In The Exorcist (1973; dir. William Friedkin), the distraught mother, Chris MacNeil, believing her daughter Regan to be possessed by a demon, asks Father Damien Karras, a Jesuit psychologist at Georgetown University, how one might go about getting an exorcism. He avers facetiously that he would have to get the possessed ‘into a time machine and get him back to the sixteenth century’, adding that ‘it just doesn't happen anymore’. He overlooks some important exorcisms in the intervening centuries, and, as he should have known, there was – and is – a process for and rite of exorcism.1 But he might well have had in mind his forefather, the Ur-Jesuit, Ignatius of Loyola, whose name was always terrible to demons, as an eighteenth-century biographer knowingly assured his readers.2
Ignatius was not particularly renowned as an exorcist, but one of the grandest depictions of him is in precisely that role (Fig. 1). In the giant painting now in Vienna that Rubens executed around 1618 for the high altar of the Jesuit church of Antwerp, Ignatius, dressed in priestly garments, one hand on an altar, raises the other hand and looks up. To one side of him is a row of Jesuits. Below, looking up to him is a crowd of people, most noteworthy of whom – especially for our purposes – are two thrashing demoniacs, female and male, falling and fallen. Fleeing into the background are demons, chastened, their tails between their legs. Above, putti swoosh about a colonnade, perhaps in mockery of the fleeing demons. It is surprising that Rubens and his patrons would choose as a subject exorcism, which played a relatively small part in Ignatius's vita.3
Peter Paul Rubens, Miracles of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, ca. 1618, oil on canvas. Kunsthistorisches Musem, Vienna. (Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.)
Rubens described a print after the painting broadly as ‘a piece on the deeds of Ignatius Loyola’ [‘Un pezzo delle Gesti d'Ignazio Loiola’],4 but attention has largely focused on the two demoniacs, or energumens, whom Ignatius is dispossessing.
Ignatius knew demons: the engraved Vita Beati P. Ignatii Loiolae Societatis Iesv Fvndatoris Romae (1606/1622) includes an image, whose design has been ascribed to Rubens, of demons beating the saint as they often did while he lay prone on his bed, praying or sleeping (‘Saepe noctu inter orandum, aut quiescendum à Daemonibus verberatur’, according to the inscription) (Fig. 2).5 Ignatius was down but not out, and he liberated many energumens from demons by the sign of the cross, as we are told by the inscription on an engraving by Hieronymus Wierix (‘Multos energumenos a daemonbius liberat crucis signo’), part of his series on the life of Ignatius, published around 1610 and reproduced several times subsequently (Fig. 3)6 – an image that Rubens certainly knew. The voices of scepticism and satire against demon possession and exorcism had already been raised by Erasmus, Joachim du Bellay, Ben Jonson, and others,7 but there is no reason not to take Rubens (and Ignatius) seriously.
J.-B. Barbé, after Rubens (?), Ignatius Attacked by Demons, plate 67 from the Vita Beati P. Ignatii Loiolae Societatis Iesv Fvndatoris Romae, 1606/1622, engraving. K.U. Leuven, Maurits Sabbe Library, Leuven. (Photo: K.U. Leuven, Maurits Sabbe Library.)
Hieronymus Wierix, Ignatius Exorcising Demons, from the Vita B. P. Ignatii de Loyola Fundatoris Societatis Iesu, ca. 1613, engraving, 104 × 66 mm. British Museum, London. (Photo: © Trustees of the British Museum.)
Andrew Tudor has drawn a distinction between horror film narratives that are ‘secure’ and those that are ‘paranoid’,8 a distinction that is applicable to other forms of narrative as well. The former leads to a successful resolution of the problem; the latter leaves the threat unresolved. The ‘secure’ narrative also relies on a successful ‘expert’, who identifies the supernatural basis of the problem and brings his expertise to bear in resolving it. Such a description fits Rubens's Vienna painting well, with its expert, the soon-to-be-saint Ignatius of Loyola, using his especial abilities to cast out the demons, and Rubens's audience is perfectly aware of the denouement of this ‘closed knowledge narrative’.9 But an understanding of the narrative is not a primarily pictorial issue, and in itself it necessitates little or no regard to how the painting works – the work of horror. Much of the horror in fiction writing, film, painting, or any other medium is predicated on threats to the body: its destruction, dissolution, fragmentation, usurpation, and so on. Even the monstrous Other can be perceived as horrifying not simply as a direct threat, but also vicariously, as evidence of the potential deformation of one's own body.10 As Philip Brophy has put it, ‘The contemporary Horror film tends to play not so much on the broad fear of death, but more precisely on the fear of one's own body, of how one controls and relates to it’.11 Horror lies in the threat to humanity and humanness, both individual and collective, whose destruction is emblematised, as we shall see, by a loss of both face and voice. My concern here is how Rubens and other artists arrive at that horror through the representation of disempowered physical states, and how such representations are apprehended by the viewer.12
Aspects of this study may smack of anachronism. Most of my examples come from two discrete historical moments and diverse media: paintings and prints from the early modern period and contemporary film. This juxtaposition is, no doubt, the happenstance result in part of my particular training and inclinations, and is thus of no historical interest or validity. But it may also bespeak real connections, however complicated, between the early modern period and the present. Although I argue that the motifs under consideration here are transhistorical, one might also argue that they are particularly prevalent in these two periods – demoniacs are relatively more numerous and horror itself perhaps more salient – and that contemporary manifestations of them exemplify the so-called ‘Neo-Baroque’,13 but a consideration of this possibility lies beyond the scope of this essay. In regard to inverted figures, with which the second half of this essay is primarily concerned, I assert that they are ubiquitous, although my use of the term is rather more hyperbolic than literal. The depiction of bodies, the body itself, and the affective force of both bodies and their depictions all have histories, but some motifs of posture and gesture are so persistent as to suggest a valid transhistoricity. By way of explanation, we might have recourse to a kind of collective memory of forms – Aby Warburg's Pathosformel, for example – but in this instance, I prefer a psycho-physiological approach that acknowledges the resistance (but not necessarily immunity) of the motif to historical contextualisation and allows for a transculturality not available to theories of the survival of forms.14 The issue of the depiction of convulsion is somewhat more complicated, in that it is more directly and frequently tied to observed behaviour, not simply as a representation of it, but perhaps also as a model for it. We might view with scepticism a project, even a ground-breaking one, like that of the nineteenth-century neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot who advocated a ‘retrospective medicine’, identifying the maladies of demoniacs in early modern paintings by comparison with the observed behaviour of his contemporaries afflicted with ‘la “grande névrose hystérique”’, so that past and present might be mutually illuminating: ‘If the works of artists have provided science with a serious contribution to establish the ancient existence of the great neurosis, our technical studies may perhaps, in return, be of some use in providing criticism with new and solid elements and appreciation for the genius and method of certain masters’.15 (First and foremost among these masters was Rubens, whose Saint Ignatius altarpiece in Genoa [Fig. 4], according to Charcot's assistant and intern, Paul Richer, struck Charcot with its spectacle of the demoniac, a ‘painting crying with truth and seemingly impressed trait for trait on the convulsive scenes that occurred daily during his service at the Salpêtrière’, and which, along with the Saint Ignatius altarpiece in Vienna [Fig. 1], garners the most attention in his 1887 Les démoniaques dans l'art.)16 There are too many variables without a control – historical narrative, demoniac, artist, art historian, neurologist, and hysteric17 – and there is no room in Charcot's analysis for conventions of representation and behaviour.18 I offer here neither retrospective medicine, nor medical art criticism, but a consideration of the ways in which diverse artists have, within a fairly narrow range of iconography and imagery, worked within their media to potent, and specifically horrific, effect on the viewer.
Peter Paul Rubens, Miracles of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, ca. 1619, Chiesa del Gesù, Genoa. (Photo: Scala / Art Resource, NY.)
