Afterlives of the Saints Read online

  The question is: What kind of gift is this? And what are we to make of such a thing? His body opened and displayed like no one else's— muscle, vein, and organ visible— Bartholomew offers us the gift of the body in a unique way and thereby presents us with the secret knowledge of the body's inner workings.

  In the fifteenth century, very little was known about the way the body worked. Dissections were done only a few times a year because the human body was doubly problematic, paradoxically both sacred and defiling. Religious and secular authorities would allow dissections only under extremely rare conditions and specifically ritualistic circumstances. The men who actually carried out dissections in that era were called sectors, and they were not doctors— they were barbers, laborers. Doctors and professors did not handle the corpse because in addition to being sacred, it was also taboo; the unburied body still carried with it a ritual pollution. So while it had a pedagogic value, the aristocratic doctors and lecturers weren't going to touch it; they left the actual dissection to lower-class tradesmen. Standing beside the sector would be the ostensor, a junior faculty member, and it was his job to narrate the dissection to the assembled students. Above them all, a senior faculty member, the lector, would read from an anatomy textbook in Latin. It was the ostensor's job to translate between the lector and the sector, to translate from the Latin into the vernacular, and to translate the corpus of learning into the corpse.

  It was a system designed to foster ignorance. Of all the various roles involved, that of the lector with his book was the most important— students were in class to learn what had been written down centuries ago, and the body itself merely illustrated what the text said. The text in question came from Galen, the third-century father of anatomy, who never dissected a human body himself. Instead, he developed his ideas through two different methods: He palpated and observed the outer workings of his patients, and then he dissected other animals that he imagined correlated well with humans, particularly apes and dogs. From these two data points, he did his best to infer how human anatomy functioned. But the interior of the body itself remained out of sight to Galen as well as to the countless doctors who took his ideas as gospel in the 1,300 years that followed.

  All this changed with Andreas Vesalius, who revolutionized modern anatomy. In 1537, he was given the chair of surgery and anatomy at the University of Padua, and though he had studied Galen, he opted not to take his work as unassailable truth. Instead, he dispensed with both the lector and the sector and performed the dissections himself, narrating what he saw to his pupils. With the help of a sympathetic judge who made more bodies available to him, Vesalius upended the Galenic regime of medicine and introduced a thoroughly new and completely empirical description of the human body. With the 1543 publication of his opus, De Humani Corporis Fabrica, Vesalius reinvented anatomy.

  Marco d'Agrate's striking sculpture of Bartholomew appeared in 1562, only twenty years after Vesalius's textbook. This hardly strikes me as a coincidence; there was a newfound interest in the skinless saint because of Vesalius, particularly because of a common image that appeared in De Humani Corporis Fabrica and a number of other textbooks that followed. Vesalius got rid of lector, ostensor, and sector in favor of one anatomist, and the artists who illustrated these medical texts took this process one step further, removing Vesalius altogether. What begins to appear is the corpse alone— removed from the anatomy theater, the corpse now offers itself. It is its own dissector.

  This is the ecorché, its name from the French verb "to flay." The skinned body of the ecorché appears in early editions of De Humani Corporis Fabrica and becomes increasingly common in anatomical textbooks throughout the Renaissance. It has moved off the operating table and into a fictional countryside, sometimes appearing amid classical ruins. Often it appears actively participating in its own mutilation, either holding the knife that cut its skin away or physically peeling back its skin with its hands or teeth.

  One inspiration for this image was the story of the satyr Marsyas, from Ovid's Metamorphoses, a story that would have been familiar to most Renaissance artists. Marsyas found a cursed set of pipes and learned to play them— arrogantly, he challenged Apollo to a musical contest. Apollo, of course, won and chose as his punishment to skin Marsyas alive:

  "Help!" Marsyas clamored. "Why are you stripping me from myself? Never again, I promise! Playing the pipe is not worth this!" But in spite of his cries his skin was torn of the whole surface of his body: it was all one raw wound. Blood flowed everywhere, his nerves were exposed, unprotected, his veins pulsed with no skin to cover them. It was possible to count his throbbing organs, and the chambers of his lungs, clearly visible within his breast.

