31 - Violence and the Force of Representation in European Art

Summary

Many of the canonical subjects of pre-modern art were tales of aggression, conflict, combat, and destructiveness; remembrances and forewarnings of disasters worldly and otherworldly; visions of wounding and dismemberment; parables of suffering, abjection, and pain. Yet medieval Christian thought and behaviour, which everywhere registered the ambivalent nature of violence, contemplated all these things in the absence of an encompassing definition of violence as a category of experience. Rather than strive anachronistically for an inclusive “iconography of violence” or map the correspondences between representations and realities, this contribution locates the significant of visual violence in its effects, in the rhetorical force of description, and in the unseen cognitive violences works of art could precipitate when they impressed the “sensitive soul” of the beholder. Beginning with a critique of the idea that violence comprises a coherent subject within European art, this chapter analyses images of warfare and the special challenge of the pre-modern battle piece; the sculpted imagery of violent struggle and predation in the famous Romanesque trumeau at Souillac's monastery church; ekphrastic and visual descriptions of the biblical Massacre of the Innocents; and the rhetorical elaboration of the Passion story's violence in the work of late medieval panel painters.