Slow Violence

In early seventeenth-century painting, unprecedented attention was given to the naturalistic depiction of the human body—something that did not go unnoticed by contemporaries: ‘at the present time’, wrote a French artist in 1635, ‘painters are obliged to write under the figures “these are painted”, lest the spectator should fancy that they are dead figures glued to the canvas’.1 Caravaggio is credited with ‘reviving’ the colour of painting, by restoring to it, in Giovan Pietro Bellori’s words, ‘the blood and colour of flesh’.2 And indeed, allusions to the evocative power of painted flesh recur again and again in seventeenth-century texts on art; in Malvasia’s Felsina pittrice, we read of ‘tender flesh ... so vivid that it has the flush and pulse of life’.3 At the same time, we can also detect a growing concern for the use of bold brushstrokes; particularly as a result of developing connoisseurship, painters are praised for their rapid, visible touch.4 For the seventeenth-century beholder, these two domains could easily overlap. When a biographer writes of the painter Lionello Spada that ‘he ground human flesh and used it for his colour’, or of Guercino that he coloured his figures with the ‘living and soft impasto of real flesh’, it seems that he is not only referring to the artist’s depiction of flesh but also his thick, impasto brushstrokes.5 Medium and subject start to blur: another author has Van Dyck speak of the ‘dough of flesh’—the pastosità of living flesh becomes that of viscous oil paint and vice versa.6

Art · Art history · Depiction · Flesh · Literature · Naturalism · Painting · Philosophy · Renaissance and Early Modern Studies