Visualizing Sensuous Suffering and Affective Pain in Early Modern Europe and the Spanish Americas

Art historians explore the somatic experiences of pain and suffering and their representations and suppressions in the visual culture of early modern Europe and the Spanish Americas, as well as the potential emotional responses of beholders to such imagery. Their overall themes are performing pain, pain and suffering in Franciscan devotion, and sensuous suffering through word and image. Among their topics are animal trials, humiliation rituals, and the sensuous suffering of criminal offenders in late medieval and early modern Europe; compassionate suffering: somatic selfhood and gendered affect in Italian lamentation imagery; an Andean stoning: Francis as Alter Christus in viceregal Santiago; hagiographical misery and the liminal witnesses: Novohispanic Franciscan martyr portraits and the politics of imperial expansion; and love hurts: depictions of Christ wounded in love in colonial Mexican convents. Annotation ©2018 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)

Lauren G. Kilroy-Ewbank, Ph.D. (2009), University of California-Los Angeles, is Associate Professor of Art History at Pepperdine University. She has published articles on colonial Mexican visual culture, and has a forthcoming manuscript on the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Mexico.Heather Graham, Ph.D. (2010) University of California-Los Angeles, is Assistant Professor of Art History at California State University, Long Beach. Her research considers the intersections of gender with the histories of the body and the emotions in Italian Renaissance art.