The most grievous fits of convulsions
Andrew Tudor has classified the relationship between humans and their threats in supernature-based horror films according to three categories. First is ‘coexistent’, in which the threat to humans is from an independent, discrete creature such as a vampire or alien. Second is ‘manipulative’, in which one creature controls another, as in witches summoning demons. The third category – what would be most relevant for demon possession rather than attack – is ‘invasive’, which includes demon possession, viruses, parasites, and so on. A quintessential feature of demon possession is the loss of bodily control, or, more specifically, an involuntary cession of control to a possessing demon – the invasive agent – which is described frequently in early sources.19 However, it should be pointed out that, in some early modern texts, a distinction is drawn between possession and obsession, the former as more internal than the latter, although the distinction is not always clear.20 A primary point of reference for such accounts (and even such behaviour) within early modern European culture must be the story told in the Synoptic Gospels of the possessed boy who was presented to Jesus following his Transfiguration. In Mark's version, the boy's father explains to Jesus that the spirit, ‘wheresoever he taketh him, dasheth him, and he foameth, and gnasheth with the teeth, and pineth away’ (9:17).21 When the boy is brought to Christ, ‘being thrown down upon the ground, he rolled about foaming’ (9:19).22 Such convulsions are consistent with many descriptions of early modern demoniacs.23 In the renowned (then and now) years-long case of demon possession among many nuns at the Ursuline convent in Loudun, France, in the 1630s, convulsions and other signs of a lack of bodily control were often described. Thus, the prioress, Jeanne des Anges, the most high profile of the demoniacs, who toured the country after her final, apparently successful exorcism in 1637 to display the names of Mary, Joseph, Jesus, and Francis de Sales miraculously inscribed on her left hand, spoke of ‘the agitations and other extraordinary things he [the devil] brought about in my body’, of ‘inner turmoil and great convulsions’.24 One witness's description recalls Luke's possessed boy: ‘one girl, howling and shouting, rolling in the dust, grimacing and doing everything that can inspire horror’.25 Urbain Grandier, the confessor of the Ursulines who was accused of sorcery (and was later burned at the stake), himself performed an exorcism of a dozen possessed women, which was described by the baron de Laubordement, who had been sent by the king on business not directly related to the possessions: ‘All the said energumens were shaken by the most violent, extraordinary, and frightful convulsions, contortions, movements, cries, clamors and blasphemies that one can imagine, it being impossible to describe or in any way represent them, unless by saying that it seemed to all present that they were seeing on that occasion all the fury of hell’.26 Such ‘very violent, continual agitations’ might last for two full hours, but entail ‘no change of pulse or breathing’.27 ‘The most grievous fits of convulsions’ and ‘sudden & vehement twitches’ of Margaret of Jesus and Ursula of All Saints, English Carmelite nuns (and biological sisters) in exile in Lierre, close to Antwerp, are also well documented in their exorcism, described by their confessor and exorcist, Edmund Bedingfield, who in the spring of 1651 pulled 300 demons from the sisters, each carefully listed by name.28 One afternoon, as Bedingfield prayed, ‘Sister Margaret especially gaped & strained herself, as if she would render up her very bowels; and she said that, as often as she did so, some of the witchcraft was cast out of her, which seemed to be drawn violently from every vein, even from the soles of her feet’.29 On the day of the final, successful exorcism, Margaret was ‘pulled up all together, her knees to her very breast, her neck turned as if it were broken’.30 The convulsions might be caused by the actions of the exorcist: presenting the Eucharist, sprinkling holy water, signing crosses over the energumen's body, or even inserting his ‘sacred finger’ into her mouth, and various body parts might convulse as the demon(s) located in those parts were named.31 The uncontrolled bodies, as one would expect, made literary appearances as well, albeit often sceptically treated. Thus one of the sonnets in Joachim du Bellay's Regrets: ‘Doulcin, when I sometimes see those poor girls who have the devil in their bodies, or seem to, move body and head in a terrible way … ’ (Doulcin quand quelquefois je voy ces pauvres filles / Qui ont le diable au corps, ou le semblent avoir, / D'une horrible façon corps et teste mouvoir…)32.
In film, with its temporal extension, such convulsions are easily, and have been enthusiastically, represented. We find them in, inter alia, The Devils (1971; dir. Ken Russell), The Exorcist (1973; dir. William Friedkin), The House of Exorcism (1975; dir. Mario Bava and Mickey Lion), The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005; dir. Scott Derrickson), Blackwater Valley Exorcism (2006; dir. Ethan Wiley), and Requiem (2006; dir. Hans-Christian Schmid). But the frozen action of painting poses problems for the depiction of convulsing energumens. Rubens and many other artists had recourse to distinctive conventions for signalling a loss of bodily control. Rubens's female demoniac has thrown her right hand back, pulling her own hair, and she claws at her clothes with her left, threatening an indecorous deshabille (Fig. 1). Her blackened tongue protrudes from her open mouth, and her eyes roll back into her head. Likewise, the male demoniac, nearly nude, eyes rolled back, opens his mouth in a scream, showing his blackened tongue. He is supine, but is not still: his feet raised from the ground and his head arched back signal violent movement. The ropes that bound him have snapped from the pressure of his tensing muscles, like the broken chains and fetters of the demoniac possessed of ‘unclean spirits’ which Christ sent into a herd of swine (Mark 5:1–20) and the demoniac healed by Ignatius in Wierix's engraving (Fig. 3). Both figures have lost their equilibrium: the woman falls or lurches backward into the arms of a supporter, and the man flops on his back.33
Rubens was certainly aware of some of these conventions from Raphael's monumental Transfiguration (Fig. 5), the most notable and noted early modern illustration of the biblical story of the possessed boy, which he or a close follower copied in a drawing now in Paris.34 Giorgio Vasari says that the ‘boy, while he stretches himself out with a contorted posture, screaming and rolling his eyes, shows his suffering in his flesh, in his veins, and in his beating pulse contaminated by the malignity of the spirit, and with pallid skin makes that forced and fearsome gesture’.35 Likewise, Giovanni Andrea Gilio da Fabriano points to the boy's ‘sforzato attitude, with swollen throat and twisted hands, as those afflicted by similar evils are apt to be’.36 The boy's supposed contortions pale by comparison to what comes afterwards, but his swelling, articulated musculature – out of keeping with his presumed age and size – signals, along with the gaping mouth and eyes rolled into his skull, the unnatural strain and movement of his body. Rubens's enormous painting of the same subject, executed for the Jesuit church of Santissima Trinità in Mantua for Vincenzo Gonzaga in 1604–1605 and now in Nancy, adapts several of Raphael's motifs, including that of the boy supported by a bearded male figure, presumably his father (Fig. 6).37 But Rubens's boy manifests much more evidently what Vasari and Gilio professed to see in Raphael's painting than Raphael's boy himself: his arms, hands, and head are twisted at unnatural angles, and his skin is a deathly grey. With his hair flopping, his mouth foaming, his clenched fist pulling on his garment, and his feet kicking off the ground entirely, he seems much more out of control than his predecessor.
Raphael, Transfiguration, 1518–20, oil on panel, 405 × 278 cm., Pinacoteca, Vatican Museums, Vatican. (Photo: Scala / Art Resource, NY.)
Peter Paul Rubens, Transfiguration, 1604–5, oil on canvas, 407 × 670 cm. Musée des beaux-arts, Nancy. (Photo: P. Mignot.)
Deviations from the gravitational verticality signal a loss of control, and in developing this group further, now with a woman, in the Miracles of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Rubens amplified the instability of the figure by forcing her backwards beyond a tipping point (Fig. 1), perhaps recalling a similar figure in Adriaen Collaert's engraving after Johannes Stradanus's design of David Playing the Harp before Saul of around 1589, in which Saul, supported by attendants, keels over backwards in his throne and exhales evil spirits – what the Vulgate refers to as ‘the evil spirit from God’ [‘spiritus Dei malus’] – in a noxious breath (Fig. 7). Rubens continued to experiment with this figure, turning her slightly away from the viewer and arching her further backwards in the Genoa version of the Miracles of Saint Ignatius of Loyola of ca. 1619 (Fig. 4),38 and his Saint Francis of Paola of around 1627–1628 in the Getty Museum (Fig. 8). We begin, now, to see her upper body upside down, and her disorientation threatens to become ours.
