Afterlives of the Saints Read online

  Pornography, after all, changed the ways other images were seen. Formerly innocent and innocuous art now took on a sexual charge, the most extreme example being a court case from the 1630s in which six Venetian patricians were formally charged with attempting to copulate with a statue of Jesus Christ. The ready dissemination of pornography had this effect; it took formerly saintly images and made them obscene. Linda Williams uses the term pornotopia to describe the mise-en-scène of porn narratives in which all characters and most objects are automatically sexualized— a situation Renaissance Italy found itself in with the sudden explosion of print technology. The saints, and even Jesus Christ, became the sexy schoolgirls, sexy nurses, and sexy nuns of their day. During the Council of Trent in 1563, it was noted that, with regard to any future sacred artwork, "all lasciviousness should be avoided, so that images shall not be painted and adorned with a seductive charm, or the celebration of saints and the visitations of relics be perverted."

  Such a proclamation was forty years too late for Sebastiano, whose painting of Agatha was executed after the birth of print but before church authorities fully understood its under belly. With Sebastiano's painting, the question is not just what are we looking at, but how are we looking at it? Do we see it as an exalted representation of the passion of the saints and through Agatha's martyrdom meditate on our own frail existence? Or is this just an early version of torture porn?

  I wasn't sure what to make of this question for the longest time because I couldn't exactly say how I felt about Sebastiano's painting. I was moved by it, to be sure, but I was moved neither to piety nor to titillation. Finally I turned to an essay by Jill Burke, an art historian, offering a number of possible options for dealing with such a singular painting. Burke points out that most earlier representations of Agatha had shown her breasts already cut off; by showing the moment before the mutilation, Sebastiano is able to show her beauty as a whole. He also, against the protests of more prudish clergy, used statues of Venus as models for her, further equating her beauty with sexuality. So, exactly as they church might have feared, Sebastiano's painting seems to translate a moment of sublime suffering into something far more sexual.

  To top it off, there is this knife in the foreground, recalling the verb tagliare, "to cut," a common euphemism for sex, specifically for the deflowering of virgins. But Burke notes that the knife is facing toward us in an almost threatening manner. So even as we are being titillated by Agatha's beauty, the knife may be reminding us of the dangers of giving in to such lust— its position suggesting that it can come for us as easily as for Agatha. This was a painting gifted to a cardinal, Ercole Rangone, who had taken a vow of chastity, though at the time, the sexual escapades of the clergy were legendary and the Vatican was being ridiculed for this hypocrisy. So perhaps this painting is a cautionary tale aimed at a particular clergy member, urging him to reject the lasciviousness of Agatha's torturers.

  Failing that, at least Rangone could engage in a more " proper" lasciviousness, for the good cardinal was, in his time, legendary for his dalliances with his own sex. In one satiric poem of the time, the author writes that if he were elected judge in heaven, "I would have it that as many cocks as Rangone has had in his anus were held in front of him, and everyone could ask for his own mouthful!" Another verse in the same poem mentions a certain "Cavaglione's ass," "always a friend of service," that Rangone and others "frequently take in sodomy." Burke suggests that by painting such a blatantly erotic image for Rangone, Sebastiano may have been attempting to steer him away from the greater crime of sodomy; if he was going to screw around, at least he could find some ladies.

  But no sooner has Burke offered this reading of Sebastiano's painting than she points out the strangely masculine character of Agatha— her broad shoulders, small breasts, etc.—suggesting that perhaps the inverse is true; Rangone is in fact incarnated here as Agatha. Burke ends this list of possible readings by suggesting that none of them is "true"; rather, an image such as this is always going to be ambiguous.

