9. System: Imagining Complexity

Braddock, Alan C.

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9. System: Imagining Complexity

Alan C. Braddock

Implication: An Ecocritical Dictionary for Art History

This chapter ponders the ecocritical significance of systems in relation to art history during a period long before Arthur G. Tansley (1871–1955) coined the term “ecosystem” in the journal Ecology in 1935...

Author

Alan C. Braddock

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00341.10

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23307

Chapter subject tags:EcocriticismEcology in artPlague in artCarracci, Lodovico, 1555-1619Painting, Baroque--ItalyCloaca Maxima

9. System: Imagining Complexity

system, n.
Etymology: . . . ancient Greek σύστημα whole composed of several parts or members, literary composition, organized body or association, group of men or animals, series of musical intervals, scale, in Hellenistic Greek also group of connected verses or periods.
I. An organized or connected group of things.
I. 2. The whole scheme of created things, the universe. Obsolete.
I. 3. a. A group or set of related or associated things perceived or thought of as a unity or complex whole.
I. 3. b. A set of persons working together as parts of an interconnecting network.
I. 3. c. (a) A collection of artificial objects organized for a particular purpose, as components of a mechanism, roads, architectural features, etc.
I. 3. d. A collection of natural objects, features, or phenomena considered as or forming a connected or complex whole.

ecosystem, n.
Biology.
A biological system composed of all the organisms found in a particular physical environment, interacting with it and with each other. Also in extended use: a complex system resembling this.
1935 A. G. Tansley in Ecology 16 306 The fundamental concept appropriate to the biome considered together with all the effective inorganic factors of its environment is the ecosystem, which is a particular category among the physical systems that make up the universe.

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This chapter ponders the ecocritical significance of systems in relation to art history during a period long before Arthur G. Tansley (1871–1955) coined the term “ecosystem” in the journal Ecology in 1935. Focusing on a seventeenth-century Italian painting and the various constellations of systemic or organized phenomena to which the work was connected, this discussion reveals once again the relevance of historical art to concepts often believed to have origins in modern environmental thought of the twentieth century.

In 1612 the Bolognese artist Ludovico Carracci (1555–1619) painted a large easel picture of an early Christian martyr, Saint Sebastian Thrown into the Cloaca Maxima (fig. 1). Commissioned by Cardinal Maffeo Barberini (1568–1644) for his family chapel at the Basilica of Sant’Andrea della Valle in Rome, the work was intended to mark an important site long associated with the saint, according to legend. For complex reasons explored here, however, Barberini withheld the picture from public view and kept it his family’s private collection, where it remained until the twentieth century. Today the J. Paul Getty Museum owns the picture. On a grand scale, it dramatically depicts ancient Roman soldiers disposing the saint’s corpse in an underground sewer, with ten human figures variously posed on a canvas more than seven feet wide. In order to begin unpacking the implications of this congested and chaotic composition, we need to know more about the basic story to which it refers and its historical context.1 On Ludovico Carracci’s Saint Sebastian Thrown into the Cloaca Maxima, see Davide Gasparotto, “St. Sebastian Thrown into the Cloaca Maxima,” in Caravaggio Bernini: Early Baroque in Rome (New York: Prestel in association with Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, and Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 2019), 189; Gail Feigenbaum, “Nature as Teacher and Subject: The Carracci Family of Painters,” in Captured Emotions: Baroque Painting in Bologna, 1575–1725 (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008), 18–19; Gail Feigenbaum, “Saint Sebastian Thrown into the Cloaca,” in Ludovico Carracci, ed. Andrea Emiliani (New York: Electa/Abbeville, 1994), 152–54; Renato Roli, “Saint Sebastian Thrown into the Cloaca Maxima,” in The Age of Correggio and the Carracci (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1986), 319–20; Charles Dempsey, “Saint Sebastian Thrown into the Cloaca Maxima,” in The Age of Caravaggio (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Electa Editrice, 1985), 124; Gail Feigenbaum, “Lodovico Carracci: A Study of His Later Career and a Catalogue of His Paintings” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1984), 429–33; and Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, Seventeenth-Century Barberini Documents and Inventories of Art (New York: New York University Press, 1975), I inv. 23.72; V. inv. 48–49, 410; VII inv. 55–47; VII inv. I6: 226. On the church and chapel, see Alba Costamagna, Daniele Ferrara, and Cecilia Grilli, Sant’Andrea della Valle (Milan: Skira, 2003).

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Description: Saint Sebastian Thrown into the Cloaca Maxima by Carracci, Lodovico

Fig. 1. Ludovico Carracci, Saint Sebastian Thrown into the Cloaca Maxima, 1612. Oil on canvas, 64 3/8 × 91 1/2 in. (163.5 × 232.4 cm). J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

According to church history and tradition, Sebastian served as an elite soldier in the Praetorian Guard under the Roman emperor Diocletian (244–311) during the third century of the Common Era. When Sebastian embraced Christianity and openly declared his faith, Diocletian ordered archers to take him into the middle of a field and execute him with arrows. Left for dead but still alive, Sebastian secretly escaped. Nursed back to health by a Christian woman, Irene, he returned to the imperial palace and once again confronted Diocletian. At this point, the emperor had Sebastian bludgeoned to death in the Palatine Stadium, known as the Hippodrome, and thrown into the Cloaca Maxima, a large and ancient subterranean drain that funneled water and waste from the Roman Forum into the Tiber River. By dumping Sebastian’s corpse in the sewer, the Romans hoped to sweep him under the rug, thereby preventing Christian followers from finding his remains and declaring him a martyr. Miraculously, Sebastian’s spirit then appeared in a dream of another Christian woman, Lucina, whom he directed to recover his corpse for proper burial in the catacombs outside Rome. According to legend, the sacred site of that ancient recovery lay beneath the foundations of the new basilica, Sant’Andrea della Valle, and specifically under the Barberini family chapel. I will have more to say about the history of this site below.2 For general information regarding the life of Saint Sebastian, see Louis Réau, Iconographie de l’art chrétien, vol. 3 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), 1190–99; Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan, vol. 1 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 97–101; and Peter and Linda Murray, The Oxford Dictionary of Christian Art and Architecture, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 553–54. The most detailed account of the saint’s life and afterlife appears in an authorized history of the church written by Cardinal Cesare Baronio during the late sixteenth century. See Cesare Baronio, Annales Ecclesiastici, vol. 2 (Antwerp: Ex Oficina Plantiniana, 1597), 673–75. On the Cloaca Maxima, see Elisabetta Bianchi, ed., La Cloaca Maxima e i sistemi fognari di Roma dall’antichità ad oggi (Rome: Palombi Editori, 2012); and John North Hopkins, “The ‘Sacred Sewer’: Tradition and Religion in the Cloaca Maxima,” in Rome, Pollution and Propriety: Dirt, Disease and Hygiene in the Eternal City from Antiquity to Modernity, ed. Mark Bradley with Kenneth Stow (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 81–102.

In visualizing Sebastian’s death and disposal at the hands of the Romans, Ludovico responded to Counter-Reformation decrees of the Catholic Church that required artists to use convincing naturalism and vivid emotional drama to appeal to the faithful and buttress papal authority against the threat of Protestantism. Challenging the pope’s legitimacy as God’s representative on earth, the Protestants attacked what they perceived to be the moral and physical corruption of Rome as the urban center of the Catholic Church. To complement their iconoclastic rejection of religious imagery, Protestants created a visual diatribe against Rome and the papacy as an empire of sin, greed, grandiosity, and moral-physical pollution. Evidence of this diatribe appears, for example, in numerous English engravings of the late 1500s, one of which represents Rome as a toxic tree of filth and evil (fig. 2). A cartouche inscription at the upper left of this image epitomizes the Protestant conflation of moral and environmental corruption, reading in part: “This poysonous tree planted in Rome doth rise, / Dungd with worlds welth, watered with Ignorance, / Drest with culture by Sathans attendaunce.”3 For discussion of Counter-Reformation image decrees, see John W. O’Malley, “Trent, Sacred Images, and Catholics’ Senses of the Sensuous,” in The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation Church, ed. Marcia B. Hall and Tracy E. Cooper (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 28–48; and Gabriele Paleotti, Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images [1582], trans. William McCuaig (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2012). On Protestant imagery and ideas about corruption in Rome, see Mark Knights, “Religion, Anti-Popery and Corruption,” in Popular Culture and Political Agency in Early Modern England and Ireland: Essays in Honour of John Walter, ed. Michael T. Braddick and Phil Withington (London: Boydell and Brewer, 2017), 181–201. Regarding “The Tree of Popery,” see Knights, 189; and Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 150–54.

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Description: The Tree of Papacy by Unknown

Fig. 2. Unknown, The Tree of Papacy, 1560–1600. Woodcut, 20 7/8 × 14 3/16 in. (53 × 36 cm). British Museum, London

My argument builds upon the work of Dominique Laporte, Timothy Morton, and other scholars in examining Ludovico’s painting as a work of complex implication, located at the nexus of multiple, overlapping systems in early modern Rome. Created during the Counter-Reformation, when the Catholic Church undertook extensive projects of public works and visual propaganda to combat Protestantism, the picture interpreted sacred history in light of emerging systems of dynamic infrastructure, Christian archaeology, and artistic patronage that were then altering Rome’s urban environment. In other words, the painting addressed an ancient early Christian subject in a timely way that spoke to intersecting contemporary urban realities as the church attempted to renovate the city and bolster the image of Catholicism. In this historical context, the problem of waste and its disposal became a particularly problematic overarching concern touching all these domains—the city, the relics of sacred bodies, and even the art of painting—producing a complex assemblage or cultural ecology, which Ludovico’s Saint Sebastian creatively engaged in a number of ways, notably through its striking setting in the sewer. Before I examine the picture and its evocation of early modern Rome, let me explain what I see as the theoretical stakes of interpreting the work in relation to historical systems.

The word “system,” rooted in the ancient Greek σύστημα (sýstima), meaning a whole composed of interrelated parts or members, has an extensive history of interdisciplinary use. For example, Aristotle referred to the “Cosmos” as “a system composed of heaven and earth and the elements contained within them,” but he also described the structure of epic poetry as a “system.” Aristotle’s legacy informed Western systems of all kinds, including the dominant Christian vision of nature as a hierarchical taxonomy, or Great Chain of Being, imagined during the medieval and early modern period as a sliding scale extending downward from God in Heaven through ranked earthly echelons to Hell (see chapter 7). This particular system—and countless versions of it—served to naturalize and sanctify the authority of various terrestrial and spiritual authorities for centuries. The early modern period in Europe witnessed the development of numerous additional systems for explaining and organizing natural phenomena, from the laws of gravitation and motion articulated by Isaac Newton (1643–1727) to the botanical and zoological taxonomies of Carl Linnaeus, among others.4 Aristotle, On the Cosmos, Loeb Classical Library 400, trans. E. S. Forster and D. J. Furley (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955), 346–47; Aristotle, Poetics, Loeb Classical Library 199, trans. Stephen Halliwell (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 92–93. On early modern systems, see Julie Candler Hayes, Reading the French Enlightenment: System and Subversion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Recent scholarship on systems has tended to ignore most of these earlier precedents, preferring to see the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as marking a paradigmatic break from classical epistemology toward an entirely new, integrated vision of unprecedented complexity in systems today. Since the late 1930s, a self-conscious discourse about systems theory has gained wide currency amid rapid changes in technology, social organization, and the sciences, including sciences pertaining to ecology. It was during this period that the British biologist Tansley invented the term “ecosystem” to describe material and chemical exchanges between organisms and their environment, including not only other organisms but also minerals, gases, and energy.5 On the emergence of “ecosystem,” see Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 302, 307–11, 364–71, 373, 389–98; and A. J. Willis, “The Ecosystem: An Evolving Concept Viewed Historically,” Functional Ecology 11, no. 2 (1997): 268–71.

Many writers discussed systems theory during the middle decades of the twentieth century, but a key spokesperson was the biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972). His book General System Theory (1968), based on essays he had written since the 1930s, framed broad concepts and parameters while also asserting the originality of systems theory and the new historical conditions to which it responded. The following quotations of two long but important framing passages in Bertalanffy’s text help to set up my argument, in which I question his representation of history and the prevailing view promoted by him that systems attained complexity only in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the preface to General System Theory, Bertalanffy stated:

Entities of an essentially new sort are entering the sphere of scientific thought. Classical science in its diverse disciplines, be it chemistry, biology, psychology or the social sciences, tried to isolate the elements of the observed universe—chemical compounds and enzymes, cells, elementary sensations, freely competing individuals, what not—expecting that, by putting them together again, conceptually or experimentally, the whole or system—cell, mind, society—would result and be intelligible. Now we have learned that for an understanding not only the elements but their interrelations as well are required. . . . [There] exist models, principles, and laws that apply to generalized systems or their subclasses, irrespective of their particular kind. . . . It seems legitimate to ask for a theory, not of systems of a more or less special kind, but of universal principles applying to systems in general. . . . In this way we postulate a new discipline called General System Theory. Its subject matter is the formulation and derivation of those principles which are valid for systems in general.6 Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications, rev. ed. (1968; repr. New York: George Braziller, 1988), xix, 37.

Along with those universalizing goals, Bertalanffy articulated some far-reaching historical assertions to underscore his idea of a qualitative, or paradigmatic, difference between past and present and the need for a new epistemological regime in order to gain control of today’s complexity:

Modern technology and society have become so complex that traditional ways and means are not sufficient any more but approaches of a holistic or systems, and generalist or inter-disciplinary nature become necessary. This is true in many ways. Systems of many levels ask for scientific control: ecosystems the disturbance of which results in pressing problems like pollution; formal organizations like a bureaucracy, educational institution or army; the grave problems appearing in socio-economic systems, in international relations, politics and deterrence. . . . Technology has been led to think not in terms of single machines but in those of “systems.” A steam engine, automobile, or radio receiver was within the competence of the engineer trained in the respective specialty. But when it comes to ballistic missiles or space vehicles, they have to be assembled from components originating in heterogeneous technology, mechanical, electronic, chemical, etc.; relations of man and machine come into play; and innumerable financial, economic, social and political problems are thrown into the bargain. It is a change in basic categories of thought. . . . This implies a basic re-orientation in scientific thinking.7 Bertalanffy, xx, 3, 4, 5.

