Martyrological Torture and the Invention of Empathy: Gallonio’s Treatise

Abstract

The Treatise of the Instruments of Martyrdom (Italian version 1591, Latin version 1594), published by the Oratorian priest Antonio Gallonio (1556-1605), textually and graphically conveys the hundreds of ways in which persecutors tormented martyrs. It constitutes a clinical and, above all, technical reconstruction of machines used to torture Christians. Yet it was not the horror of blood and gore, nor the pleasure of pain, which Gallonio aimed to impress upon the readership. The underlying message was rather the victory of the impassive faith in God over the ingenuity and inventiveness of engineers. This martyrological machine theatre, however, lost its efficacy as subsequent generations put the work to their own use in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Gallonio’s mechanistic imagery was appropriated by art theorists. Meanwhile, his antiquarian scholarship fed into the juridical and historical fortification of the edifice of the Church. Gallonio’s treatise became a sterile reconstruction of juridical torture. To early Enlightenment thinkers, including Pierre Bayle (1646-1706), the work came to exemplify the cruelty that the Church of Rome seemed to exalt. The legalistic antiquarianism which appropriated Gallonio’s scholarship around 1700 offended a new sensitivity which shunned salvific violence: from a spiritual exercise the treatise became an aesthetic aberration.