Against the Wound

Jake Romm navigates artistic depictions of genocide and religious violence—some illuminating, others devoid of substance—from Renaissance Italy to modern-day Berlin, in an essay from LARB Quarterly no. 46: “Alien.”

By Jake RommSeptember 29, 2025

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This essay is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 46: Alien. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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IN THE CENTER sits a stainless steel table covered with a black plastic tarp. On top of the tarp is a lump of charred organic material, something burned and burst apart. Behind the table is a workbench (stainless steel again) covered in, one assumes, accurate facsimiles of forensic tools and charts: scissors, droppers, tweezers, a clinical sketch of a body covered in handwritten notes, a microscope, gloves. Also on the workbench are what appear to be the charred remains of a human spine. The recognition gives meaning to the first lump. Here is what remains of a body: here is flesh and bone destroyed.

The installation, Death May Wait (2022), is by Norwegian artist Ajla R. Steinvåg. It’s the first piece of The New Subject. Mutating Rights and Conditions of Living Bodies, a group exhibition at KINDL, a former Berlin brewery that is now one of the city’s many museums of contemporary art. The exhibition purportedly “explores the political and technological challenges affecting bodies today.” I scan the sparse curatorial text: this, a recreation of a forensics laboratory, a reconstruction of the remains of Vladimir Komarow (a Russian cosmonaut who died during the Soyuz 1 mission in 1967), is meant to examine “the consequences of technological violence and their aestheticisation in forensic contexts” and “the complex, interdependent relationship between the body and technology.” Et cetera, et cetera.

The facsimile of the charred body says nothing. Nothing except: Look here. Here—not there. Over there, the real thing makes demands; dead bodies carry an imperative that the Germans know all too well. So, the Germans look at the facsimile and not the body.

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I landed in Berlin in mid-December of last year. On my fifth day, I visited the Gemäldegalerie, a museum that houses the city’s collection of art from the 13th to 18th centuries. Among its Poussins and Rembrandts is Saint Michael, the version painted by Luca Giordano circa 1663. Giordano himself is unimportant to me: born in Naples in the 1630s, Italian baroque, court painter in Spain between 1692 and 1702, famously a quick worker (nicknamed “Luca fa presto”), primarily a painter of scenes from Christian scripture, known for his busy compositions (vibrant colors, virtuosic use of light, dynamic, crowded but never muddled). Enough of that. What interests me about Giordano is this specific painting, and the specific, incredibly idiosyncratic choice he made when painting it.

Saint Michael, originally intended for an altarpiece, depicts a familiar scene: the archangel Michael vanquishing Satan and banishing him and his armies from heaven. It was an especially popular subject throughout Renaissance art—significant versions have been painted by Guido Reni, Raphael (twice), Bonifazio Veronese, Peter Paul Rubens, and Tintoretto, among others. The theme dates back to the fourth century, when Constantine, the first Christian emperor of Rome, defeated the armies of his rival Licinius at Byzantium and Chrysopolis (which together comprise modern-day Istanbul). Constantine’s victory united the western and eastern portions of the Roman Empire, and, as historian Richard F. Johnson writes, “after his victory, Constantine commissioned a painting of himself and his sons standing on top of a serpent pierced by a weapon.” Johnson goes on to explain that the “iconographic representation of Constantine’s victory over Licinius is clearly a visual reworking of the mythic battle of Revelation 12:7–9,” in which Michael defeats Satan in the guise of (depending on the translation) a “serpent” or “dragon,” casting him and his rebel angels out of heaven.

