| Summary: | In 1520 Sebastiano del Piombo completed the painting the Martyrdom of Saint
Agatha for his patron Cardinal Ercole Rangone. Scholarly discussions of this image
indicate that struggles to describe it are caught up in an imposed artificial division
between the erotic and the sacred. However, as my analysis of the painting will make
clear, there is no stable separation between the secular and the sacred in visual imagery
of the sixteenth century. In the Martyrdom of Saint Agatha, erotic and spiritual interests
cannot be separated, but are codependent within the multivalent possibilities articulated.
My argument derives from the image itself, and in particular from an analysis of the
artistic traditions employed and early sixteenth-century attitudes toward the body and
erotic tropes. Two established visual modes are conflated in the painting: the tradition of
the Venetian nude and the tradition of the monumental muscular female figure associated
with Michelangelo. The salvific resonance of Christ's body, related to all saints' bodies,
is also an important aspect of the painting. In the case of a female saint, a conflict is
played out between the idea that holy women have "become male," and practices from
female piety in which women associate their own corporeality with Christ's suffering
flesh.
The gender ambiguity of Saint Agatha - the result of the blurring of visual traditions,
her connection to the body of Christ, and the "becoming male" theory, is also related to
ideas about androgyny and hermaphroditism. Sebastiano del Piombo's Martyrdom of
Saint Agatha problematizes gender, erotic, sacred, passive, and active categories. In the
Renaissance, it offered a complex type of viewing pleasure, and its viewers participated
in the formation of its potential meanings.
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