Adriaen Collaert after Johannes Stradanus, David Playing the Harp before Saul, ca. 1589, engraving, 217 × 290 mm. Plate 6 of the Encomium Musices. British Museum, London. (Photo: © Trustees of the British Museum.)
Peter Paul Rubens, The Miracles of Saint Francis of Paola, ca. 1627–8, oil on panel, 97.5 × 77.2 cm (38(3/8) × 30(3/8) in.). The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. (Photo: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.)
le ventre en haut
One of the most potent and disturbing images in The Exorcist is the possessed girl's ‘spider-walk’ down the stairs in her home; she descends on her hands and feet, head first, back to the steps and front to the ceiling, much to her mother's dismay (Fig. 9).39 This backward arching position was anticipated in Mother Joan of the Angels (Matka Joanna od Aniołów; dir. Jerzy Kawalerowicz, 1960; Fig. 10) and The Devils, and indeed in the events at Loudun on which these latter two films were based.40 Doctors Grolleau, Brion, and Duclos, in a report of 17 April 1634, described the movements – a means of locomotion even more remarkable than that of the young Regan MacNeil – of the energumen Elisabeth Blanchard at a Mass in the chapel of the Ursulines, which surprised and horrified Blanchard herself. ‘[B]y using her feet and the top of her head, the only things holding her up, with her belly high [le ventre en haut], [she] arched herself backward, head first, squirming from her place to the height of the altar, having by an all new and extraordinary manner of disproportion quickly ascended with the back of her head the two steps to reach the feet of the priest … ’.41 J.-M. Charcot finds the back-bending posture of hysterics/demoniacs, which he calls ‘l'arc de cercle’, in Domenichino's depiction of Saint Nilus Dispossessing the Son of Polieuto in Grottaferrata (1608–1610), although the boy remains standing (supported by his father, as in Raphael's Transfiguration).42 A back-bending energumen is featured in the engraving, probably by Johan Wierix after Gerard van Groeningen, that illustrates the synoptic Gospels’ account of Christ dispossessing the man living among the tombs, whose demons here spew forth from his mouth (Fig. 11). His contorted position is in no way required by the Gospels, but effectively suggests a total – and unnatural – loss of bodily control.
Linda Blair as Regan MacNeil performing the ‘spider-walk’ in The Exorcist (1973), Hoya Productions / Warner Bros. Pictures.
Johan Wierix, attr., after Gerard van Groeningen, Christ Healing the Man Possessed with Devils, in or before 1574, engraving, 20.5 × 25.4 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. (Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.)
Without such control, the possessed is liable to end up on the ground, as are both the boy in Mark's account and the male demoniac in Rubens's Miracles of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. But an important factor in the disturbing effect of Rubens's figure has not been examined extensively. It is the result of either the position of a figure or a point of view for the spectator or both: namely, that the figure is, in whole or in part, inverted, that is, upside down. Rubens has turned the figure towards the viewer, so that as we look down on him, we see him inverted. I should like to suggest that much of the unsettling power of Rubens's figure and comparable figures comes from this orientation. The contortions of Elisabeth Blanchard notwithstanding, inversion among demoniacs, unlike convulsion, is rarely attested to specifically,43 and its use for the representation of demoniacs (and very many other distressed figures) is a nearly purely pictorial device.44
Inverted figures in the visual arts are ubiquitous, often appearing among a welter of figures, as in battle scenes in which they can contribute greatly to the disturbing effect of the image, or playing a more central role. The motif is both transhistorical and transcultural.45 It is not my intention here to explore the origin of such figures or trace their genealogy, but it soon becomes clear that they almost always carry negative connotations. Persons depicted in this position are generally disempowered, defeated, dead, dying, in pain, incapacitated, or the like. The inversion signifies a loss of control – of one's body and of the situation – of which demon possession is only one type. Rubens used the motif in various contexts, including for the demoniac in the Vienna altarpiece, a figure falling from a horse in the Munich Lion Hunt, the martyred Saint Peter in Cologne (illustrated here by the related drawing in Basel; Fig. 12), a fallen soldier in the Battle of the Milvian Bridge tapestry, and a damned soul chomped by a hellish beast in the lower right corner of the Munich Last Judgment (Fig. 13).46 His Prometheus in Philadelphia – upside down for no more reason, perhaps, than that Rubens was struck by the effectiveness of the motif he had seen in Venetian compositions (where it was often used) such as Titian's Tityus in Madrid – struggles mightily to remain upright in a vain attempt to regain control, much like Caravaggio's later martyred Saint Peter.
Peter Paul Rubens, The Crucifixion of the Apostle Peter, ca. 1640, chalk and brush, 45.9 × 33.6 cm, Inv. U.IV.97, Kunstmuseum Basel, Kupferstichkabinett. (Photo: Kunstmuseum Basel, Martin P. Bühler.)
Peter Paul Rubens, The Large Last Judgment (detail), 1617, oil on canvas, 608.5 × 463.5 cm. Alte Pinakothek, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich. (Photo: bpk, Berlin / Alte Pinakothek / Art Resource, NY.)
In some cases, the inversion of figures, as with Saint Peter, is required by the narrative, but in other cases it is not – as, for example, in Jusepe de Ribera's two much imitated versions of Apollo and Marsyas (Fig. 14). The use of the motif, therefore, demonstrates the artists' awareness of both its function as an index of abjection and its potentially powerful effect on the spectator. For instance, in a letter of 25 July 1637 proposing the subject of Saint Peter's martyrdom for his Cologne painting, Rubens suggested ‘his crucifixion head-downwards, a striking scene of which I could make something extraordinary according to my powers’.47 One might distinguish between those figures that are inverted only with respect to the viewer – that is, they are on or parallel to the fictive ground of the composition, but they are seen from the head to the foot – and those figures whose bodies (or even just their heads) approach the perpendicular to the fictive ground. But I am convinced that the effect of the inverted figure (apart from its iconographic or narrative import) is fundamentally the same, whether the head is perpendicular to the fictive ground or not, suggesting the importance of point of view with respect to bodies in a composition without regard to their position within a fictive, narrative space. Rubens's male demoniac in the Vienna painting is scarcely inverted with respect to the ground on which he writhes, but he is inverted with respect to the viewer, and his impact on the viewer would be greatly diminished if he were otherwise.48
Jusepe de Ribera, Apollo and Marsyas, 1637, oil on canvas, 182 × 232 cm. Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples. (Photo: Scala / Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali / Art Resource, NY.)
The face of a fiend
What does make a difference is the turning of the inverted face towards the viewer, which greatly amplifies the disturbing effect. A passage in G.K. Chesterton's ‘The Vanishing of Vaudry’, a Father Brown mystery from 1927, dwells at length on the problematic of the upside-down face:
Sir Arthur Vaudrey was glaring and grinning up at him; the face was turned up so that he could have put his foot on it; the head was thrown back, with its wig of whitish yellow hair towards him, so that he saw the face upside down. This made it seem all the more like a part of a nightmare; as if a man were walking about with his head stuck on the wrong way. What was he doing? Was it possible that Vaudrey was really creeping about, hiding in the cracks of field and bank, and peering out at them in this unnatural posture? The rest of the figure seemed hunched and almost crooked, as if it had been crippled or deformed. But on looking more closely, this seemed only the foreshortening of limbs fallen in a heap. Was he mad? Was he? The more Smith looked at him the stiffer the posture seemed.
‘You can't see it from here properly,’ said Father Brown, ‘but his throat is cut.’
Smith shuddered suddenly. ‘I can well believe it's the most horrible thing you've seen,’ he said. ‘I think it's seeing the face upside down. I've seen that face at breakfast, or dinner, every day for ten years; and it always looked quite pleasant and polite. You turn it upside down and it looks like the face of a fiend.’