Despite his laudable support for interdisciplinary perspectives and relational approaches to solving major problems in ecology, war, and social organization, Bertalanffy’s emphatic assertion about the “essentially new” nature of modern systems producing “a change in basic categories of thought” invites critical scrutiny.

The need for such scrutiny becomes especially evident in Bertalanffy’s caricature of the “steam engine, automobile, or radio receiver” as simple devices supposedly “within the competence” of a single engineer and therefore ostensibly different—in an essential, qualitative sense—from the “heterogeneous” nature of “ballistic missiles or space vehicles.” To be sure, the steam engine and automobile are less complex than these vehicles of space travel and mass destruction, but to deny the former any complexity as heterogeneous systems relative to their own contexts and relations of production does considerable violence to history. We only need to remember that the steam engine designed by James Watt (1736–1819) required not only iron cylinders, pistons, and condensers but also unprecedented amounts of fossil fuel in the form of coal extracted and delivered by thousands of laborers to power it; or that the production of automobiles presupposed, among many other things, the importation of rubber from Brazilian and East Asian rainforest plantations to make tires; or that Henry Ford (1863–1947) adapted the slaughterhouse animal disassembly system in reverse when devising his mass-production assembly line. Such facts help us begin to glimpse some of the complexity and heterogeneity of historical systems that Bertalanffy’s cursory assessment elides. If ecocriticism and environmental history have taught us anything in the past few decades, it is that even seemingly simple artifacts and entities can embody complex global systems, networks, and commodity chains, whether we are talking about Spanish colonial pearl necklaces and silver coins, New England furniture made of mahogany sourced in the Caribbean with enslaved labor, European hats made of American beaver pelts, or West African textiles produced in the Netherlands with inspiration from traditional kente weaving and Indonesian batik.8 Regarding the steam engine, see Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016). For historical information about automobile tires and global rubber extraction, see Michitake Aso, Rubber and the Making of Vietnam: An Ecological History, 1897–1975 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018); Stephen L. Nugent, The Rise and Fall of the Amazon Rubber Industry: An Historical Anthropology (New York: Routledge, 2017); Andrew Loman, “Rubber,” in Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment, ed. Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, and Patricia Yaeger (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 296–99; and Warren Dean, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber: A Study in Environmental History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). On Henry Ford’s adaptation of the “disassembly line” system of the Swift Meatpacking Company, see Nicole Shukin, Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 87–130; and James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 299. See also Frances Backhouse, Once They Were Hats: In Search of the Mighty Beaver (Toronto: ECW, 2015); Molly A. Warsh, American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire, 1492–1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018); Jennifer L. Anderson, Mahogany: The Cost of Luxury in Early America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012); Doran H. Ross, Raymond Aaron Silverman, and Agbenyega Adedze, Wrapped in Pride: Ghanaian Kente and African American Identity (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum, 1999); Robb Young, “Africa’s Fabric Is Dutch,” New York Times, November 14, 2012; and Sarah Archer, “How Dutch Wax Fabrics Became a Mainstay of African Fashion,” Hyperallergic, November 3, 2016.

My objection here to Bertalanffy specifically has to do with his reductive vision of history, but it is worth pointing out that much of his analysis provoked withering critical feedback already in the 1970s, when numerous scholars questioned the basic assumptions and utility of systems theory as well as its propensity for totalizing generalizations. For example, sociologist Ida Hoos challenged what she called the “tautological nature of systems analysis,” saying that it “proceeds from (a) certain assumptions and (b) on certain premises. It defines a universe which allows or disallows certain factors or data according to their ‘fit,’ and thus produces, with disingenuous certainty, justification for (a) and (b).” In the words of biologist and mathematician David Berlinski, “There is in systems analysis an inexpungible craving for generality. . . . So much of systems analysis is mathematically meretricious.” According to sociologist Robert Lilienfeld, “[Systems theory] tends towards a doctrine of increasing unification and centralization of social functions, with organizations reified and claiming a monopoly of the processes of thought, will, and action, and with human individuals reduced to the role of ‘cells’ in the organism with their functions and sphere of action delimited from outside and from above.” As a result, Lilienfeld said, “Systems theory appears to be the ‘natural’ ideology of bureaucratic planners and centralizers.” And for philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, “Systems theory and the kind of legitimation it proposes have no scientific basis whatsoever; science itself does not function according to this theory’s paradigm of the system, and contemporary science excludes the possibility of using such a paradigm to describe society.”9 Ida R. Hoos, Systems Analysis in Public Policy: A Critique [1972], rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), xv; David Berlinski, On Systems Analysis: An Essay concerning the Limitations of Some Mathematical Methods in the Social, Political, and Biological Science (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1976); Robert Lilienfeld, The Rise of Systems Theory: An Ideological Analysis (New York: Wiley, 1978), 263; Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 61.

Such critiques have not halted the allure of systems theory or prevented it from spawning artistic and art historical trends that continue to embrace Bertalanffy’s breezy myth of originality and historical exceptionalism. For example, in an Artforum essay on “Systems Aesthetics” (1968), art critic Jack Burnham declared triumphantly, “We are now in transition from an object-oriented to a systems-oriented culture,” where “change emanates, not from things, but from the way things are done.” Fifty years later, in the introduction to a Whitechapel Gallery anthology on systems and art since the 1960s, Edward Shanken basically reiterated Bertalanffy’s position by saying, “Cybernetics and systems theory fundamentally challenged conventional approaches to the production of knowledge, provoking a paradigm shift that rippled throughout all academic disciplines.”10 Jack Burnham, “Systems Aesthetics,” Artforum 7, no. 1 (1968): 31; Edward A. Shanken, “Introduction: Systems Thinking, Systems Art,” in Systems (London: Whitechapel Gallery in association with MIT Press, 2015), 14.

Evincing a similar will to power, Niklas Luhmann’s Art as a Social System and Francis Halsell’s Systems of Art ramble on, page after page, without illustrating or even mentioning examples of specific works of art, as if their theoretical propositions required no evidence or demonstration. While ostensibly resisting the strawman silos of epistemological specialization, such texts construct another kind of specialization based on unproven insider assumptions and theoretical abstractions—a recondite world of generalized relationships unsullied by material particularities and therefore inaccessible to empirical observation or testing. The tendency of systems theory toward universalizing and self-congratulatory historical exceptionalism should make us pause, not least for the way in which its proponents also embrace a familiar, binary narrative of modern progress versus classical stasis. Reading the progressivist narrative of systems theory, we might be led to believe that past societies had not devised complex systems of their own—systems worthy of (eco)critical historical inquiry—but this is simply false.11 Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System, trans. Eva M. Knodt (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000); Francis Halsall, Systems of Art: Art, History and Systems Theory (New York: Peter Lang, 2008).

I have decided to approach historical systems historically by attending to specific examples in context, as well as to how one particular work of art creatively engaged them, without resorting to the abstractions of systems theory. My approach relates more closely to that of recent historians who have productively examined early modern systems of roads and highways, military command structures, maritime economics, news and intelligence networks, food distribution, gender codes in theater, and literature in connection with technologies of communication and transmission, such as postal systems. I align my work in ecocritical art history with these scholars because they attend to the functional aspects of historical systems as well as their ruptures, failures, and contradictions. Unlike systems theory, which views art as constituting an abstract realm of autonomous closure, ecocriticism revels in the material and historical specificity of creative works as well as their interrelationships with other phenomena—both within the art world and beyond.12 Bernard Siegert, Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System, trans. Kevin Repp (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999); Russel West-Pavlov, Bodies and Their Spaces: System, Crisis and Transformation in Early Modern Theatre (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006); Joad Raymond, ed., News Networks in Seventeenth-Century Britain and Europe (New York: Routledge, 2007); Jacob Soll, The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s Secret State Intelligence System (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009); Susan E. Alcock, John Bodel, and Richard J. A. Talbert, eds., Highways, Byways, and Road Systems in the Pre-Modern World (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012); Elina Gugliuzzo, Economic and Social Systems in the Early Modern Age Seaports: Malta, Messina, Barcelona, and Ottoman Maritime Policy (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 2015); Stewart Stansfield, Early Modern Systems of Command: Queen Anne’s Generals, Staff Officers, and the Direction of Allied Warfare in the Low Countries and Germany, 1702–1711 (Solihull, U.K.: Helion, 2015); Luca Clerici, ed., Italian Victualling Systems in the Early Modern Age, 16th to 18th Century (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

PICTURE AS RUPTURE

Ludovico’s Saint Sebastian registers a significant rupture in the European iconographic system of Christian martyrdom through its unusual treatment of subject matter—a rupture symptomatic of the larger transformations then reshaping early modern Rome, as we will see. Since the late medieval period, artists typically represented Sebastian shot with arrows against either a tree or a column—an iconographic formula that emphasized the saint’s Christlike sacrifice and spiritual power as an intercessor against plague—his arrow wounds, akin to stigmata, conflated with pustules of disease (fig. 3). Ludovico himself had participated in this enduring visual tradition earlier in his career, as seen in a painting from 1599 showing Sebastian bound and punctured but heroically defiant (fig. 4).13 On artistic iconography of Saint Sebastian in the centuries leading up to Ludovico’s painting of 1612, see Sheila Barker, “The Making of a Plague Saint: Saint Sebastian’s Imagery and Cult before the Counter-Reformation,” in Piety and Plague: From Byzantium to the Baroque, ed. Franco Mormando and Thomas Worcester (Kirksville, Mo.: Truman State University Press, 2007), 90–131; Louise Marshall, “Reading the Body of a Plague Saint: Narrative Altarpieces and Devotional Images of St. Sebastian in Renaissance Art,” in Reading Texts and Images: Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Art and Patronage in Honour of Margaret M. Manion, ed. Bernard J. Muir (Exeter, U.K.: University of Exeter Press, 2002), 237–72; and Réau, Iconographie de l’art chrétien,1190–99. See also Vittorio Sgarbi, San Sebastiano: Bellezza e integrità nell’arte tra Quattrocento e Seicento (Milan: Skira, 2014).

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Description: Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian by Giovanni del Biondo

Fig. 3. Giovanni del Biondo, Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, ca. 1370. Tempera on wood panel, 88 3/16 × 35 in. (224 × 89 cm). Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Florence

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Description: Saint Sebastian Tied to the Tree by Carracci, Ludovico

Fig. 4. Ludovico Carracci, Saint Sebastian Tied to the Tree, ca. 1599. Oil on canvas, 61 5/8 × 44 11/16 in. (156.5 × 113.5 cm). Doria Pamphilj, Rome

Ludovico’s picture of 1612 for the Barberini Chapel at Sant’Andrea della Valle, however, departed dramatically from the tradition by highlighting an episode in Sebastian’s story rarely addressed in art and never so bluntly: the disposal of his corpse into a Roman sewer (see fig. 1). In Ludovico’s composition, we see the muscular, idealized martyr at the center of an eerie subterranean scene, posed horizontally as swarthy centurions and their assistants unfurl his body from a bloody white sheet on a crumbling stone ledge just above the drain. A moment later, Sebastian’s mortal coil will tumble down into the filth of the sewer, besmirching his haloed head and pearly physique. Ludovico chose not to represent the murky effluent of the sewer explicitly, but we infer its presence from the dark shadows at the bottom of the composition. One centurion at left even appears to stand directly in the muck, confirming his moral depravity, whereas Sebastian’s imminent immersion reads as poignant and tragic. The beholder implicitly stands in the sewer as well, facing the action. The abundance of cropped, overlapping figures in a variety of twisting poses, dimly painted on a dark brown ground, creates a general impression of chaos and confusion. Ludovico seems to have appropriated aspects of the Protestant discourse of filth and corruption in Rome, deliberately in order to counteract it. Arousing the faithful in allegiance to Catholicism, Ludovico here dramatized an egregious act of impiety, in which pagan Romans treated the body of a Christian saint like garbage or excrement.14 For other rare depictions of the martyred Saint Sebastian disposed in a sewer, see Josse Lieferinxe, The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, ca. 1497, oil on panel, Philadelphia Museum of Art; and Master W. B. (Wolfgang Beurer?), The Corpse of Saint Sebastian Thrown into the Sewer, ca. 1490, oil on panel, Dommuseum, Mainz, https://www.flickr.com/photos/hen-magonza/4521763370/; https://web.archive.org/web/20120412232442/http://www.dommuseum-mainz.de/01_seiten/03_dommuseum/031_sebastiansaltar.html. I thank Renzo Baldasso for informing me about the latter work. On impiety, see Dempsey, “Saint Sebastian Thrown into the Cloaca Maxima,” in The Age of Caravaggio, 124. Dempsey also suggests a compositional and thematic connection to the character of Palinurus from Virgil’s Aeneid, based on a comment by the biographer and collector Carlo Cesare Malvasia (1616–1693), who referred to a drawing he owned by Ludovico representing that subject “Which he made as a Saint Sebastian.” Palinurus, the helmsman of Aeneas, fell asleep, tumbled overboard, and, when he tried to come ashore, was murdered by the Lucanians, who then discarded his body in the water. These narrative details, along with Palinurus’s later appearance in a vision requesting proper burial, may have provided Ludovico with “a classic exemplum of impiety,” according to Dempsey.

