Displacing Caravaggio: Art, Media, and

Humanitarian Visual Culture Francesco

Zucconi
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 DI SPLAC I NG C AR AVAG G I O
A RT, M E DI A , A ND H U M A NI TA RI A N V I SUA L CU LTU RE

FR A N C ES C O Z UC C O N I
Displacing Caravaggio
 Francesco Zucconi

Displacing Caravaggio
Art, Media, and Humanitarian Visual Culture

Translated by Zakiya Hanafi

Francesco Zucconi
Iuav University of Venice
Venice, Italy

ISBN 978-3-319-93377-1    ISBN 978-3-319-93378-8 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93378-8

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 Acknowledgments

This book was written over three years, mainly in Paris, Boston, and
Barcelona. Moving between different languages, not always with a sure
foot, I decided to write it in the only language I think I know well and in
which, in any case, my ideas tend to take form. I’d like to thank Zakiya
Hanafi, who took care of my writing and stimulated me to reflect on the
book’s lexical and conceptual issues. My thanks to Palgrave Macmillan,
especially to my editor, Lina Aboujieb, her editorial assistant Ellie
Friedman, and the reviewers who believed in my proposal.
Most of the research was conducted at the École des Hautes Études en
Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, where I received funding from the
European Union (H2020, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship,
HumanitarianPassions, No. 658512). There I was able to benefit from
daily contact with Giovanni Careri, Director of the Center for History and
Theory of Arts (CEHTA), to whom I’d like to express my deepest admira-
tion and appreciation. I also want to thank the other members of the
Center for welcoming me into their midst: Jean-Claude Bonne, Emanuele
Coccia, Georges Didi-Huberman, Pierre-Olivier Dittmar, André Gunthert,
Anne Lafont, and Eric Michaud.
The final work on the manuscript benefited from the excellent working
conditions provided by Harvard University, thanks to the Lauro de Bosis
Fellowship that I received for the Spring 2018 semester. I’d like to thank
Francesco Erspamer and the other Committee members of the program
commemorating the Italian intellectual, aviator, and anti-fascist: Giuliana
Bruno, Gennaro Chierchia, James Hankins, Charles Maier, Alina
Payne, Lino Pertile, Robert Putnam, and Jeffrey Schnapp. A special thanks

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

goes to Pier Luigi Sacco for involving me in extraordinarily interesting

scholarly and cultural projects.
During the months spent in Barcelona, a good part of my concentra-
tion was owed to the serene atmosphere of the Biblioteca de Catalunya. I
was fortunate to have the company of Elsa Soro during the writing pro-
cess, when the work can seem like an emotional see-saw, and my gratitude
to her goes well beyond the space of these acknowledgments.
Parts of this book were presented at conferences and seminars with
Maria Cristina Addis, Enrico Camporesi, Guillaime Cassegrain, Lucia
Corrain, Paolo Fabbri, Sara Guindani, Stefano Jacoviello, Tarcisio
Lancioni, Andrzej Lesniak, Carmelo Marabello, Angela Mengoni,
Philippe-Alain Michaud, Jonathan Pouthier, and Catherine Sussloff. Over
these years, I’ve also had the opportunity of discussing topics regarding
media theory and contemporary visual culture with Francesco Casetti,
Roberto De Gaetano, Ruggero Eugeni, Pietro Montani, and Antonio
Somaini. I am profoundly grateful to all of them. A very special thanks to
Mieke Bal, for her willingness to entertain a dialogue with me on the
themes of this book, whose title alone testifies to the profound inspiration
her work has given me.
Several friends have read parts of the manuscript and offered valuable
suggestions. Others have participated unknowingly in the labor of writing
by engaging with me in discussions on topics of shared interest. My thanks
to Luca Acquarelli, Michele Campanini, Maurizio Corbella, Massimiliano
Coviello, Matteo Giuggioli, Matthieu Griffith, Francesco Guzzetti, Maria
Anna Mariani, Céline Krauss, Angela Maiello, Valentina Manchia, Chiara
Quagliariello, Antonio Rafele, Marie Rebecchi, Giacomo Tagliani, Matteo
Treleani, Nicolas Tripet, Anna Tuli, Luca Venzi, and Massimo Zucconi.
I’d also like to thank Sabine Guermouche, Clara Lieutaghi, Matteo
Vallorani, and the other doctoral candidates and students who organized
workshops on the concept of the “theoretical object,” which took place at
CEHTA between 2015 and 2017. Without Lorenzo Sibiriu and Pietro
D’Aietti, my trip to Lampedusa would have been nothing like it was.
Lorenzo Alunni, Giorgio Fichera, Nicola Perugini, and Kendra Walker
have supported me with their friendship during the ebbs and flows of this
research. To them I dedicate this book.
 Contents

1 Introduction   1

2 Humanitarian Archeology  27

3 Un-Still Life  57

4 Pathos, Survival, and “Quasi Immanence” 105

5 On the Limits of the Virtual Humanitarian Experience 149

6 Caravaggio on Lampedusa 183

7 On Displacing 199

Bibliography  207

Index 227

vii
 List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Caravaggio, The Seven Works of Mercy, 1606–1607, Pio Monte
della Misericordia, Naples, courtesy of Alamy 35
Fig. 2.2 Alice Seeley Harris, missionary, photographer and campaigner
with large group of Congolese children, early 1900s, The Harris
Lantern Slide Show, ©Anti-­Slavery International/Autograph
ABP46
Fig. 2.3 Giovanni Gerolamo Savoldo, The Venetian Woman or Mary
Magdalene, 1520–1530, Gemäldegalerie—State Museums,
Berlin49
Fig. 3.1 Caravaggio, Madonna di Loreto/Madonna of the Pilgrims,
1604–1606, Basilica of Sant’Agostino, Rome, courtesy of
Alamy60
Fig. 3.2 Caravaggio, The Resurrection of Lazarus, 1608–1609,
Regional Museum, Messina, courtesy of Alamy 63
Fig. 3.3 Caravaggio, Boy Bitten by a Lizard, 1595–1596, Roberto
Longhi Foundation of Historical Studies, Florence, courtesy
of Alamy 67
Fig. 3.4 Willoughby Wallace Hooper, “Objects deserving of gratuitous
aid in Madras” (during the famine 1876–1878), Tamil Nadu,
South India, ©The Royal Geographical Society 72
Fig. 3.5 From Mark Twain, King Leopold’s Soliloquy (Boston:
F.R. Warren, 1905) 74
Fig. 3.6 Jean Mohr, A young Mozambican refugee, Muhukuru clinic,
Tanzania, 1968, ©HCR/Mohr 78
Fig. 3.7 Shehzad Noorani, A young girl drapes her hand over the
shoulder of a man she is soliciting outside a brothel in the city of
Tangail, Bangladesh, 2008, ©UNICEF/0986/Noorani 81

ix
x LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 3.8 From “Atlas of framboesia. A nomenclature and clinical study