‘The face really is smiling,’ said Father Brown, soberly; ‘which is perhaps not the least part of the riddle. Not many men smile while their throats are being cut, even if they do it themselves. That smile, combined with those gooseberry eyes of his that always seemed standing out of his head, is enough no doubt, to explain the expression’.49
Father Brown goes on relate the disturbing and unreadable appearance of the inverted face to artistic practice: ‘“But it's true, things look different upside down. Artists often turn their drawing upside down to test their correctness. Sometimes, when it's difficult to turn the object itself upside down (as in the case of the Matterhorn, let us say), they have been known to stand on their heads, or at least look between their legs”’.50 Artists, connoisseurs, conservators, curators, and forgers may use such techniques to eliminate consideration of the subject matter of a work in order to focus attention on its form. A. Hyatt Mayor recommended: ‘One should always look at pictures upside down because then you no longer see the smile on the pretty girl or the gesture or anything like that’.51 Documented instances from the early modern period are, to my knowledge, scarce, although it may be accounted among Bernini's techniques for analysing his own drawings,52 and any use of the camera obscura (and, later, photographic camera) for compositional or mimetic purposes would naturally involve a defamiliarising inversion. My interest here is not only in the generally defamiliarising effect of inversion, but also in more specifically how it might turn a pleasant face into ‘the face of a fiend’.
In Chesterton's story, the relationship between the head and the rest of the body is unclear (and the body itself is scarcely legible), and thus the head is visually dissociated from the body, as it is in many of the images discussed above. The head becomes physically dissociated from the body in the most spectacular of upside-down heads: that of an alien masquerading as the human Norris in John Carpenter's The Thing from 1982 (Fig. 15). The head eventually detaches itself and sprouts spider legs, a wittily literal manifestation of Regan MacNeil's ‘spider-walk’. The inverted, repurposed head then goes scuttling off, eliciting perhaps the best line in the history of horror film: “You've got to be fucking kidding!”53 The detachment of the head here physically enacts what upside-down heads more often visually do: isolate – monstrously – the face and head from the human body. And as it renders literal the detachment and independent animation of the body part, it provides an extreme provocation of the confusion, cognitive dissonance, and disbelief inherent in the perception of the inverted human body.
Within the inverted face itself, whether from shock or horror, or simply being upside down, the eyes are bulging in most instances, displaying an unusual amount of white above or below the irises.54 Furthermore, the usual fall of light on the face is often reversed, leading to a spectral or at least unaccustomed appearance, as in Rubens's depiction of Saint Peter (Fig. 12). Of course, the greatest change is in the positions of the facial features themselves.
Our ability (or inability) to perceive upside-down faces (and other mono-oriented objects) has been a lively topic of analysis over the last four decades or so in psychology and cognitive sciences, an overlapping of the fields of inverted form recognition and facial recognition. In an early article on the subject, Irving Rock concluded that our ability to recognise forms that are disoriented – that is, either rotated or fully inverted 180° – is a function of the ability of our perceptual system to ‘correct’ the disorientation of such figures, to restore them, mentally, to an environmentally vertical axis.55 The more complicated the forms – such as faces or words (especially those written in longhand) – the more difficult such a correction is. As we correct for the inversion of one facial feature, such as the eyes, another, such as the mouth, remains uncorrected.56 Any correction that is made is not necessarily instantaneous, or even quick, and the corrective mechanism may be overtaxed, as Rock puts it, illustrating his point with an inverted photograph of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom we recognise only with difficulty.
Our ability to recognise faces when turned upside down generally suffers a greater decrease than with other, simpler objects – a phenomenon known as the Face Inversion Effect (FIE) or Inverted Face Effect (IFE).57 And I would suggest that our inability to read an inverted face with any precision, a kind of prosopagnosia, or face blindness, contributes to its unsettling – or even horrific – effect. We know it is a face, but it appears as a jumble of distorted facial features, which is often attached to a body in an abnormal (or at least an unaccustomed) physical and psychological position, that is, a body in distress.
When the face is turned upside down, lively recent philosophical debates about the ontology, epistemology, and psychology of human emotions and the face as a privileged site of expression are largely obviated,58 as is the long line of physiognomic studies from Leonardo to Le Brun to Lavater,59 because the face as such has been destroyed. The features are still there, and their positions relative to each other are there, but their positions relative to the viewer are radically altered, altered to the point of cognitive failure. And because the face is understandable, indeed, is brought into being, only by a viewing – a facing – Other, the face inverted can no longer exist. Neither the features nor their expressive movements can be read, and ‘faciality’ and any possible coding systems for the expressive function of the face are therefore nullified along with the face itself.60 Insofar as the face may be said to be an instrument of communication, it is severely blunted – or the lines of communication are bluntly severed – by inversion. What becomes expressive in the inverted figure is the very lack itself of a face – that which makes us recognisably human.61 The inverted features remain just familiar enough to signal the once-presence-now-absence of the face, just as the bloody round cross-section of the neck of Cellini's Medusa signals the once-presence-now-absence of her head.
This disturbing effect of inverted heads is clearly amplified when the face is screaming, although there has not been any extended scientific study of this hypothesised phenomenon, which we might call the Unsettling or Horrific Inverted Screaming Face Effect (UHISFE). The screaming mouth remains a potent, expressive image upside down, but it must work without coordination with the other features, no longer as part of a facial ensemble. And it is as coarsely inarticulate as the cries we imagine coming from it, the cries of a pre-linguistic body in pain.62 It represents at an extreme the loss of rational or personal voice that is a salient function of the loss of bodily control more generally.63 The human mouth is relatively infrequently seen wide open in artistic representation or even in reality, and in this state it naturally draws our attention, to the detriment or even exclusion of the other elements of the face.64 The open mouth acts as synecdoche for the face and the body, and as index of the bodily affect expressed by the open-mouthed figure. This synecdoche becomes more distanced from its originating context, and at the same time the index becomes perceptually more disturbing, as the face is turned upside down. Even with a convincing imitator of experiential reality like Ribera, who has rendered Marsyas's mouth with as much illusionism as the rest of the work, the viewer can no longer fully apprehend the form of the face, let alone appreciate the mimesis (Fig. 14). Ovid describes Apollo as stripping Marsyas's entire body of his skin: his nerves and veins were exposed, and even his organs could be seen functioning, so that he was nothing but a wound (‘nec quicquam nisi vulnus erat’). In Ribera's painting, Apollo has begun the flaying, but Marsyas's open mouth is the great wound. This mouth is, perhaps, Bataille's informe65; as a sign, it becomes resistant to determinate meaning, and our experience of it is more somatic than intellective. Our gaze is riveted by the dangerously dentate or bloody maw (Fig. 16) that sucks us in like a cosmic black hole,66 an effect that is grotesquely doubled in Rubens's Last Judgment as the unnaturally open-mouthed, screaming face of the damned is enveloped in the even wider mouth of the demon (Fig. 13). The inverted screaming mouth recalls aspects of a Barthesian punctum – a point, an attracting or distressing detail, always uncoded; a prick, a sting, a wound, a ‘point of effect’, an ‘element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me’67 – with the paradoxical ability to expand to fill the whole picture.68 But rather than presenting ‘a kind of subtle beyond’, endowing the image with a ‘blind field’ (‘hors-champ’) of inferrable non-diegetical content,69 the punctum of the inverted screaming mouth presents by contrast not just the end of the face as representation (whether of the affects or of personal identity), and not just the end of control over one's own body, but the end of representation itself. The punctum is phenomenological, as Barthes would have it, but here it is less personal, and we can sense nothing beyond it; it has lost its referentiality as a signifier.70 It pricks us, distresses us, but it also punctures the painting, kicks a hole in the painting-as-representation. This mouth is horror.
Linda Blair as Regan MacNeil in The Exorcist (1973), Hoya Productions / Warner Bros. Pictures.