Underscoring the sense of impiety is the symbolic presence of a scorpion, lurking in the shadows at the lower right on a piece of broken masonry (fig. 5). In 2018, the art historian Gail Feigenbaum noticed and briefly mentioned this detail in the painting for the first time, but its significance awaits a full explanation. For centuries in Europe, scorpions had functioned as dangerous figures of treachery to be crushed by Christianity, as indicated in the Gospel of Luke 10:19, in which Christ told his disciples, “I give unto you the power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy.” Revelation 9:5 compares the torment of the damned to “the torment of a scorpion, when it striketh a man.” Dante Alighieri (ca. 1265–1321), in the Inferno, represents the fraudulent monster, Geryon, as a savage beast with stinging tail like a scorpion (in guisa di scorpion) who “pollutes the whole world” (colei che tutto il mondo appuzza).15 Dante Alighieri, The Inferno of Dante Alighieri, trans. Israel Gollancz (London: J. M. Dent, Aldine House, 1904), 17.3, 27, pages 180, 182. In a pamphlet titled Of Reformation (1641), John Milton (1608–1672) prays that the enemies of Christianity will not “bring about their damned designes that stand now at the entrance of the bottomlesse pit expecting the Watch-word to open and let out those dreadfull Locusts and Scorpions, to re-involve us in that pitchy Cloud of infernall darknes, where we shall never more see the Sunne of thy Truth againe.”16 John Milton, Of Reformation [1641], quoted in Karen Edwards, “Milton’s Reformed Animals: An Early Modern Bestiary,” Milton Quarterly 43, no. 2 (2009): 96.

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Description: Saint Sebastian Thrown into the Cloaca Maxima, detail by Giovanni del Biondo

Fig. 5. Ludovico Carracci, Saint Sebastian Thrown into the Cloaca Maxima, 1612 (detail). Oil on canvas, 64 3/8 × 91 1/2 in. (163.5 × 232.4 cm). J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Tapping this deep well of moral condemnation concerning scorpions, Renaissance artists occasionally depicted them on the banners and uniforms of Roman soldiers officiating at Christ’s Crucifixion. For example, in two fifteenth-century panels, from a series by Fra Angelico (Guido di Pietro, ca. 1395–1455) at the Monastery of San Marco in Florence, the arachnid appears repeatedly on the centurions’ yellow tunics (fig. 6).17 Feigenbaum, “Nature as Teacher and Subject: The Carracci Family of Painters,” in Captured Emotions, 19: “A scorpion lurking on the stones in the lower right of Ludovico’s picture, heretofore unremarked, but emphasizing the sense of place, may have been the sort of grisly detail that entered into the Barberini’s reaction to the picture.” On the scorpion as a Christian symbol of evil, see Jennifer Speake, The Dent Dictionary of Symbols in Christian Art (London: J. M. Dent, 1994), 124, referring to the Gospel of Luke 10:19; George Ferguson, Signs and Symbols in Christian Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), 24, citing Revelation 9:5.

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Description: Christ on the Way to Calvary by Angelico, Fra

Fig. 6. Fra Angelico, Christ on the Way to Calvary, 1451–52. Tempera on wood panel, 48 7/16 × 63 in. (123 × 160 cm). Monastery of San Marco (doors of the Silver Cabinet), Florence

Various other, mostly negative, symbolic associations also attached to the scorpion. In an extensive study, Marcel Bulard examined a long European Renaissance tradition of Christian iconography featuring the scorpion as a denigrating symbol of the Jewish people because of their supposed culpability for the death of Christ. One of the many examples in this anti-Semitic tradition illustrated by Bulard is a predella panel painted by Paolo Uccello (1397–1474) for an altarpiece in Urbino on the theme of the Miracle of the Desecrated Host, in which an impious Christian woman sells a sacred eucharistic wafer representing the body of Christ to a Jewish merchant. Decorating the chimney on the back wall of the Jewish merchant’s house are symbolic images of a scorpion, an African, and a seven-pointed star.18 Marcel Bulard, Le Scorpion symbole du people juif dans l’art religieux des XIVe, XVe, XVIe siècles, à propos de quatre peintures murales del chapelle Saint-Sébastien, à Lanslevillard (Savoie) (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1935). See also Dana E. Katz, The Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 21, 29, 57, 169n16; and Dana E. Katz, “The Contours of Tolerance: Jews and the Corpus Domini Altarpiece in Urbino,” Art Bulletin 85, no. 4 (2003): 648–49, 660n21.

Still another possibility could be that the scorpion alludes to the Zodiac sign of Scorpio, as discussed by the art historian Simona Cohen in relation to the notoriously enigmatic Allegory painting by Agnolo Bronzino (1503–1572) of circa 1545 (National Gallery, London). This line of inquiry seems doubtful regarding Ludovico’s Saint Sebastian, however, since no obvious zodiacal significance presents itself here. The astrological period in question, running from October 22 until November 21, does not correspond with the birthdates of either the patron, Maffeo Barberini (April 5), or the artist, Ludovico Carracci (April 21), nor would such an association be appropriate in light of the theme or context.19 Simona Cohen, “The Ambivalent Scorpio in Bronzino’s London Allegory,” in Animals as Disguised Symbols in Renaissance Art (Boston: Brill, 2008), 263–90. For the birthdates, see Nicholas Turner, “Ludovico Carracci," Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/art/Baroque-art-and-architecture.

Ludovico’s Saint Sebastian presents the scorpion very differently from the aforementioned symbolic examples by depicting the creature with greater discretion and naturalism, as if to suggest it were just an ordinary inhabitant of Rome’s subterranean sewer environment. The straightforwardness of Ludovico’s scorpion even recalls natural history illustrations, such as those published in De Animalibus Insectis (1602), a treatise by his Bolognese contemporary Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605) (fig. 7). Research on Mediterranean biology confirms the historic and ongoing presence in Rome of a scorpion species noted for being relatively benign, compared with lethally venomous counterparts in North Africa and elsewhere. As a result, Ludovico’s scorpion reads somewhat ambiguously. Is it a symbol of evil or a representation of Rome’s environment? Perhaps it functions as both simultaneously, confirming the treachery and corruption in Rome as a fact of “nature.”20 Pierangelo Crucitti, Marcello Malori, and Giovanni Rotella, “The Scorpions of the Urban Habitat of Rome (Italy),” Urban Ecosystems 2 (1998): 163–70.

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Description: Scorpions from De animalibus insectis by Aldrovandi, Ulisse

Fig. 7. Ulisse Aldrovandi, Scorpions from De animalibus insectis (Bologna, 1602), 579. Wellcome Collection, London

In what follows, I examine additional ways in which Ludovico’s richly anomalous picture suggests a broader cultural and environmental context in Rome at the time. My focus is on its engagement with three emerging systems in the city—urban infrastructure renovation, the cult of relics associated with Christian archaeology, and the increasing mobility of art itself resulting from the innovation of easel painting as a portable medium, facilitating greater circulation of pictures among makers and patrons. These interrelated historical conditions of the Counter-Reformation era informed Ludovico’s work and provided it with meaningful context. Ultimately, Saint Sebastian Thrown into the Cloaca Maxima registers the manifold emergence of waste as a kind of metasystem in early modern Rome, one that functioned dialectically by resisting simplistic moral analysis in terms of good or bad. As such, waste began to surface as a visible condition of early modernity across multiple domains. Accordingly, Ludovico’s picture envisioned waste through the body of Saint Sebastian as irrepressible spiritual matter that was impossible to discard permanently and subject only to temporary displacement. In that respect, Ludovico’s Sebastian positively prefigures (and inverts) what the eco-philosopher Timothy Morton calls a hyperobject, a negative thing of such environmental vastness and durability that it will remain in circulation indefinitely, such as Styrofoam or uranium, defying the notion that throwing it away could ever be a final, decisive act of elimination. For Ludovico Carracci, Sebastian was, in effect, a hyperobject of ineffable, enduring Christian faith.21 Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Ecology and Philosophy after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). For more on plastic in the context of recent artistic practice and theory, see Amanda Boetzkes, Plastic Capitalism: Contemporary Art and the Drive to Waste (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2019).

Yet, as Morton has also observed, “When you think about where your waste goes, your world starts to shrink.” The ecological thought, he says, “isn’t like thinking about where your toilet waste goes. It is thinking about where your toilet waste goes.” In other words, “ecology” is not a simile or a metaphor. As a way of deepening Morton’s insight about waste, I turn to Dominique Laporte’s important study, History of Shit (1978). For Laporte, since the early modern period, that history has unfolded, not as a simple, linear progression toward systematic cleanliness and civilization, but rather as a contested story of power, tradeoffs, transformations, and sublimations. The gradual domestication of waste eventually enabled the early modern state to ascribe responsibility for hygiene to private individuals, contributing to the rise of bourgeois subjectivity and new disciplinary regimes for regulating urban public space, language, and sensory perception. As Laporte says, “If language is beautiful, it must be because a master bathes it—a master who cleans shit holes, sweeps offal, and expurgates city and speech to confer upon them order and beauty. . . . This compulsive purification makes most sense when understood not as a step forward in history, but as a regression that paralleled the Renaissance’s return to the values of antiquity in other spheres.”22 Dominique Laporte, History of Shit [1978], trans. Nadia Benabid and Rodolphe el-Khoury (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 7, 13.

Bracketing Laporte’s negative assessment of what he regards as historical “regression,” I believe that his connection here between urban and cultural spheres of state regulation during the early modern period serves a useful purpose. Such a connection pertains to the artistic sphere of Counter-Reformation Rome, in which Ludovico imagined Saint Sebastian Thrown into the Cloaca Maxima. I now situate the painting in relation to the relevant spheres, or systems, of early modern Rome.23 Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 1; Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 9. Laporte, History of Shit, 7, 13.

RENOVATIO ROMAE—THE SYSTEM OF URBAN INFRASTRUCTURE IN COUNTER-REFORMATION ROME

First, let us consider some of the ways in which Ludovico’s Sebastian broached Rome’s emerging system of urban infrastructure. As noted earlier, he and his patron, Maffeo Barberini, originally intended to install the picture in the Barberini family chapel at Sant’Andrea della Valle, a basilica erected during the first half of the seventeenth century (fig. 8). Construction of that church punctuated a larger building boom known as the renovatio Romae, an extensive campaign of urban renewal in Rome begun in the fifteenth century and dramatically expanded during the Counter-Reformation. Located along the Via Papale, a prominent religious procession road leading to the Vatican, Sant’Andrea was one of many new structures that marked the papacy of Paul V (Camillo Borghese, 1550–1621), a pontiff committed to grand rebuilding of the city during the first two decades of the seventeenth century. In addition to financing the completion of the new Saint Peter’s Basilica, Paul V ordered the restoration of an ancient Roman aqueduct renamed the Acqua Paola, culminating in monumental public fountains such as the Fontana dell’Acqua Paola, completed on the Janiculum Hill in 1612. The Acqua Paola provided freshwater to several neighborhoods of the city in what historian Katherine Rinne has described as an early “water distribution system.” According to Rinne, this system exemplified the renovatio Romae as “a manifold process undertaken to implement the [Counter-Reformation] decrees of the Council of Trent by cleansing and rebuilding the city, starting with the body of the Church and its individual souls and extending outward to the streets and piazzas of Rome and to the Tiber River. Physically rebuilding Rome,” says Rinne, “was closely linked to rebuilding the moral authority of the Church.”24 Katherine Wentworth Rinne, The Waters of Rome: Aqueducts, Fountains, and the Birth of the Baroque City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 38–55, quotations on pages 154, 193; Pamela M. Jones, Barbara Wisch, and Simon Ditchfield, eds., A Companion to Early Modern Rome, 1492–1692 (Boston: Brill, 2019), 285–481. On the Via Papale (or Via Papalis), see Rabun Taylor, Katherine Wentworth Rinne, and Spiro Kostof, Rome: An Urban History from Antiquity to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 205–13.

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Description: Piazza e Chiesa di S. Andrea della Valle by Falda, Giovanni Battista

Fig. 8. Giovanni Battista Falda, Piazza e Chiesa di S. Andrea della Valle, 1665. Engraving, 15 × 9 1/16 in. (38 × 23 cm). Private Collection

Renovating Rome also necessitated the demolition of many older structures, not just ancient ruins but in some cases private homes and earlier Christian architecture. The construction of Sant’Andrea della Valle displaced numerous houses and a small medieval church dedicated to Saint Sebastian on the same site. In 1961, the architectural historian Howard Hibbard created a diagram showing a plan of the large, new basilica superimposed over the small, older structure, called San Sebastianello (fig. 9). According to tradition, San Sebastianello marked the sacred place where Lucina and her fellow early Christians had retrieved the body of Saint Sebastian from the sewer. Scholars of Roman history, however, do not regard this tradition as based on fact or even plausible. According to the archaeologist Rodolfo Lanciani (1845–1929), for example, any connection between this site and Saint Sebastian was only a matter of “ecclesiastical legend,” not empirical evidence. Already during the late sixteenth century, the legend apparently had lost enough credibility that Pope Sixtus V (Felice Piergentile, 1521–1590) formally desanctified San Sebastianello in 1590, facilitating its demolition and the construction of Sant’Andrea della Valle. In addition to allowing wealthy families such as the Barberini to build family chapels, the pope’s decision to demolish the old medieval church may have had something to do with changing understandings of early Christian history within the church itself.25 Rodolfo Lanciani, Storia degli scavi di Roma: E notizie intorno le collezione Romane di antichità, vol. 4 (Rome: Ermanno Loescher, 1913), 171. On the demolition of San Sebastianello to make way for Sant’Andrea della Valle, see Howard Hibbard, “The Early History of Sant’Andrea della Valle,” Art Bulletin 43, no. 4 (1961): 289–318, esp. 292–93.

