It opens from a dark corner: halfway along the ground – an old man, fallen in deep penitence. A naked body, slightly covered by the cardinal’s red cloak, worn and torn at the edges, reveals its pitiful state. The skin hangs low with battered elegance around the swollen abdomen, the light grey curls frame the thick wrinkles on his face; the flesh, aged by the imputed sin of our forefathers, shiver under the rhythmic strokes of the rope. The fluidity of paint, rendered with unsurpassed elegance and speed, brings forth the fleshiness of the wretched body, making it gleam in the warm radiance of the candlelight. We slowly find ourselves lost in the materiality of these traces: moving from one brushstroke to another, from one layer to another, pausing ever so slightly on their broken edges, finding ourselves moved by an intense desire to touch and engage with the surface of paint as open fragments of rough flesh.

Georges de La Tour’s Penitent Saint Jerome (1630-1635) (Image 12) is a painting of displaced violence. The canvas reveals as much at it conceals: it shows the instrument of violence without showing the wound; it shows blood, although there is no visible lesion on the body; and it shows the potentiality of the paint to become open flesh in an image where the very denial of flesh is at stake – flagellation as the mortification of the flesh.