Contrapposti
The inversion of the face is a form of a broader process of dehumanising the body, rendering it unfunctional, strange, confusing, and unrecognisable as such. Sixteenth-century Italian painting and sculpture often feature contorted figures – bent, twisted, folded, forced into extreme positions by both a narrative agent and the hand of the artist – ‘discomposed’ bodies, to use Michael Cole's neatly applied term.71 In the virtuoso displays of these figure sforzate, Cole has argued, ‘meaning resides in the folding of bodies’, and ‘narrative is subsidiary [to artistry], if not irrelevant’.72 Many of these figures are subjugated by a superpositioned victor, whether mythological/historical or allegorical in subject, establishing a contrapposto of bodily control, emblematised in the contrast between a beautiful face and a formless face. The force necessary to bend a resistant, struggling body, to turn it upside down, is fully on display in Giambologna's Hercules and the Centaur in the Loggia de' Lanzi, Florence (Fig. 17). Hercules corkscrews the man-beast backwards, rendering him simultaneously upright and inverted – a twist, as it were, on the mannerist challenge of showing the front and back of the same figure. As Cole points out, ‘when a figure is bent, someone is doing the bending’,73 and the sculpture manifests both Hercules's strength and Giambologna's artistic prowess. Yet within the narrative, a contrapposto of two figures can be maintained even when the disempowered body is not so obviously subjected to an external physical force. Thus, Stradanus's David – calm, restrained, enclosed with his harp in a virtually unbroken silhouette – provides a perfect foil to Saul – head thrown back, arms and legs thrown wide (Fig. 7). Ribera's Apollo and Marsyas (Fig. 14) form a more closely bound formal group (in both versions), their naked limbs and torsos echoing each other, the bodies connected where Apollo's hand reaches into the space opened by Marsyas's detached flesh, as much a part of each other as obverse and reverse of the same coin, but here as well they constitute a pairing of opposites. Likewise, Rubens's Ignatius in the Vienna painting rises serenely above the tumult below him, stiff in his chasuble and pleated alb, a veritable pillar of strength and authority, with one arm raised in command and the other firmly planted on the altar, rather than flung out like that of the female demoniac (Fig. 1). He is the ‘upright man’ in full control of his body (it was said that God gave him the ability to control even his tears),74 who has responded to Paul's injunction to ‘Put you on the armour of God, that you may be able to stand against the deceits of the devil’ (Ephesians 6:11).
The contrapposti of these sculptures and paintings are vehicles, formal and conceptual, for their meaning, or one might even be able to say that the meaning inheres in the contrapposti.75 On a symbolic level, these agonistic figural groups represent contests between supersensible forces, such as Good and Evil, but as elements in a pictorial device they work on a structural and perceptual level in not only visualising such contests but also in conveying the essence of those contests to the viewers. (The differences – that Ignatius and David seek to heal, Hercules to kill, and Apollo to torture to death – are inessential in this context.) In many of these works the rather abstract contrappuntal arrangement of figures is complemented by more direct means of engaging the viewer, namely, the rendering of the body and face as scarcely decipherable, inhuman, and horrifying. The narrative contexts of subjugated and upended bodies generally call for them to be placed in the lower register of compositions, where they are more likely to confront the viewer at closest range. In the works by Rubens cited here, these heads are at or close to life size, and the confrontation is immediate and actual, prompting the same kind of confused and horrified reaction elicited by Sir Arthur Vaudrey's fiendish face in Chesterton's tale. The artist has worked to make the events real and potent, even on a physiological level. The ‘closed narrative’ of the Miracles of Saint Ignatius of Loyola may hold little suspense or horror with regard to the specific exorcism depicted, and both the narrative and the binary structure – in this painting as in many of the works considered here – may work to recuperate what is potentially out of control, to reassure the viewer that the powers that be will prevail. But the staying power of such works resides in the convulsing and unformed details that threaten to break loose of such tidy meanings, in the perpetual presence of the horrific, in the anticipated return of the escaping demons, in the certain knowledge that though this battle may have been won, the body is always at risk of twisting from the human to the monstrous.
See Adolf Rodewyk, S.J., Dämonische Besessenheit heute: Tatsachen und Deutungen, 2nd ed. (Paul Pattloch Verlag: Aschaffenburg, 1970); Matt Baglio, The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist (Doubleday: New York, 2009). For the rite of exorcism in the Rituale Romanum of 1614 (‘De exorcizandis obsessis à daemonio’), see Manlio Sodi and Juan Javier Flores Arcas, eds, Rituale romanum: Editio Princepts (1614) (Libreria Editrice Vaticana: Vatican City, 2004), pp. 206–27.
Josephus Rocchus Vulpius, De divi Ignatii Lojolae, Societatis Jesu fundatoris, gloria. Liber Singularis (Josephus Cominus: Padua, 1727), p. 327: ‘Ignatii nomen daemoniis terribile semper fuisse’.
Pedro de Ribadeneyra's Vita Ignatii Loiolae, Societatis Iesu fundatoris, first published in Naples in 1572 and again in Antwerp in 1587, followed by a spate of further editions and translations in the early seventeenth century, has often been adduced as a source for Rubens's picture (Graham Smith, ‘Rubens Altargemälde des Hl. Ignatius von Loyola und des Hl. Franz Xavier für die Jesuitenkirche in Antwerpen’, Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, vol. 65, 1969, pp. 51–2), but the correspondence is by no means exact. Anna C. Knapp, ‘Meditation, Ministry, and Visual Rhetoric in Peter Paul Rubens's Program for the Jesuit Church in Antwerp’, in John W. O'Malley et al. (eds), The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts 1540–1773 (University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 2006), p. 177, suggests that the portrayal of Ignatius as ‘purifying the church of demonic forces’ ties him to Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, also depicted by Rubens in the church. It is remarkable that the Antwerp Jesuits would dedicate such an important painting to Ignatius before he was canonised, in contravention of a papal injunction against such representations, and the same may be said regarding Rubens's other high altar for the same church – they were alternated according to the liturgical calendar – of Miracles of Saint Francis Xavier, who had not yet even been beatified. But it seems, as has been suggested, that the paintings were meant to play a role in the campaign for the canonisation of the two Jesuits. On the paintings, see also Christine Göttler, ‘“Actio” in Peter Paul Rubens’ Hochaltarbildern für die Jesuitenkirche in Antwerpen’, in Joseph Imorde, Fritz Neumeyer, and Tristan Weddigen (eds), Barocke Inszenierung (Edition Imorde: Emsdetten and Zürich, 1999), pp. 10–31.
Smith, ‘Rubens Altargemälde’ (1969), p. 50.
Julius S. Held, ‘Rubens and the Vita Beati P. Ignatii Loiolae of 1609’, in John Rupert Martin (ed.), Rubens before 1620 (The Art Museum, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J., 1972), pp. 113–14, who specifically attributes the design for this print to Rubens, as had Mariette who owned the (now lost) drawing. On the series, see Ursula König-Nordhoff, Ignatius von Loyola: Studien zur Entwicklung einer neuen Heiligen-Ikonographie im Rahmen einer Kanonisationskampagne um 1600 (Gebr. Mann Verlag: Berlin, 1982), pp. 277–309; John W. O'Malley, Constructing a Saint through Images: The 1609 Illustrated Biography of Ignatius of Loyola (Saint Joseph's University Press: Philadelphia, 2008).
On the series, see König-Nordhoff, ‘Ignatius von Loyola’ (1982), pp. 257–60. The Vita Beati P. Ignatii Loiolae also includes a scene of exorcism (O'Malley, ‘Constructing a Saint’ (2008), pl. 46).
Henri Weber, ‘L'exorcisme à la fin du XVIe siècle, instrument de la contre réforme et spectacle baroque’, Nouvelle revue du seizième siècle, vol. 1, 1983, pp. 80–1; Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Loudun and London’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 4, no. 2, Winter 1986, pp. 326–46.
Andrew Tudor, Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie (Basil Blackwell: Oxford, 1989), pp. 213ff.
Tudor, ‘Monsters’ (1989), p. 214.
A widely accepted definition of ‘art-horror’ remains elusive. That of Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart (Routledge: New York and London, 1990), has perhaps provoked the most discussion, but has also been much challenged as overly restrictive.
Philip Brophy, ‘Horrality – the Textuality of Contemporary Horror Films’, Screen, vol. 27, no. 1, January–February 1986, p. 8.
I am addressing here an ‘affected’ rather than ‘detached’ viewing, although the two are not always so neatly distinguishable as some (the putatively detached) might maintain. On the difference, see Matt Hills, The Pleasures of Horror (Continuum: London and New York, 2005), p. 80.