Earlier Christian veneration of Saint Michael almost exclusively revolved around his association with the healing powers of fountains and springs. Following Constantine’s victory and the subsequent display of the painting, however, Michael, already “Commander of the Heavenly Host in battle,” became most associated with (and most famous among) the so-called military saints. As Johnson explains, tracing the history of the migration of the cult of Saint Michael from modern-day Turkey west to France, “each of the three great regional powers, Constantine’s empire, the Lombards, and the Carolingians, adapted and adopted St. Michael, Commander of the Heavenly Host in battle, as the patron saint of its imperial ambition.” Historian John Charles Arnold refines this vision, observing that, “in visual media, the angel came to represent a Christian sense of ‘victoriousness’ as well as the triumph of Christian light and reason over the darkness and ignorance of paganism.” And just as Saint Michael came to represent empire, so Satan became a stand-in for empire’s foes, be they Licinius, the Protestants, or the Ottomans.

In typical depictions of Saint Michael, the angel dominates the composition: center frame, occupying the upper two-thirds or three-fourths of the plane. Blond locks caught in divine light, the defender of heaven sprouts feathery wings beneath a splendid red cloak and shining armor, wielding a sword (or, occasionally, a spear). He is almost always poised mid-stroke—often at the apex of his swing—with one or two feet driven into Satan’s body or head. For his part, Satan typically writhes in the lower third of the composition (varying levels of animal hybridization riff on Revelation 12:17–9; in Rubens’s 1622 version, for instance, Satan has fangs, bat’s ears, and snakes for hair).

Giordano painted the scene twice, once in 1663 and again three years later. The latter depiction, titled The Fall of the Rebel Angels, bears many of the hallmarks of prior or contemporaneous depictions: the sword, the locks, the wings, the mid-stroke pose. Instead of armor, however, Michael wears a skintight blue cloth (a detail borrowed from Reni’s 1635 version). The composition differs slightly; here, the fallen angels, more numerous and human than usual, take up nearly the entire lower half of the frame in a tangle of screaming bodies. Giordano’s interest in large-scale, crowded compositions afforded these demons the extra space, space that Giordano used—out of humanism or virtuosity—to draw out their individual features. Michael’s foot meets Satan’s collarbone at exactly center frame, uniting the heavenly vision of the upper half and the destruction of the lower in the image’s sublime moment of conquest.

It is Giordano’s earlier painting that marks a more significant deviation from conventional depictions of Michael vanquishing Satan. For Giordano, the scene is relatively sparse, especially compared to his subsequent rendition: only Michael and Satan are given any compositional prominence, though two other bodies also partially appear, along with a goat’s head and a snake. Unlike the later Fall of the Rebel Angels, in which the golden heavens are crowded with cherubs greedily watching the destruction below, here the sky is bare. The violence occurs in a darker, earthlier register. The background colors, too, are less celestial, the golden heavens replaced by moonglow in the upper third, which deftly transitions into a hazy red, burnt brown, and gray coal-fire in the lower half (in the later Rebel Angels, even the red of the hellfire burned with a heavenly glow). On the left side of the lower third, a man’s back twists as a snake wraps around his arm; just beneath, a screaming goat’s head, its tongue extended and loose. To the right, a figure tumbles out of frame, leaving only a foot and a leg in view.

As usual, Michael stands atop Satan. His body, in its tight blue cloth, faces the viewer, twisted left at the torso, right at the hips; his left leg flares back and his right is planted in Satan’s chest. His face is turned in profile. Michael’s cloaks alternate from a light, whitish pink on the left of the image to a gold-flecked red on the right; a brilliant yellow cloud seems to emanate from beneath the blue fabric to frame his exposed arms and legs.

Then there’s Satan. Satan emerges from the center of the lower third. Formally speaking, he’s fighting for visibility as much as for his life: only his torso is illuminated, his lower half forced into a shroud of smoke and flame. Unlike Michael, Satan is nude, every muscle of his body contracted as he turns upward in an inhuman rightward diagonal. His left arm is thrust behind his head. His face is contorted in a primal scream, mirroring the goat’s below him; his jaw, like a serpent’s, seems to unhinge; his mouth is cavernous. Where Michael’s head is topped (as ever) with delicate golden waves, Satan’s hair is black; his skin is tan whereas Michael’s glows cream white. The difference is as much racial as it is theological. His eyes are hidden in shadow—magnified on the computer, it looks as though they’ve been gouged out.

