Reading a “Titian”: Visual Methods and the Limits of Interpretation

ABSTRACT

Contemporary criminology is witnessing something of a “visual turn” and as researchers develop their methods of enquiry it is clear that interdisciplinary scholarship will play a key role in shaping inventive approaches in it. In this article, I discuss some of the different ways art historians have “read” images and the multiple connections they have forged to understand an artwork, before turning to how these approaches have been mobilized in a single example: Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas, which dates from the 1570s, and is among the most disturbing images in the entire history of art.

Acknowledgements

A version of this article was presented at the ‘Crime, Culture and Social Harm’ conference held at York St. John Univeristy, UK, in July 2017 and I am grateful to the audience for their comments and insights. I would also like to thank the editors for their helpful feedback and suggestions. This work was supported by a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship, MRF-2014-052.

Notes

¹ In his introduction to a ground breaking collection of essays on art by leading French thinkers (including Barthes, Baudrillard, Foucault, Kristeva and Serres) Bryson makes the point that so much anglo-american art history “reacts to the image by seeking documentation: that is where it does its reading–in documents” and he occasionally has the “sense that patronage studies, in particular, will read anything rather than read the painting” (1988:xvi, emphasis in original). The collection was explicitly designed to address this audience and highlighted the importance of reading a painting as a semiotic sign and opened up this world to the then contemporary currents in “critical theory”, which had become the umbrella term to cover feminism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, postcolonialism and poststructuralism. This movement transformed art history as an academic discipline and was foundational to the “new” art history that had begun to invade and challenge the tranquil domains of the visual arts. Scholars from various disciplines, most notably from literary studies and philosophy, have migrated to the field and revitalized art history, suggesting there is much to be gained from pursuing interdisciplinary strategies and crossing disciplinary borders.

² Wind was a student of Panofsky and was among a group of scholars who used to meet in Aby Warburg’s library in Hamburg in the years before Hitler came to power and was part of the great diaspora of Central Europeans, most of them Jewish, who sought refuge abroad with the advent of Nazism. Panofsky emigrated to the United States in 1933 and Wind played a key role in moving Warburg’s library to London and establishing the Warburg Institute, so that knowledge of the iconographical approach spread widely in the Anglophone world after the war. Indeed, Wind was to be the first professor of art history at Oxford (under the Faculty of Modern History) from 1955 until his retirement in 1967.

³ He does not appear in Ovid’s version of the Marsyas story, but was the judge in an earlier dispute between Apollo and Pan, and being notorious for his foolishness voted against Apollo, and so infuriated the god that he punished Midas by transforming his ears into those of an ass. This story is told by Ovid in Metamorphoses XI, 146–93, while the Marsyas story is in Metamorphoses VI, 382–400, and there are many further variants in the tradition of the myth.

⁴ Wind (1968:173) notes how the “musical contest between Apollo and Marsyas was therefore concerned with the relative powers of Dionysian darkness and Apollonian clarity; and if the contest ended with the flaying of Marsyas, it was because flaying was itself a Dionysian rite, a tragic ordeal of purification by which the ugliness of the outward man was thrown off and the beauty of his inward self revealed.” For some commentators Marsyas represents the pure, wild Dionysian spirit of art, which must be tamed by the Apollonian aspect of it, blending with the laws of harmonious proportion and found in the music of strings. On this reading the significant meaning of the painting is that it is an act of redemption, rather than a portrayal of gratuitous cruelty, a metaphor of transformation, and ultimately harmony (Matthews, 1993).

⁵ Melanie Hart (2007:277) has insisted that some of the figures in the painting represent different attitudes to suffering and creativity, noting the psychotic disposition of Apollo: the lack of empathy, the vengefulness and cool obsession–dissecting the body in such a way as to find out how a mere mortal can rival himself as a maker of beautiful music. In the novel The Silence of the Lambs the homicidal genius Hannibal ‘the Cannibal’ Lecter advises the FBI agent Clarice Starling to see the painting, in her efforts to track down a schizoid serial killer who flays the bodies of his victims. Dr Lecter advises: ‘“When you’re back in Washington, go to the National Gallery and look at Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas before they send it back to Czechoslovakia. Wonderful for details, Titian–look at helpful Pan, bringing the bucket of water”’ (Harris 1988/1990:143). I am grateful to Mark Bushell for pointing this out to me.