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Description: Plan of Sant'Andrea della Valle and the medieval church of San Sebastianello

Fig. 9. Plan of Sant’Andrea della Valle and the medieval church of San Sebastianello. From Howard Hibbard, “The Early History of Sant'Andrea della Valle,” The Art Bulletin (1961), p. 293, fig. 1

During the 1590s, a new, twelve-volume history of the church had begun to appear in print, written by Cardinal Cesare Baronio (1538–1607) in a systematic effort to validate the foundations of Catholicism and reinforce the papacy in its conflict with Protestantism. Arranged chronologically with detailed descriptions of the lives of early Christian saints, Baronio’s Annales Ecclesiastici offered an authoritative account of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian. In the relevant passage, next to a marginal heading that reads “Sebastian thrown into the Cloaca,” Baronio described the fateful events:

Then [Diocletian] ordered [Sebastian] to be led to the Palatine Hippodrome, and beaten with clubs until he exhaled his spirit. They took his body at night and cast it into the cloaca Maxima [in cloacam Maximam], saying: Do not make a martyr of him for his own people would perhaps become Christians. Saint Sebastian appeared in a dream to the married religious woman, named Lucina, and said: In the sewer, which is next to the Circus: seek and find there my body.26 Baronio, Annales Ecclesiastici, 674: “Tunc iussit eum in Hippodromum Palatij duci, & tam diu sustibus caedi, donec exhaleret spiritum. Tulerunt ergo corpus eius noctu, & in cloacam Maximam miserunt, dicentes: Nefortè Christiani eum sibi martyrem faciant. Portò beatus Sebastianus apparuit in somnis matronae religiosae, Lucinae nomine, dicens ei: In cloaca illa, quae est iuxta Circum, quaere, & ibi inuenies corpus meum pendens in vnco.”

“Circus” here means Circus Maximus, the largest ancient Roman stadium, located near the Palatine Hill and nowhere near the site later occupied by San Sebastianello and Sant’Andrea della Valle. By unequivocally confirming Sebastian’s disposal in the Cloaca Maxima, Cardinal Baronio effectively invalidated the medieval legend associated with the old church of San Sebastianello, since the martyr’s corpse could not have been recovered from two different sewers in separate parts of the city. This topographical impossibility becomes clearer from an aerial photograph of Rome showing the key sites of Sebastian’s martyrdom (fig. 10). As described by Baronio, Sebastian was bludgeoned to death at the Palatine Hippodrome, indicated at the far right. Diocletian’s troops then dumped his body into the Cloaca Maxima, only a short distance away to the northwest. According to the Annales, Lucina finally recovered the martyr’s corpse from the great sewer near the Circus Maximus, which resides just to the southwest of the hippodrome. Since the Cloaca Maxima drained directly to the Tiber River, and since the river flows south, Sebastian’s body could not have floated upstream to the site of San Sebastianello. Another ancient sewer line called the Euripus tunnel does run near the old medieval church, but too many miracles would have been necessary to transport Sebastian’s body such a long distance against multiple currents. Whatever actually happened in the mists of early Christianity, Cardinal Baronio’s history of the church offered an up-to-date, official account that firmly located the disposal and recovery of Sebastian’s corpse in the Cloaca Maxima, far from San Sebastianello and Sant’Andrea della Valle.

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Description: Aerial view of Rome: Cloaca Maxima, Sant'Andrea della Valle, Palatine Hippodrome,...

Fig. 10. Aerial view of Rome: Cloaca Maxima, Sant’Andrea della Valle, Palatine Hippodrome, Circus Maximus, and Euripus/Republican tunnel. Prepared by Madeline Mulder, Center for Geospatial Analysis, William & Mary

Then why did Maffeo Barberini hire Ludovico to paint a picture of Saint Sebastian Thrown into the Cloaca Maxima for his family chapel in Sant’Andrea della Valle, a site far away that had nothing to do with the martyr’s demise or disposal? Old legends apparently die hard. Local residents were probably accustomed to thinking about Saint Sebastian as having an important connection to their neighborhood, especially during recurring plagues in Rome. Out of respect for the legend and the old medieval church, Cardinal Barberini decided to honor Sebastian with a small shrine dedicated to the saint. Barberini was a prominent member of one Rome’s wealthiest and most politically powerful families. Educated in law, letters, and Jesuit doctrine about militant evangelism, he was also an avid patron of the arts. Eventually, in 1623, the ambitious cardinal would be elected pope, taking the name Urban VIII, but when he commissioned Ludovico in 1612 to paint Saint Sebastian, he was serving as a papal representative in the artist’s hometown of Bologna.27 For biographical information about Cardinal Maffeo Barberini and his rise to the papacy, see Peter Rietbergen, Power and Religion in Baroque Rome: Barberini Cultural Politics (Boston: Brill, 2006), 95–142; and Sebastian Schütze, Kardinal Maffeo Barberini, später Papst Urban VIII, und die Entstehung des römischen Hochbarock (Munich: Hirmer, 2007).

In conceiving his family chapel at Sant’Andrea della Valle, Barberini contemplated building a staircase and subterranean sanctuary beneath the chapel for displaying Ludovico’s painting amid the ruins of San Sebastianello. When this idea proved impossible to engineer, the cardinal commissioned architect Matteo Castelli to erect a miniature side chapel dedicated to Sebastian in a small niche within the Barberini Chapel.28 Costamagna, Ferrara, and Grilli, Sant’Andrea della Valle, 69. For more on Castello, see Mariusz Karpowicz, Matteo Castello: L’architetto del primo barrocco a Roma e in Polonia (Lugano: Ticino Management, 2003). On the Barberini Chapel, see Rietbergen, Power and Religion in Baroque Rome, 61–94. This change in construction plans created a problem, since Ludovico had conceived his painting with the unbuilt underground sanctuary in mind. Having already received Ludovico’s picture, Cardinal Barberini decided to withhold it from public view, but his reasons for doing so were more than merely logistical. Writing from Bologna, Maffeo explained his thinking in a letter to his brother, Carlo, citing various concerns:

I had a Carracci here make a painting of the saint being thrown into the Cloaca, but I shall keep it for my house because the light would perhaps not be suitable. If the staircase for going underground cannot be done, then make the memorial according to what you have written to me. I would also prefer the St Sebastian being recovered from the Cloaca, because while his being thrown in by the soldiers is a good representation of strength, it does not inspire very much devotion.29 Maffeo Barberini (in Bologna) to Carlo Barberini (in Rome), December 5, 1612, translated in Gasparotto, “St. Sebastian,” 189. For the original Italian text of the letter in the Barberini Family archives, Rome, see Cesare d’Onofrio, Roma vista da Roma (Rome: Edizioni “Liber,” 1967), 419.

At first glance, Maffeo’s letter simply seems to provide a practical reason for withholding Ludovico’s picture. Since the painting could not be installed in a sanctuary beneath the Barberini Chapel, where the light would be suitable, Maffeo decided to keep the work for his private collection. Yet his letter also reveals a serious concern about the picture’s capacity to “inspire . . . devotion” in the public sphere. Cognizant of this key Counter-Reformation requirement in religious imagery, the cardinal expressed misgivings about the representation of Sebastian “being thrown in” as opposed to “being recovered from the Cloaca.” Playing it safe, Barberini hired another artist, Domenico Passignano, to produce an uplifting alternative, showing Sebastian’s recovered corpse above ground instead of its disposal in the subterranean Cloaca, along with the facade of Sant’Andrea della Valle in the background.30 For discussion of Passignano’s picture, see Costamagna, Ferrara, and Grilli, Sant’Andrea della Valle, 74, 78. On devotion as an imperative in Counter-Reformation imagery, see Prodi, “Introduction,” in Paleotti, Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images, 10, 11, 19, 20, 30, 31, 33, 35. Barberini’s use of “devotion” is similar to the sense of veneration of images as proxies advocated by the Council of Trent in this passage from the council’s concluding twenty-fifth session in 1564: “Moreover, that the images of Christ, of the Virgin Mother of God, and of the other saints, are to be had and retained particularly in temples, and that due honour and veneration are to be given them; not that any divinity, or virtue, is believed to be in them, on account of which they are to be worshipped; or that anything is to be asked of them; or, that trust is to be reposed in images, as was done of old by the Gentiles who placed their hope in idols; but because the honour which is shown them is referred to the prototypes which those images represent; in such wise that by the images which we kiss, and before which we cover the head, and prostrate ourselves, we adore Christ; and we venerate the saints, whose similitude they bear.” The Council of Trent: The Twenty-Fifth Session: The Canons and Decrees of the Sacred and OEcumenical Council of Trent, ed. and trans. J. Waterworth (London: Dolman, 1848), 234.

Official edicts of the Council of Trent had called for clarity and decorum in Counter-Reformation Catholic imagery, but Ludovico’s unusual composition crossed a line. The painting’s eccentric intensity prompted Cardinal Barberini—the ambitious future pope—to pull the plug on its public display. Undoubtedly, the sewer setting and its scatological associations contributed to this decision. In light of Sebastian’s traditional importance as a divine intercessor against plague, the cloaca setting looks even more provocative when we recall that Europeans of this period still embraced the miasma theory of disease, which attributed infection to bad air—literally mal aria in Italian. Ludovico’s painting threatened to bring such associations into the Barberini family chapel.31 On the Council of Trent and religious imagery, see John W. O’Malley, “Trent, Sacred Images, and Catholics’ Senses of the Sensuous,” in The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation Church, ed. Marcia B. Hall and Tracy E. Cooper (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 28–48. See also John W. O’Malley, Trent: What Happened at the Council (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013). On filth, odors, and miasma, see Renato Sansa, “Le norme decorose e il lavoro sporco: L’igiene urbana in tre capitali europee: Londra, Parigi, Roma tra XVI e XVIII secolo,” Storia Urbana 29, no. 112 (2006): 85–112; Renato Sansa, “L’odoro del contagio: Ambiente urbano e prevenzione delle epidemie nella prima età moderna,” Medicina e Storia 2 no. 3 (2002): 83–108; Carlo M. Cipolla, Miasmas and Disease: Public Health and the Environment in the Pre-Industrial Age, trans. Elizabeth Potter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); and Elizabeth Potter, Fighting the Plague in Seventeeth-Century Italy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), esp. 8, 12, 14–15, 53, 72, 74, 81.

Remember that Barberini was both a prominent official in the Catholic Church and a wealthy private citizen overseeing the construction of a high-profile family chapel at an important basilica in the center of Rome. The ambitious young cardinal therefore had a personal stake in public matters of decorum. Maffeo’s decision to withdraw Ludovico’s painting from view out of concerns that it would fail to inspire devotion suggests fears about waste tarnishing his family’s reputation and calling into question the Catholic Church’s power to regulate the city—both physically and morally. Yet the picture remains, a reminder of forces in early modern Rome that could not be contained or eliminated.

There is still more to say about how Ludovico’s Saint Sebastian broached urban infrastructure by imagining the interior of the Cloaca Maxima, a landmark of ancient Roman civil engineering. Keep in mind that the artist lived in Bologna and visited Rome only briefly in 1602 for about two weeks, so it is very unlikely he ever saw the Cloaca Maxima, unless he happened to walk past the arched exterior drain spout, or sbocca, located along the east side of the Tiber River near the ancient Pons Aemilius (Emilian Bridge). Still visible today (fig. 11) and in various historical representations, including an important eighteenth-century etching made by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) before the modern embankment of the river (fig. 12), the sbocca perhaps helped inspire Ludovico’s representation of the cloaca’s rusticated interior masonry, but this is pure speculation. Maybe he had also heard that an ancient section of the Cloaca Maxima was rediscovered in 1612 during excavations under Via Macel de’ Corvi, near the Roman Forum, but no mention of this appears in the artist’s surviving letters. At the very least, Ludovico could have read about the Cloaca Maxima in numerous ancient and early modern written accounts. For example, the Hellenistic writer Dionysius of Halicarnassus described the sewers as among the “most magnificent works of Rome, in which the greatness of her empire is best seen.” A sixteenth-century Tuscan observer named Bernardo Gamucci referred to “that famous sewer the ancients called the Cloaca Maxima . . . which, receiving all the ugliness and filth of the city, and directing them to the Tiber River, cleansed Rome of every annoyance.”32 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, vol. 2, Books 3–4, trans. Earnest Cary, Loeb Classical Library 347 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1939),3.67.5, pages 239, 241; Bernardo Gamucci, Le antichità della città di Roma (Venice: Giovanni Varisco, 1588), 32–33. For detailed historical and archaeological information about the Cloaca Maxima, see Elisabetta Bianchi, “Projecting and Building the Cloaca Maxima,” in Aquam Ducere: Proceedings of the Second International Summer School, Water and the City: Hydraulic Systems in the Roman Age (Feltre, 24th–28th August 2015), ed. Eugenio Tamburino (Seren del Grappo: Edizioni DBS, 2017), 177–204; Bianchi, La Cloaca Maxima e il sistemi fognari di Roma dall’Antichità ad Oggi; and Ernest Nash, Pictorial Dictionary of Ancient Rome, rev. ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968), 258–62. On Ludovico’s brief stay in Rome, see Turner, “Ludovico [Lodovico] Carracci”; Carlo Cesare Malvasia, Malvasia’s Life of the Carracci, ed. Anne Summerscale (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 242; and Anna Stanzani, “Regesto della vita e delle opera,” in Ludovico Carracci, ed. Andrea Emiliani (Bologna: Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1993), 231–35. For the discovery of a branch of the Cloaca Maxima under Via Macel de’ Corvi in 1612, see Rinne, Waters of Rome, 216. The sbocca of the Cloaca Maxima also appears in a detail of a seventeenth-century plan of Rome engraved by Giovanni Battista Maggi, Roma al tempo di Urbano VIII, 1625, reproduced in Rinne, 217.

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Description: Sbocca of the Cloaca Maxima on the Tiber River

Fig. 11. Roman, Sbocca of the Cloaca Maxima on the Tiber River, 1st century CE. Photograph by Alan C. Braddock

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Description: Veduta delle antiche Sostruzioni fatte da Tarquinio Superbo dette il Bel Lido by...

