeness in check, at least if visual satire is to be believed!Viewed as a panorama, such images easily reinforce that cherished historical picture of the Middle Ages as an era obsessed with End Times, accultu- rated to the sight of blood, intimate with pain, and haplessly driven by uncontrolled aggressiveness - ‘a world of thin skins, short fuses and physical
MITCHELL Â. MERBACk
violence’.1 The great French historian Marc Bloch (1886-1944) called medieval violence the ‘distinguishing mark of an epoch’: ‘deep-rooted in the social structure and in the mentality of the age’, it played a crucial part in economy, law and manners.[1169] [1170] No wonder art is compelled to reflect it.
But does the sprawling collection of violence imagery constitute a unified ‘theme’ in the imagination of premodern Europe? Is scholarship justified in seeking a ‘visual culture of violence’ peculiar to the era?Headaches of taxonomy are not the only reason to doubt the viability of an iconography of violence in the visual arts before 1500. Modern understanding has long tended to reify violence as a transcendent category of human experience, one encompassing physical force and coercion, aggression and cruelty, bodily violation and suffering, and non-physical violences such as symbolic exclusion, horror and psychological trauma. In contrast, medieval people tended to grasp violence according to its particular forms, as distinct problems begging solutions. Violent disruptions to social or political order - the endless feud, the vendetta, duelling - called forth clerical peacemaking efforts, for example, or royal legislation, or civic justice. Terrifying ecological upheavals such as plague, famine or foreign invasion, interpreted as divine chastisements, called forth communal supplications in the form of processions, votive offerings or mass displays of penance. Many of these critical solutions, it has been remarked many times, themselves entailed violence. The holy warrior, the exorcist, the inquisitor and the flagellant each engaged in his own, specific form of violent problem-solving. This reminds us that before 1500 European Christians recognised many good, salutary forms of violence: the righteous warfare preached by the church militant and put into practice by crusading elites; the punishing ‘sword’ of earthly justice that reversed the pollution crime brought upon the social body; the ascetic tortures that appeased God’s wrath, tamed the passions and sanctified the body; and those many dramatised violences - the tournament, the charivari, the mystery play - that channelled potentially disruptive psychic or social energies into useful ritual forms. Even the exclusionary violence of the urban pogrom or the witch trial, irrationally cruel rites of scapegoating to modern eyes, displayed a kind of rationality in the way they worked to regulate the
social body, to quell the internal violence compounded of the ‘dissensions, rivalries, jealousies and quarrels within the community'.[1171]
Medieval thought and behaviour everywhere registered the ambivalent nature of violence, but did so, it seems, without recourse to an encompassing definition of ‘violence' as a category of action and experience, and without the moral disapproval that shadows most modern discussions.
Defining categories for representing violent behaviour did find currency in the Middle Ages, for example in words like crudelitas, with its more circumscribed meaning of excessive and depraved violence. Such distinctions were no doubt as available to the artist representing a biblical slaughter as they were to the chronicler describing Mongol wartime atrocities, or the hagiographer detailing the tortures inflicted upon the martyr.[1172] Complexities such as these place the art historian's desire to isolate and analyse violence as ‘a subject of artistic speculations', as one practitioner put it, seriously into doubt.[1173] Like the historian's effort to trace a coherent yet encompassing discourse of violence across a range of medieval sources, it is doomed to anachronism. Art historians, like cultural historians, can no longer do without an appreciation of how fluid and shifting perceptions of violence and vengeance, cruelty and pain could be, and how dependent the effort to represent them in the visual and dramatic arts was on the contexts in which images were seen, the cultural practices that engaged them, the perspective of their audiences, and the rhetorical intention and moral directionality behind the representation.[1174]Part of the problem is the persistent assumption that the fundamentally imitative nature of European art lent itself to a kind of progressive refinement of art's capacity to capture and mediate violence, widening art's documentary potential. Another problem is the situation of the work of art within relations of power, wherein the work of art is reduced to technique of ideology or a fulcrum for the construction of hegemonic identities. Under the weight of the realism fallacy what suffers is the recognition of the work's rhetorical structure, its identity as the bearer of a distinctive kind of aesthetic force in the work of description, dramatisation, and persuasion it performs.
While under the weight of the second, instrumental fallacy, we risk missing what is often playful, ironic, comedic or therapeutic in works that a greying historicism has deemed in advance to be deadly serious. Here I explore one way these fallacies might be overcome, the how the dimensions of violent imagery that they eclipse can be recovered. My overarching emphasis is well summed up by Mary Carruthers in her recent defence of medieval aesthetic experience: ‘Medieval art is not only explained by considerations of semiology and representation, mimesis... but also by persuasion.... [it] seeks to effect in its audience... “a confident consent to believe”.'[1175] Persuasion in the sense of fostering conviction and belief is, however, only part of the story when it comes to violent imagery and the matrix of perception and affect built up around it. Also at stake is the quasimaterial capacity of visual and verbal signs (signa) to impact the internal senses, to ‘strike' the receptive intellect by virtue of their peculiar power to produce emotion, to ‘move' the soul of the beholder from one state to another. It is well to remember that the root of our word ‘violence', violentia in Latin, is not only the noun that found currency, in Old French for example, in words like violer, meaning the use of force in general (and rape in particular),[1176] but also the adjective describing a quality of mind we call ‘vehement' and ‘impetuous' (violentus in Latin) - a ‘passion' - as well as the trait of ‘having some quality so strongly as to produce a powerful effect'.[1177] Violence in the visual, verbal and dramatic arts, we might say, can be recognised principally by its effects, and known through the evidentia of those effects, both physical and psychological.Ripe for re-examination in these terms are images of combat and armed conflict, the most characteristic type being representations of battles, the subject of the first section of this chapter.
To the extent that medieval and early Renaissance military genre captures violence's most characteristic historical form, we will see that it refuses violence in a telling way: it very rarely rises to (or descends into) a ‘documentary' realism. Its attractive power trades, rather, on the percussive and penetrating force of representation itself - its figures, formulas, codes and cliches - in such a way that violence is displaced from the visible scene of bloody struggle to those invisible movements of the soul targeted by rhetorical persuasion. Images of warfare, physical attack and massacre (discussed in a subsequent section) offered the artist a unique opportunity to afect the imagination of the beholder in a space between narration and presentation. The idea, first heralded in ancient theories of oratory, was to produce an image that could, by virtue of the vividness of its description, make an impact in the mind and stick in memory - effects understood in terms of what the Aristotelian and Galenic tradition called accidentia animae, ‘things that happen to the soul’. This sympathetic transfer of violent effects from image to spectator is by no means unique to the battle piece. It extends to other domains of violent imagery before 1500 as well: visions of eschatological turbulence in the apocalyptic tradition, descriptions of hell’s tortures, even the charming fantasies of animal combat found in Romanesque art (discussed below). And it is clearly operative in the notoriously brutal devotional imagery of the later Middle Ages, an expansive topic I will save for my concluding section.
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