ABSTRACT
This classicistic aesthetics, aimed at ‘minimizing the pain of pain’, sharply contrasts not only with our contemporary preferences for a ‘maximum amount of trauma, violence and physical indignity’, but also
1 S. Sontag, The Volcano Lover. A Romance (New York: Doubleday, 1992), pp. 295-7. The relationship between pain and beauty in eighteenth-century aesthetic theory is discussed in S. Richter, Laocoon’s Body and the Aesthetics of Pain (Detroit: Wayne University Press, 1992). For a more comprehensive discussion of the representation of the tortured body, see E. Scarry, The Body in Pain (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). On pain in medieval and early modern culture, see K. Schreiner and N. Schnitzler, Gepeinigt, begehrt, vergessen. Symbolik und Sozialbezug des Körpers im späten Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit (Munich: Fink, 1992), esp. pp. 131-46. On horror and disgust in general, see J. Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur. Essai sur l’abjection (Paris: Seuil, 1980); N. Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the (New York: Routledge, 1990), and W. Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge,
with a major tendency in Neapolitan art of the preceding, seventeenth century: the depiction of full horror and, consequently, the presence of an aesthetics that focuses on ‘maximizing the pain of pain’. Had the author, in fact, chosen as hero of her novel not the English diplomat and collector of antiquities, but his almost equally famous predecessor Gaspar Roomer, the Flemish merchant and art collector who dominated much of Neapolitan cultural life in the first half of the seventeenth century, she would have come across quite a different artistic taste. In fact, a remarkable part of the huge Roomer collection of eleven hundred pictures consisted of paintings renowned for their crudely realistic depiction of torture and pain, like Jusepe de Ribera’s Apollo and Marsyas (see Fig. 4.1) or Rubens’ Feast of Herod.2 And Roomer’s fascination with naturalism and violence was not an isolated phenomenon. His business associate’s son and successor Ferdinand van den Eijnden continued this line in his own art collection, commissioning for example a series of pictures by Mattia Preti in which the martyrdom of the saints Peter, Paul and Bartholomew was depicted in a particularly dramatic kind of realism, clearly inspired by Ribera.