  Ovid emphasizes the particularly visible aspect of this ghastly punishment— one can count organs and chambers that are "clearly visible." But what he describes is also fundamentally unrepresentable. He speaks of Marsyas being "all one raw wound," and a wound, like a void, does not exist unto itself. The ecorché is a sort of visual paradox, an explicitly visual form of that which cannot be

  F I G U R E 4 : Flayed Man Holding a Dagger and His Skin from Juan Valverde de Amusco's Antomia del Corp Humano (1560), artist unknown

  seen. So Marsyas became something of a popular artistic challenge— how does one paint that which has no shape, no container, no outline? We have gone from the body being invisible, to the very limits of what's possible of representation— the ecorché, standing relaxed, and by no means in any visible pain, no hint of scream or cry on the face of this mutilated body. If anatomists like Vesalius sought to reveal what had always been invisible, artists who now illustrated these textbooks sought to make visible what was logistically and visually impossible.

  Cadavers available for dissection were first and foremost the bodies of executed criminals. Since burial in consecrated ground was necessary for one's resurrection, certainly no one was going to donate her or his body to science. Dissection itself was a kind of second punishment, another way of condemning the criminal, and as with the case of Marsyas, flayed by a god, flaying acted as a particularly visible form of damnation. In England, the so-called Murder Act of 1752 attempted to stop a rise in violent crime by mandating that all executed criminals, after death, would either be strung up in gibbets or dissected in the medical schools. Without proper burial, these criminals had no chance of salvation. Execution took away your life; dissection took away your soul.

  In addition, these corpses were not just dismembered— they were flayed. Flaying, historians have suggested, was rather uncommon, but when it was used, it had a specific symbolic refer ence. The ecorché loses all identity; neither the skinned body nor the skin itself preserve anything of the image of the punished; flayed, the condemned's identity is ultimately obliterated, and the condemned ceases to be human. Flaying, according to one historian, was used "not merely a means of inflicting a cruel death on a criminal, but of marking abhorrence of breaches of the fundamental bond of human society."

  The fact is that the skin itself was often the very means of demarcating one's punishment. In Kafka's "In the Penal Colony," the execution device works by inscribing the crime of the condemned onto his skin over and over again until he dies— the skin being the ledger on which the machine indicates why this individual is being excised from humanity.

  The historical precedent for Kafka's idea can be found in the practice of anthropodermic bibliopegy, that is, binding books with human skin. Often this was done as a nonpunitive measure, but in early-nineteenth-century England, it became particularly popular as a means of marking the extreme status of the criminal. In 1827, a man named William Corder murdered his girlfriend in a barn (the so-called Red Barn Murder); caught and convicted, he was sentenced not only to death but to dissection at Cambridge University afterward. And after the dissection, one of the attending surgeons removed a portion of Corder's skin, tanned it, and used it as the cover of a book containing the court record of his trial. The body of William Burke, the famous murderer who sold h
is victims to medical schools, underwent a similar process. After his dissection, part of his skin was made into a wallet that was given to the doorkeeper of the dissection lab; another part was used to bind a book containing a record of Burke's crimes that was given to Sir Walter Scott.

  Flaying is the ultimate punishment, the one that removes you from human society, literally and symbolically, in a way perhaps no other torture can match. The ecorché is on the very outside limit of society and representation, well beyond the bounds of the human.

  But there is a difference between the corpse laid out on the table under Vesalius's inquisitive eyes and the ecorché who holds up his own skin to show us the interior; now the condemned is actively involved in this dissection. Having been killed, damned, and obliterated, the figure still offers itself to us. Why?

