This beautifully produced book constitutes a significant and welcome contribution to the growing literature on the body, violence, and pain in the past. It is decidedly a book of art history, where the illustrations form the backbone of the argument rather than a decoration. At the same time, both editors and contributors are clearly anchored in the historical contexts of the works they analyze, and their interpretations of art objects are clearly embedded and contextualized. The editors are well versed in the contemporary state of the research, and their imprint upon the finished volume is meaningful. This emerges from the network of carefully placed footnotes connecting the different articles, guiding the reader back to previous treatments of salient issues.
The book is divided into three parts. This structure, however, is not felicitous. Part 1 treats the performance of pain in four completely different contexts: The first article treats the flaying of Marsyas in the works of Titian and Ribera (Sapir). This is followed by a synthesis of research about animal trials and punitive justice in early modern Europe (Terry-Fritsch). The third article in this section is an outstanding contribution investigating the impact of art upon behavior, drawing on little-known Lamentation scenes for the death of Christ and connecting them with the culture of mourning in late medieval Italy (Graham). The final article is concerned with Flemish Catholic engravers who fled to Rome during the Counter-Reformation and created martyrial engravings (Noyes). Viewed as a whole, this section does not hang together very well.
In contrast, part 2 of the volume is a coherent collection of essays on Franciscan devotion. Again, the quality of the articles varies. Weller's article is an extraordinary and original study of Antonello da Messina's Ecce Homo paintings and their use in domestic devotion. Burdick's study takes the reader into the world of colonial Peru, analyzing the figure of Saint Francis in an indigenous painting of his stoning. Ortega's article, on the art of Franciscan eighteenth-century missionary martyrs in Mexico and its impact upon novice trainees to the mission, is strongly one-sided. There is no mention of the role of the Mexican Inquisition and the Franciscan Order in causing the Pueblo revolts. The missionaries and their sufferings at the hands of the so-called savages, as depicted in portraits at the College of Propaganda Fide, stand in a historical vacuum.
Part 3 is the most coherent and interesting part of the volume. All four articles are firmly centered on the expression of pain, physical and emotional, at Christ's death. They are also all concerned with the connection between word and art object. Melion's article analyzes a remarkable devotional object, a manuscript handbook with printed images pasted in. The strong connection between word and image comes to life in this article. The next article (Kilroy-Eubank) takes us back to Mexico and continues the same motif, this time examining the centrality in art and writing of blood mysticism in eighteenth-century convents. Burdette's study, also focused on Mexico, connects a miraculous statue of Christ with a contemporary manual of spiritual exercises. The final article (Hunt) connects the statues of the dead Christ in seventeenth-century Spain with anatomy and theology.
This volume, despite its uniqueness, does suffer from some flaws. The colonial context is original, but fails to fulfill the introduction's promise of providing an indigenous view. All the South American–centered articles are largely consonant with the European studies. Burdick's article alone attempts an answer, noting the importance of stones in Inca culture. None of these articles provide any picture of the syncretic Christianity of Andean cultures, as revealed by anthropological studies. Perhaps this is a result of the almost exclusive focus on pain in Christian devotion. No other aspect of pain studies is present in this volume, other than the use of anatomy in Hunt's article. Whether this is due to a dearth of sources or of interest remains unsaid.
This question is important. This volume maps a new territory, and the picture it draws is of total assimilation of New Spain into the European culture of pain. Is there no alternative picture?
