The Thief, the Cross, and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (review)

The Thief, the Cross, and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe. By Mitchell B. Merback. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999; 352 pp.; illustrations. $42.00 cloth.

The body in pain, the agonized body on display, the diseased body, the body in extremis, the body as "the body" are common themes in contemporary performance art, medicine, religion, and police practices. The body in extreme pain was also a key theme of medieval and renaissance European societies and art. Mitchell B. Merback's book on the spectacle of pain and punishment can be very helpful to today's artists and performance theorists. A book like Merback's signals a paradigm shift in how "the body" figures in art history and performance theory and practice. Less than a half-century ago, in Kenneth M. Clark's 1956 classic, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, "the body" was presented as graceful, static, or in repose--meant to be regarded in a detached manner, abstractly, as a sign of transhistorical beauty.

The 20th century (and maybe the 21st also) tells a very different story, which has been illustrated by photographs of bodies torn by war, emaciated in concentration camps, piled thousands upon thousands in mass graves. It wasn't until roughly the 1960s that these images began to be assimilated into art or performance as images or actions (Picasso's Guernica, 1937, is an exception proving the rule). Then in the 1980s, AIDS "arrived," with the horrors of blood and semen, its ugly, agonizing, and slow body-wasting death. Suddenly, the body was both victim and death-carrier. At about the same time, from Latin America, South America, and elsewhere, came accounts of torture used systematically and sexually. Taken together, all this contradicted what the viewer of "the nude" was supposed to get from regarding "the body." "The nude" was not meant to arouse, disgust, terrify, or warn.

Acting against "the nude" and in response to what "bodies" were actually experiencing, artists from the late 1950s onward began exploring what Rebecca Schneider calls "the explicit body" (1997), the extreme body, the body under attack, torture, or surgery. The term "nude" dropped from use, and although "the body" does not necessarily mean the naked body, it implies a kind of exposure that goes beyond nudity to opening the insides of the body: sphincters, juices, excretions. "The nude" was in repose, composed, and posed with an emphasis on surfaces and planes. "The body" is expressive by means of performances that emphasize the permeable boundary between the interior and the exterior. The list of "body artists" from the 1960s to the present is long, indicating a movement of significance and duration.

By surpassing conventional art history, Merback's book is a model of performance studies. He relates Crucifixion art to judicial and punishment practices, spectacle, execution oratory by the condemned, and a wide range of social performances of the late medieval period and early Renaissance. His undertaking is strikingly original in subject matter as well as methodology and range. He does not focus on Jesus, the center of so many Crucifixion scenes, but on the Two Thieves who flank Jesus--the "good" Thief, saved and destined for heaven, and the unrepentant Thief, condemned and hell-bound.

Merback carefully examines how artists depict exactly the ways in which these Thieves are hung on their crosses and how this display relates to what was done to their bodies prior to crucifixion. The bodies have been broken on the wheel, stabbed, twisted, or in other ways tormented. Merback knows painting, anatomy, and social history. He describes the torture processes. He wonders about what the painters saw, who they used as "models" for their depictions. He connects the paintings with how people were actually abused and executed. "What better model could be...