Fig. 12. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Veduta delle antiche Sostruzioni fatte da Tarquinio Superbo dette il Bel Lido, 1776. Etching, 26 3/8 × 17 1/2 in. (67 × 44.5 cm). Private Collection

Scholars of the early modern infrastructure of Rome have examined the Cloaca Maxima within a larger constellation of civic projects intended to renovate the city physically, spiritually, and politically. According to Katherine Rinne, “The Counter-Reformation provided a moral imperative . . . to cleanse the city systematically just as the decrees of the Council of Trent were intended to cleanse the Church systematically.” As a painting conceived with this urban Counter-Reformation context in mind, Ludovico’s Saint Sebastian exposed the physical and moral decay of ancient Rome while projecting an ideal image of Christian purity through the body of the saint, whose disposal in the sewer marked a step toward the redemption of a corrupt city.33 Katherine Wentworth Rinne, “Urban Ablutions: Cleansing Counter-Reformation Rome,” in Bradley and Stow, Rome, Pollution and Propriety, 201. On ancient Roman religious associations, see Hopkins, “‘Sacred Sewer,’” and private communication, December 2019, for which I am especially grateful.

However, Pamela Long reminds us of the gap between Counter-Reformation ideals and urban realities in early modern Rome. According to Long, “Roman streets often were filled with sewage and other filth—as much or more by the end of sixteenth century as at its beginning,” revealing that “a fully integrated urban system of sanitation supported by public funding was not even envisioned let alone approached in practice.” The ancient Romans had built the Cloaca Maxima in part to alleviate persistent flooding in the Forum, but the problem never went away. Recurring Tiber River floods during the early modern period, exacerbated by deforestation upstream and population growth in the city, worsened urban pollution in Rome by causing massive sewer overflows in the streets—all of which underscores the potential danger of displaying Ludovico’s picture in a prominent church like Sant’Andrea della Valle. In addition to conjuring the persistent filth, stench, and plague of the city, its vision of a crumbling subterranean sewer (however moralized) was a constant reminder of infrastructure in Rome that remained in disrepair and disorder—not exactly the message desired by papal authorities in their ideological war against Protestantism.34 Pamela O. Long, Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 24–41, 43–62, quotation on page 62. For more on flooding, sewers, and pollution in Rome, see Rinne, Waters of Rome, 11–16, 18, 20–28, 31, 33, 39, 45, 51–53, 66–68, 76, 111, 123, 138, 146, 148, 156, 171, 179, 193–96, 199, 203, 208–11, 215, 221–22, 231–32.

In addition to such Counter-Reformation environmental politics, Ludovico’s painting risked evoking contemporary social concerns in Rome over class and urban demography. For some urban residents, perceptions of pollution in the streets mingled with ideas about human diversity and economic difference. This connection directly informed seventeenth-century art criticism, notably in constructing the reputation of Ludovico’s controversial contemporary Caravaggio (1571–1610). His monumental altarpiece Death of the Virgin, completed in 1606, became a lightning rod of negative critical judgments reflecting deep anxieties about waste and social disorder in the urban environment—anxieties that art critics attached to Caravaggio’s style in painting as well as his dark and violent persona (fig. 13). Consideration of Caravaggio and his work in light of such criticism further illuminates the historical context of Ludovico’s Saint Sebastian.35 On Caravaggio’s Death of the Virgin, see Pamela Askew, Caravaggio’s Death of the Virgin (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990).

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Description: Death of the Virgin by Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da

Fig. 13. Caravaggio, The Death of the Virgin, ca. 1601–06. Oil on canvas, 145 1/4 × 96 1/2 in. (369 × 245 cm). Musée du Louvre, Paris

Officials at the Church of Santa Maria della Scala in Rome had rejected Death of the Virgin as unsuitable for display because they felt that its frank naturalism violated decorum. Caravaggio allegedly modeled the dead Virgin Mary on the corpse of a woman described by critic Giulio Mancini (1559–1630) in his unpublished Thoughts on Painting (Considerazioni sulla pittura) of 1617–21 as a “dirty prostitute” (meretrice sozza) from a working-class neighborhood who drowned in the Tiber. In an unsympathetic biography of the artist, Giovan Pietro Bellori (1613–1696) said that church officials rejected the painting because the artist had “imitated too much a swollen dead woman” (havervi troppo imitato una Donna morta gonfia). Bellori also railed in general against Caravaggio for using models originating “in the streets and squares” (in piazza, e per via). For Bellori, such an artistic approach consisted of “imitating vile things, seeking filth and deformities” (l’imitazione delle cose vili, ricercandosi le sozzure, e le deformità). According to Bellori, when Caravaggio was shown great examples of ancient classical sculpture to use as artistic models, “his only answer was to point toward a crowd of people, saying that nature had given him an abundance of masters” (non diede altra risposta, se non che distese la mano verso una moltitudine di huomini, accennando che la natura l’haveva à sufficienza proveduto di maestri). This was a direct reference to the urban environment of Rome, since Bellori disparaged Caravaggio for viewing the “crowd” in the streets as his only artistic “masters” (maestri). Moreover, says the art historian Todd Olson, the word “maestri” bitingly punned on the name for city workers responsible for cleaning the streets, the maestri delle strade. According to Olson, Caravaggio’s various pictures of the Roman poor—card sharps, fortune tellers, and Roma zingari—alluded to the growing presence of “dangerous” classes in the city, resulting in “high-low encounters between different social types.” Such demographic conditions prompted increasing government regulation during the seventeenth century in the form of papal edicts restricting the movement and livelihood of those whom Bellori regarded as “vile” denizens of the “piazza” and “street.” Such edicts illustrate Laporte’s point about physical and cultural cleaning of the early modern city by the state.36 Todd Olson, Caravaggio’s Pitiful Relics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 32–47, quotations on pages 32, 33, 46. Bellori, Le vite de’ pittori, scultori et architetti moderni (Rome: Mascardi, 1672), 202–3, 205, 213, trans. in Olson, 46–47. Mancini, Considerazioni sulla pittura (1617–21), quoted and translated in Todd Olson, “Caravaggio’s Coroner: Forensic Medicine in Giulio Mancini’s Art Criticism,” Oxford Art Journal 28, no. 1 (2005): 87.

Not unlike Caravaggio’s Death of the Virgin, Ludovico’s Saint Sebastian depicted the lifeless, horizontal corpse of a holy figure in a shadowy interior surrounded by living figures, albeit tormentors not faithful attendants. The only such attendant depicted by Ludovico is a woman, who looks up from the center of the maelstrom, just above Sebastian’s left shoulder, perhaps representing Lucina gazing heavenward. Despite obvious thematic differences, the paintings by Caravaggio and Ludovico evidently provoked similar concerns about decorum and devotion, resulting in their withdrawal from public view. The key distinction, apart from Ludovico’s somewhat lighter palette and less extreme chiaroscuro, resides in the specific locus of concerns about urban filth and waste. Whereas Caravaggio’s critics associated filth with his blunt portrayal of the Virgin Mary’s body, Maffeo Barberini expressed misgivings about Ludovico’s disposal of Saint Sebastian into the Cloaca Maxima, but both works reveal that urban waste was a source of cultural anxiety in early modern Rome.

Here it also intriguing to consider the biographical fact that Ludovico’s father, Vincenzo, was a butcher in Bologna. In 1561, Vincenzo matriculated in the local butchers’ guild, the Compagnia dei Beccai, along with his son, Ludovico, then aged six. When Ludovico began an apprenticeship in painting later in that decade, he certainly would have understood how the materiality of animal slaughter directly influenced artistic practice. In addition to the glues and other preparatory materials made from animals, charred bones were a constituent of the pigment known as bone black, which Getty conservators have found in the dark passages of Ludovico’s picture. In an apparent tribute to the family business, Ludovico’s cousin Annibale painted two pictures of butcher shops during the 1580s, one on a monumental scale (fig. 14). Some scholars have interpreted these works as a personal manifesto of Carracci artistic naturalism, expressing a philosophical preference for what their biographer Carlo Cesare Malvasia metaphorically called viva carne, or living flesh, in art, as opposed to the elegant artificialities of mannerist painting.37 On bone black, see Andrea Kirsh and Rustin L. Levenson, Seeing through Paintings: Physical Examination in Art Historical Studies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 102. The detection of bone black in a sample taken from Ludovico’s painting on March 4, 2002, was reported by Karin Groen, “Microscopy and Chemical Analysis of Paint Layers,” January–April 2002, object file, Paintings Conservation Department, J. Paul Getty Museum. For history about the butchers’ trade in Bologna, illustrated with drawings and paintings by Annibale Carracci, see Mario Fanti, I macellai bolognesi: Mestiere, politica e vita civile nella storia di una categoria attraverso i secoli (Bologna: Sindicato Esercenti Macellerie, 1980). Reference to a document from 1561 recording Vincenzo Carracci’s matriculation into the Compagnia dei Beccai, along with his sons Giovanni Nicolò and Ludovico (the future painter at age six), appears on pages 138 and 163n95. For Ludovico’s apprenticeship with Prospero Fontana in the late 1560s, see Stanzani, “Regesto,” 202. Regarding Malvasia and viva carne, see Malvasia, Malvasia’s Life of the Carracci, 95, 136, 140, 149–50, 324; and Charles Dempsey, Annibale Carracci and the Beginnings of Baroque Style (Glückstadt, Germany: J. J. Augustin Verlag, 1977), 106n184.

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Description: Butcher's Shop by Carracci, Annibale

Fig. 14. Annibale Carracci, Butcher's Shop, early 1580s. Oil on canvas, 74 3/4 × 106 5/8 in. (190 × 271 cm). Christ Church Picture Gallery, University of Oxford

Ludovico produced no butcher shop pictures per se, but Saint Sebastian Thrown into the Cloaca Maxima reconstructs a scene with similar associations of filth and violence. Growing up in Bologna, he could not have avoided knowing about the substantial pollution of urban streets and waterways from animal slaughter in the form of discarded viscera, blood, bones, and excrement. As the art historian C. D. Dickerson has observed, “During the Renaissance, it was one thing to earn one’s living with one’s hands, another to participate in a profession that was also unhygienic, or unclean, which is why the stigma associated with butchers was particularly strong.” Butchers’ waste was an omnipresent problem in cities during this period, prompting early sanitary regulation and necessitating drainage into sewers and rivers. As Rinne observes about early modern Rome, besides recurring floods of the Tiber, “another reason that the river was so filthy and treacherous was because many of Rome’s most important industries were located along its banks.” These included the butchers, tanners, candlemakers, and other industries that “exploited animal products” and “generated foul air and fetid conditions.” Rinne notes the existence in late sixteenth-century Rome of “a type of informal yet hierarchical zoning . . . that required the smelliest and dirtiest industries to be placed in the more marginalized areas along the water’s edge,” such as the Jewish ghetto—not far from Sant’Andrea della Valle. Another salient association here concerns the ancient cultural association of butchery, murder, and sacrifice. In his official historical account of Sebastian’s martyrdom, Cardinal Baronio referred to an executioner with the Latin word carnifex, or butcher. This brings us to the next element of analysis.38 C. D. Dickerson III, “Butchers as Murderers in Renaissance Italy,” in Murder in Renaissance Italy, ed. Trevor Dean and K. J. P. Lowe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 295. See also C. D. Dickerson III, Raw Painting: The Butcher’s Shop by Annibale Carracci (Fort Worth, Tex.: Kimbell Art Museum in association with Yale University Press, 2010). Rinne, Waters of Rome, 27. Baronio, Annales Ecclesiastici, 674: “Carnifex vnco trahatur more maiorum, cadauer vnco trahatur, dictum est pluries.”

CHRISTIAN ARCHAEOLOGY AND MARTYRDOM—THE SYSTEM OF SACRED RELICS AND IMAGES

By placing the body of Saint Sebastian so vividly before the eyes of the beholder, Ludovico creatively engaged an emerging system of Christian archaeology, as manifested specifically in the Roman cult of sacred relics and the violent spectacle of martyrdom circa 1600. This form of devotion, informed by Baronio’s accounts of early Christian martyrdom in the Annales Ecclesiastici and focused on violated holy bodies, asserted visceral proof of Catholicism’s legitimacy in the face of Protestant iconoclasm. As Olson explains, “In the last decades of the sixteenth century, the cult of the saints and the recitation of their lives had been invigorated; in particular, those who had been persecuted, tortured, maimed, and killed were the object of renewed devotion. Martyrs were largely venerated because of the violation to which their bodies had been subjected by pagans, heretics, and heathens. Thereafter, they disintegrated and were archeologically recovered as sacred relics.” A particularly vivid pictorial example of such veneration appears in a large cycle of frescoes painted by Niccolò Circignani, Il Pomarancio (ca. 1517/24–after 1596), at the Church of Santo Stefano Rotondo during the 1580s. This ancient church, built on a circular plan at the center of Rome and consecrated in 470, was dedicated to the early Christian martyr Saint Stephen. As such, it constituted an important site within the city’s sacred topography and served as a vehicle for expressing devotion focused on the veneration of ancient martyrs. Accordingly, Circignani’s extensive fresco cycle depicts the violent deaths of thirty-two early Christian saints in grisly detail, their tortured bodies garishly displayed in the foreground of each picture with a titulus inscription recounting the particular agonies and mode of disposal, along with the name of the emperor responsible for the persecution (fig. 15). Such imagery effectively represented the transformation of saints into a kind of waste material for veneration in the form of sacred relics.39 Olson, Caravaggio’s Pitiful Relics, 69; see also pages 57–83, discussing the broader European context of religious wars between Protestants and Catholics, resulting in massacres and desecrations. On Circignani and Santo Stefano Rotondo, see Nadja Horsch, Sixtus V. als Kunstbetrachter? Zur Rezeption von Niccolò Circignanis Märtyrerfresken in S. Stefano Rotondo (Berlin: Reimer, 2005); Leif Holm Monssen, “The Martyrdom Cycle in Santo Stefano Rotondo,” Acta ad Archaeologium et Artium Historiam Pertinentia 2 (1982): 175–317; 3 (1983): 11–106.