of the skin lesion,” WHO Bulletin 4, no. 2 (1951) 83
Fig. 3.9 Claude Huber, Searo Medical Education, India, 1967,
©WHO/Claude Huber 86
Fig. 3.10 Sebastião Salgado, In the hospital of Abéché, Chad, the German
organization CAMS in charge of the surgical unit, Chad, 1985,
©Amazonas/Salgado88
Fig. 3.11 William Daniels, Hit by an arrow, Mpoko airport camp,
Central African Republic, 2014, ©MSF/Daniels 91
Fig. 3.12 Sebastião Salgado, Polio vaccination at the cattle camp of
Wumpul, Rumbek, Southern Sudan, 2001, ©Amazonas/
Salgado95
Fig. 3.13 The Doctors Without Borders campaign “La próxima vacuna
ponla tú” (The next vaccine you can give yourself),
photographer: Pedro Ballesteros, 2015, ©MSF/Ballesteros 98
Fig. 4.1 The UNICEF campaign “Bambini in pericolo” (children in
danger), photographer: Tomislav Georgiev, 2015,
©UNICEF/Georgiev106
Fig. 4.2 The Pope on Lesbos: the desperate tears of a migrant, 2016,
Repubblica.it, still frame 111
Fig. 4.3 Caravaggio, The Entombment of Christ, 1603–1604,
Pinacoteca Vaticana, Vatican City, courtesy of Alamy 117
Fig. 4.4 Samuel Aranda, Fatima al-Qaws cradles her son Zayed, 18, who
is suffering from the effects of tear gas after a street
demonstration in Sana’a, Yemen, on 15 October, 2011, Sanaa,
Yemen, ©The New York Times/Aranda 124
Fig. 4.5 John Vink, Rumanian refugees in their rented apartment,
Budapest, Hungary, 19 March, 1989, ©Magnum/Vink 138
Fig. 4.6 John Vink, Guatemalan refugees rehearsing songs for Sunday
mass, Maya Tecum, Mexico, 27 June, 1988, ©Magnum/Vink 140
Fig. 4.7 John Vink, Nicaragua refugees playing cards, Guasimo,
Honduras, June 4, 1988, ©Magnum/Vink 142
Fig. 4.8 Caravaggio, The Cardsharps, 1594, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort
Worth, courtesy of Alamy 143
Fig. 4.9 Caravaggio, Rest on the Flight into Egypt, 1595–1596, Galleria
Doria Pamphili, Rome, courtesy of Alamy 145
Fig. 5.1 Rob Thom, A delegate at the supporting Syria conference checks
out an immersive story—“Clouds over Sidra”—following the life
of one young Syrian refugee living in Za’atari Camp in Jordan,
London, February 4, 2016, ©Thom/Crown 151
Fig. 5.2 Gabo Arora and Chris Milk, Clouds over Sidra, 2015, selection
from a 360-degree video 157
 LIST OF FIGURES xi

Fig. 5.3 Gabo Arora and Chris Milk, Waves of Grace, 2015, selection
from a 360-degree video 159
Fig. 5.4 Gabo Arora and Chris Milk, Clouds over Sidra, 2015, selection
from a 360-degree video 166
Fig. 5.5 Caravaggio, The Taking of Christ, 1602, National Gallery of
Ireland, Dublin, courtesy of Alamy 172
Fig. 5.6 Caravaggio, The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, 1599–1600,
Chiesa di San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome, courtesy of Alamy 176
Fig. 6.1 Towards the Museum of Trust and Dialogue for the
Mediterranean, Lampedusa, September 26, 2016 186
Fig. 6.2 Magnus Wennman, Mahdi, 18 months old, Horgoš/Röszke,
Serbian-­Hungarian Border, 2016, ©UNHCR/Wennman 195
Fig. 6.3 Magnus Wennman, Moyad, 5 years old, Amman, Jordan, 2016,
©UNHCR/Wennman196
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

A Humanitarian Caravaggio?
It was certainly not the first time something similar had taken place.
Masterpieces of Italian, Flemish, “Oriental,” and other traditions of art
have been transported from one museum to another on countless occa-
sions. There was something particularly interesting about this time,
though—interesting enough to warrant a few pages and draw inspiration
from it for a book.
In the summer of 2014, a painting by Michelangelo Merisi, also known
as Caravaggio, became embroiled in negotiations among a group of insti-
tutions and representatives of civil society. The talks concerned the possi-
bility of its temporary transfer. The painting in question was The Seven
Works of Mercy, delivered by Caravaggio to the Confraternity of the Pio
Monte della Misericordia of Naples on January 9, 1607 and rarely moved
since then.1 The negotiations—which lasted for several weeks, at times
sparking off public debate—focused on the possibility of transferring
Caravaggio’s iconic masterpiece from Naples to Milan, specifically for the
2015 Universal Exposition. The institutions involved in the talks included
the Vatican State and the Italian Republic’s Ministry of Cultural Heritage,

1
See Vincenzo Pacelli, Caravaggio. Le Sette Opere di Misericordia (Naples: Art Studio
Paparo, 2014), 93.

© The Author(s) 2018 1

F. Zucconi, Displacing Caravaggio,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93378-8_1
2 F. ZUCCONI

Activities and Tourism.2 The possibility weighed by the lay and religious
institutions was that of exhibiting the seventeenth-century work inside the
pavilion of Caritas: the pastoral body of the Italian Episcopal Conference
for the promotion of charity; but also the Italian branch of Caritas
Internationalis—one of the largest nongovernmental organizations
(NGOs) in the world, whose humanitarian activities spread out over doz-
ens of countries.
As will be explored in greater detail, Caravaggio’s painting is a powerful
representation of the iconographic theme of the corporal works of mercy,
which every good Christian is expected to perform in aid of the needy by
providing basic necessities such as food, water, clothing, shelter, and so
forth. The reasons behind the request to borrow the painting can there-
fore be found in the Expo 2015 theme—“Nourish the Planet, Energy for
Life”—and even more so in the humanitarian campaign launched for the
occasion by Caritas called “Divide to multiply” and its global action cam-
paign “One human family, food for all: it’s our duty.”3
Despite the authority of the institutions involved, the idea came to
nothing. The painting remained where it was. The pavilion had to manage
without Caravaggio’s work or, at best, refer to it indirectly. As soon as
news of the painting’s possible transfer came out, protests erupted in
Naples—not so much because of the risks associated with transferring any
work of art, or even because of potential issues bound up with introducing
Caravaggio’s painting into a contemporary humanitarian framework. The
demonstrators demanded that the historical and artistic heritage of south-
ern Italy be defended from a predatory attitude on the part of political and
cultural institutions in the north. As it turned out, the vision of the
Minister of Cultural Heritage, Activities and Tourism, Dario Franceschini,
would ultimately promote an idea of Expo as a journey along the Italian
peninsula in discovery of its cultural and culinary delights.
At the beginning of 2016, Caravaggio’s The Seven Works of Mercy found
itself enmeshed once again in a controversy, also involving several institu-
tions and a possible transfer: this time, from Naples to Rome. The idea was
to display the work inside the Palazzo del Quirinale—the residence of the

2
“Un Caravaggio all’Expo ma scoppia la polemica,” La Repubblica, August 29, 2014,
http://napoli.repubblica.it/cronaca/2014/08/29/news/un_caravaggio_all_expo_ma_
scoppia_la_polemica-94651107.
3
For all content regarding these campaigns and initiatives, please refer to the Caritas pavil-
ion web page, http://expo.caritasambrosiana.it/english.html.
 INTRODUCTION 3