  It is precisely this ambiguity that is bequeathed to us by this moment in which pornography emerged to flood and corrupt the visual lexicon. The once stable iconography of the church was opened up by a pornotopic gaze that sees sex in everything. And of course Agatha's torture, by its very nature, was particularly susceptible to this subversion. Breasts didn't really exist in Western art until precisely the moment when they became pornographic. The problem with representations of sexual violence is that even if we are asked to empathize with the victim, the painting can never fully guarantee that we will. You can make us look, but you can't tell us what to see. Here is the lesson of the saints, and of the images of the saints: that the lesson always gets away from us.

  Pornography, particularly in the Italian Renaissance, was a stalking horse for a rising autonomy of the illiterate, the poor, the dispossessed— those who previously had been invisible. Sebastiano finished his painting at precisely the time when the church was losing its authority over its own imagery, when its monopoly of interpretation was breaking down. Interpretation, particularly of visual images, suddenly belonged equally to the uneducated and the marginalized. And while this was true of all representation, torture was and remains particularly vulnerable to "bad" interpretations by those with uncontrollable urges.

  The passion of Agatha is perhaps really a struggle between high and low, between those in control and those excluded— the authorities and the pornographic viewer meet in this portrait of sexual violence, each struggling for the right to give voice to her silent screaming.

  ·ten·

  Unhidden Desires, Unquiet Secrets: Sebastian

  When it comes to the saints, the pornographic and the erotic are everywhere, and towering above them all, even more iconic than Agatha, is Sebastian. The image of Saint Sebastian comes naturally even to those who have never heard his name spoken. Painted countless times during the Renaissance, most notably by Guido Reni, he is impossibly beautiful: naked to the waist, hands bound above his head, his eyes placid but searching. But it is not his eyes that come to mind; it is his naked torso, pierced by a half-dozen arrows. The way Reni paints him, the arrows are fully in his body, no more than a few inches of the shafts protruding.

  A Roman captain of the Praetorian Guard under Diocletian,

  Sebastian had initially kept his Christian faith secret. But when two brothers named Mark and Marcellian were arrested for heresy, Sebastian could restrain himself no longer. After their parents tried to get the two brothers to renounce Christianity, Sebastian spoke up and not only strengthened their resolve but also converted their parents, Tranquillinus and Martia. Further, he converted the prefect Chromatius, who released the two brothers and his other captives. Sebastian went on to convert another prefect, Nicostratus, and his wife, Zoe. Zoe had been mute for six years, but upon her conversion by Sebastian she miraculously regained the power of speech. Unfortunately, due to his intercession, Mark and Marcellian were shortly killed, as were Chromatius; his only son, Tiburtius; and Nicostratus and Zoe. All were martyred.

  Sebastian's persuasive talent leaves behind a trail of corpses: His golden tongue sows death and reaps martyrdom when ever he speaks. When Diocletian finally learns that a Christian is among his beloved Praetorian Guard, he sentences the young captain to death by firing squad. According to one account of his story, the archers "shot at him until he was as full of arrows as a hedgehog."

  Among those struck by this story was Kimitake Hiraoka, who discovered a reproduction of one of Reni's paintings when he was twelve years old. By the time he wrote of his experience, he had taken the pen name Yukio Mishima, and his description of the experience in his

  F I G U R E 9 : Saint Sebastian (1615), Guido Reni © CHELTENHAM ART GALLERY & MUSEUMS, GLOUCESTERSHIRE, UK/THE BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY

  autobiographical coming-out novel, Confessions of a Mask, remains one of the great literary passages on masturbation:

  The instant I looked upon the picture, my entire being t
rembled with some pagan joy. My blood soared up; my loins swelled as though in wrath. The monstrous part of me that was on the point of bursting awaited my use of it with unprecedented ardor, upbraiding me for my ignorance, panting indignantly. My hands, completely unconsciously, began a motion they had never been taught. I felt a secret, radiant something rise swift-footed to the attack from inside me. Suddenly it burst forth, bringing with it a blinding in toxication.

