The Appeal of Horror

The spectral luminescence of a man's face reverberates in the dark, hovering above the gold charger into which spirals of his hair pool (Fig. 1). To the left a small reed cross identifies John the Baptist, whose open mouth, aligned with the cut of his neck, evokes the connection between his voice and his death. The halo to the right echoes the illuminated rim on which drops of blood glisten, drips that retain the memory of an earlier moment when the severed head would have been suspended above the charger by the executioner. Housed in the Church of S. Bartolomeo in Gerola, in Sondrio, the painting is one of the five versions attributed to Francesco Cairo (1607–1665).1 Another example, in a private collection, is similarly dramatic with its evocation of moonlight, low vantage point, and startling naturalism that together activate a recursive process of looking that oscillates between scrutiny and repulsion (Fig. 2). Instead of a cross, a sword in the foreground recalls the brutality and mystical sacrifice – John's decapitation preceding the sacrifice of Christ – the combination, to use Julia Kristeva's words, of ‘horror and promise’.2

Art · Art history · Evocation · Literature · Musical · Sacrifice · Theology · Historical and Religious Studies of Rome · Philosophy · Renaissance and Early Modern Studies