President of the Republic and a symbol of the power of the Italian state—
during the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy, which was inaugurated by
Pope Francis on December 8, 2015 and ended on November 20, 2016.
This was a tribute to the desperate condition of migrants attempting to
reach Europe along the Mediterranean routes and, by extension, to every-
one suffering from the hardships of war or natural disasters.4 At first it
seemed as if the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, was person-
ally involved in implementing the proposal. However, not long afterwards
the Presidency was forced to specify that a group of people linked to the
Pio Monte of Naples had put forward the idea of the loan for the Jubilee,
so it was not the Quirinal who had spearheaded the initiative.5 As a matter
of fact, a few days earlier the President of the Republic had been addressed
in an open letter published in the newspaper Corriere del Mezzogiorno, in
which intellectuals and art historians, including Paolo Isotta, Aldo Masullo,
and Tomaso Montanari, had asked him to give up on the idea of exhibit-
ing the masterpiece. They reminded him that in 1613 “the Founding
Members of the Pio Monte established the ‘perpetual immovability’ of the
painting because the chapel, on whose main altar it is preserved, was cre-
ated specifically for Caravaggio’s masterpiece: the architecture, the con-
text, is complementary to and inseparable from the extraordinary pictorial
work.”6
From the Expo to the Jubilee, then, this time too, prompted by its
relevance to a large public event with a strong symbolic impact, someone
had the idea of moving the same painting by Caravaggio. Then controver-
sies arose and everything stayed where it was. In both cases, the arguments
aimed at preserving the painting in the artistic and historical context in
which it was created. The polemics, it should be noted, remained largely

4
On the idea that the “‘Jubilee Year of Mercy’ issued a call to journalists, multimedia
experts and social media communicators to report on facts, people, ideas and evangelization
by using Christian art to explore benevolence, pardon, and mercy,” see Ralf van Bühren,
“Caravaggio’s ‘Seven Works of Mercy’ in Naples. The Relevance of Art History to Cultural
Journalism,” Church, Communication and Culture 2, no. 3 (2017): 80.
5
Anna Paola Merone, “Il Quirinale rinuncia al Caravaggio. Ecco la lettera al Corriere,”
Corriere del Mezzogiorno, February 23, 2016, http://corrieredelmezzogiorno.corriere.it/
napoli/cronaca/16_febbraio_22/ecco-lettera-quirinale-che-rinuncia-caravaggio-48eb7aa8-
d99c-11e5-97be-11f35f9213e8.shtml.
6
“Signor Presidente, Roma rinunci alle ‘Sette Opere’ del Caravaggio,” Corriere del
Mezzogiorno, February 16, 2016, http://corrieredelmezzogiorno.corriere.it/napoli/
arte_e_cultura/16_febbraio_16/signor-presidente-mostra-rinunci-sette-opere-caravaggio-
05b88266-d4e8-11e5-988b-47e1acade9a1.shtml.
4 F. ZUCCONI

indifferent to any in-depth examination of the social and political issues

involved in the transfer: the fact of allying the religious theme of mercy
with the mostly secular field of contemporary humanitarianism; the ethno-
centrism potentially implied in the gesture of associating the work of a
master of Italian painting with the conditions of people assisted by NGOs
located around the world; the risk of creating a sort of forgetfulness or, at
the very least, of upstaging the real sufferings of individuals affected by
catastrophic events by giving center stage to a work of art.
Anybody who goes to Naples does so to plunge into the maze of streets
that make up the city’s enormous historic center. One climbs up and down
streets coming from the Spanish Quarters, crosses via Toledo and takes
Spaccanapoli or the Decumano Maggiore, which cuts the city in two: it is
a long alley that, in terms of place names, coincides with today’s Via dei
Tribunali. At number 253, there stands a building with a large loggia.
Since 1602, this structure has been the seat of the Pio Monte della
Misericordia, a registered charity founded by seven Neapolitan noblemen;
an institution linked to the values of the Counter-Reformation but con-
ceived from the outset as a lay organization.7 It is one of the most active
associations in the city as well as the owner of a picture gallery, the
Quadreria, that is endowed with a priceless collection. The paintings dis-
played in the chapels located inside the octagonal church of the Pio Monte
della Misericordia alone, which take the theme of mercy in multiple direc-
tions, include works by artists Giovanni Bernardino Azzolino, Fabrizio
Santafede, Luca Giordano, Giovanni Vincenzo Forlì, and Battistello
Caracciolo. Caravaggio’s painting hangs on the left side of the entrance,
mesmerizing visitors and bringing them to a halt.
During Expo 2015, as during the Jubilee, anybody who went to Naples
to see The Seven Works of Mercy might have been surprised by what was
exhibited for the occasion on all sides of the Caravaggio: not only the
paintings by the artists mentioned earlier but also a series of works in dif-
ferent media. These were contemporary art pieces installed inside the vari-
ous chapels of the church. They formed part of the “Seven Works for
Mercy” project, developed in 2011 from an idea by Maria Grazia Leonetti
Rodinò, a cultural heritage management consultant. The idea she had was
simple and original: to invite seven artists every year to freely engage with

7
For an overview of the Pio Monte della Misericordia, see the various papers published in
a collection edited by Mario Pisani Massamormile, Il Pio Monte della Misericordia di Napoli
nel quarto centenario (Naples: Electa, 2003).
 INTRODUCTION 5

the theme of mercy, showing its topicality on the contemporary scene.8

Among the works of the 2016 edition, those of Rachel Howard and Olaf
Nicolai create an explicit link between the theme of mercy and contempo-
rary tools for emergency management: in Howard’s mixed media piece,
Controlled Violence, she folds and stacks white sheets stained with red. The
German artist uses instead seven disposable isothermal blankets, like those
currently employed by NGOs: he spreads them out and plays with their
color scheme, creating a relationship with Caravaggio’s painting and in
particular with the Christian duty to “clothe the naked.”9 The works by
artists from previous editions now form part of the Confraternity’s collec-
tion and can be viewed in the Quadreria gallery: from Jannis Kounellis,
who crosses and nails five men’s shoes, to Anish Kapoor; from Mimmo
Jodice to Joseph Kosuth; and from Francesco Clemente to Douglas
Gordon.
Anyone disappointed by the failure to transfer Caravaggio’s painting to
the Caritas Pavilion at the Milan Expo or to the Quirinal in Rome and
who managed to visit the marvelous spaces in the Pio Monte della
Misericordia would have surely picked up on the ironic associations to be
made between these aborted projects and the act of installing contempo-
rary pieces in its home location. “If Caravaggio won’t come to contempo-
rary events, then contemporary events will just have to go to Caravaggio,”
a slightly cynical spectator with a dry sense of humor might well have
remarked while exiting the Pio Monte. This is a way of encapsulating the
“topicality of Caravaggio” in a simple sentence or motto: the continuous
references to the artist and to the composition of his paintings (the inten-
sity of the passions, the spectacularity of the composition, the chiaroscuro),
as if the secret of contemporary communications were locked up inside
them—effective images that bear witness to today’s most tragic events and
evoke an attitude of “common humanity.” But this was hardly the last
word on the matter: attempts to juxtapose Caravaggio’s art with humani-
tarian emergency conditions did not end in Naples; nor were they limited
to the failed cases mentioned here.
In June 2016, President Mattarella inaugurated the exhibition “Towards
the Museum of Trust and Dialogue for the Mediterranean” on Lampedusa.