⁶ The tradition can be traced back to the work of émigré Marxist art historians such as Frederick Antal, Arnold Hauser and Meyer Schapiro who were marginalized in the Cold War but pioneered what is often termed the “social history of art”. It became influential in the 1970s, most notably in John Berger’s (1972:33) book and television series Ways of Seeing, which called for a radically new way of looking at the “entire art of the past” so that it now becomes a “political issue”. He insisted that works of art have become “holy relics”, surrounded by an “atmosphere of entirely bogus religiosity” (Berger 1972:21), and then explained how the ideological ties between painting and property are usually ignored by art experts and historians. The book and television series were intended to be polemical, and generated heated responses not only from traditional art historians and treasure houses, but the challenges were taken up and art history’s centre of gravity shifted and encouraged art historians to “break their own mould” (Rees and Borzello 1986:6).

⁷ He was first “dragged around the walls, with sacks of earth and stones on his back; next, tied onto a chair, he was hoisted to the yardarm of the Turkish flagship and exposed to the taunts of sailors. Finally, he was taken to the place of execution in the main square, tied naked to a column, and, literally, flayed alive…” (Freedberg, 1984, cited in Richard, 1986:3). It was reported that 350 Venetian soldiers were massacred and the grisly details of their demise will have shocked Venice, but within weeks the Venetian fleet defeated that of Turkey at the battle of Lepanto so that fear turned to joy and according to Freedberg (id.) the deeper meaning of the Marsyas legend for Titian was that “torment in the end laid truth bare, and as in the Christian legend, sacrifice begot redemption”.

⁸ In her study of the semiotics of rape in two versions of the Lucretia theme by Rembrandt (1664 and 1666), which was an originary myth in Roman culture, the story is told from Lucretia’s viewpoint (Bal, 1991). This was certainly not the case in Rembrandt’s principle source, in Livy, where the rape of the virtuous Lucretia by the son of the leading Tarquin dynasty leads to their overthrow and the foundation of the Roman republic. Lucretia, having been raped, kills herself to prove her chastity and the myth makes the “woman’s violated and dying body serve the purpose of masculine political power” (Pollock, 1999:158). In both Rembrandt’s portrayals, the story appears to be reversed, showing the consequences of the rape for Lucretia and her inability to tell it except through masculine terms.

⁹ Piers Beirne (2018) has attended to the meaning and effects of animal imagery in eighteenth century art in his efforts to develop a nonspeciesist criminology, while the exchange of letters between Katya Andreadakis and her father, John Berger, over the relationships between flesh and fur in Titian offer further startling insights into the painting (see Berger, 2015:67–80).

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Eamonn Carrabine

EAMONN CARRABINE is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex. His books include Crime in Modern Britain (co-authored, 2002); Power, Discourse and Resistance: A Genealogy of the Strangeways Prison Riot (2004); Crime, Culture and the Media (2008); and Crime and Social Theory (2017). He has published widely on media criminology, the sociology of punishment and cultural theory. The textbook he co-authors with colleagues from the University of Essex, Criminology: A Sociological Introduction, is now in its third edition. He currently holds a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship to research his project ‘The Iconography of Punishment: From Renaissance to Modernity’, which will be published as a book. Since 2015 he has been co-editing the journal Crime, Media, Culture with Michele Brown (University of Tennessee) and they have recently edited the Routledge International Handbook of Visual Criminology (2017). With Avi Brisman (Eastern Kentucky University) and Nigel South (University of Essex) he has also co-edited the Routledge Companion to Criminological Theory and Concepts (2017).