The stones and the crown

Abstract

Ralph Dekoninck focuses on this painting’s dramatic display of suffering and death of the first martyr of Christianity as a case study in the paradox of the performative strategy of ‘sacred horror’ in the context of Tridentine reform. In this large altarpiece, Dekoninck identifies the coincidence of abjection and glory as a reflexive topos through which martyr, painter, and beholder are bound in a complex visual erotics. The troubling beauty of violence, which simultaneously repels and draws the viewer nearer to the image, invites an inner emulation of the holy, bodily sacrifice which does not deform the figure, in Rubens’s image, but instead perfects his physical appearance as a visible embodiment of supreme spiritual attainment. Dekoninck reads this attainment in terms of neo-Stoic philosophy current in Rubens’s circle, which provides a means to understand how the ‘horrific display’ of martyrdom serves to confirm both the sanctity of the portrayed and the efficacy of the image.