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A Thin Line Between Love and Hate Torture, Martyrdom, and the White Marble Statue

This essay explores the analogy between sculpture and torture as it appears in a significant number of sixteenth and seventeenth-century literary and visual sources, and in doing so intends to foreground an aspect of sculpture that is easily forgotten in the face of the often highly polished statues of the period: the fundamental violence of their production. To interpret the act of sculpture as a form of torture brings out the ambiguous relationship between sculptor and stone inherent to the sculpting process. The artist’s love for his creation, epitomized, for example, in the story of Pygmalion and Galatea, is balanced against the destructive urge he feels towards his base material, with the stone requiring partial demolition in order to be shaped. The sculptor’s own travails when facing the stone are transcended in his artistic triumph. The relevance of this analogy for our understanding of sculpture is tested by examining its appearance in texts and images on martyrdom. In this context, as sources would suggest, the different themes brought out by the analogy acquire topical meanings: perseverance in the face of adversity; transformation through violence; integrity or wholeness through destruction. It is argued that these meanings, activated by the analogy, are relevant for our understanding of those statues that display the moment of martyrdom or its result. Precisely because of this analogy between torture and sculpture, these statues draw attention not only to the act of sculpting but also to its medium: white marble. By highlighting the close and productive relationship between the creation and destruction involved in sculpting marble, it will be asserted here that these works of art therefore concern questions of idolatry and iconoclasm. In collecting and comparing an array of, in part, well-known primary sources drawn from a range of different fields, this essay aims to focus on a theme that often remains implicit in discussions of seventeenth-century marble sculpture and to relate it to particular statues of martyrdom. As such, this essay will touch upon a range of issues, from the general iconography of martyrdom, to visual representation of antique statues and the human body, to the figure of the sacred artist and the imitatio buonarroti. The limited scope of this paper does not allow it to do full justice to these issues, but by laying out these themes, it will hopefully contribute to their future exploration.