Visualizing Sensuous Suffering and Affective Pain

Visualizing Sensuous Suffering and Affective Pain in Early Modern Europe and the Spanish Americas is a trans-cultural collection of studies on visual treatments of the phenomena of suffering and pain in early modern culture. Ranging geographically from Italy, Spain, and the Low Countries to Chile, Mexico, and the Philippines and chronologically from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, these studies variously consider pain and suffering as somatic, emotional, and psychological experiences.
From examination of bodies shown victimized by brutal public torture to the sublimation of physical suffering conveyed through the incised lines of Counter-Reformation engravings, the authors consider depictions of pain and suffering as conduits to the divine or as guides to social behaviour; indeed, often the two functions overlap.

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.