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Description: Persecutions under Emperors Maximinus II and Licinius, detail of a Christian...

Fig. 15. Niccolò Circignani, Il Pomarancio, and Matteo da Siena, Persecutions under Emperors Maximinus II and Licinius, detail of a tortured Christian, 1581–82. Fresco. Santo Stefano Rotondo, Rome

This milieu of violent representation and bodily devotion circa 1600 helps explain some of the details in Ludovico’s Saint Sebastian, beginning with the dramatic depiction of Sebastian’s corpse directly before the viewer. As in many baroque altarpieces, the artist has placed the saint’s body in the foreground, so close to the picture plane that it seems poised to burst into the space of the observer. The fingers of his right hand dangle very near the bottom edge of the painting, testing the limits of the canvas. Despite having been shot with arrows and finally bludgeoned to death, Sebastian looks miraculously strong, beautiful, and intact. A glowing halo subtly encircles his head and serene face as his hair hangs down, subject to gravity. The beauty and serenity of Ludovico’s Sebastian differs from the explicit violence of Circignani’s saints, but other details suggest a common devotional purpose through material references to martyrdom. For example, Sebastian’s bloodstained white shroud discreetly offers quasi-indexical traces of the physical torture he endured before his earthly demise. In another subtle detail at right, a centurion conspicuously holds three arrows in front of a mysterious column, alluding to the first attempt against Sebastian’s life by Diocletian’s archers. This detail introduces an element of narrative discontinuity, revealing Ludovico’s willingness to sacrifice temporal coherence in favor of an allegorical summa, condensing multiple episodes of Sebastian’s Passion into a single frame. Not unlike the urban infrastructure of Rome, with its discontinuous flow of architectural and spatial fragments, the painting’s storyline unfolds with a hectic visual logic of its own.

As Ludovico was painting his picture for the Barberini Chapel in 1612, Cardinal Scipione Borghese renovated an important pilgrimage church dedicated to Saint Sebastian on the outskirts of Rome—part of the city’s complex and expanding sacred topography. Constructed atop Sebastian’s tomb in the ancient catacombs, the church contains important relics, including a sacred arrow and a fragment of the column associated with the saint’s martyrdom. Fascination with such tools of torture was pervasive during these years, as seen in Antonio Gallonio’s Treatise on the Instruments of Martyrdom, published in 1591 with meticulously researched illustrations of various devices for tormenting Christian bodies through laceration and dismemberment (fig. 16). Among the many items identified and depicted in Gallonio’s book was a device called “the Scorpion” (marked with the letter B), a whip with barbed ends for tearing flesh. Such a device has no direct thematic connection to the arachnid depicted by Ludovico in the shadows of Saint Sebastian Thrown into the Cloaca Maxima, but Gallonio certainly underscored the creature’s negative symbolic connotations in this historical context.40 Antonio Gallonio, Trattato de gli instrumenti di martirio, e delle varie maniere di martoriare usate da’ gentili contro christiani, descritte et intagliate in rame (Rome: A. e G. Donangeli, 1591), 52–53. On Rome’s sacred topography, see Giuseppe Antonio Guazzelli, “Roman Antiquities and Christian Archaeology,” in A Companion to Early Modern Rome, 1492–1692, ed. Pamela M. Jones, Barbara Wisch, and Simon Ditchfield (Boston: Brill, 2019), 530–45; and Simon Ditchfield, “Reading Rome as Sacred Landscape, c. 1586–1635,” in Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe, ed. Will Coster and Andrew Spicer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 167–92. On Scipione Borghese’s restoration and expansion of San Sebastiano fuori le mura, see Aloisio Antinori, Scipione Borghese e l’architettura: Programmi, progetti, cantieri alle soglie dell’età baroca (Rome: Archivio Guido Izzi, 1995); Gioacchino Mancini and Benedetto Pesci, San Sebastiano fuori le mura (Rome: Marietti, 1958).

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Description: Trattato de gli instrumenti de martirio, e delle varie maniere di martoriare usate...

Fig. 16. Antonio Gallonio, Trattato de gli instrumenti de martirio, e delle varie maniere di martoriare usate da' gentili contro christiani, descritte et intagliate in rame (Rome: Ascanio e Girolamo Donangeli, 1591), 53, University of Valladolid Library, Spain

Not unlike Ludovico, Caravaggio also sacrificed narrative and pictorial unity in response to this violent Roman culture of Christian relics and martyrdom. For example, in the Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, painted by Caravaggio in 1599 for the Contarelli Chapel at the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi, a similarly chaotic array of characters and actions revolves around a Christian martyr (fig. 17). At the center of the scene, an executioner prepares to run Matthew through with a sword while a veritable explosion of subsidiary figures hurtles in every direction, including a cloud-borne angel who plummets downward with the palm of martyrdom. Compositional fragmentation here results in what Olson calls “a failure of legibility that anticipates . . . the . . . spectacle of Matthew’s imminent disintegration as violated martyr”—that is, disintegration into a reliquary object that would provide a sacred forensic trace. Such an object, says Olson, “embodied narrative without representing active, integrated anatomies.” Real or implied bodily fragmentation in the artist’s paintings “drew upon this enduring devotional object that became a highly charged flashpoint in the late sixteenth century,” such that “the constitutive body of the composition was imagined by Caravaggio in 1600 as a relic,” according to Olson. In this context of devotional imagery and reliquary veneration, “temporal and spatial unity is sacrificed,” mirroring in formal terms the sacrifice of the martyrs themselves. Adapting Olson’s insights about Caravaggio, I contend that similar, though not identical, effects appear in Ludovico’s Saint Sebastian. Ludovico avoided the extreme chiaroscuro of Caravaggio, but both painters dispersed figures and actions in a manner that complicates linear narrative reading. Not surprisingly, the Carracci expert Gail Feigenbaum has independently described Ludovico as an artist prone to “visionariness,” “choppy rhythms,” and “disjunctive compositions” around 1600.41 Gail Feigenbaum, in Ludovico Carracci, ed. Andrea Emiliani (New York: Abbeville, 1994), xxii, lxiv.

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Description: The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew by Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da

Fig. 17. Caravaggio, The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, 1599–1600. Oil on canvas, 127 × 135 in. (323 × 343 cm). Contarelli Chapel, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome

CIRCULATING PICTURES—EASEL PAINTING AND THE SYSTEM OF ARTISTIC MOBILITY

The advent of the portable easel picture, or quadro riportato, circa 1600 signaled a new mobility and disposability of art itself as another constitutive element of the early modern metasystem of urban dislocation, devotion, and waste. As an easel picture, Ludovico’s Saint Sebastian embodied this development as well. Art historian Michael Fried has noted “the emergence of the modern (but premodernist) easel painting and . . . the coming into prominence of the autonomous and independent ‘gallery picture’ in the Roman art world of the 1590s and early 1600s.” For Fried, this historic development resulted in what he calls “the invention of absorption,” coupled with “effects of instantaneousness,” “violent subject matter,” and thematics of “severing or cutting out of the painting from its immediate environment as well as . . . from the painter himself.” Caravaggio’s Judith and Holofernes (fig. 18) epitomizes this “specular ‘moment’ in the production of . . . painting,” says Fried, who also includes Ludovico’s Saint Sebastian among such “severed representations,” which reveal “the physical limits of the painting” and thereby “[promote] an awareness of the fact that a gallery picture is by its very nature discontinuous with . . . or cut off from its surroundings.” In this iteration of Fried’s familiar argument about absorption and modernity, pictorial autonomy equals aesthetic and environmental detachment.42 Michael Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art in association with Princeton University Press, 2010), 1, 3, 155, 159, 163–64. On the development of the portable easel picture and mobility in the Counter-Reformation era, see also Victor I. Stoichita, The Self-Award Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2015).

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Description: Judith and Holofernes by Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da

Fig. 18. Caravaggio, Judith and Holofernes, ca. 1599. Oil on canvas, 57 1/16 × 76 3/4 in. (145 × 195 cm). Palazzo Barberini, Rome

Fried’s analysis characteristically downplays the broader historical context that shaped artistic production, including Counter-Reformation image rhetoric, urban renewal, the cult of relics, and emerging patronage networks, all of which increasingly put objects and matter of all kinds into circulation circa 1600. Epitomizing this pervasive sense of circulation and mobility was the monumental fresco cycle by Annibale Carracci at the Palazzo Farnese depicting the Loves of the Gods, based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses (fig. 19). Apart from the iconographic theme, Annibale’s formal conceit of an illusionistic gallery with framed quadri riportati dramatized the new mobility of easel painting with humorous irony in the permanent medium of fresco. Evidence of increasing mobility in art circa 1600 also appeared in Ludovico’s letters, communicating with various patrons about their dynamic traffic of commissions and pictures sold and shipped through Italy’s early modern postal system.43 For a reference to the early modern postal system, see Ludovico’s letter to Francesco Brizio, sent from Rome on June 8, 1602. Complaining that an earlier letter written by him never arrived, Ludovico described searching for it with the help of a “Signor Dionisio”: “Abbiamo fatto cercare alla posta di Roma, e non vi é nulla” (“We searched the Roman post, and there was nothing”). Giovanna Perini, ed., Gli scritti dei Carracci: Ludovico, Annibale, Agostino, Antonio, Giovanni Antonio (Bologna: Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1990), 110. On early modern postal systems in Europe, including the imperial Hapsburg network established by the influential De Tassis family of couriers (origin of the term “taxi”), see Asa Briggs and Peter Burke, A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet, 3rd ed. (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2009), 22–23.

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Description: The Loves of the Gods (The Farnese Gallery) by Carracci, Annibale

Fig. 19. Annibale Carracci, The Loves of the Gods (The Farnese Gallery), 1597–1608. Ceiling fresco. Palazzo Farnese, Rome

As Olson has observed, “Fresco painting did not fully satisfy the requirements for artistic production in Rome, where there was a demand for altarpieces in the chapels and a drive for portable property in the palaces. The new medium of this historical moment was the easel painting.” Such conditions made it possible for Maffeo Barberini to withhold Ludovico’s picture from public view, effectively disposing of it to his private collection. Saint Sebastian Thrown into the Cloaca Maxima, a painting that embodies disposal and transmission in multiple senses, has traveled from Bologna to the Barberini Palace in Rome to the Getty in Los Angeles and to many other destinations over the centuries. Contrary to Fried’s ahistorical vision of a picture “severed” from its environment, Ludovico’s Saint Sebastian participated in an extensive network of artistic mobility and disposability that defined Rome’s cultural landscape circa 1600—a version of which continues today on a global scale. As Feigenbaum has observed in an anthology about Roman palace collections at this time, “Display of art is thus part of a larger system of display meant to convey identity and importance.”44 Olson, Caravaggio’s Pitiful Relics, 2. Gail Feigenbaum, “Introduction: Art and Display in Principle and in Practice,” in Display of Art in the Roman Palace, 1550–1750, ed. Gail Feigenbaum (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2014), 8.

CONCLUSION: FROM THE SEWER TO THE STARS

By way of conclusion, I quote Dominique Laporte once more: “Through the elimination of their waste, city and speech participated in the great visual experimentation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that occurred in painting; in the new astronomy, which attributed a geometric point to the eye and invented a telescope that extended the gaze to infinity; and in the primacy of the image, through which . . . Ignatius of Loyola established Catholic orthodoxy against . . . the Protestant Reformation’s rallying cry.” Laporte’s statement suggests that early modern efforts to eliminate waste, both spatially and culturally, went hand in hand with other emerging visual systems, including telescopic investigation of the heavens.45 Laporte, History of Shit, 37–38.

How interesting, then, that at the very moment Ludovico imagined the disposal of an early Christian saint in a subterranean Roman sewer, his patron, Maffeo Barberini, was engaged in a friendly and momentous conversation with Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) about the heavens, specifically concerning the Copernican system of planetary motion, heliocentrism, and telescopic viewing. In his astronomical treatise Sidereus Nuncius (Starry Messenger, 1610), Galileo published findings and illustrations based on the first telescopic observations of the moon and stars. Galileo’s book revealed much about the heavens previously invisible to the naked eye, including hitherto unseen craters and mountains articulating the lunar landscape (fig. 20). Inspired by these discoveries, Galileo’s artist friend Lodovico Cigoli (1559–1613) represented the moon’s surface with unprecedented variegation in depicting the Assumption of the Virgin (fig. 21) for a chapel dome in the Roman church of Santa Maria Maggiore in 1612—the same year Ludovico Carracci painted Saint Sebastian Thrown into the Cloaca Maxima. A convergence of multiple early modern systems at this time encouraged artists to recognize greater complexity in inaccessible places. Galileo’s telescopic discovery of complexity in the heavens set him on a collision course with the papacy over biblical doctrine about the immobility of the Earth. In 1632, the scientist published a new treatise titled Dialogue . . . on the Two Great Systems of the World, endorsing the dynamic, heliocentric Copernican system against the ancient Ptolemaic system, thereby decentering Earth as just one of several planets orbiting around the Sun. The resulting public controversy pitted Galileo against his old friend Maffeo Barberini, who by this time had become Pope Urban VIII. Despite their earlier amicable relations, Urban VIII broke with Galileo and refused to defend him against charges of heresy by the Inquisition, which censored the scientist’s books and sentenced him to house arrest for the remainder of his life.46 Galileo Galilei, Sidereus Nuncius (Venice: Thomas Baglioni, 1610), 8–10; Galileo Galilei, Dialogo . . . sopra I due Massimi Sistemi del Mondo (Florence: Giovanni Battista Landini, 1632). For discussion of Cigoli and Galileo, see Eileen Reeves, Painting the Heavens: Art and Science in the Age of Galileo (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 138–76. On Galileo, Barberini, and the cultural debate in Rome over Copernican heliocentrism, see John Beldon Scott, “Galileo and Urban VIII: Science and Allegory at Palazzo Barberini,” in I Barberini et la cultura europea del seicento, ed. Lorenza Mochi Onori, Sebastian Schütze, and Francesco Solinas (Rome: De Luca Editore d’Arte, 2004), 127–36; William R. Shea and Mariano Artigas, Galileo in Rome: The Rise and Fall of a Troublesome Genius (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); and Pietro Daniel Omodeo, Copernicus in the Cultural Debates of the Renaissance: Reception, Legacy, Transformation (Boston: Brill, 2014), 293–321.

