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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 April 2023
Abstract
Chapter Two explores the relationship between touch and the sacred in Giovanni Lanfranco’s Saint Peter Healing Saint Agatha. The chapter rethinks the relationship between sight and touch and the implication it has in the economy of the painting and the beholder’s relationship with the figure of Saint Agatha. It argues for an understanding of touch as a new form of contact in separation. We are encouraged to contemplate the untouchable encountered in touching – and witness the desire to touch what can never be touched – the miracle of the divine working through matter, the miracle of transforming the figure of Saint Agatha into a distinct and sacred image. For the wound of the Saint Agatha marks the moment when the intense materiality of her body violently erupts within representational order to impose its own truth: the sacred made visible through martyrdom and sacrifice.
Keywords: Lanfranco, touch, sight, materiality, sacred, image
The ‘sacred’ was always a force, not to say a violence.
– Jean-Luc NancyThere. The smallest pause. And then, a slight withdrawal. The promise of a touch, not yet delivered, never accomplished; suspended – a moment of expectancy split between two desires: longing to be touched and wanting to touch. Saint Agatha is brought into the light: a body of pain and acceptance. Her head tilted to one side. Her naked breast revealing a sharp cut, with small drops of blood dribbling down the brittle white dress. The angel shows the way. Saint Peter moves slowly, his hand gently guided by the angel – such a strange presence, almost like a negative projection, his skull rendered against the white light, his vision impaired. He reaches for the opening of the wound, and yet, he does not touch it. He pauses. Two hands suspended in mid-air – a touch without contact; or perhaps, a touch in separation, at the limit. The painting stages the ellipse of touch; its limits and possibilities, its syncope; it invites us to touch the very limit of touch.
Giovanni Lanfranco’s Saint Peter Healing Saint Agatha (1613–1614) (Image 6) presents two forms of touch turned against each other: touching to see and touching to no longer see; touching the untouchable, the inaccessible, or the unapproachable.
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