Executed in the 1470s, Antonello da Messina’s paintings of Ecce homo mark an anomaly regarding the Renaissance depiction of Christ. Few works before, and certainly none in the following century, would equal the power of Antonello’s vivacious realism in the human countenance of Jesus in living agony. No documents confirm patronage of these paintings. From the mid-duecento, however, early Franciscans were the first in Italy to demand pathos from depictions of Christ in extreme pain. However, with Giotto’s 1312 painted crucifix in Santa Maria Novella, the portrayal of Christ’s torment had begun a conversion from degradation to the aesthetic beauty of the 1500s. Sixteenth-century Italy, tempering the imago of Franciscan pathos, searched for a tender Messiah, not a pitiless reminder of the humiliation of Christ in Jerusalem. Michelangelo, for example, would remove all blood and wounds, saying; “My eyes, eager for beautiful things, and my soul, no less eager for salvation, have no other means by which it may ascend to heaven;” consequently, his 1539 drawing for Vittoria Colonna transformed Christ’s suffering into radiant victory. In contrast to the preponderance of sixteenth-century works, on the other hand, Antonello’s Ecce homo paintings provoke the verisimilitude of Rome’s brutality. I argue that these pictures of pathos represent a last vestige of radical Franciscan iconography, and that, in comparison, no pictures, until Caravaggio in the opening decade of the 1600s would depict the face of Christ in a commensurate acuity of realistic pain

Pain is primarily felt, not seen. Of the five senses, touch is the only one directly capable of experiencing pain. Painting’s capability to represent a painful experience is thus directly related to the pictorial “circumlocutions” by which the most visual of media cleverly addresses the beholder’s tactile sensibility.

It is perhaps not just a fortunate coincidence that in the early modern period, the most visual and the most haptic of painters, respectively Titian and Jusepe de Ribera, were both interested in the pictorial representation of pain. More specifically, both artists created excruciating depictions of what is possibly the most painful scene imaginable: flaying a person alive. Titian’s testamentary Flaying of Marsyas (c. 1575) and Ribera’s two versions of Apollo and Marsyas, created sixty years later, are sophisticated treatments of the visual appearance of physical suffering, of the tactile presence of paint and of the interrelation between texture, color and form in the depiction of painful bodies.

Touch and sight, however, are not the whole story: after all, Marsyas predicament is a direct consequent of a “hearing disorder”, responsible, in turn, for a more general loss of order and harmony. The musical contest to which the satyr foolishly challenged Apollo resulted, as is clear from Titian’s painting, in general chaos; while Ribera’s pagan martyr, deprived of the hope of redemption and confronted with Apollo’s vain, spectacular visuality, can only address our ears – although his silent scream on a painted canvas remains, of course, as desperately futile as are Ribera’s haptic surfaces from which concrete touch is forever excluded.

San Stefano Rotondo sits atop the Caelian Hill in Rome, its graceful late antique ambulatory filled with over thirty scenes of gruesome torture from the sixteenth century. The incongruity between tranquility and abjection occurs within the frescoes themselves: each image unapologetically depicts the gory deaths of early Christian martyrs, but with ordered layouts and an impassive didactic lettering system. In one balanced tripartite composition, for example, the female saint Martha stands in repose as her amputated hands hang from her neck, while her elegantly poised sons quietly endure metal hooks tearing into their flesh. The hilly landscape behind the stretched St. Marius is dotted with further horrors, including a heap of bloody corpses cursorily identified by the letter “D”.

These visual inconsistencies will be explored as a productive disjuncture between two competing post-Tridentine approaches to religious art, the emotive appeal of violence and the need for ordered didacticism. These dual functions will be explored specifically as tactics tailored to the uneducated pilgrims of Counter-Reformation Rome, a population underemphasized in previous interpretations of the S. Stefano Rotondo frescoes. The shocking violence of this cycle offers a way into early modern theories on the function of religious art. Yet when attention is shifted from the intent of the Jesuit patrons to popular reception, the depiction of torture in its most nauseating forms—the dismemberment, disembowelment, and boiling of Christian bodies—reveals its inherent instability, alluding to the broader problem of the gap between religious art in theory and in practice.