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

Mitchell B. Merback, The Thief, the Cross, and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 280 pp.

Merback's sophisticated and elegantly written book has at its core the observation, not original with him, that the depiction of the execution of two thieves alongside Christ in medieval paintings of the Crucifixion paralleled the contemporary practice of breaking the bodies of criminals on the wheel. From this observation arise both an exploration of how utterly different are medieval and modern understandings of pain and an argument for how visual culture should be understood. Merback shows us that medieval suffering was world-constituting and community-creating, not (in Elaine Scarry's term) world-destroying—that even the studiedly cruel execution of criminals could provide an opportunity for a good (i.e., penitential) death; hence the blood of thieves and murderers was spiritually and physically curative, their bodies sacraments, their screams access to heaven. He also provides a model of how to study images not as reflecting but as constituting culture. We come to see that people did not so much decipher pictures as discern their motifs visually and viscerally, that pain was experienced as depicted and depicted as experienced.

When Merback produced his study of late medieval Calvary, the modern question hovering behind it was the significance and consequences of our "unending capacity for prepackaged horror," our desire not only for the vengeance of capital punishment but also for its presence visually in our midst. Since September 11, 2001, our images have changed. But we may need more than ever to think about the implications of a visual culture of violence if we are to avoid both voyeurism and a shallow distancing that misunderstands images of vengeance and pain as mere illustrations.