8
Please refer to the project’s web page, available on the Pio della Misericordia site, www.
piomontedellamisericordia.it/la-collezione/sette-opere-per-la-misericordia.
9
The original work of mercy of clothing the naked will be examined in the next chapter.
For now, the Gospel reference is Matthew 25, 35–36.
6 F. ZUCCONI

Located in the heart of the Mediterranean, the island has been the main
arrival point for migratory routes from the African continent since the
1990s and a host for NGOs regularly engaged in rescue and hospitality
operations along its shores and in its interior. The exhibition center,
located only a short distance from the sea, brings together works of art
with a variety of objects salvaged during recent years from shipwrecks. The
centerpiece of this exhibition was a painting: Caravaggio’s Sleeping Cupid
(1608), normally displayed at the Galleria Palatina in Florence but loaned
to the fledgling museum for the occasion. After the many failed attempts
to move Caravaggio in the name of “humanitarian relevance,” then, the
initiative finally met with success. One of the forces behind the loan was
the director of the Uffizi Galleries, Eike Schmidt, who emphasized that
“Sleeping Cupid reminds us of the many children on the boats who did
not make it. But our message is also one of hope and solidarity and serves
as a warning about the love we need to awaken toward those in need.”10
The exhibition ended on October 3, 2016, in a flurry of journalists who
arrived on the island for the event.
So far we have surveyed the main circumstances linking Caravaggio’s
pictorial corpus to the topicality of current events and to the so-called
European migrant crisis. The question arises whether these episodes were
minor occurrences, which will naturally fade from public interest, or
whether they point to a problematic entanglement between the icono-
graphic models of the Western artistic heritage and media representation
of contemporary suffering. If the latter is true, then the forms and critical
issues of this entanglement need to be explored and investigated. If, as the
ironic title of a pamphlet by art historian Tomaso Montanari states,
“Caravaggio’s mother is always pregnant”11 (an explicit reference to art-­
history “hoaxes” and to the profitable business of forgeries and false attri-
butions), then, on closer inspection, the series of transfers presented here
have created something akin to “a humanitarian Caravaggio.” Obviously,
this does not involve a new painting or a forgery but, rather, a visual con-
figuration that seeks to keep past and present together, to unite the reli-
gious and the secular spheres in a sort of mutual promotion: humanitarian

10
The quotation is taken from an article by Alessandra Ziniti, “Lampedusa, Mattarella
inaugura il museo della fiducia e del dialogo: ‘La piccola Favour è ormai italiana’,” La
Repubblica, June 3, 2016, http://palermo.repubblica.it/cronaca/2016/06/03/news/
lampedusa_migranti_museo_dialogo_presidente_mattarella-141200798.
11
Tomaso Montanari, La madre di Caravaggio è sempre incinta (Milan: Skira, 2012).
 INTRODUCTION 7

communication would receive a problematic “ennoblement” from art his-

tory, while the latter would enjoy a no less questionable “return to
relevance.”
What is immediately worth highlighting, therefore, are the similarities
and differences in the stories told thus far. Picking up on a term in media
theory that has met with some success, it might be said that the first two
anecdotes express the strategic intention of remediating Caravaggio. The
reference is to the idea of “remediation” introduced by Jay David Bolter
and Richard Grusin to examine ways in which “[a medium] appropriates
the techniques, forms, and social significance of other media and attempts
to rival or refashion them in the name of the real.”12 Remediation serves
in this case to describe how The Seven Works of Mercy would have been
inscribed in the communication strategies of the Expo pavilion belonging
to one of the most important humanitarian organizations in the world, or
in the context of the Jubilee year exhibitions.
What can be recognized in the third anecdote is, in a certain sense, a
programmatic recycling of the idea developed by Mieke Bal in a ground-
breaking study dating from 1999: that the contemporary arts straddling
the new millennium have given form to explicit or implied “quotations”
of Caravaggio’s works; and that an artistic practice of this type generates
inevitable feedback effects on the ways we observe and interpret
Caravaggio’s pictorial corpus. The creation of works such as the ones
mentioned earlier by Howard, Kounellis, Gordon, and Nicolai explicitly
express the intention of quoting Caravaggio13—making The Seven Works of
Mercy an attractor for new expressive languages and social discourses, and
for turning the entire Pio Monte Church into a contemporary media
environment.
On closer inspection, the last example—the voyage of the Sleeping
Cupid from Florence to Lampedusa—does not represent a simple transfer
or common loan between museum institutions. A concept developed by
Francesco Casetti is useful here for identifying the ways in which a work
and a medium are transformed during the passage from one environment
to another, so that “a form of experience […] reestablishes itself in a new

12
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media
(Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2003), 98.
13
On this topic, which will be discussed several times in this book, starting from the next
sections in the introduction, see Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art,
Preposterous History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
8 F. ZUCCONI

context.”14 Borrowing this notion, one might describe the last case as an
attempt to relocate Caravaggio to Europe’s southernmost strip of land. It
seeks to relocate the pictorial experience to the place where migrant bod-
ies disembark—forced into desperate journeys using whatever means they
can find—and where the spectacular rescue operations of NGOs attempt
to compensate for the inability of the international community to come up
with political responses that are compatible with the human right to move
freely around the planet.
Caravaggio’s pictorial corpus appears to have formed the axis of a
moral, political, and aesthetic discourse that plays on the most tragic
aspects of the contemporary world. What position should we take on these
types of actions? Should we offer generic praise for the attempt to bring
the artistic and historic heritage of the past into the present? Or should we
firmly criticize acts that not only decontextualize paintings but are also,
ultimately, impertinent toward the real conditions of suffering experienced
by the people assisted by the work of NGOs? When pressured to take a
position, one runs the risk of limiting oneself to a binary opposition,
thereby losing sight of the levels of complexity that exist in even the most
trivial of phenomena. By embracing one or the other of these two solu-
tions, one actually misses out on the opportunity—effectively offered by
the construction of “a humanitarian Caravaggio”—to examine the pro-
found interweaving between the composition strategies of the most tragic
images of the present day and the iconographic repertoire of the history of
western art. This question was also examined, for that matter, by Susan
Sontag, in one of the most compelling pages of her book entitled
Regarding the Pain of Others:

Photographer-witnesses may think it more correct morally to make the spec-

tacular not spectacular. But the spectacular is very much part of the religious
narratives by which suffering, throughout most of Western history, has been
understood. To feel the pulse of Christian iconography in certain wartime or
disaster-time photographs is not a sentimental projection.15

In this passage, as in others in her book, Sontag appears to lower the

lexical rigor of her argument so as to use words that are eminently
understandable in public discourse but highly vague in theoretical

14
On relocation, see Francesco Casetti, The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Keywords for the Cinema
to Come (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 17–42.
15
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), 80.
 INTRODUCTION 9

­ iscourse. Although taking an indirect approach, the pages that follow

d
will disambiguate the meaning of expressions such as “to make spec-
tacular,” “to feel the pulse,” and “a sentimental projection” as they
appear in thought on past and present images of suffering. Of immedi-
ate note in the quotation from Sontag is the opportunity and impor-
tance of investigating photographs, videos, images, and, more generally,
the various forms of communications produced by NGOs, both reli-
gious and secular—and, hence, of investigating contemporary forms of
representation of the pain of others—in a comparative relation with the
repertoire of Christian iconography.
Beyond the reasons stated by supporters or detractors of these sorts of
initiatives, juxtaposing the representation of mercy and suffering in
Caravaggio’s paintings with the scene of contemporary humanitarianism
assumes a certain theoretical weight if we consider the growing impor-
tance of a notion such as “anachronism” in the discourse of history and in
the theory of art and the image.16 As does, even more explicitly, the idea
of the “dialectical image” developed by Walter Benjamin, according to
which the images of the past are bearers of specific questions about the
present, and vice versa: “the image is that wherein what has been [das
Gewesene] comes together in a flash with the now [das Jetzt] to form a
constellation.”17 Instead of taking a position by unconditionally embrac-
ing or simply opposing the construction of a “humanitarian Caravaggio,”
it is certainly more productive to try to analyze and deconstruct its inher-
ent ideological implications. The task is to accept the challenge it holds in
order to usher in other possible comparisons between images that are dis-
tinct from each other and distant in time.
The idea that guides the following pages is, therefore, to start off from
these transfers and juxtapositions between Caravaggio’s work and the
context of contemporary humanitarianism in order to venture farther
afield. The aim is to carve out a path in the open field of humanitarian
visual culture through Caravaggio. What, then, are the underlying factors,

