Martyrdom of St. Agatha
Painted in 1520, del Piombo's Martyrdom of Saint Agatha depicts the Italian Saint's torture at the hands of Sicilia nonbelievers. The Golden Legend, written in the early 13th century by Dominican friar Jacobus de Voragine, includes the story of "Saint Agatha, Virgin." She was born "of a noble family and exceptional beauty," in Catania, an Italian city on the coast of Sicily. Though noble, she lives simply and refers to herself as a "slave to Christ... the highest nobility." The consul of Sicily, Quintianus, a "low-born lecher, a miser, and idolater" sought to make Saint Agatha his wife in order to corrupt her service to God and Christ (1998). He placed her in a brothel in order to challenge her chastity oath. Unsuccessful, Quintianus then subjected Saint Agatha to torture, eventually crushing and cutting off her breasts. The basis of Saint Agatha's Sainthood is her self-denial of physical pleasure and open acceptance of pain; her oath of chastity and commitment to Christ is rooted in her body itself. It is this feminine form that is taken away from her through punishment. Her breasts are removed by her torturers (incited by Quintiantus's lust for this body already devoted to Christ); they are later returned to her by Christ. It is her alienation from agency over and ownership of her body– made even more meaningful by the attractiveness of that body– that marks Saint Agatha as holy. Del Piombo's depiction of the Martyrdom of Saint Agatha emphasizes this very paradigm. While her appearance and expression may seem erotic by nature, according to art historian Jill Burke in an article on the piece, the "Council of Trent ruled that religious images should not incite lust," so there may have been a deeper motivation for the seemingly salacious content; perhaps the Saint is depicted this way in order to emphasize the gravity and willfulness of this self-denial, the enormity of her sexual potential harnessed for the divine: as Saint Agatha loses her sex she gives her soul to Christ.
The Martyrdom of Saint Agatha also evokes a sense of lust in the tense, angled bodies of the men. The classic Milgram experiment, in which people were instructed to give an electric shock to "learners" if they answered correctly demonstrated that when a person in power ordered subordinates to inflict pain, they would comply. It's possible that the men in the painting were responding to Quintianus's orders just as the Milgram participants responded to the lab technicians (Cohen, 2008). Another explanation could be that the men were experiencing pleasure from watching Agatha's pain, as suggested in part by the emotions conveyed through the painting's rich reds and dark shadow. "Sadism" was introduced into the diagnostic lexicon in 1912 by Krafft-Ebing and is defined as the act of deriving sexual pleasure from the infliction of pain and humiliation of others. According to a forensic study done on sadistic murder trials, the term "covers not only real and observable pain of a victim as the source of pleasure feelings but also the fantasy of the pain and humiliation the victim may feel" (Berner et al., 2003). This could explain why the two outermost men are on looking expectantly at St. Agatha's face, maybe looking for a response of pain.