  Some have argued that it was extremely important that the cadavers be made to participate actively in their own mutilation— even though these were the bodies of criminals, there was still a great deal of anxiety on the part of the medical community about such a complete annihilation of a fellow human's soul. We should note that although these were executed criminals, they were not all murderers; the majority of cadavers dissected in sixteenth-century Italy had been executed for lesser crimes, including theft and sodomy. Such a harsh punishment for minor crimes may not have set well with everyone involved, so depicting the dissected bodies in a such a peaceful, even helpful, pose, as though they were giving their consent to the practice, helped alleviate these fears and legitimize dissection.

  So this is the gift of Bartholomew, the gift of visibility, a secret knowledge of the body's workings, even at the cost of his own annihilation.

  Intentionally or not, the images of the ecorché that appear in anatomy textbooks repeatedly evoke Bartholomew; specifically, they call to mind what remains a central image of Bartholomew, one found in Michelangelo's Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel.

  Michelangelo undertook this massive fresco, painted between

  1537 and 1541, just as Vesalius was beginning his revolution in nearby Padua. It was immediately controversial because Michelangelo had brought genitals into the space of the church, depicting them explicitly on many of the figures. Making visible that which should remain hidden is always going to catch the eye of the censor, but in addition, critics singled out his depiction of Bartholomew, who stands holding his flayed skin just to the lower right of Christ. To put something so horrific at the center of such a majestic painting, many felt, was beyond the pale. "It is necessarily crude and wanton," the censor Johannes Molanus wrote in 1570, "to depict Saint Bartholomew totally flayed like a monster of old." More important than this breach of decorum, though, was a central contradiction— Bartholomew does not appear to be holding his own skin. Don Miniato wrote to Vasari in 1545, " There are a thousand heresies here, and above all the beardless skin of Saint Bartholomew, while the skinned one has a long beard, which shows that the skin is not his."

  F I G U R E 5 : Detail from The Last Judgment ( 1537– 1541), the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo Buonarroti VATICAN MUSEUMS AND GALLERIES, VATICAN CITY, ITALY/THE BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY

  It wasn't until 1925 that this mystery was finally resolved when a physician named Francesco de Cava realized that Bartholomew is not holding his own skin— he's holding Michelangelo's. What we're looking at is a self-portrait, the artist as a flayed pelt of human skin. It is, in fact, the only known self-portrait of Michelangelo.

  Why did he place his only known likeness here, in this most gothic of places? Leo Steinberg points out that Michelangelo did not believe that everyone would be saved in the resurrection. As a result, he expressed a certain amount of anxiety about his own salvation. And so, Steinberg argues, this painting, for all its universal themes, hides a personal drama. Drawing a diagonal through the painting— what Steinberg calls the "line of fate"— connects God in the upper left corner to Satan in the lower right, and the line bisects, almost exactly, the face of Michelangelo in the skin Bartholomew is holding. Michelangelo would have known, Steinberg argues, the passage from the Book of Job: "I know that my Redeemer liveth, and in the last day I shall rise out of the earth. And I shall be clothed again with my skin, and in my flesh I shall see my God. This hope is laid up in my bosom." These lines were inscribed on Bertoldo di Giovanni's medal for a bishop in the Medici family, which Michelangelo would have been familiar with, a medal that also featured an abbreviated scene of The Last Judgment. The skin is something of a figure for the as yet unredeemed sinner, the remains of the mortal body that have not yet been reanimated by God's grace.

  In other words, Bartholomew holds not his own skin but that of Michelangelo, the painter who hangs midway between God and Satan, whose fate is not yet determined. The work of the apocalypse almost done, Bartholomew intercedes on behalf of the painter, offering up his as yet unredeemed skin to Jesus, plaintively asking the Savior to animate it once more with Michelangelo's soul.

