Afterlives of the Saints by Colin Dickey

Author:Colin Dickey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Unbridled Books
Published: 2012-05-05T04:00:00+00:00

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.

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