16
Regarding the topic of anachronism, see Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant le temps.
Histoire de l’art et anachronismme des images (Paris: Minuit, 2000). On anachronism as a
theoretical problem and a methodological tool in the history and theory of the arts, see also
Alexander Nagel and Chris Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010),
and Angela Mengoni, “Anacronismi, tra semiotica e teoria dell’immagine,” Carte Semiotiche
1 (2013): 12–18.
17
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin
(Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), 462.
10 F. ZUCCONI

if any, that propel his work outside the museum and art history circuit
and make a juxtaposition possible with NGO communications and with
the social and political practices characteristic of today’s humanitarian-
ism? And—once its depths have been plumbed and all its potentialities
have been put to the test—where does this sort of juxtaposition lead?
Does it create a simple, reassuring confirmation of some of the rhetoric of
contemporary humanitarian communications, or does it put them in cri-
sis? A preliminary, possible answer to these questions is that the icono-
graphic theme of the works of mercy offers an implicit model of the
communications strategies of contemporary organizations, whether the
latter are faith-based or secular. Another possibility is that the celebrated
“naturalism of Caravaggio” and its ability to bring life itself into focus, in
all its forms, provides a prism through which images of humanitarian
assistance can be observed and, thus, offers a direct passage into the heart
of today’s “biopolitical regime.”18
Reflection on the juxtapositions that have given rise to “a humanitarian
Caravaggio” thus necessarily produce other types of juxtapositions. The
task, then, is to start from his work and the aesthetic, ethical, and political
issues it raises, in order to create what Benjamin called a “constellation”—
a compass for navigating through the most haunting and compelling
images of the present.

Humanitarian Visual Culture as Montage

But what is “humanitarian visual culture”? What does it mean to couple
the name of a field of studies that has profoundly renewed thought on arts
and images with an adjective that refers to the modern culture of human
rights? When talking about humanitarian visual culture, are we referring to
images explicitly produced during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries
by NGOs and by the health and aid agencies of the United Nations? Or
does it refer to something like a style or a canon of photography that is
somehow independent from the communications put out by humanitarian
organizations?

18
The relationship between political and aesthetic configurations will be examined more
thoroughly in the following chapters. As an introduction to the concept of biopolitics, see
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, ed.
Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
 INTRODUCTION 11

Major studies on the topic largely veer toward the first of the two pos-
sibilities. The way that the various chapters of a book such as Humanitarian
Photography: A History are structured constantly references the key
moments of twentieth-century humanitarianism: the relationship between
missionarianism, colonialism, and humanitarian practice in the early twen-
tieth century; the rhetoric of development between the post-war period
and the 1960s; the shock of Biafra in 1968; the spectacularization of the
famine in Ethiopia in 1984–1985; the rise of a debate on the limits of the
representation of suffering at a distance, and the attempts on the part of
NGOs themselves to regulate photographic and communicative practic-
es.19 The corpus of images examined in the book edited by Heide
Fehrenbach and Davide Rodogno correspond to the key events in the
history of humanitarianism and ably demonstrate how strategies of visual
communication relating to historical and ideological changes have evolved.
The literature on the relationship between humanitarianism and visual
communication is vast and continually expanding, with studies published
in collected volumes and journals, which, for the most part, analyze the
strategies of individual humanitarian campaigns by assessing their effec-
tiveness and their characteristic values.
As for the second approach mentioned above, it is equally possible to
consider humanitarian visual culture as something bigger and more varied
than the images specifically produced by NGOs and allied aid organiza-
tions. How can one pass over a pioneering project such as the reportage
How the Other Half Lives, created in 1890 by the journalist and
­photographer Jacob Riis to expose the living conditions in New York City
slums and show the urgency for social reforms?20 How can one forget the
tradition of “humanist photography,” developed mainly in France in the
period after the Second World War, which sought to make human beings
and their conditions of daily life central to the representation? The works
of masters like Edouard Boubat, Robert Doisneau, Lucien Lorelle, and
Willy Ronis can be associated with this school.21 And how can one exclude
the important role that the works of American photographers like Walker

19
Heide Fehrenbach and Davide Rodogno, eds., Humanitarian Photography: A History
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
20
Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York, with an
introduction and notes by Luc Sante (London: Penguin, 1997).
21
For an overview, see Dominique Versavel, Laure Beaumont-Maillet, and Françoise
Denoyelle, La photographie humaniste, 1945–1968: Autour d’Izis, Boubat, Brassaï, Doisneau,
Ronis… (Paris: BNF, 2006).
12 F. ZUCCONI

Evans and Dorothea Lange hold in the history of reportage?22 When

drawing up a list of the possible twentieth-century foundations of some-
thing like a style of humanitarian communications, mention must also be
made of the great exhibition project of 1953 titled The Family of Man,
curated by the Luxembourg photographer Edward Steichen.23 This was an
attempt to establish a universalist collective imagery, an effort whose
“essentialism” was roundly criticized by Roland Barthes (“this means pos-
tulating a human essence, and here is God re-introduced into our
Exhibition”),24 and which scholars of photography and visual culture have
continued to revisit over the decades.
In addition to these issues regarding the possibility of coming up with
a preliminary definition of humanitarian visual culture, there is the extreme
difficulty of how to delimit the field, especially in a study like this one,
whose aim is to develop transversal paths of interpretation that cut across
images from a long-term perspective. Even the modes of production, dis-
tribution, and archiving of images and documents that are in some way
connected to the practice of rescue and assistance under conditions of war
and emergency—and therefore the idea itself of humanitarian communi-
cations—have varied over time.
If this difficulty in circumscribing the object of study is relevant from a
historical point of view, the question becomes all too evident in relation to
the present. When walking in the street, taking the subway, surfing the
web, or scrolling through one’s Facebook, Instagram or Twitter feed,
there is an endless stream of various types of messages about the living
conditions of political prisoners in Mexico, the famine and disease that
devastate the South Sudan, Syrian refugees in Lebanon, migrants fleeing
across the Mediterranean, and the activities of the NGOs who care for
them. This content is mostly linked to specific campaigns, which are

22
See Gilles Mora, Beverly W. Brannan, FSA: The American Vision (New York: Harry
N. Habrams, 2006). On the “documentary style” see Olivier Lugon, Le style documentaire.
D’August Sander à Walker Evans, 1920–1945 (Paris: Macula, 2001). An attempt to reflect on
the differences between humanistic photography and humanitarian reportage is offered in
Vincent Lavoie, Recueil. Ouvrages sur la photographie, Vol. 6, L’instant-monument, du fait
divers à l’humanitaire (Montreal: Dazibao, 2001), 97–120.
23
See Edward Steichen, The Family of Man (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1955).
24
See Roland Barthes, “The Great Family of Man,” in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers
(London: Granada, 1982), 100. For a reappraisal of the exhibition, starting from Barthes’
ideas and going beyond them, see Gerd Hurm, Anke Reitz, and Shamoon Zamir, eds., The
Family of Man Revisited: Photography in a Global Age (London and New York: I.B. Tauris,
2018).
 INTRODUCTION 13

