Martyrdom and the visual production of otherness in Europe, 1450-1650

KWIATKOWSKI, NICOLÁS

Rijeka

Conferencia; Fifteenth International Conference of Iconographic Studies, ?Iconography and Religious Otherness?; 2021

University of Rijeka, University of Split, University of Macerata

In Christian thought and imagination, martyrdom is a fundamental expression of religious belief. The corpus representing individual and collective martyrdom was essential for theology and tirelessly represented in Christian iconography. From the Trecento onwards, the Massacre of the Holy Innocents became a prototypical image for the depiction of victims? innocence and suffering, but also for the attribution of barbarity and cruelty to the perpetrators. One of the consequences of the Early Modern wars of religion and the conflictive relationships between Europeans and Turks was that biblical martyrdom, and in particular infant martyrdom, was used as a metaphor to represent contemporary killings and massacres. My paper will study representations of real massacres as scenes of martyrdom in Early Modern Europe, in the two centuries that go from the fall of Constantinople to the Thirty Years? War. First, I will briefly describe the iconography of martyrdom that emerged at the end of the Middle Ages and soon became topical. Next, I will study the use of this iconography to represent massacres in realistic, propagandistic, and artistic imagery. Through pictures coming from Catholic and Protestant artists, I will show the construction of identities based on the display of innocence and victimhood, and the emergence of a religious other (Muslim, Catholic and Protestant in each case) imagined as cruel and barbaric. Representations of massacres (real or legendary) are particularly well suited for a study of the shaping of identity and otherness. The violent destruction of people that are seen as incapable to defend themselves and not responsible for the harm that is inflicted upon them has, in general, been seen with outrage. This has been even more the case when the victims were perceived as part of a religious or ethnic community that included the author of the text or image representing the attack, opposed to that of the perpetrators. In these cases, the power of images has many times been used to increase the cohesion of a group, to separate it more clearly from that of a perceived other, to further define the characteristics of such otherness and, on occasion, to justify retaliation. My aim will be to provide examples of these cultural courses of action and to discuss the consequences, through the study of a few images produced in particularly conflictive religious contexts.