Another day, another tragedy. Look over your shoulder in any direction and the world seems to be sobbing. The Middle East — sob. The climate — sob. Ukraine — sob. So people have once again been dreaming about the healing power of art.
It was something I noticed during Covid. People kept writing to say they had taken up drawing again, and that their kids were happily scrawling flowers and pictures of Mum on every scrap of empty paper. Art, they said gratefully, was bringing joy back into their lives.
And, of course, it can. But a combination of watching Conclave and the arrival of a new pope directed me recently to Rome, the home of so much great art from so many ages. What struck me there was how little of the great art on show can be described as joyous, and how much of it was packed with terror, darkness and fear.
Not far from the Colosseum, where the Romans fed Christians to the lions, is a small church called Santo Stefano al Monte Celio, in which you will find the highest concentration of gory deaths, amputations, slashings, squashings, stonings and boilings in art. If you’re keen on horrible passings, put Santo Stefano on the bucket list.
Interestingly, the church is round, hence its nickname of Santo Stefano Rotondo. In the 16th century its walls were covered from floor to ceiling with scenes of Christian martyrdom, a panorama of death, painted by Niccolo Circignani and Antonio Tempesta, consisting of 34 spectacularly gruesome frescoes. When I pushed my nose in the air in Rome, and sniffed for torture and horror, the smell led unstoppably to Santo Stefano Rotondo.
The titular saint here, St Stephen, is celebrated as the first Christian martyr. You see him near the entrance being stoned to death in Jerusalem by an angry Jewish mob. In art, if you see a saint with symbolic rocks stuck to his head and shoulders, that’s Stephen.
Elsewhere in the church, St Artemius is being crushed between two gigantic blocks of stone, so his eyes have popped out on their stalks. Behind him, St Pigmenio is being drowned while the bishops Pietro and Simeone are having their bodies cut up into handy chunks. It’s inventive stuff, an explosion of creative mortality yanked up from black spots deep within the Catholic psyche. I could not help noticing, however, that a special goriness was reserved for female martyrs.
You know their names. They have survived unchanged through the centuries and appear remarkably resistant to history. Nobody gets called Artemius or Pigmenio any more, but the world remains busy with Catherines, Lucys, Margarets, Barbaras, Cecilias, Agneses and Agathas.
All of them meet their deaths in ghastly ways on the walls of Santo Stefano. St Cecilia is being boiled to death. St Margaret’s naked body is being raked with a metal claw. St Lucy is having her eyes gouged out. St Agatha, the most tragic female martyr of all, is having her breasts hacked off.
Their crime, in most cases, is refusing to marry a pagan. Dad insists she weds a Roman. Daughter refuses as she’s a Christian. So Dad murders daughter. It’s a grotesquely masculinist progress and we can still see obscene examples of it being repeated in real life today.
What’s interesting, though, at least as far as art is concerned, is how much lateral thinking the female deaths triggered in the imaginations of artists. Few trails in art turn out to be as bleakly rewarding as the trail of the female martyr.
While the fresco painters at Santo Stefano Rotondo remain grimly explicit in their depictions, elsewhere in art the fates of the female victims have prompted a surreal inventiveness. Poor St Lucy, who is these days respected as the patron saint of the blind, is often shown holding up her displaced eyes to us like a pair of elegant opera glasses or displaying them on a plate like two boiled eggs.
St Cecilia, despite being cooked to death in some versions of her story, heard the song of Jesus in her ears when she was forced to marry a pagan, and has duly become the patron saint of music. St Catherine, whom the Romans tried to kill by driving a wooden wheel covered in metal spikes across her, has inspired fabulous depictions from Artemisia Gentileschi, Caravaggio, Raphael.
But the most inspirational of the female martyrs turned out to be Agatha: the one whose breasts were hacked off. Sometimes, as with St Lucy, the depictions were ludicrous. In the silliest examples, she holds up her severed breasts to us on a plate, like a pair of wobbly jellies. That, famously, is how Francisco de Zurbarán painted her.
However, to see how transformative her story can also be I recommend a trip to Italy’s second city of death, Naples, to the Capodimonte Museum, where you will find a portrayal of Agatha by Francesco Guarino, a thoroughly obscure baroque painter, who managed, just this once, to paint an emotional masterpiece.
Agatha, as depicted by Guarino (1611-51), is red-eyed and thoughtful. She wears an expression of investigative sadness that seems to implicate the viewer in her fate and feels curiously modern. The most cunning touch is the way Guarino has implied her torture, rather than described it, by showing her clutching a cloth to her chest, behind which we can see a spreading bloodstain. The horrors of the flesh and the horrors of the mind have been combined brilliantly.
It’s something to cling on to: awful times can inspire wonderful art.