(Recommended music: “Miserere Mei Deus” by Allegri, performed by “The Choir of New College”)

 

Whatever human beings do, they do it first of all using skin, the largest organ in the human body. The skin is our protective camouflage that keeps the internal organs unexposed while acting as a mediator between the inside and the outside by being sensitive to the slightest change in the environment. When a baby is born the most information he or she receives is through touch. In the first few days the parent-newborn relationship is ‘fateful, in that it determines the child’s subsequent interaction with all future relationships’. Therefore skin is ‘capable of representing a wide spectrum of symbolic meanings’. Saint Augustine said: “The greatest evil is physical pain”. This essay will discuss the relationship between art and anatomy along scenes of martyrdom of a saint and a satyr and how blood found its use as a contemporary artistic medium. It also draws parallels between the Jusepe de Ribera's paintings and some real accounts of torture.

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Born in 1591 near Valencia, Ribera had settled in Naples as a teenager. Being originally Spanish he travelled to Rome where he studied classical sculpture and Renaissance art, and undoubtedly got influenced by the extent to which Caravaggio adopted chiaroscuro. Seen as a ‘hybrid figure, his art encompasses two artistic idioms, painterly and graphic’. The shocking images of pain have often been described as ‘grotesque in their realism’...