See Omar Calabrese, Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times, trans. Charles Lambert (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1992) and, especially for film, Angela Ndalianis, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (The MIT Press: Cambridge, 2004).
In his funeral oration for Warburg, however, Ernst Cassirer asserted a more universal significance to Warburg's Pathosformeln, saying that Warburg saw behind works ‘the great formative energies’ (‘die grossen gestaltenden Energien’), which were ‘the eternal forms of expression of human being, human passion, and human destiny’ (‘ewigen Ausdrucksformen menschlichen Seins, menschlicher Leidenschaft und menschlichen Schicksals’), even as he noted that Warburg saw the Pathosformeln as created by Antiquity. Quoted by Georges Didi-Huberman, L'Image survivante: histoire de l'art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg (Les Éditions de Minuit: Paris, 2002), p. 200.
J.-M. Charcot and Paul Richer, Les démoniaques dans l'art (Adrien Delahaye et Émile Lecrosnier, Editeurs: Paris, 1887), p. VII: ‘Si des oeuvres d'artistes ont pu fournir à la science un appoint sérieux pour établir l'existence ancienne de la grande névrose, peut-être nos études techniques peuvent-elles, par un juste retour, être de quelque utilité en fournissant à la critique de nouveaux et solides éléments d'appréciation sur le génie et la méthode de certains maîtres’.
Richer's comment is quoted by Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘Charcot, l'histoire et l'art: imitation de la croix et démon de l'imitation’, postface to J.-M. Charcot, Les démoniaques dans l'art (Macula: Paris, 1984), p. 158: ‘Un jour, notre illustre et regretté maître, le professeur Charcot, visitant à Gênes l'église Saint-Ambroise, s'arrêtait saisi à la vue d'une peinture de Rubens représentant une scène d'exorcisme. Il était frappé du spectacle que lui offrait la possédée, tableau criant de vérité et paraissant emprunté trait pour trait aux scènes convulsives qui se passaient journellement dans son service de la Salpêtrière’. The demoniac in the Genoa altarpiece was the only figure from early modern art to appear in Charcot's Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière of 1875 – the early stage of a project that culminated in Les démoniaques dans l'art over a decade later.
On Charcot and the ‘invention of hysteria’, see Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, trans. Alisa Hartz (The MIT Press: Cambridge, 2003), who is ‘nearly compelled to consider hysteria, insofar as it was fabricated at the Salpêtrière in the last third of the nineteenth century, as a chapter in the history of art’ (p. 4).
On this latter point, see Rebecca Zorach, ‘Despoiled at the Source’, Art History, vol. 22, no. 2, June 1999, pp. 253–54.
Tudor, ‘Monsters’ (1989), pp. 158ff.,
See, for example, Michel de Certeau, The Possession at Loudun, trans. Michael B. Smith (The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1996; first published 1970), p. 38.
‘qui ubicumque eum adprehenderit adlidit eum et spumat et stridet dentibus et arescit’. I have used the Douay-Rheims version for English translations of the biblical texts.
‘elisus in terram volutabatur spumans’. For the full accounts, see Matthew 17:14–20; Mark 9:13–28; Luke 9:37–43. In Matthew, the boy's father describes him as ‘lunaticus’; in Mark as ‘habentem spiritum mutum’; and in Luke, he says that ‘spiritus adprehendit illum’.
On the historical relation between demonic possession and epilepsy, see Owsei Temkin, The Falling Sickness: A History of Epilepsy from the Greeks to the Beginnings of Modern Neurology, 2nd ed. (The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, 1971). On demonology, see David Frankfurter, Evil Incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and Ritual Abuse in History (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 2006).
Certeau, ‘Possession’ (1996), pp. 29–30.
Certeau, ‘Possession’ (1996), p. 32; see also pp. 86–88, and the report of M. Hédelin, abbé d'Aubignac, on the demoniacs of Loudun (Sept. 1637), in Robert Mandrou, Posession et sorcellerie au XVIIe siècle: Textes inédits (Fayard: Paris, 1979), pp. 144–94, esp. p. 161.
Certeau, ‘Possession’ (1996), p. 108. See also the comment of D.P. Walker, Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries (University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia, 1981), p. 50: ‘thus for over three years this respectable household contained twelve girls constantly shrieking, sneezing and writhing on the floor. One can only wonder at the grown-ups' patience, kindness and gullibility’.
Thus ‘Sieur Seguin, a physician in Tours’, quoted by Certeau, ‘Possession’ (1996), p. 121; see also p. 140.
Nicky Hallett, Witchcraft, Exorcism and the Politics of Possession in a Seventeenth-Century Convent: ‘How Sister Ursula Was once Bewiched and Sister Margaret Twice’ (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2007), pp. 67, 71, 74, 89.
Hallett, ‘Witchcraft’ (2007), pp. 74–5.
Hallett, ‘Witchcraft’ (2007), p. 76.
Weber, ‘L'exorcisme’ (1986), p. 88; Certeau, ‘Possession’ (1996), pp. 142–3; Hallett, ‘Witchcraft’ (2007), pp. 67, 89. For a sixteenth-century prayer with a nearly exhaustive list of potentially inhabited body parts, see Girolamo Menghi, The Devil's Scourge: Exorcism during the Italian Renaissance, trans. Gaetano Paxia (Weiser Books: Boston, 2002), pp. 160–1.
Quoted by Weber, ‘L'exorcisme’ (1986), p. 81. For the full sonnet, with a different translation, see Joachim du Bellay, “The Regrets,” with “The Antiquities of Rome,” Three Latin Elegies, and “The Defense and Enrichment of the French Language”: A Bilingual Edition, ed. and trans. Richard Helgerson (University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia, 2006), pp. 148–9.
Convulsions can also result from the infusion of the Holy Spirit rather than a demon, as in Hogarth's Enthusiasm Delineated (published in a much revised form as Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism), albeit ironically. The woman at the lower left, embracing a holy statue, has collapsed, her fists clenched. At the right, what we might call the spiritometer passes, on its way to Revelation, through ‘Luke Warm’, ‘Love Heat’, ‘Lust Hot’, ‘Extacy’ [sic], ‘Convulsion Fits’, and ‘Madness’. From a fairly early date, the more spectacular behaviour of energumens was parodied and mined for comic theater; see Hilaire Kallendorf, Exorcism and Its Texts: Subjectivity in Early Modern Literature of England and Spain (University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 2003), esp. pp. 17–66.
Even if the convulsing is not the result of demonic possession or spiritual infusion, there is a significant common factor, as in a well-known scene from Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), with John Hurt as the convulsor. Tudor's third category of relations between monsters and humans – ‘invasive’ – can be invoked here in that it includes not only demon possession but also viruses, parasites, and, I would suggest, incubating aliens, as in Scott's film. At the end of this scene, the somewhat amphibious-looking creature goes skittering away, much as do the demons in Hieronymus Wierix's engraving and Rubens's altarpiece of Ignatius exorcising. The crucial point here is that the human has lost authority and control over his or her own body.
For the copy, see Jacques Foucart, ‘Les dessins de Rubens, d'après la Transfiguration de Raphaël’, in La Transfiguration de Rubens (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nancy, 1990), pp. 41–6.
Giorgio Vasari, Le Vite de' più eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568, vol. 4, ed. Rosanna Bettarini (S.P.E.S.: Florence, 1976), p. 203: ‘il quale giovanetto, mentre che con attitudine scontorta si prostende gridando e stralunando gli occhi, mostra il suo patire dentro nella carne, nelle vene e ne' polsi contaminati dalla malignità dello spirto, e con pallida incarnazione fa quel gesto forzato e pauroso’.
Quoted and translated by Michael Cole, ‘The Figura Sforzata: Modelling, Power and the Mannerist Body’, Art History, vol. 24, no. 4, September 2001, p. 529.