  Despite publication of Confessions of a Mask, Mishima continued to maintain that he was straight. He eventually took a wife and fathered two children, keeping his homosexual identity somehow secret from his family and the public— though, as Confessions of a Mask suggests, he was dying to tell anyone who would listen. Whether Mishima was straight or not, his attraction to Sebastian marks that moment of collision between sexuality and death; the eroticism for Mishima is exactingly in the violence of the image: "The arrows," he writes, "have eaten into the tense, fragrant, youthful flesh and are about to consume his body from within with flames of supreme agony and ecstasy." It is a textbook moment of eroticism. According to Georges Bataille, a writer Mishima very much admired, eroticism is the assenting of life up to the point of death, which reopens "the abyss that death once revealed."

  But there is a problem. See Sebastian again, his body pierced by arrows, driven deep, puncturing liver, kidneys, lungs. Sebastian, despite these wounds, does not die. We think of this moment as his martyrdom, but Sebastian does not die by arrows. When the widow Irene comes to retrieve his body, she finds the maker of martyrs still alive.

  Sebastian is secretly nursed back to health by Irene— whose own martyrdom is coming soon. Everyone who touches and is touched by Sebastian is marked for death, and Irene, too, will soon join the catalog of wreckage he leaves behind.

  Convalescing, Sebastian continues his conversions. The power of his voice knows no bounds. But Sebastian can no longer stand being the one left alive while he sentences those around him to death. While he's staying at Irene's house, he gets word that the Emperor Diocletian is passing through the streets outside, and Sebastian goes to Irene's balcony and begins shouting at the emperor, calling him a murderer, a coward, a heretic. This is why he's been kept alive, why Irene rescues him: so he can heckle and insult the emperor. How must Sebastian have looked to his former boss, who had assumed him dead, and to his former comrades, who had shot him full of arrows? Miraculously resurrected, yet stupidly daring them to kill him once more. This is how he is captured by Roman soldiers a second time; when they storm Irene's house, he does not resist. He's been waiting for this moment— he's already had practice at martyrdom. This time, they beat him with clubs— savagely. They beat him until he is dead.

  I have no image of this to draw from. Unlike the arrows, the saint's being beaten to death was not a thing to be painted. If anything, I picture the scene in Scorsese's Casino, when Joe Pesci is taken to a cornfield and, along with his brother, stripped to his underwear and beaten by five men with aluminum baseball bats. The wet, flat slapping of the bats against Pesci's fat, the thud as he's thrown on his brother's body in the shallow grave, the dust coating the blood on his face, like flour on a greased pan, as they bury him alive. This is how Sebastian dies: It is not beautiful; it is not erotic. It is death, and it is brutal. They beat him, and then they throw his body in the sewers.

  But if this is his real martyrdom, why do we only see him impaled by arrows? The confusion dates to the tenth century, when the first cycle of frescoes to depict the life of Sebastian was painted in the church of Santa Maria in Pallara. The frescoes depict five scenes from his life— the archers attempting to kill him, his convalescence at Irene's house, the disposal of his body in the sewer, the transportation of his corpse to the catacombs, and the burial. Notably missing in all this is his actual martyrdom, and over the ensuing centuries that omission was repeated until people assumed that it was the arrows that had done Sebastian in.

  But there is another, more important reason for this misunderstanding: When Sebastian finally died, he was clothed, and it was his nudity that won him fame. Other than Christ, Sebastian was one of the few male nudes deemed an acceptable subject in the Renaissance and as such became a common image. Vasari relates that when Fra Bartolommeo was chided for not being able to paint nudes, "he did a nude St. Sebastian with very good flesh-coloring, of sweet aspect and great personal beauty, so that he won great praise among artists." Bartolommeo's Sebastian was so good, in fact, that while the painting was on exhibit in a convent chapel in San Marco, "the friars found out by the confessional that women had sinned in regarding it, owing to the realistic skill of Fra Bartolommeo."