  The Last Judgment, finished two years before Vesalius's textbook, would have been well known by many of the artists illustrating anatomical textbooks. In these textbooks, the ecorché appears serene, complicit in his mutilation. And this may be because of the anatomists' anxiety over what they were doing, an attempt to reassure them of the importance of dissection. But like Marsyas, the cadaver is cursed by God, and like Marsyas, the punishment may not fit the crime. And so, like Michelangelo, the cadaver is desperate for absolution. In holding its skin up for inspection, it echoes Bartholomew pleading on behalf of the painter, and in that echo we are once again reminded of the horrific acts of execution, dismemberment, and finally obliteration of the dissected corpse. At the limits of the human, it is Bartholomew, the flayed one, who speaks for the criminals and the artists, who offers up his own skin to save ours, who tries to bring these dead back into the fold.

  ·eight·

  The Inscrutable Look: Magdalen

  Life magazine, May 22, 1944, " Photo of the Week," by Ralph Crane: Her hair is perfectly styled, pinned up behind her with a huge flower. She wears a blazer, rests her chin on her left hand while her right hand holds a poised pen. In a perfectly proportioned composition, her head and right hand make two points of a triangle; the third, connected by the diagonal of her left arm, sits on the table in front of her: a human skull.

  Subtitled "Arizona war worker writes her Navy boyfriend a thank-you note for the Jap skull he sent her," the photograph seems to offer yet one more instance of man's inhumanity to man from a war notable for its unparalleled destruction and brutality. The underlying rhetoric of racism that determined World War II

  F I G U R E 6 : "Arizona war worker writes her Navy boyfriend a thank-you note for the Jap skull he sent her," Life magazine, May 22, 1944 RALPH CRANE/TIME & LIFE IMAGES/ GETTY IMAGES

  (on all sides) is well known, including the differing American attitudes toward the Japanese and the Germans. As one marine told John Hersey in 1943, "I wish we were fighting against Germans. They are humans like us. . . . But the Japs are animals." It is in this culture of pervasive racism and dehumanization that the problem of Japanese war trophies arises. As James Weingartner puts it, "If as a Marine Corps general noted, 'Killing a Japanese was like killing a rattlesnake,' then it might not seem inappropriate to detach something comparable to the reptile's skin or rattles for the pleasure of the victorious combatant and entertainment of his friends and relatives back home." The collection of Japanese war trophies— which included various body parts, including skulls— was, by all accounts, endemic and uncontrollable. Charles Lindbergh noted numerous such instances in the diaries of his travels to the Pacific theater: "It is the same everywhere I go," he wrote. The problem was so widespread that when Lindbergh returned to the States, he was asked by customs officers— almost as a matter of course— if he was carrying any "human bones" in his luggage. Crane's photo, appearing in one of the most popular magazines of the day, was only the most visible instance of a much deeper problem, one that was rooted in a long-standing prog
ram of propaganda that stretched back over a decade.

  But Crane's photo stands out in its composition, which evokes the tableau of the memento mori, particularly Georges de La Tour's Penitent Magdalen. De La Tour painted this subject at least four times, each painting composed slightly differently, but always the silent, contemplative woman gazing at a human skull.

  Mary Magdalen was a popular image in Renaissance art, and along with Jerome and Francis was most commonly depicted with a human skull. The common story at the time, that Magdalen had been a prostitute before meeting Christ, became a powerful narrative moment, as Magdalen is shown in de La Tour's paintings contemplating her mortal, earthly ways. As she holds the skull, she repents, turns her back on this life with its inevitable death in favor of an immortal life with Christ.

  Crane's echo of de La Tour says a great deal about our relationship with death. In the Renaissance memento mori tradition, the skull is that sudden and uncanny disruption, an alien presence that infects its surroundings with the taint of mortality. By nature anonymous, it is an abstract figure of death, not any particular individual's remains. The tradition of memento mori is self-reflexive: One is meant to meditate not on the death of the skull's owner but on one's own death— the skull before the viewer is always and only the viewer's skull.