planned by agencies and launched by NGOs. These campaigns differ from

country to country depending on the communication’s target audience—
sometimes only the titles change, while sometimes the entire content is
redesigned. However, what is even more challenging is that anyone who
wants to set out a comparative approach that takes into consideration the
multiple aspects of contemporary humanitarian communications must
deal with a stream of images, whose forms change depending on the flow
dynamics of the social network. Given these conditions, the campaigns
themselves are designed to be modular—easy to disassemble and put back
together in different versions—and the value of getting the message out
on social networks prevails over the composition of a homogeneous and
closed corpus. Every organization has different profiles active on the vari-
ous social networks; but a whole series of individuals in professional
roles—managers, spokespeople, communication directors, consultants,
digital strategists—also participate in the discussion, by introducing images
and comments on news events that are inevitably linked to “humanitarian
relevance.”
Then there are actual photographic contests linked to NGOs, taking
place monthly and annually, including UNICEF’s Photo of the Year
Award25 and the Click About It Photography Competition.26 There are
also awards such as the Pulitzer Prize and the World Press Photo Contest.
Although not strictly linked to the work of NGOs and the UN, they con-
tribute to defining the agenda and to establishing the cognitive and emo-
tional framework of the visual and audiovisual productions that will be
created during the following months. Since 2014 there has also been the
Radi-Aid Award, a project organized by the Norwegian Students’ and
Academics’ International Assistance Fund, with the support of the
Norwegian Agency for Development and Cooperation.27 This is an award
designed to develop critical reflection on the persistence of colonial and
racist clichés in humanitarian discourse as well as to promote the develop-
ment of a new political language. Every year, the Radi-Aid Award honors
the worst and the best humanitarian campaigns.
Finally, in addition to the individual photos or media campaigns
designed by agencies, there are the shocking images in the news, which are
inevitably connected to official humanitarian communications: images and

25
See the web page https://www.unicef.de/informieren/aktuelles/photo-of-the-year.
26
http://previous.clickaboutit.net.
27
https://www.radiaid.com.
14 F. ZUCCONI

statements that were originally independent but that can be reintroduced,

reworked, and remediated within the circuits of humanitarian communi-
cation. Think of the visibility and effectiveness of the pastoral missions of
Pope Francis on the islands of Lampedusa and Lesbos, of his words and his
gestures, charged with theological and iconographic implications. Or, to
stick with media cases that have received a great deal of attention, think of
the photo of the little refugee Marwan, taken in 2014 in the Syrian desert
and, especially, that of Alan (also known as Aylan) Kurdi, taken on
September 2, 2015 by the journalist Nilüfer Demir, and of their circula-
tion on the web.28 On these lines, the scholars mentioned earlier, Heide
Fehrenbach and Davide Rodogno, start from photographic images and
modes of dissemination such as the ones just mentioned in order to high-
light how the “symbiotic relationship between media and humanitarian-
ism—with its ambiguous politics and reliance on emotional and moral
appeals—continues today.”29
With these considerations in mind, it seems allowable to give up on
something like an a priori definition of humanitarian visual culture. Giving
up on providing a preliminary definition and on circumscribing the field
does not imply a retreat of some sort but, rather, a theoretical and meth-
odological assumption, in recognition of the fact that humanitarian com-
munication itself functions as a transmedial, complex mechanism.30 Rather
than possessing typical productions or stable stylistics that characterize it a
priori, it constitutes an open, stratified discursive field, one that is able to
continually transform itself in response to the news, according to the
opportunities of the moment, and on the basis of long-term, strategic
guidelines. In this sense, humanitarian communications proceed through
montage and by juxtapositions aimed at promoting past and present

28
For a discussion of the second photograph, see Nadine El-Enany, “Aylan Kurdi: The
Human Refugee,” Law and Critique 27, no. 1 (2016): 13–15. For more on the first image
and on the problems linked to its circulation on social networks, see Nicola Perugini and
Francesco Zucconi, “Marwan, quattro anni, solo nel deserto,” Il lavoro culturale, March 5,
2014, http://www.lavoroculturale.org/marwan-quattro-anni-solo-nel-deserto.
29
Heide Fehrenbach and Davide Rodogno, “A Horrorific Photo of a Drowned Syrian
Child: Humanitarian Photography and NGO Media Strategies in Historical Perspective,”
International Review of the Red Cross 97, (2015): 1154.
30
For more on the circulation strategies and platform changes characteristic of the visual
culture of nongovernmental activism, see Meg McLagan and Yates McKee, “Introduction,”
in Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernamental Activism, eds. Meg McLagan
and Yates McKee (New York: Zone Books, 2012), 16–18.
 INTRODUCTION 15

i­conographic configurations based on contextual opportunities.31 The

series of Caravaggio anecdotes presented at the beginning of this intro-
duction exemplify this mechanism.
Therefore, to speak of a humanitarian visual culture does not mean
confining oneself to the historical or thematic ordering of campaigns pro-
duced by NGOs; or to identifying a specific communicative genre. The
term will be used, rather, to identify a cultural response to a series of social
and political problems that can be investigated over long durations: it sig-
nifies a way of viewing and managing relations with alterity. If humanitar-
ian visual culture is conceived in these terms and studied through these
typical aesthetic configurations and rhetorics, it may thus offer a litmus
test for reflecting on the economic and political imbalances of the contem-
porary world.

Montage as Method
During the last decades of the twentieth century, issues regarding the
expression and media portrayal of suffering became the focal point of a
broad debate. Elaine Scarry spoke about the utter incapacity of physical
suffering to be expressed in language: “Whatever pain achieves, it achieves
in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through
its resistance to language.”32 The development of “trauma studies” as a
research field further developed this problem, responding to the need to
probe its psychological and social implications.33 The representation of
suffering and forms of humanitarian communications therefore constitute
an area of multidisciplinary interest: the subject has been addressed in

31
In German, French, and Italian studies especially, the concept of montage has achieved
a theoretical and methodological status in arts and media research. The next section, which
focuses more on methodological issues, sets out a few possible meanings of this term. For the
moment, the simple dictionary idea of “montage”—as the collection, preparation, and orga-
nization of heterogeneous materials in order to express them as a composition—will serve.
32
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1985), 4.
33
Essential texts include, for example, Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma,
Narrative, and History (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996); Dominick
LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press,
2001); E. Ann Kaplan, Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and
Literature (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005); Jeffrey C. Alexander, Trauma:
A Social Theory (Cambridge and Malden: Polity, 2012); Marianne Hirsch, Writing and
Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
16 F. ZUCCONI

philosophical, anthropological, and sociological studies, contributing to

its analysis from different theoretical perspectives.34 In visual studies, sev-
eral scholars have also investigated forms of pathos in situations where
political violence takes place and where human rights are violated; in many
cases, they have highlighted the forms of persistence of themes or icono-
graphic configurations from past centuries.35
This book is located at the intersection between these disciplines; its
aim is contribute to discussion on issues involving the development of a
humanitarian culture. It does so by drawing inspiration from the trans-
fers—the “remediations,” “quotes,” and “relocations”—of Caravaggio’s
paintings described earlier, in order to create space for a practice of com-
parison between some forms of representation of contemporary suffering
and the artistic and historic heritage of the West. To use one of the expres-
sions that appears repeatedly in the writings of Aby Warburg, in bringing
together the history of art, iconology, and the most experimental theories
of the image with historical, philosophical, and anthropological studies
related to the political problem of human rights, we must not be intimi-
dated by the “tendency to regulate art-historical inquiry by posting border
guards.”36
In the previous section, it was argued that humanitarian visual culture
is constructed through a process, by means of continuous reorganizations
of the image stream, which have been given the name of “montage.” The
idea of montage has been alluded to more implicitly from the start of this
book. To argue that media communications pertaining to humanitarian