Like the other figures in the lower third of the painting, Satan seems to be lifted from the earth by an explosive force. Smoke billows upward; a light, curling broad stroke of red and white just beneath Satan further suggests blast-driven upward motion. Centuries before the first aerial bombing, Giordano has given us the visual language of the air strike: Michael inflicts death from above. The world below, a furnace, tangled and burned in a cloud of smoke. Limbs fly around the painting; clumps of earth burst toward the sky. If there were buildings, rubble would collapse around the figures. But there are no buildings, and the figures are nude, intertwined with animals, suffering and screaming together in indistinction. These tan figures beneath the boot of pearly Saint Michael, Giordano seems to say, are savages, human animals. Michael, first in heaven’s army, deals them their just deserts.

This is the West as it sees itself, and as it sees its victims. Michael’s martial resonance, remember, was born in the West’s victory over the East. The Michaelion, the great lost sanctuary dedicated to the archangel, was built by Emperor Constantine just over the Bosphorus Strait, right where Europe begins: a watchtower and a warning.

That’s the easy reading—the one that reaffirms the false, the one that merely doubles the world as it seems. But it’s not right; I’ve left something out. Here is Giordano’s most confounding choice: unlike the later Fall of the Rebel Angels, the 1663 painting does not depict the angel mid-thrust. Rather, we see Michael plunging his spear into Satan’s side, blood spurting from the wound. Giordano clearly intended to emphasize this detail. Indeed, it is the focal point of the composition: it sits directly in the center of the bottom third, and forms the tip of the triangle implied by Michael’s figure; the leftward twist in Michael’s body and his dancing left leg spin on the axis centering around the wound, balanced by their opposite, the rigid spear.

Beyond the atypicality of actually seeing Michael complete his blow, Giordano means to tell us: this wound is no ordinary wound. In the annals of Christian art, it is a direct mirror of the side wound of Jesus. According to the Gospel of John, as Jesus hung from the cross, the Romans went to break his legs, intending to hasten his death so that he could be buried before the Sabbath. Coming upon Jesus, however, they realized that he was already dead. A Roman soldier (named Longinus in later Christian writing) took his spear (also translated as “lance”) and stabbed Jesus in the side to confirm the death. Blood and water poured from the wound. In later tellings of the story, the blood and water from Jesus’s wound fell into Longinus’s eyes, healing his blindness.

The wound is the truth of the work, of the world. The visual language of the painting and its theme both point to a positive identification with Michael, but the wound tells us to think again. Everything is not as it seems. Satan’s scream of anguish becomes a protestation of innocence; the wound offers evidence for that assertion. In his 2011 book After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights, scholar Robert Meister writes:

When Milton’s Satan (“The Enemy”) says “Evil, be thou my good,” he inaugurates a war for the soul of mankind based on the meaning of the distinction between good and evil itself. If a struggle over the meaning of evil is the moral template for war, then consensus on the fact of evil is what it would mean for this war to end.

The wound inflicted by Michael is the fact of the contestation—the formal unification between Michael and Satan in Giordano’s painting that locks them together. Satan’s protestation is not only one of innocence, then, but also one that carries a demand to Michael: see this wound, let the blood heal your blindness; you are committing evil, you must stop.

But this doesn’t seem quite right either. The side wound was the last of Christ’s holy wounds, the one that confirmed his martyrdom. “Human rights have become a discourse of revelation-followed-by-conversion that is modeled on certain Christian accounts of the Cross,” Meister writes. “In these accounts, Christ’s sacrifice is meant to reveal the cruelty of all sacrifice (because the victim is innocent) and thus to bring the cycle of sacrifice to an end through concern for the suffering of humans as such (love one another).” The wound gives possible meaning to Satan’s death: in the death of this creature that you revile, Giordano seems to say, you will see your error. Yet Christ freely chose his death; Satan does not. And crucially, in history there is no resurrection. The dead do not benefit from the conversion, even if they are its occasion.

