{"title":"Creating and unmaking the political body","authors":"Thomas Balfe","doi":"10.1163/22145966-07101004","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"The shared embodiment of humans and animals, and the notion of the ‘creaturely’ human influentially discussed by Anat Pick, have recently emerged as vital concerns within Animal Studies. Aligning its critical stance with these perspectives, this article analyses the small painting in the Rijksmuseum, traditionally attributed to Jan de Baen, which depicts the 1672 murder of the Dutch politicians Johan and Cornelis de Witt. Pamphlets, broadsheets and other contemporary responses to the murder frequently compare the bodies of the De Witts – which were eviscerated, hung upside-down, shorn of body parts and allegedly partially eaten – to animal carcasses. Drawing on these contextual sources, the essay explores how the painting works with and against period constructions of the killing in terms of inter-species violence. It uncovers tentative admissions of human creatureliness in the painting’s representation of the murdered body as a temporal, material and fragile entity.","PeriodicalId":29745,"journal":{"name":"Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art-Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1000,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art-Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22145966-07101004","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"ART","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The shared embodiment of humans and animals, and the notion of the ‘creaturely’ human influentially discussed by Anat Pick, have recently emerged as vital concerns within Animal Studies. Aligning its critical stance with these perspectives, this article analyses the small painting in the Rijksmuseum, traditionally attributed to Jan de Baen, which depicts the 1672 murder of the Dutch politicians Johan and Cornelis de Witt. Pamphlets, broadsheets and other contemporary responses to the murder frequently compare the bodies of the De Witts – which were eviscerated, hung upside-down, shorn of body parts and allegedly partially eaten – to animal carcasses. Drawing on these contextual sources, the essay explores how the painting works with and against period constructions of the killing in terms of inter-species violence. It uncovers tentative admissions of human creatureliness in the painting’s representation of the murdered body as a temporal, material and fragile entity.
人类和动物的共同体现,以及Anat Pick所讨论的有影响力的“生物”人类的概念,最近成为动物研究领域的重要关注点。根据这些观点,本文分析了国立博物馆的这幅小画,传统上认为是Jan de Baen的作品,描绘了1672年荷兰政治家Johan和Cornelis de Witt的谋杀案。当时的小册子、大报和其他对这起谋杀案的回应经常把德威特夫妇的尸体比作动物尸体——他们被掏空内脏,倒挂着,被剪掉身体的一部分,据说还被吃掉了一部分。在这些背景资料的基础上,本文探讨了这幅画是如何与物种间暴力的杀戮时期结构一起工作的。它揭示了在绘画中将被谋杀的身体表现为一个暂时的、物质的和脆弱的实体时,对人类生物性的尝试性承认。