On Rubens's Transfiguration, see La Transfiguration de Rubens, Nancy; Christine Göttler, ‘“Barocke” Inszenierung eines Renaissance-Stücks: Peter Paul Rubens’ Transfiguration für Santissima Trinità in Mantua’, in Christine Göttler, Ulrike Müller Hofstede, Kristine Patz, and Kaspar Zollikofer (eds), Diletto e maraviglia: Ausdruck und Wirkung in der Kunst von der Renaissance bis zum Barock (Edition Imorde: Emsdetten, 1998), pp. 167–89. For its relationship to Raphael's painting, see Foucart, ‘Les dessins’ (1990); and Göttler, ‘Barocke Inszenierung’ (1999), esp. pp. 175–7 for the figure of the possessed boy. For other instances of the representational conventions of demon possession and exorcism, see Zorach, ‘Despoiled at the Source’ (1999), pp. 253–8.
Oil sketch in the Dulwich Picture Gallery (DFG148).
In the novel from which the film was adapted, it takes place on the floor rather than the stairs: ‘Gliding spiderlike, rapidly, … her body arched backward in a bow with her head almost touching her feet, was Regan, her tongue flicking quickly in and out of her mouth while she hissed sibilantly like a serpent’ (William Peter Blatty, The Exorcist [HarperCollins: New York, 1971], p. 135).
See also The Last Exorcism (dir. Daniel Stamm, 2010).
Quoted by Certeau, ‘Possession’ (1996), p. 114.
Charcot and Richer, ‘Démoniaques’ (1887), pp. 49–51. On the painting, see Richard E. Spear, Domenichino, 2 vols, vol. 1 (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 1982), p. 162 (cat. 35.iv), and vol. 2, pl. 77.
It is worth noting, however, that Charcot's depictions of contemporary hysterical attacks includes two examples of the posture he calls ‘l'arc de cercle’, in these cases with the patient's body supported only by the feet and the top of the head (unlike Charcot's example from Domenichino's painting, but comparable to the description of Elisabeth Blanchard). Both figures are viewed from the side, like van Groeningen's demoniac (Charcot, ‘Démoniaques’ (1984), pp. 93–4).
This is not to say that negative associations of the device are not generated by historical contexts; one might recall, for example, that throughout Europe in the later Middle Ages, Jews were executed, along with homicidal animals, by hanging upside down (Esther Cohen, ‘Symbols of Culpability and the Universal Language of Justice: The Ritual of Public Executions in Late Medieval Europe’, History of European Ideas, vol. 11, 1989, pp. 411–2).
It also works across species: see the howling upside-down dog, gored and flung by a stag in the hunt scene by Paul de Vos and Jan Wildens in the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels (Inv 2858).
Rubens may have adapted this particularly gruesome motif from Hendrick Goltzius's engraving of The Dragon Devouring the Companions of Cadmus of 1588; see also the painting of the same subject in the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (inv 1183), attributed to Goltzius, which depicts one figure with his head in the dragon's mouth, and another dead, with bloodied head upside down at the lower edge of the composition.
Rubens quoted in Hans Vlieghe, Saints II, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, trans. P. S. Falla (Phaidon: London and New York, 1973), p. 139: ‘syne cruysinghe met de voeten om hoogh, welck seer uyterlick en bequaem is om iedt extraordinar [(noch naer myn vermoghen) af te maecken’.
Drawings from the Carracci and their circle indicate that models were posed lying on the floor, sometimes with their feet elevated, and drawn from the head (see Carl Goldstein, Visual Fact over Verbal Fiction: A Study of the Carracci and the Criticism, Theory, and Practice of Art in Renaissance and Baroque Italy [Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1988], pp. 99–100; The Drawings of Annibale Carracci [National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 1999, p. 63]), which became a common type of académie (see, for example, The Language of the Nude: Four Centuries of Drawing the Human Body [Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, 2008], pp. 100–1). How inverted heads – perpendicular to the ground – were executed in practice is not entirely clear and presumably varied from artist to artist. It would have been a difficult position for a model to sustain, but artists may have looked down on a model lying on his or her back or even drawn the head right side up for later inversion, with necessary adjustments made to lighting. Inverted head drawings are rare; for Rubens's drawing from the model of ca. 1618–20, used for the figure falling from his horse in the Munich Lion Hunt, see Julius Held, Rubens: Selected Drawings (Phaidon: London, 1959), pp. 134–5 and plate 111 (cat. no. 97). For uncomfortable models in early modern Italy, see Elizabeth Cropper, ‘Michelangelo Cerquozzi's Self-Portrait: The Real Studio and the Suffering Model’, in Victoria v. Flemming and Sebastian Schütze (eds), Ars naturam adiuvans: Festschrift für Matthias Winner zum 11. März 1996 (Verlag Philipp von Zabern: Mainz am Rhein, 1996), pp. 401–2; Cole, ‘Figura Sforzata’ (2001), pp. 540–2.
G.K. Chesterton, ‘The Vanishing of Vaudrey’, in The Secret of Father Brown (Penguin: New York, 1975), pp. 101–2. The story was first published in Harper's Magazine, January 1927, pp. 228–38.
Chesterton, ‘Vanishing’ (1975), p. 102.
A. Hyatt Mayor and Paul Cummings, ‘An Interview with A. Hyatt Mayor’, Archives of American Art Journal, vol. 18, no. 4, 1978, p. 17. See also, for example, Janos Scholz, ‘Connoisseurship and the Training of the Eye’, College Art Journal, vol. 19, no. 3, Spring 1960, p. 229; Charles Williford, The Burnt Orange Heresy (Black Lizard Books: Berkeley, 1987) (first published 1971), p. 125; Betty Edwards, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain: A Course in Enhancing Creativity and Artistic Confidence (J.P. Tarcher: Los Angeles, 1979), pp. 50–7. In a now lost letter, John Singer Sargent made a somewhat ambiguous remark in asserting that he had inverted his rather large portrait of Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau): ‘My portrait! it is much changed and far more advanced than when you last saw it. One day I was dissatisfied with it and dashed a tone of light rose over the former gloomy background. I turned the picture upside down, retired to the other end of the studio and looked at it under my arm. Vast improvement. The élancée figure of the model shows to much greater advantage’. (Quoted by Evan Charteris, John Sargent [Charles Scribner's Sons: New York, 1927], pp. 59–60.) See also Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Painting Photography Film, trans. Janet Seligman (The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1969), p. 13: ‘a picture could be standing on its head and still provide a sufficient basis for an assessment of its worth as a painting’.
Paul Fréart de Chantelou, Diary of the Cavaliere Bernini's Visit to France, ed. Anthony Blunt, trans. Margery Corbett (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1985), p. 19 (see also p. 119, entry for 14 August).
See Steven Neale, ‘“You've Got To Be Fucking Kidding!”: Knowledge, Belief and Judgement in Science Fiction’, in Annette Kuhn (ed.), Alien Zone (Verso: London, 1990), pp. 160–8.
The central panel of Bernard van Orley's Triptych of the Virtue of Patience (1521) in the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels (inv 1822), representing the Feast of Job's Children, conveniently includes two overturned figures with bulging eyes, one with the white showing above the irises, the other with the white showing below the irises.
Irvin Rock, ‘The Perception of Disoriented Figures’, Scientific American, vol. 230, no. 1, 1974, pp. 78–85 (rpt. in Image, Object, and Illusion: Readings from Scientific American, ed. Richard Held [W. H. Freeman: San Francisco, 1974], pp. 71–8; rpt. as ‘Orientation and Form’ in Indirect Perception, ed. Irvin Rock [The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1997], pp. 133–50). See further, inter alia: Robert K. Yin, ‘Looking at Upside-down Faces’, Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 81, no. 1, July 1969, pp. 141–5; Rhea Diamond and Susan Carey, ‘Why Faces Are and Are Not Special: An Effect of Expertise’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, vol. 115, no. 2, 1986, pp. 107–17; Yael Moses, Shimon Ullman, and Shimon Edelman, ‘Generalization to Novel Images in Upright and Inverted Faces’, Perception, vol. 25, no. 4, 1996, pp. 443–61; James T. Enns and David I. Shore, ‘Separate Influences of Orientation and Lighting in the Inverted-Face Effect’, Perception & Psychophysics, vol. 59, no. 1, 1997, pp. 23–31; D.I. Perrett, M.W. Oram, and E. Ashbridge, ‘Evidence Accumulation in Cell Populations Responsive to Faces: An Account of Generalisation of Recognition without Mental Transformations’, Cognition, vol. 67, nos 1–2, July 1998, pp. 111–45; Bruno Rossion and Isabel Gauthier, ‘How Does the Brain Process Upright and Inverted Faces?’ Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience Reviews, vol. 1, no. 1, 2002, pp. 63–75; Romke Rouw and Beatrice de Gelder, ‘Impaired Face Recognition Does Not Preclude Intact Whole Face Perception’, Visual Cognition, vol. 9, no. 6, 2002, pp. 689–718; R. Kramer and B. Parkinson, ‘Generalization of Mere Exposure to Faces Viewed from Different Horizontal Angles’, Social Cognition, vol. 23, no. 2, 2005, pp. 125–36. For facial perception more generally, see David Perrett, In Your Face: The New Science of Human Attraction (Palgrave Macmillan: Houndmills, Basingstoke, 2010).