34
See, for example, Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador,
2008); Eyal Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils (London: Verso, 2012); Didier Fassin
and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood,
trans. Rachel Gomme (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Luc Boltanski, Distant
Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1999).
35
Over the next few pages, reference will be made to a number of studies relating to spe-
cific topics. For an introduction, see, for example, Jill Bennet, Empathic Vision: Art, Politics,
Trauma (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005); Asbjørn Grønstad and Henrik
Gustafsson, eds., Ethics and Images of Pain (New York: Routledge, 2012); Maria Pia Di Bella
and James Elkins, eds., Representations of Pain in Art and Visual Culture (New York:
Routledge, 2012).
36
Aby Warburg, “Peasants at Work in a Burgundian Tapestries,” in The Renewal of Pagan
Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, introduction by
Kurt. W. Forster, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of
Arts and the Humanities, 1999), 319.
 INTRODUCTION 17

activities entertain a relationship with iconographic configurations and

passions from the history of art means at the very least to evoke the idea
(advanced earlier by the Soviet film director and theoretician Sergei
Mikhailovich Eisenstein) that every image contains in itself others, which
are realized precisely in the effect exerted on the audience, but which at
the same time remain in a state of incomplete expression, as potentials.37
However, clearly, montage itself may constitute the most effective
answer to the questions raised earlier, on the possibility of analyzing forms
of humanitarian visual culture in the even larger field of the western icono-
graphic tradition. To think of montage as method can help open up a
pathway of inquiry that precedes criticism and moral judgment but does
not exclude them; it can also help to pick out, from one case to the next,
what is considered to be most relevant and significant within a potentially
unlimited corpus. If the goal of the analysis is to identify forms of continu-
ities and discontinuities between visual regimes that are highly heteroge-
neous, montage is therefore a means for interacting with the hybrid nature
of the discursive field and with the possible iconographic stratifications
that exist in every image.
Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, conceived in the early 1920s as a tool for
understanding artistic and media images from a long and very long per-
spective, provides a theoretical and methodological model. The Atlas con-
sists of a series of black panels on which the German scholar gave himself
the liberty of juxtaposing photographic reproductions of paintings and
artistic objects, but also newspaper clippings, postcards, advertisements,
and stamps.38 It is not difficult to imagine that if Warburg had lived in the

37
See Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, Towards a Theory of Montage: Sergei Eisenstein
Selected Works, Volume 2, eds. Michael Glenny and Richard Taylor, trans. Michael Glenny
(New York and London: I.B. Tauris, 2010). For an examination of the theoretical and epis-
temological potentialities of Eisenstein’s idea of montage as well as a comparison with the
thought of Aby Warburg, see Antonio Somaini, “Cinema as ‘Dynamic Mummification,’
History as Montage: Eisenstein’s Media Archeology,” in Sergei M. Eisenstein: Notes for a
General History of Cinema, eds. Antonio Somaini and Naum Klejman (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2016), 69. On the relation between montage and method in
Eisenstein, see Alessia Cervini, La ricerca del metodo. Antropologia e storia delle forme in
S.M. Ejzenštejn, with a preface by Roberto De Gaetano and an afterword by Salvatore
Tedesco (Milan: Mimesis, 2010).
38
The literature on Warburg’s thought and his Atlas is immense and the topic will
addressed again on several occasions in this book. Here, the reference is restricted to Aby
Warburg, Gesammelte Schriften. Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, eds. Martin Warnke and Claudia
Brink (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2000).
18 F. ZUCCONI

second half of the twentieth century and, still more so, in the era of social
networking, he would have devoted at least one panel of his Atlas to forms
of representation of pathos in humanitarian communications and to their
problematic relationship with pagan and Christian iconography. Through
montage, then—assumed as an experimental methodological tool—
understanding can be gained on the question of if and how the effective-
ness (and ineffectiveness) of some forms of contemporary media
representation is based on the relationship they entertain with images
from the past. This would be a pathway through which something like an
iconographic memory can be reconstructed; a memory that nobody owns
or controls in its entirety but that, rather, operates through the images; a
memory that is general and specific at the same time, with the capacity to
elicit effects that intensify the effectiveness of the images of the present; a
memory that is also liable to be instantly and consciously summoned up
by the viewer in order to analyze and understand in dialectical fashion how
the images of the present work.39
To paraphrase Sontag’s quotation cited at the beginning of this intro-
duction and reframe it within the humanitarian context: if the various
forms of humanitarian communications produced or reintroduced by
both faith-based and secular NGOs entertain some relationship with
Christian iconography, then our task is to not dwell on “sentimental pro-
jections” or to confine ourselves to formulating simple hypotheses. To be
able to probe the depths of this problematic entanglement, what is needed
instead is a set of montages. The series of anecdotes about Caravaggio’s
works offers a starting point for initiating a cross-analytical practice
between the forms of representation of contemporary suffering and the
artistic and historic heritage of the West.
Developed out of the dialogue around studies on intertextuality, the
original idea behind Quoting Caravaggio introduced by Mieke Bal is com-
patible with this approach and anticipates several of its aspects—specifi-
cally, the idea of conceiving of the influences between works beyond the
authors’ intentions, and the possibility of articulating the relationship
between images of the past and those of the present along a bidirectional
vector, as mutually illuminating:

39
Specifically on the relation between montage and memory in Warburg’s work, see
Georges Didi-Huberman, The Surviving Image: Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms.
Aby Warburg’s History of Art, trans. Harvey L. Mendelsohn (University Park: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 2017), 295–332.
 INTRODUCTION 19

Intertextuality—the specific quotation which is also the object of iconogra-

phy—is, in this sense, a particular instance of the more general practice of
interdiscursivity: the mixture of various visual and discursive modes that
Mikhail Baktin called heteroglossia. Thus this “textualizing” iconography
will consider visual principles of form, such as chiaroscuro, color, folds, sur-
face texture, and different conceptions of perspective, as “discursive posi-
tions” that entertain interdiscursive relations with other works. […] In this
study, quotation is seen in a number of distinct ways, each of which illumi-
nates—through its theoretical consequences—one aspect of the art of the
present and the art of the past.40

In harnessing the spirit of this gesture, the intention is not—at least

preliminarily—to enter into a discussion about issues regarding the rela-
tionship between word and image, which were dealt with through the
notion of quotation but, rather, to protract the ability to analyze and
understand images through other images. The introduction of the expres-
sion “displacing Caravaggio” requires the adoption of a term that is no
less problematic than “quoting”—one with multiple meanings and mul-
tiple forms in the humanities and social sciences. “Displacing” can be used
to identify the cultural and social mechanisms that are likely to produce
transfers such as the ones described in the opening pages; it also serves to
describe the theoretical and methodological tool that will be used to ana-
lyze this mechanism.
In the first instance, we can look to the psychoanalytical meaning of
displacement: the definition of the equivalent in German, Verschiebung,
introduced by Freud, is a mechanism that can take on a defensive function
and whose “essence lies in the diversion of the train of thought, the dis-
placement of the psychical emphasis on a topic other than the opening
one.”41 This term has been widely taken up in the fields of trauma studies
and postcolonial studies, in which scholars have worked on identifying
when particular tools of psychoanalysis can be used for examining cultural
and social phenomena.42 Considered from this viewpoint, the concept of

