ABSTRACT
On the spiralling, circular walls of the church, gruesome visual spectacle is everywhere, and the discipline that offers some clues to understanding this cultural obsession with pain and suffering is art history. This chapter sets out some of the basic contours of how the discipline has developed in a Western context, and focuses on how the representation of violence cannot be easily separated from the violence of representation. The overall intention is to indicate some resources that might be used by criminologists as they seek to incorporate visual theories and methods in their research. The ideas of eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophers like G. W. F. Hegel and his near contemporary Immanuel Kant form the conceptual core of art history, especially over the question of whether aesthetic objects have an autonomous meaning that possesses a universal validity. Violence in its many forms has preoccupied Western artists, though the question of why this is so, is one of the great taboos in art history.