The independence of facial elements is evident from a famous (and famously short) 242-word article by Peter Thompson, ‘Margaret Thatcher: A New Illusion’, Perception, vol. 9, 1980, pp. 483–4, who published a pair of photographs of Margaret Thatcher's face, upside down. Even though the eyes and mouth of the second one have been left uninverted, our reading of her expression is more or less the same. This phenomenon is now known as ‘The Thatcher Illusion’, and the photograph of one's face can be ‘thatcherised’. But when we turn them upright, we are able to process the features much more completely, and the manipulated photograph is particularly unsettling. The phenomenon remains puzzling; see Peter Thompson, ‘The Thatcher Illusion 28 Years on … ’, Perception, vol. 38, 2009, pp. 921–2, 931–2; Stuart Anstis, ‘Mrs Thatcher and the Bikini Illusion’, Perception, vol. 38, 2009, pp. 923–6; Gillian Rhodes and Linda Jeffery, ‘The Thatcher Illusion: Now You See It, Now You Don't’, Perception, vol. 38, 2009, pp. 927–9; Tim Valentine, ‘The Enduring Nature of the Thatcher Illusion’, Perception, vol. 38, 2009, pp. 929–30.
Rossion and Gauthier, ‘How Does the Brain’ (2002).
For these debates, see Ruth Leys, ‘How Did Fear Become a Scientific Object and What Kind of Object Is It?’ Representations, vol. 110, no. 1, Spring 2010, pp. 66–104; Bernard Rhie, ‘The Philosophy of the Face: An Introductory Overview’, Philosophy and Literature (forthcoming) (I am grateful to the author for providing me with his text prior to publication).
See, inter alia, Jennifer Montagu, The Expression of the Passions: The Origins and Influence of Charles Le Brun's Conférence sur l'expression générale et particulière (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 1994); Lucia Rodler, Il corpo specchio dell'anima: teoria e storia della fisiognomica (Mondadori Bruno: Milan, 2000), Martin Porter, Windows of the Soul: The Art of Physiognomy in European Culture 1470–1780 (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 2005), and Bronwen Wilson, ‘The “Confusion of Faces”: The Politics of Physiognomy, Concealed Hearts, and Public Visibility’, in Bronwen Wilson and Paul Yachnin (eds), Making Publics in Early Modern Europe: People, Things, Forms of Knowledge (Routledge: New York and London, 2010), pp. 177–92.
On ‘faciality’ and the face as a constructed space, with elements organised according to social codes, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis and London, 1987), pp. 167–91; Maria H. Loh, ‘Renaissance Faciality’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 32, no. 3, 2009, pp. 341–63.
Deleuze and Guattari, ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ (1987), pp. 170–71, assert that ‘there is even something absolutely inhuman about the face’, even before it proceeds ‘beyond a certain threshold’, which is crossed by ‘close-up, extreme magnification, recondite expression, etc.’ (to which we might add inversion) (see also p. 190).
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1985), pp. 4, 19, 43.
In the case of possesion, see Zorach, ‘Despoiled at the Source’ (1999), p. 258, on demons as ingested voices, and Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (Columbia University Press: New York, 1988), pp. 244–68, on the question of a ‘discourse of the other’.
Cartoonists have recognised this effect and often depict open-mouthed faces as consisting almost entirely of the dark orifice itself, with the eyes eliminated and the nose and ears reduced to mere bumps on the circumference of the thrown-back head. Various figures in Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts offer as good as examples as any, although they are more frequently laughing, singing, or yelling, rather than screaming in agony.
See Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A User's Guide (Zone Books: New York, 1997).
One might even think here, by extension, of the headless body of Cellini's Medusa, her inverted head/face/mouth displaced, and formally represented by, the circular stump of her neck spewing blood.
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (Hill and Wang: New York, 1981), pp. 26–27, 40, 42, 51, 53. I realise that I am wilfully redirecting ‘punctum’ – Barthes uses the term only in the context of photography, and does not allow for the punctum to be intentional or an artifice – but its potential application to other media strikes me as worth exploring, as are other terms suggestive of resistence to meaning in late Barthes, such as ‘the third meaning’ (‘le troisième sens’) or ‘obtuse meaning’ (as opposed to ‘obvious’ meaning) (Roland Barthes, ‘The Third Meaning: Research Notes on Some Eisenstein Stills’, in Image – Music – Text, trans. Stephen Heath [Hill and Wang: New York, 1977], pp. 52–68). See Elena Oxman, ‘Sensing the Image: Roland Barthes and the Affect of the Visual’, SubStance, vol. 39, no. 2, 2010, pp. 71–90. Barthes posits the punctum as singular and contingent, but, as Derek Attridge has shown, seems also to hope for its generality and codedness – its communicability (Derek Attridge, ‘Roland Barthes's Obtuse, Sharp Meaning and the Responsibilities of Commentary’, in Jean-Michel Rabaté [ed.], Writing the Image after Roland Barthes [University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia, 1997], pp. 77–89). My use of punctum here depends on its generality, which is not to say universality.
Barthes, ‘Camera Lucida’ (1981), p. 45.
Barthes, ‘Camera Lucida’ (1981), p. 59.
One might also adopt the phrase, ‘the place where meaning collapses’, used to describe ‘the abject’ by Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (Columbia University Press: New York, 1982), p. 2, but her sense of ‘the abject’ scarcely overlaps with this motif. See Barbara Creed, ‘Kristeva, Femininity, Abjection’, in The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Routledge: London, 1993), pp. 8–15; and Hal Foster, Benjamin Buchloh, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Denis Hollier, and Helen Molesworth, ‘The Politics of the Signifier II: A Conversation on the “Informe” and the Abject’, October, vol. 67, Winter 1994, pp. 3–21.
Cole, ‘Figura Sforzata’ (2001), p. 520.
Cole, ‘Figura Sforzata’ (2001), pp. 520, 532.
Cole, ‘Figura Sforzata’ (2001), p. 547.
Held 1972, 96. Marc Fumaroli, L'École du silence: Le sentiment des images au XVIIe siècle (Flammarion: Paris, 1998), pp. 202–3, noted more broadly the contrast in both the Saint Ignatius and the Saint Francis Xavier between the gestures of the Jesuits and those below them: ‘L'anthithèse est violente … entre la noblesse éloquente des saints et l'agitation désordonnée du peuple’ (cited by Göttler, ‘Actio’, p. 14).
The fundamental and still unsurpassed study on contrapposto is David Summers, ‘Contrapposto: Style and Meaning in Renaissance Art’, Art Bulletin, vol. 59, no. 3, September 1977, pp. 336–61.
Author notes
For helpful suggestions, I am grateful to Susan Baker, Peter Briggs, Mark Cervenka, Emma Chambers, Sandra Cheng, Art DiFuria, Linda Duychak, Eik Kahng, Kandice Rawlings, Bernard Rhie, David Rosand, Nichola Rumsey, Larry Silver, Marc Simpson, Susan Stewart, David Stone, Joyce Tsai, and Joanna Woodall, members of the CAAH listserv, anonymous reviewers, and especially to Maria Loh for carefully reading and astutely commenting on the text.
