Beasts of Burden by Broglio Ron;

Author:Broglio, Ron;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2017-06-17T16:00:00+00:00

3

On Vulnerability

Studies from Life That Ought Not to Be Copied

In his 1806 encyclopedia of images Microcosm, William Henry Pyne illustrates daily tasks of rural peasant life. Workers draw water from a well, they bail hay, shoe horses, tend cattle, and watch over sheep. As A. E. Santaniello’s introduction explains, “The men and women depicted in Microcosm, those masses of English workers, led hard lives; what was hardest was that they were also silent and to most of their more fortunate compatriots, invisible. Microcosm was one of the first books to do for the common man the great and lasting service of making him visible.”1 The images are set out according to typical picturesque groupings and so provide professional and amateur artists with “studies from life” from which to take inspiration. Within the two-volume work, one page stands out as a unique set of images: “Slaughter-Houses” (image 3.1).2 Although illustrating the slaughter of cattle by poleax, the artist has cleverly hidden the deadly head of the ax in each illustration. We never see the blunt mallet head of the instrument.3 Such a lacuna haunts the moment of death. The textual commentary by Pyne’s companion Gray informs the reader that these images of slaughter “ought not to be copied” by the reader using Microcosm to learn how to make picturesque sketches, and so Gray furthers the lacunae where the instrument of death should be. Gray insists the animals should not be copied despite the observation that “slaughtering cattle is a necessary evil.”4

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