~

Description: Illustrations of the moon based on telescopic observations by Galilei, Galileo

Fig. 20. Galileo Galilei, Illustrations of the moon based on telescopic observations, from Sidereus Nuncius (Venice: Tommaso Baglioni, 1610), facing page 11. Dibner Library, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

~

Description: Assumption of the Virgin by Cigoli, Lodovico

Fig. 21. Ludovico Cigoli, Assumption of the Virgin, 1612. Ceiling fresco. Dome of the Pauline Chapel, Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome

Ludovico’s Saint Sebastian was no “starry messenger” of Copernican heliocentrism, but the painting’s unprecedented treatment of this early Christian martyr registered a rupture in artistic tradition and a new openness to complexity—even a kind of realism—in depicting sacred history by imagining the saint thrown into a famous sewer. Although Ludovico certainly served Counter-Reformation goals of shoring up the Catholic Church against Protestantism, his picture nevertheless discloses and mirrors some of the mobility and fragmentation then characterizing Rome more broadly as a city and spiritual center undergoing transformation. Just as the ancient Romans had attempted to sweep Sebastian under the rug for ideological reasons, Maffeo Barberini—as cardinal and later as pope—tried to contain Ludovico’s picture and Galileo’s texts through acts of disposal and suppression, fearing that both would fail to inspire devotion. In the end, it was Barberini who failed, as artist and astronomer alike envisioned environmental systems and forces that exceeded papal control.

Epigraph: “system, n.,” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2022, www.oed.com/view/Entry/196665.

1 On Ludovico Carracci’s Saint Sebastian Thrown into the Cloaca Maxima, see Davide Gasparotto, “St. Sebastian Thrown into the Cloaca Maxima,” in Caravaggio Bernini: Early Baroque in Rome (New York: Prestel in association with Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, and Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 2019), 189; Gail Feigenbaum, “Nature as Teacher and Subject: The Carracci Family of Painters,” in Captured Emotions: Baroque Painting in Bologna, 1575–1725 (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008), 18–19; Gail Feigenbaum, “Saint Sebastian Thrown into the Cloaca,” in Ludovico Carracci, ed. Andrea Emiliani (New York: Electa/Abbeville, 1994), 152–54; Renato Roli, “Saint Sebastian Thrown into the Cloaca Maxima,” in The Age of Correggio and the Carracci (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1986), 319–20; Charles Dempsey, “Saint Sebastian Thrown into the Cloaca Maxima,” in The Age of Caravaggio (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Electa Editrice, 1985), 124; Gail Feigenbaum, “Lodovico Carracci: A Study of His Later Career and a Catalogue of His Paintings” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1984), 429–33; and Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, Seventeenth-Century Barberini Documents and Inventories of Art (New York: New York University Press, 1975), I inv. 23.72; V. inv. 48–49, 410; VII inv. 55–47; VII inv. I6: 226. On the church and chapel, see Alba Costamagna, Daniele Ferrara, and Cecilia Grilli, Sant’Andrea della Valle (Milan: Skira, 2003). »

2 For general information regarding the life of Saint Sebastian, see Louis Réau, Iconographie de l’art chrétien, vol. 3 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), 1190–99; Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan, vol. 1 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 97–101; and Peter and Linda Murray, The Oxford Dictionary of Christian Art and Architecture, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 553–54. The most detailed account of the saint’s life and afterlife appears in an authorized history of the church written by Cardinal Cesare Baronio during the late sixteenth century. See Cesare Baronio, Annales Ecclesiastici, vol. 2 (Antwerp: Ex Oficina Plantiniana, 1597), 673–75. On the Cloaca Maxima, see Elisabetta Bianchi, ed., La Cloaca Maxima e i sistemi fognari di Roma dall’antichità ad oggi (Rome: Palombi Editori, 2012); and John North Hopkins, “The ‘Sacred Sewer’: Tradition and Religion in the Cloaca Maxima,” in Rome, Pollution and Propriety: Dirt, Disease and Hygiene in the Eternal City from Antiquity to Modernity, ed. Mark Bradley with Kenneth Stow (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 81–102. »

3 For discussion of Counter-Reformation image decrees, see John W. O’Malley, “Trent, Sacred Images, and Catholics’ Senses of the Sensuous,” in The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation Church, ed. Marcia B. Hall and Tracy E. Cooper (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 28–48; and Gabriele Paleotti, Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images [1582], trans. William McCuaig (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2012). On Protestant imagery and ideas about corruption in Rome, see Mark Knights, “Religion, Anti-Popery and Corruption,” in Popular Culture and Political Agency in Early Modern England and Ireland: Essays in Honour of John Walter, ed. Michael T. Braddick and Phil Withington (London: Boydell and Brewer, 2017), 181–201. Regarding “The Tree of Popery,” see Knights, 189; and Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 150–54. »

4 Aristotle, On the Cosmos, Loeb Classical Library 400, trans. E. S. Forster and D. J. Furley (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955), 346–47; Aristotle, Poetics, Loeb Classical Library 199, trans. Stephen Halliwell (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 92–93. On early modern systems, see Julie Candler Hayes, Reading the French Enlightenment: System and Subversion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). »

5 On the emergence of “ecosystem,” see Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 302, 307–11, 364–71, 373, 389–98; and A. J. Willis, “The Ecosystem: An Evolving Concept Viewed Historically,” Functional Ecology 11, no. 2 (1997): 268–71. »

6 Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications, rev. ed. (1968; repr. New York: George Braziller, 1988), xix, 37. »

7 Bertalanffy, xx, 3, 4, 5. »

8 Regarding the steam engine, see Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016). For historical information about automobile tires and global rubber extraction, see Michitake Aso, Rubber and the Making of Vietnam: An Ecological History, 1897–1975 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018); Stephen L. Nugent, The Rise and Fall of the Amazon Rubber Industry: An Historical Anthropology (New York: Routledge, 2017); Andrew Loman, “Rubber,” in Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment, ed. Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, and Patricia Yaeger (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 296–99; and Warren Dean, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber: A Study in Environmental History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). On Henry Ford’s adaptation of the “disassembly line” system of the Swift Meatpacking Company, see Nicole Shukin, Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 87–130; and James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 299. See also Frances Backhouse, Once They Were Hats: In Search of the Mighty Beaver (Toronto: ECW, 2015); Molly A. Warsh, American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire, 1492–1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018); Jennifer L. Anderson, Mahogany: The Cost of Luxury in Early America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012); Doran H. Ross, Raymond Aaron Silverman, and Agbenyega Adedze, Wrapped in Pride: Ghanaian Kente and African American Identity (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum, 1999); Robb Young, “Africa’s Fabric Is Dutch,” New York Times, November 14, 2012; and Sarah Archer, “How Dutch Wax Fabrics Became a Mainstay of African Fashion,” Hyperallergic, November 3, 2016. »

9 Ida R. Hoos, Systems Analysis in Public Policy: A Critique [1972], rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), xv; David Berlinski, On Systems Analysis: An Essay concerning the Limitations of Some Mathematical Methods in the Social, Political, and Biological Science (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1976); Robert Lilienfeld, The Rise of Systems Theory: An Ideological Analysis (New York: Wiley, 1978), 263; Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 61. »

10 Jack Burnham, “Systems Aesthetics,” Artforum 7, no. 1 (1968): 31; Edward A. Shanken, “Introduction: Systems Thinking, Systems Art,” in Systems (London: Whitechapel Gallery in association with MIT Press, 2015), 14. »

11 Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System, trans. Eva M. Knodt (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000); Francis Halsall, Systems of Art: Art, History and Systems Theory (New York: Peter Lang, 2008). »

12 Bernard Siegert, Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System, trans. Kevin Repp (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999); Russel West-Pavlov, Bodies and Their Spaces: System, Crisis and Transformation in Early Modern Theatre (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006); Joad Raymond, ed., News Networks in Seventeenth-Century Britain and Europe (New York: Routledge, 2007); Jacob Soll, The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s Secret State Intelligence System (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009); Susan E. Alcock, John Bodel, and Richard J. A. Talbert, eds., Highways, Byways, and Road Systems in the Pre-Modern World (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012); Elina Gugliuzzo, Economic and Social Systems in the Early Modern Age Seaports: Malta, Messina, Barcelona, and Ottoman Maritime Policy (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 2015); Stewart Stansfield, Early Modern Systems of Command: Queen Anne’s Generals, Staff Officers, and the Direction of Allied Warfare in the Low Countries and Germany, 1702–1711 (Solihull, U.K.: Helion, 2015); Luca Clerici, ed., Italian Victualling Systems in the Early Modern Age, 16th to 18th Century (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). »

13 On artistic iconography of Saint Sebastian in the centuries leading up to Ludovico’s painting of 1612, see Sheila Barker, “The Making of a Plague Saint: Saint Sebastian’s Imagery and Cult before the Counter-Reformation,” in Piety and Plague: From Byzantium to the Baroque, ed. Franco Mormando and Thomas Worcester (Kirksville, Mo.: Truman State University Press, 2007), 90–131; Louise Marshall, “Reading the Body of a Plague Saint: Narrative Altarpieces and Devotional Images of St. Sebastian in Renaissance Art,” in Reading Texts and Images: Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Art and Patronage in Honour of Margaret M. Manion, ed. Bernard J. Muir (Exeter, U.K.: University of Exeter Press, 2002), 237–72; and Réau, Iconographie de l’art chrétien,1190–99. See also Vittorio Sgarbi, San Sebastiano: Bellezza e integrità nell’arte tra Quattrocento e Seicento (Milan: Skira, 2014). »

14 For other rare depictions of the martyred Saint Sebastian disposed in a sewer, see Josse Lieferinxe, The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, ca. 1497, oil on panel, Philadelphia Museum of Art; and Master W. B. (Wolfgang Beurer?), The Corpse of Saint Sebastian Thrown into the Sewer, ca. 1490, oil on panel, Dommuseum, Mainz, https://www.flickr.com/photos/hen-magonza/4521763370/; https://web.archive.org/web/20120412232442/http://www.dommuseum-mainz.de/01_seiten/03_dommuseum/031_sebastiansaltar.html. I thank Renzo Baldasso for informing me about the latter work. On impiety, see Dempsey, “Saint Sebastian Thrown into the Cloaca Maxima,” in The Age of Caravaggio, 124. Dempsey also suggests a compositional and thematic connection to the character of Palinurus from Virgil’s Aeneid, based on a comment by the biographer and collector Carlo Cesare Malvasia (1616–1693), who referred to a drawing he owned by Ludovico representing that subject “Which he made as a Saint Sebastian.” Palinurus, the helmsman of Aeneas, fell asleep, tumbled overboard, and, when he tried to come ashore, was murdered by the Lucanians, who then discarded his body in the water. These narrative details, along with Palinurus’s later appearance in a vision requesting proper burial, may have provided Ludovico with “a classic exemplum of impiety,” according to Dempsey. »

15 Dante Alighieri, The Inferno of Dante Alighieri, trans. Israel Gollancz (London: J. M. Dent, Aldine House, 1904), 17.3, 27, pages 180, 182. »

16 John Milton, Of Reformation [1641], quoted in Karen Edwards, “Milton’s Reformed Animals: An Early Modern Bestiary,” Milton Quarterly 43, no. 2 (2009): 96. »

17 Feigenbaum, “Nature as Teacher and Subject: The Carracci Family of Painters,” in Captured Emotions, 19: “A scorpion lurking on the stones in the lower right of Ludovico’s picture, heretofore unremarked, but emphasizing the sense of place, may have been the sort of grisly detail that entered into the Barberini’s reaction to the picture.” On the scorpion as a Christian symbol of evil, see Jennifer Speake, The Dent Dictionary of Symbols in Christian Art (London: J. M. Dent, 1994), 124, referring to the Gospel of Luke 10:19; George Ferguson, Signs and Symbols in Christian Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), 24, citing Revelation 9:5. »

18 Marcel Bulard, Le Scorpion symbole du people juif dans l’art religieux des XIVe, XVe, XVIe siècles, à propos de quatre peintures murales del chapelle Saint-Sébastien, à Lanslevillard (Savoie) (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1935). See also Dana E. Katz, The Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 21, 29, 57, 169n16; and Dana E. Katz, “The Contours of Tolerance: Jews and the Corpus Domini Altarpiece in Urbino,” Art Bulletin 85, no. 4 (2003): 648–49, 660n21. »

19 Simona Cohen, “The Ambivalent Scorpio in Bronzino’s London Allegory,” in Animals as Disguised Symbols in Renaissance Art (Boston: Brill, 2008), 263–90. For the birthdates, see Nicholas Turner, “Ludovico Carracci," Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/art/Baroque-art-and-architecture. »

20 Pierangelo Crucitti, Marcello Malori, and Giovanni Rotella, “The Scorpions of the Urban Habitat of Rome (Italy),” Urban Ecosystems 2 (1998): 163–70. »

21 Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Ecology and Philosophy after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). For more on plastic in the context of recent artistic practice and theory, see Amanda Boetzkes, Plastic Capitalism: Contemporary Art and the Drive to Waste (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2019). »

22 Dominique Laporte, History of Shit [1978], trans. Nadia Benabid and Rodolphe el-Khoury (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 7, 13. »