A better reading, perhaps: Satan’s protestation is not for his innocence, because innocence is immaterial; it is a protestation against the wound, against a martyrdom that—even should it exist—he did not choose. The victims do not have a hand in the construction of the new order, and thus the new order is made jointly by converted witness and perpetrator alike. But the revelation is ambiguous. As Adorno writes in Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, “Murder is thus the repeated attempt, by yet greater madness, to distort the madness of such false perception into reason: what was not seen as human and yet is human, is made a thing, so that its stirrings can no longer refute the manic gaze.” Murder and dehumanization are simultaneous events: the human becomes a corpse, a thing, and the sight of the corpse spreads the lie about the human. The victim, whose death is the revelation, is at once excluded from the human community and the occasion for a new one.

Meister turns to Emmanuel Lévinas to draw out this deficient ethics:

Like today’s humanitarian politics, the first imperative of Lévinasian ethics is to avoid historical contextualization. It does this by assigning to historical enemies a responsibility to coexist in the same place, regardless of the broader political context, and thus provides an implicit rationale for the politics-without-redistribution that today’s purely ethical interventions presuppose.

In other words, peace over justice at all costs, in all contexts. The fixing of the meaning of good and evil without the truth of resolution.

A pretty thought. Yet one can sidestep these questions of justice only because the dead cannot speak. Given voice, they might say: My death was an injustice; injustice is what killed me. On the graves of the victims, what is sought is not peace, the absence of suffering for all—which would require the recognition of the victims as human and a reckoning with their testimony about the present order—but equanimity for those who remain. Revelation is for the living, and also by the living: the new order always seems to reek of the old.

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There is, nevertheless, the righteousness of victimhood. Yet even this is incomplete. The moral authority of victimhood is unequally distributed: it belongs to those whose suffering the world has forbidden in advance. Meanwhile, the world marks others for damnation—there are no victims in hell, only devils. Art history confirms the thought.

The bottom third of Giordano’s painting bears an uncanny resemblance to Picasso’s 1937 masterpiece Guernica—a baroque forerunner, almost. The thrashing and tangled limbs (concentrated as well in the lower quadrant of the frame), the obscure movements and positions of the subjects amid the chaos, the screaming ungulate alongside a screaming human face, the fire, the twist of the horse’s neck, all resound across time. If Giordano’s Saint Michael offers an anachronistic depiction of an air strike, Picasso’s Guernica supplies a contemporaneous one.

Guernica was, famously, painted in response to the 1937 German bombing of the Basque town (and important cultural and historical site) of the same name during the Spanish Civil War. Around 20 years after Guernica first debuted, John Berger wrote that “Guernica has deservedly become the one legendary painting of this century.” Indeed, it has become the international art historical symbol for the suffering and chaos of war—the painting by which others are measured. But is this purely a matter of Picasso’s talent? Here is the second half of that line from Berger: “although works of art can perpetuate legends, they do not create them.” The bombing of Guernica was, prior to Picasso, already an international scandal—it was intended, as Sven Lindqvist explains in The History of Bombing (2000), in Linda Haverty Rugg’s translation, as “an experiment” to test “a particular blend of incendiaries, high-explosive, and splinter bombs,” entirely directed at the town’s civilian population. The Germans bombed the town in three sorties, resulting in massive destruction and thousands of casualties. The destruction was so bad that the Nazis and Franco’s troops attempted to orchestrate a cover-up: in a propaganda tactic that people will surely recognize from the Israeli tool kit during the Gaza genocide, they claimed that there wasn’t a bombing raid at all, that it was in fact their enemies, the Republican forces, who had burned the city.

