Excerpt from “Measuring Martyrdom: Ribera’s San Gennaro Escaping from the Furnace Unharmed”

Coda: A Living Image

“… et en icelle église fut monstré au roy le chief du…Saint Genny, qui est une moult riche chose a voir, digne et saincte…. [le sang] dur comme perre commença a eschauffer et amollir comme le sang d’un home en l’eure biuillant et fremmisant…”  

— André De La Vigne, 1495 [1]

Ribera’s San Gennaro leads us gradually beyond the image itself. Similar to Tesauro’s evocation of simpatia between the relics of Maurice and the Holy Shroud, Ribera’s painting exists in proximity to, or sympathy with, two powerful objects: Gennaro’s blood, contained in the set of ampoules once lifted by the Neapolitan Cardinal of Manso’s description; and the skull of the martyr himself, placed within a silver reliquary bust commissioned in 1304 by Charles of Anjou. In 1647, the year of San Gennaro’s completion, bust, blood, and image were brought into proximity. They remain today in the Capella del Tesoro. There, the devout (or merely curious) witness the miracle of the liquefaction as described by De La Vigne: a transubstantiation of blood, “hard as pearl” (dur comme perre), into the “boiling and trembling” (biuillant et fremmisant) blood of man. Witnesses gather still. Liquefaction occurs three times each year: most notably, the 19th of September (Gennaro’s Feast Day) and the 16th of December as the reliquary commemorates, or “responds” to, its most miraculous act, salvation from Vesuvius’s eruption on that very day in 1631. 

San Gennaro exists as a living object. It “lives” in dialogue with the blood and bones of the subject it depicts. Like animated blood, the altarpiece continues to tremble. The mimetic (skin) and formulaic (space) are productively opposed. As I have argued, Ribera’s images delight in the materiality of flesh made emergent through oil. His painted skins assume a heightened degree of naturalism. They act as the surface of a disclosing subject. The ampoule’s liquid acts analogously. Whether blood or not, this transubstantiation provides corporeal evidence of a miracle’s continued disclosure. Conceiving Ribera’s image as a depiction of a singular because resolved event risks delimiting its continuity and periodicity. It risks, in other words, secularizing a chiefly religious image. A central paradox thus emerges: viewing Lo Spagnoletto’s imagery as formulaic does not circumscribe its religious agency. Instead, it proffers the methodology of programmatic and sensorial viewing standardized by Ignatius, theorized by Suárez, and manipulated by Biverus. As the living extension of Gennaro’s body, the ampoule may now be viewed as an object mirroring Ribera’s approach to the martyrological image: an image highly sympathetic in its contrivance and resonant, still, in its suffering. 

[1] And in this church the King was shown the [sculpted] head of San Gennaro, a very splendid thing to see, honorable and holy.... [the blood] hard as pearl began to heat up and soften like a man’s blood, trembling and boiling [with]in the hour.” My translation. Cited in the original Middle French in Lucio Fino, The Miracle of San Gennaro: Witness Accounts in Travel Literature from the 18th to the 19th Century, trans. Angela Federico (Napoli: Grimaldi & C. Editori, 2018), 19.