Abstract Representations of martyrs are rare in early Christian art and largely render their pain and deaths invisible. Art’s unwillingness to confront devotees with images of violence and suffering contrasts with the visceral descriptions of martyrdoms in contemporaneous texts. These ekphrastic texts, some of which purport to describe violent paintings depicting the torture of saints, encouraged these same devotees to visualize and participatorily reperform the violence of these martyrdoms in their imaginations—spaces free from the dangerous interactivity and immediacy of physical vision. An examination of how these texts conceive of the (material) images they describe and the (mental) images they conjure demonstrates that representations of martyrdom varied fundamentally across text and image, as ekphrastic texts guided listeners to see beyond the literal in response to challenging physical sights. Martyrdoms were, at first, spectacles to be seen with the “eyes of the mind” and not the eyes of the body.
Katherine Taronas (Wed,) studied this question.