  Mishima could have told you that it wasn't just the nuns you had to worry about. Oscar Wilde may have been the first to refer to Sebastian as the "many penetrated saint," but throughout the twentieth century, he increasingly became a gay icon. In 1913, sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld listed paintings of Saint Sebastian in the first tier of images that especially appeal to the homosexual, and in 1976, Derek Jarman removed any lingering doubt with his first feature film, Sebastianne, in which the homoeroticism of the saint is made explicit and which— at this writing— marks the only time an erect penis has ever been shown on the BBC. Sebastian is the patron saint of secrets hiding in plain sight, secrets that are invariably about the ecstatic, erotic aspect of death, the beauty of a youth impaled by arrows.

  But something else lingers after this unhidden secret, something that Yukio Mishima, for one, found out at the last. He had long dreamed of his own suicide, which finally came about on November 25, 1970 (not long after he'd staged a photograph of himself as Sebastian). After Mishima disemboweled himself, his former student and lover, Masakatsu Morita, stepped forward to decapitate him, completing the ritual of seppuku and the writer's beautiful, erotic death. Except that Morita, unskilled as a swordsman and overcome with emotion, was unable to swiftly and neatly behead his teacher— he hacked at the neck twice, succeeding only in making a grisly mess, before another of Mishima's students stepped forward to finally decapitate the writer.

  So if all you see of Sebastian when you close your eyes is his perfect, serene beauty, remember always that after his eroticized death comes this other, far uglier thing, this second death, brutal, with little eros or redemption. It, too, is hiding, also in plain sight.

  ·eleven·

  A Multitude of Demons and a Solitary Vice: Anthony

  In many ways, the saga of Anthony and his temptations stems from a short scene from the Gospels that reappears in Mark, Matthew, and Luke: When the rich man comes to Jesus to ask what he must do to inherit eternal life, Jesus replies, "Sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me." Anthony was among those who heard the story of the rich man and took it seriously, though then as now it was a difficult passage to make sense of, particularly in cultures that see wealth and commerce as perfectly compatible with piety. Jesus's comment is not just about a disdain for money and worldly goods; it's about withdrawal, a removal from exchange and commerce, a solitude and isolation. Likewise, Anthony has continued to be a difficult saint to make sense of, one who's intrigued and confounded artists and writers in the centuries since, a saint of multitudes and of madness.

  The main account of Anthony, a young nobleman from third-century Alexandria, comes from an early theologian named Athanasius who may have met him once but would later claim to have been a close disciple. Like any biographer, he aimed not at an objective record of facts but at a tightly constructed narrative with a pedagogical aim.

  As Athanasius tells it, Anthony makes the decision to give all his worldly possessions to charity— which includes dropping his sister off at a convent— and wanders out into the desert. He takes up residence in a tomb carved into the side of a mountain, and there he is tempted by the devil. The devil begins by reminding him of his "guardianship of his sister" and the "bonds of kinship," hoping to smash Anthony's spiritual resolve with visions
of the life he's abandoned. But these exhortations fall on deaf ears.

  The devil then turns to lust, relying on "the weapons in the navel of his belly" to engage the hermit, but visions of luxurious women and at least one young Nubian boy also fail to stir Anthony. So the devil turns to fear and sends a horde of demons to physically attack the monk. Athanasius relates how, "approaching him one night with a multitude of demons," the enemy "whipped him with such force that he lay on the earth, speechless from the tortures. He contended that the pains were so severe as to lead one to say that the blows could not have been delivered by humans, since they caused such agony." In what was to become a hallmark of the Anthony story, Athanasius describes how these demons appear as a menagerie of terrifying animals: The demons "were changed into the forms of beasts and reptiles. The place immediately was filled with the appearances of lions, bears, leopards, bulls, and serpents, asps, scorpions and wolves, and each of these moved in accordance with its form." When Jesus was tempted by the devil in the desert, it was just the two of them, but hordes of intermediaries attack Anthony.

  This conflict is not staged as an internal, psychological battle between faith and doubt: These events are external, visible to passersby. " Since he did not allow them to enter," Athanasius tells us,