ABSTRACT
Annibale Carracci's The Dead Christ represents the body after its removal from the cross, immediately before burial. The prisoner's punished body was the star feature in a regularly performed piece of urban theater, there being one plot with the same ending, though with numerous variations. Convention required that the prisoner's body be punished sequentially, as though following a strict logic as part of an obvious plan or protocol. Christ Bernini's body gains its identity, in other words, from its wounds and the blood dripping from them—and not from his visage Art's task, to put it succinctly, was to confront the body after its radical scientific separation from beauty, whether because of its occasional monstrousness or its having been cut apart on the dissection table. The cutting and probing goes a certain distance, but never surrenders the spectacle of dissection for the scientific knowledge that might be gained from minute, systematic examination.