Guernica’s “legendary” status was, then, due not solely to the scale of destruction—the world, after all, had just seen far more extensive destruction during World War I—but also to the calculus behind it. As Berger (forgive him) writes, echoing the popular understanding of the event, “Guernica was the first town ever bombed in order to intimidate a civilian population: Hiroshima was bombed according to the same calculation.” This is, however, untrue. As Lindqvist so masterfully illustrates, echoing Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism (1950), Guernica was exceptional only for having taken place on European soil. Twenty-six years before Guernica, the Italians were dropping bombs on Arabs and Turks in Tripoli in the first ever bombing attacks from the air. Newspapers at the time noted that “this was not war. It was butchery, in which non-combatants, young and old, were slaughtered ruthlessly, without compunction and without shame.”

Around the same time, the French and the Spanish were carrying out bombing raids across Morocco. Well before the world knew the name Guernica, the British were bombing civilian populations across Iraq, the French were using the tactic in Syria, and the South Africans were doing the same across southwest Africa. In 1925, American airmen volunteered to bomb the Moroccan town of Chefchaouen on behalf of the French, even though “every male inhabitant capable of bearing arms was known to be absent”—I imagine that they thanked the French for the opportunity. As opposed to the bombing of Guernica, “the truth about Chechaouen,” Lindqvist writes, “required no coverup. Bombing natives was considered quite natural. […] Chechaouen had no Picasso. There was not even a camera there to record the destruction.”

It was the Devil who died in Chefchaouen, and it was the angel who killed him from above; Saint Demetrios drives his spear through the heart of the gladiator in Arab garb. I mean: Chefchaouen had a Picasso, in a sense; so did Ben Carrich, so did Damascus, so did Tripoli. The canon of Western art bears broader witness to these crimes, but from the standpoint of the perpetrator. Typically, the image of the victim is absent; to the West, there were no victims. A portrait of French president Gaston Doumergue by Marcel-André Baschet—a mediocrity who, like so many other mediocrities, turned to official portraiture—is a painting of the bombing of Damascus. The shadow cast by Doumergue on his desk is the shadow of modernity, of the wrong life. Guernica compels us to consider the victims and their suffering (albeit with the perpetrators absent). Still, Picasso’s victims were and remain clearly cognizable as such to a Western viewer; Giordano’s Saint Michael offers us “Saint” and “Satan” locked together in vivid moral contestation. It is the mere suggestion that there might be, in this scene, a victim at all that makes Giordano’s painting so radical. It asks us to accept the blood from the side wound into our eyes so that we might see this apophatic history of representation.

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The morning after I landed in Berlin, I woke up, opened my phone, and saw a picture of a man in a displaced persons shelter in the Palestinian city of Khan Younis, in central Gaza. The image had been taken the day before; the shelter had just been bombed by Israel. The man is on his knees in the center of the frame, his hands covering his eyes, his mouth open in a scream of such anguish that, even though I have returned to this picture hundreds of times, I can still barely stand to look at it. Everything around him is chaos: the air is hazy and orange with smoke; he is surrounded by rubble and torn rags (bodies?); a streak of red slashes across the left side of the image (blood?).

I went to KINDL that same day. I walked through the exhibition looking for something, mere mention of the slaughter taking place in Gaza, a slaughter supported wholesale by the German state, which had so generously funded the KINDL exhibition that began 344 days into the genocide. Not a single word. I looked for “the political and technological challenges affecting bodies today” and found it only in the image of Khan Younis. There is nothing complex about the relationship, about the challenges: a bomb has torn people to shreds, has burned them alive, has brought rubble down upon their heads. The relationship is between the body and bomb; the challenge is murder.

The Germans extend their right hand to the genocidaires, filled with weapons and messages of support; they use their left to write curatorial texts. The cleanliness of the lab, the careful examination of the body after death, is denied to the Palestinians—all the hospitals in Gaza have, to some degree, been reduced to rubble. Surgeons operate without anesthesia; blood covers the floors. Next to the facsimile of the spine laid out on the sterile table in the sterile white room, with the images of the holocaust in Khan Younis in my head, I felt like I was going insane.

