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Custodia degli occhi: Discipline and Desire in Post-Tridentine Italian Art

Context and contribution: Loh’s chapter appeared in a peer-reviewed edited book, The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation Church, concerned with the promotion of the sensuous as part of religious experience in the Roman Catholic Church of the early modern period. Loh’s essay contributes to a reassessment of the art of the Counter-Reformation through a detailed, historically contextualized consideration of two lost images in the light of the changing conditions of their reception. In her contribution, the motif of the reclining female nude in sixteenth-century Italian painting provides a case study in the reception and afterlife of pre-Tridentine images in post-Tridentine contexts.

Research imperatives and process: Loh’s essay is about blind spots, about looking beyond the usual frames of viewing. Her analysis of two lost and partial images shows how works of art are transformed both physically and iconographically by altering perspectives, and how artists shape and are shaped by these changes along the way. Through careful historical contextualization, she shows how, with the wave of moralizing treatises written after the closing of the Council of Trent in 1563, representations of the body increasingly came to be read as sites of contestation. While Tridentine reforms in the second half of the sixteenth century sought to create a rupture in the way these works were appreciated, this chapter outlines the different strategies of negotiation (e.g., repression, displacement, sublimation, and transformation) that occurred between the work and a multiplicity of early modern spectators in the century that followed.