23 Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 1; Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 9. Laporte, History of Shit, 7, 13. »

24 Katherine Wentworth Rinne, The Waters of Rome: Aqueducts, Fountains, and the Birth of the Baroque City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 38–55, quotations on pages 154, 193; Pamela M. Jones, Barbara Wisch, and Simon Ditchfield, eds., A Companion to Early Modern Rome, 1492–1692 (Boston: Brill, 2019), 285–481. On the Via Papale (or Via Papalis), see Rabun Taylor, Katherine Wentworth Rinne, and Spiro Kostof, Rome: An Urban History from Antiquity to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 205–13. »

25 Rodolfo Lanciani, Storia degli scavi di Roma: E notizie intorno le collezione Romane di antichità, vol. 4 (Rome: Ermanno Loescher, 1913), 171. On the demolition of San Sebastianello to make way for Sant’Andrea della Valle, see Howard Hibbard, “The Early History of Sant’Andrea della Valle,” Art Bulletin 43, no. 4 (1961): 289–318, esp. 292–93. »

26 Baronio, Annales Ecclesiastici, 674: “Tunc iussit eum in Hippodromum Palatij duci, & tam diu sustibus caedi, donec exhaleret spiritum. Tulerunt ergo corpus eius noctu, & in cloacam Maximam miserunt, dicentes: Nefortè Christiani eum sibi martyrem faciant. Portò beatus Sebastianus apparuit in somnis matronae religiosae, Lucinae nomine, dicens ei: In cloaca illa, quae est iuxta Circum, quaere, & ibi inuenies corpus meum pendens in vnco.” »

27 For biographical information about Cardinal Maffeo Barberini and his rise to the papacy, see Peter Rietbergen, Power and Religion in Baroque Rome: Barberini Cultural Politics (Boston: Brill, 2006), 95–142; and Sebastian Schütze, Kardinal Maffeo Barberini, später Papst Urban VIII, und die Entstehung des römischen Hochbarock (Munich: Hirmer, 2007). »

28 Costamagna, Ferrara, and Grilli, Sant’Andrea della Valle, 69. For more on Castello, see Mariusz Karpowicz, Matteo Castello: L’architetto del primo barrocco a Roma e in Polonia (Lugano: Ticino Management, 2003). On the Barberini Chapel, see Rietbergen, Power and Religion in Baroque Rome, 61–94. »

29 Maffeo Barberini (in Bologna) to Carlo Barberini (in Rome), December 5, 1612, translated in Gasparotto, “St. Sebastian,” 189. For the original Italian text of the letter in the Barberini Family archives, Rome, see Cesare d’Onofrio, Roma vista da Roma (Rome: Edizioni “Liber,” 1967), 419. »

30 For discussion of Passignano’s picture, see Costamagna, Ferrara, and Grilli, Sant’Andrea della Valle, 74, 78. On devotion as an imperative in Counter-Reformation imagery, see Prodi, “Introduction,” in Paleotti, Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images, 10, 11, 19, 20, 30, 31, 33, 35. Barberini’s use of “devotion” is similar to the sense of veneration of images as proxies advocated by the Council of Trent in this passage from the council’s concluding twenty-fifth session in 1564: “Moreover, that the images of Christ, of the Virgin Mother of God, and of the other saints, are to be had and retained particularly in temples, and that due honour and veneration are to be given them; not that any divinity, or virtue, is believed to be in them, on account of which they are to be worshipped; or that anything is to be asked of them; or, that trust is to be reposed in images, as was done of old by the Gentiles who placed their hope in idols; but because the honour which is shown them is referred to the prototypes which those images represent; in such wise that by the images which we kiss, and before which we cover the head, and prostrate ourselves, we adore Christ; and we venerate the saints, whose similitude they bear.” The Council of Trent: The Twenty-Fifth Session: The Canons and Decrees of the Sacred and OEcumenical Council of Trent, ed. and trans. J. Waterworth (London: Dolman, 1848), 234. »

31 On the Council of Trent and religious imagery, see John W. O’Malley, “Trent, Sacred Images, and Catholics’ Senses of the Sensuous,” in The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation Church, ed. Marcia B. Hall and Tracy E. Cooper (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 28–48. See also John W. O’Malley, Trent: What Happened at the Council (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013). On filth, odors, and miasma, see Renato Sansa, “Le norme decorose e il lavoro sporco: L’igiene urbana in tre capitali europee: Londra, Parigi, Roma tra XVI e XVIII secolo,” Storia Urbana 29, no. 112 (2006): 85–112; Renato Sansa, “L’odoro del contagio: Ambiente urbano e prevenzione delle epidemie nella prima età moderna,” Medicina e Storia 2 no. 3 (2002): 83–108; Carlo M. Cipolla, Miasmas and Disease: Public Health and the Environment in the Pre-Industrial Age, trans. Elizabeth Potter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); and Elizabeth Potter, Fighting the Plague in Seventeeth-Century Italy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), esp. 8, 12, 14–15, 53, 72, 74, 81. »

32 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, vol. 2, Books 3–4, trans. Earnest Cary, Loeb Classical Library 347 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1939),3.67.5, pages 239, 241; Bernardo Gamucci, Le antichità della città di Roma (Venice: Giovanni Varisco, 1588), 32–33. For detailed historical and archaeological information about the Cloaca Maxima, see Elisabetta Bianchi, “Projecting and Building the Cloaca Maxima,” in Aquam Ducere: Proceedings of the Second International Summer School, Water and the City: Hydraulic Systems in the Roman Age (Feltre, 24th–28th August 2015), ed. Eugenio Tamburino (Seren del Grappo: Edizioni DBS, 2017), 177–204; Bianchi, La Cloaca Maxima e il sistemi fognari di Roma dall’Antichità ad Oggi; and Ernest Nash, Pictorial Dictionary of Ancient Rome, rev. ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968), 258–62. On Ludovico’s brief stay in Rome, see Turner, “Ludovico [Lodovico] Carracci”; Carlo Cesare Malvasia, Malvasia’s Life of the Carracci, ed. Anne Summerscale (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 242; and Anna Stanzani, “Regesto della vita e delle opera,” in Ludovico Carracci, ed. Andrea Emiliani (Bologna: Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1993), 231–35. For the discovery of a branch of the Cloaca Maxima under Via Macel de’ Corvi in 1612, see Rinne, Waters of Rome, 216. The sbocca of the Cloaca Maxima also appears in a detail of a seventeenth-century plan of Rome engraved by Giovanni Battista Maggi, Roma al tempo di Urbano VIII, 1625, reproduced in Rinne, 217. »

33 Katherine Wentworth Rinne, “Urban Ablutions: Cleansing Counter-Reformation Rome,” in Bradley and Stow, Rome, Pollution and Propriety, 201. On ancient Roman religious associations, see Hopkins, “‘Sacred Sewer,’” and private communication, December 2019, for which I am especially grateful. »

34 Pamela O. Long, Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 24–41, 43–62, quotation on page 62. For more on flooding, sewers, and pollution in Rome, see Rinne, Waters of Rome, 11–16, 18, 20–28, 31, 33, 39, 45, 51–53, 66–68, 76, 111, 123, 138, 146, 148, 156, 171, 179, 193–96, 199, 203, 208–11, 215, 221–22, 231–32. »

35 On Caravaggio’s Death of the Virgin, see Pamela Askew, Caravaggio’s Death of the Virgin (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990). »

36 Todd Olson, Caravaggio’s Pitiful Relics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 32–47, quotations on pages 32, 33, 46. Bellori, Le vite de’ pittori, scultori et architetti moderni (Rome: Mascardi, 1672), 202–3, 205, 213, trans. in Olson, 46–47. Mancini, Considerazioni sulla pittura (1617–21), quoted and translated in Todd Olson, “Caravaggio’s Coroner: Forensic Medicine in Giulio Mancini’s Art Criticism,” Oxford Art Journal 28, no. 1 (2005): 87. »

37 On bone black, see Andrea Kirsh and Rustin L. Levenson, Seeing through Paintings: Physical Examination in Art Historical Studies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 102. The detection of bone black in a sample taken from Ludovico’s painting on March 4, 2002, was reported by Karin Groen, “Microscopy and Chemical Analysis of Paint Layers,” January–April 2002, object file, Paintings Conservation Department, J. Paul Getty Museum. For history about the butchers’ trade in Bologna, illustrated with drawings and paintings by Annibale Carracci, see Mario Fanti, I macellai bolognesi: Mestiere, politica e vita civile nella storia di una categoria attraverso i secoli (Bologna: Sindicato Esercenti Macellerie, 1980). Reference to a document from 1561 recording Vincenzo Carracci’s matriculation into the Compagnia dei Beccai, along with his sons Giovanni Nicolò and Ludovico (the future painter at age six), appears on pages 138 and 163n95. For Ludovico’s apprenticeship with Prospero Fontana in the late 1560s, see Stanzani, “Regesto,” 202. Regarding Malvasia and viva carne, see Malvasia, Malvasia’s Life of the Carracci, 95, 136, 140, 149–50, 324; and Charles Dempsey, Annibale Carracci and the Beginnings of Baroque Style (Glückstadt, Germany: J. J. Augustin Verlag, 1977), 106n184. »

38 C. D. Dickerson III, “Butchers as Murderers in Renaissance Italy,” in Murder in Renaissance Italy, ed. Trevor Dean and K. J. P. Lowe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 295. See also C. D. Dickerson III, Raw Painting: The Butcher’s Shop by Annibale Carracci (Fort Worth, Tex.: Kimbell Art Museum in association with Yale University Press, 2010). Rinne, Waters of Rome, 27. Baronio, Annales Ecclesiastici, 674: “Carnifex vnco trahatur more maiorum, cadauer vnco trahatur, dictum est pluries.” »

39 Olson, Caravaggio’s Pitiful Relics, 69; see also pages 57–83, discussing the broader European context of religious wars between Protestants and Catholics, resulting in massacres and desecrations. On Circignani and Santo Stefano Rotondo, see Nadja Horsch, Sixtus V. als Kunstbetrachter? Zur Rezeption von Niccolò Circignanis Märtyrerfresken in S. Stefano Rotondo (Berlin: Reimer, 2005); Leif Holm Monssen, “The Martyrdom Cycle in Santo Stefano Rotondo,” Acta ad Archaeologium et Artium Historiam Pertinentia 2 (1982): 175–317; 3 (1983): 11–106. »

40 Antonio Gallonio, Trattato de gli instrumenti di martirio, e delle varie maniere di martoriare usate da’ gentili contro christiani, descritte et intagliate in rame (Rome: A. e G. Donangeli, 1591), 52–53. On Rome’s sacred topography, see Giuseppe Antonio Guazzelli, “Roman Antiquities and Christian Archaeology,” in A Companion to Early Modern Rome, 1492–1692, ed. Pamela M. Jones, Barbara Wisch, and Simon Ditchfield (Boston: Brill, 2019), 530–45; and Simon Ditchfield, “Reading Rome as Sacred Landscape, c. 1586–1635,” in Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe, ed. Will Coster and Andrew Spicer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 167–92. On Scipione Borghese’s restoration and expansion of San Sebastiano fuori le mura, see Aloisio Antinori, Scipione Borghese e l’architettura: Programmi, progetti, cantieri alle soglie dell’età baroca (Rome: Archivio Guido Izzi, 1995); Gioacchino Mancini and Benedetto Pesci, San Sebastiano fuori le mura (Rome: Marietti, 1958). »

41 Gail Feigenbaum, in Ludovico Carracci, ed. Andrea Emiliani (New York: Abbeville, 1994), xxii, lxiv. »

42 Michael Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art in association with Princeton University Press, 2010), 1, 3, 155, 159, 163–64. On the development of the portable easel picture and mobility in the Counter-Reformation era, see also Victor I. Stoichita, The Self-Award Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2015). »

43 For a reference to the early modern postal system, see Ludovico’s letter to Francesco Brizio, sent from Rome on June 8, 1602. Complaining that an earlier letter written by him never arrived, Ludovico described searching for it with the help of a “Signor Dionisio”: “Abbiamo fatto cercare alla posta di Roma, e non vi é nulla” (“We searched the Roman post, and there was nothing”). Giovanna Perini, ed., Gli scritti dei Carracci: Ludovico, Annibale, Agostino, Antonio, Giovanni Antonio (Bologna: Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1990), 110. On early modern postal systems in Europe, including the imperial Hapsburg network established by the influential De Tassis family of couriers (origin of the term “taxi”), see Asa Briggs and Peter Burke, A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet, 3rd ed. (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2009), 22–23. »

44 Olson, Caravaggio’s Pitiful Relics, 2. Gail Feigenbaum, “Introduction: Art and Display in Principle and in Practice,” in Display of Art in the Roman Palace, 1550–1750, ed. Gail Feigenbaum (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2014), 8. »

45 Laporte, History of Shit, 37–38. »

46 Galileo Galilei, Sidereus Nuncius (Venice: Thomas Baglioni, 1610), 8–10; Galileo Galilei, Dialogo . . . sopra I due Massimi Sistemi del Mondo (Florence: Giovanni Battista Landini, 1632). For discussion of Cigoli and Galileo, see Eileen Reeves, Painting the Heavens: Art and Science in the Age of Galileo (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 138–76. On Galileo, Barberini, and the cultural debate in Rome over Copernican heliocentrism, see John Beldon Scott, “Galileo and Urban VIII: Science and Allegory at Palazzo Barberini,” in I Barberini et la cultura europea del seicento, ed. Lorenza Mochi Onori, Sebastian Schütze, and Francesco Solinas (Rome: De Luca Editore d’Arte, 2004), 127–36; William R. Shea and Mariano Artigas, Galileo in Rome: The Rise and Fall of a Troublesome Genius (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); and Pietro Daniel Omodeo, Copernicus in the Cultural Debates of the Renaissance: Reception, Legacy, Transformation (Boston: Brill, 2014), 293–321. »

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