I did not return to KINDL during the month I spent in Berlin, but I visited the Gemäldegalerie three times. Each time, my walk around the gallery became shorter and shorter as I moved impatiently toward Giordano’s painting. Each time: Gaza. In Satan’s scream, I see the scream of the man in Khan Younis. In Satan’s shadow-shrouded eyes, I see the man’s deliberate covering. The demon to the left of Satan raises his arm against the assault and the flames; I see Shaaban al-Dalou raising his own arm against Israel’s flames before being burned to death in his tent. No other painting in the museum, certainly no other painting of a military saint, gave any credence to the possible humanity of the supposed enemy. This left me disgusted—not with the works themselves but with the society that continues to venerate them, to uphold a centuries-old consensus on the fact of evil. The dialectic of enlightenment: all this loot, all this beauty, all this murder. It became hard not to imagine the Gemäldegalerie in ruins, harder still not to feel some glee at the thought. If these are the artifacts our present order venerates, then they, too, are retroactively tainted by that order. They contain the present as past-potential—what have we done with it?

What does all this beauty speak to in the face of the genocide of the Palestinians except the complicity of history? The war rages on in Saint Michael precisely because of the ambivalence introduced by the wound, a renewed struggle over previously determined notions of “good” and “evil.” The present genocide, however, should leave no room for ambivalence. The extermination of a people for the sole reason that they are not the right type of people is an evil that admits no ambiguity, no contestation. Enlightenment devours itself: the individual, emancipated from nature by the capacity for rational thought, has created the very conditions for its own complete nullity; the chaotic scene of every flour massacre in Gaza, the apex of Israeli barbarity thus far, contains within it as well the coolly rational calculations of calorie counts, logistics, and political messaging. I repeat Henri Bergson: the image of the present “is reflected behind it into the indefinite past; thus it finds that it has from all time been possible, but it is at this precise moment that it begins to have been always possible.” In other words, there is a hallucinatory sense in which the present can infect the works of the past. Gaza causes each image to say its name. The same march of “progress” that allowed Giordano his mastery of light and pigment is, to borrow from Adorno and Horkheimer, “culminating objectively in madness.” Every image carries with it the shadow of catastrophe; every image carries with it the calamity of history—look here.

Look here, but also there. In the streets, people chant, “Palestine will free us all.” To be sure, the victory of the Palestinians over Zionism would indeed not only be a victory in and for Palestine but also a victory against the present colonial order that continues to immiserate the majority of the world. But such a slogan uttered now, in the throes of unabated genocide, smacks of imposition. It carries with it an unavoidable, if implicit, suggestion: that there might be victory through Palestinians’ death, and that their death might convert the world to a new order that abhors and rejects the violence at its origin. Historically, the gambit has never worked—the existence of Israel itself is proof of its failure.

The Palestinians have rebelled against a colonial idea of heaven by insisting on their place among its peoples, by insisting that they are people. But, to borrow from Kafka: For the colonial world order, heaven is precisely the absence of the colonized. Michael, the avatar of divine empire, enforces the separation. Satan’s side wound, his death, did not bring about a new order. Nor, more importantly, will the death of Palestinians; each death in Gaza confirms the present order instead. Not all death is meaningless, of course, but victory can only be secured by the living. Liberation is a vital act; the people must live so that they can carry it through. Each bullet fired at the enemy is a protest against victimhood, against death; each bullet evinces a belief in one’s right to the future. In Satan’s scream we see this protest, in his wound a testament to the justice of his cause. And the scream and wound say together: I do not want to die.

On my last visit to the Gemäldegalerie, a group of children were touring the museum on a school trip. The walls of the galleries are covered in a thick velvet, alternating between green, red, blue, and gray; if you run your finger across, you can leave a trace in the fabric. The children were noisily chatting as they hurried through the rooms, mostly ignoring the actual paintings and only pausing to draw little figures or write their names in the velvet. I waited on a bench in front of Saint Michael for a while, then walked around to look at what they’d made.

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Featured image: Luca Giordano, Der Heilige Michael (Saint Michael), ca. 1663. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie (KFMV.261), photo by Christoph Schmidt. CC0, smb.museum. Accessed September 25, 2025.