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Revelations of the flesh and testimonies of desire : Sebatino del Piobo’s "Martyrdom of Saint Agatha"

University of British Columbia

In 1520 Sebastiano del Piombo completed the painting the Martyrdom of Saint Agatha for his patron Cardinal Ercole Rangone. Scholarly discussions of this image indicate that struggles to describe it are caught up in an imposed artificial division between the erotic and the sacred. However, as my analysis of the painting will make clear, there is no stable separation between the secular and the sacred in visual imagery of the sixteenth century. In the Martyrdom of Saint Agatha, erotic and spiritual interests cannot be separated, but are codependent within the multivalent possibilities articulated. My argument derives from the image itself, and in particular from an analysis of the artistic traditions employed and early sixteenth-century attitudes toward the body and erotic tropes. Two established visual modes are conflated in the painting: the tradition of the Venetian nude and the tradition of the monumental muscular female figure associated with Michelangelo. The salvific resonance of Christ's body, related to all saints' bodies, is also an important aspect of the painting. In the case of a female saint, a conflict is played out between the idea that holy women have "become male," and practices from female piety in which women associate their own corporeality with Christ's suffering flesh. The gender ambiguity of Saint Agatha - the result of the blurring of visual traditions, her connection to the body of Christ, and the "becoming male" theory, is also related to ideas about androgyny and hermaphroditism. Sebastiano del Piombo's Martyrdom of Saint Agatha problematizes gender, erotic, sacred, passive, and active categories. In the Renaissance, it offered a complex type of viewing pleasure, and its viewers participated in the formation of its potential meanings.

Thesis/Dissertation

application/pdf

2009-01-28

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/3966

Fine Arts

University of British Columbia

UBCV

DSpace