40
Bal, Quoting Caravaggio, 8.
41
Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their Relation with the Inconscious, trans. James Strachey (New
York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1990), 72–73.
42
See especially LaCapra’s Writing History, Writing Trauma, cited earlier, on the displace-
ment and transference mechanisms and their implications in cultural and scientific contexts.
On displacement as a phenomenon that is active in constructing racist stereotypes, examined
through a rereading of Frantz Fanon, see Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New
York and London: Routledge, 1994), 81–82.
20 F. ZUCCONI

displacement corresponds to the critical issues involved in the opening

series of anecdotes: the gesture of shifting onto Caravaggio’s paintings the
problems associated with contemporary migratory phenomena and with
the inability to confront and prevent the continuous reoccurrence of mas-
sacres by drowning or by other forms of violence and suffering. This shift
could, therefore, be interpreted as an artistic “sublimation,” one that may
very well coincide with a form of “suppression” of differences—to the
benefit of the ethnocentric posture that organizes this operation. With this
meaning of “displacing” in mind, the chapters to come will identify the
forms of persistence and transformation of this sort of mechanism in indi-
vidual images and campaigns in humanitarian communications.
In the second place, it is important to note that the verb “to displace”
refers to extremely concrete actions, in history as well as in current affairs.
As much as one can try to limit its scope by using a synonym such as “to
shift,” and as much as the idea of displacement has penetrated intellectual
discourse, its proximity with other verbs such as to dismiss, to exile, and to
deport is impossible to overlook. These are mostly violent actions that
affect individuals and populations who are forced to abandon their land,
waiting to be relocated elsewhere or for a resettlement that may never
come. These words do not refer to impromptu actions stemming from
simple inhumanity; rather, they identify specific political mechanisms,
whose connections with humanitarian practice have been investigated,
among others, by a sociologist and economist of great analytical and criti-
cal breadth named Saskia Sassen.43 For the purposes of an inquiry into
visual culture like the one pursued here, what is possible to investigate and
discover are the modes of visual representation of subjects and populations
who have been subjected to, or are liable to be subjected to, this type of
violence.
A third meaning of displacing identifies the theoretical and method-
ological tool used in this book to tackle and study the problems involved
in the first two meanings. In addition to the importance that the concept
of displacement has acquired in trauma studies and in the social and politi-
cal sciences, it has also undergone significant development in the history
and theory of art.
Most notably, there is the work of Hubert Damisch, who was a leading
figure in the post-structuralist debate that led to profound theoretical and

43
Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global World (Cambridge and
London: Harvard University Press, 2014), especially 50–79.
 INTRODUCTION 21

methodological renewal, kindled by the revival of psychoanalytical thought

and engagement with linguistics and semiotics. For the French scholar,
displacement (déplacement) does not identify an empirical process; nor is
it expressed in relation to a mechanism of sublimation and suppression.
Rather, it expresses the potentialities specific to the work of analysis of,
and through, images. Déplacement is in the first instance what leads artistic
and cultural objects to escape from the linearity of history and “gain their
function as theoretical objects.”44 “A kind of deviation,” he adds, “as a
displacement within which theory takes place.”45 Displacement is thus
understood by Damisch as a way of working on and with objects, in the
conviction that an individual work or visual motif or problem—such as
“cloud” or “perspective”46—can force the history of art to confront its
outside, which is to say, the open field of theory, where new problems are
identified and new pathways take shape. This vision problematizes a linear
and arborescent conception of the history of art, and of any other discur-
sive field. If taken to its logical consequences, this approach ultimately
makes possible a new mode of spectatorship: “a displacement—and no
longer simply the place,”47 as Damisch writes in an essay on the theory and
practice of exposure.
On the other hand, keeping with French theory of art, it is important
to recall how Georges Didi-Huberman has used the concept of déplace-
ment, to define an approach that manages to overcome both a linear con-
ception of art history and a static vision of iconology. Fundamental to his
idea is the salvaging of the Freudian meaning of the “work of displace-
ment” (Verschiebungsarbeit).48 By examining this dynamic, which is con-
tinually in action in images, Didi-Huberman has thus undertaken to
analyze the symptoms of “the unconscious of the visible,” understood as
that which gives “access to something like an unthinkable,” and through

44
Hubert Damisch, Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Hal Foster, “A Conversation with
Hubert Damisch,” October 85, (Summer 1998): 11.
45
Ibid.
46
The reference is to Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting,
trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), and Hubert Damisch, The
Origin of Perspective, trans. John Goodman (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1994).
47
Hubert Damisch, L’amour m’expose (Paris: Klincksieck, 2007), 120. French original:
“un déplacement—et non plus simplement la place.”
48
See Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the End of a Certain
History of Art, trans. John Goodman (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
2005), 147.
22 F. ZUCCONI

which “the constructed share of the work staggers under the shock and
violation of a cursed share that is central to it.”49 In one of his many studies
on Warburg, Didi-Huberman has moreover suggested that the Atlas itself
should be reconceptualized as an “incessant combinatory displacement of
the images from plate to plate.”50
Compared to the maneuver carried out in Bal’s Quoting Caravaggio
and to Damisch’s déplacement, which tend to develop within the artistic
disciplines, this book must come to terms with a field that is not only more
undefined, but also riskier, in the same way that one of the thorniest politi-
cal issues of today is risky. How can one set a painting by Caravaggio—
whose market value is so priceless that the work belongs in the high end
of luxury goods—alongside images of suffering bodies, which, despite all
the possible “derealization” effects created by the spectacle of pain at a
distance, do not for this reason stop being real? How can one avoid being
sucked into the critical issues encountered in the various attempts to trans-
fer Caravaggio’s works in connection with the topicality of European news
events; and, therefore, avoid contributing to the construction of “a
humanitarian Caravaggio”? In short, how does one prevent one’s analysis,
in its tenacious pursuit of its object, from turning into an opportunity for
the spectacularization of suffering, not so different from those linked to
the colonial past and to the humanitarian present that one seeks to decon-
struct? These are obviously complex questions, explicitly addressed by Bal
herself, in a book that came out before the one on Caravaggio. In it, she
raises the issue of the “double exposure” effect that affects both exhibition
practices and critical analyses of cultural phenomena whose public visibility
presents pressing concerns:

doesn’t one repeat the gesture of appropriation and exploitation one seeks
to criticize, if one reprints as quotations the very material whose use by pre-
decessors is subject to criticism? […] Is the quotation fundamentally

49
Ibid., 182. On the question of the “optical unconscious,” see Walter Benjamin, The
Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, eds.
Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al.
(Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2005), 274–298; on its revival, see
Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1994).
50
Didi-Huberman, The Surviving Image, 301. On the “atlas form,” in addition to
Warburg’s Bilderatlas see Georges-Didi-Huberman, Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science: How
to Carry the World on One’s Back?, trans. Shane B. Lillis (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2018).
 INTRODUCTION 23

­ ifferent from the gesture of the colonial predecessor? Is scholarly neutrality

d
and even critical analysis not a misguided, even disingenuous excuse to let
the insidious effect through, even to enjoy it?51

The only way to arrive at an answer, then, is by proceeding page by

page, and by holding firm to a few points that are worth restating here.
First, a project of this type is, in a certain sense, a “fiction” written about
a dramatically real subject. Nevertheless, fictions also constitute something
essential and ubiquitous in defining the ways that reality is perceived.
Therefore, reflecting on the quality of these fictions and problematizing a
particular conception of reality that tends to be equated with a mere “fact”
constitutes a possible form of civil and political engagement, as much for
artistic practice as for the human sciences. Second, the series of montages
between art works and contemporary images offered here is a free prac-
tice, although there is a rationale at times: no equivalences come out of
this approach, only mutual illuminations. Third, the series developed in
the individual chapters do not respond to purely formal criteria: the images
that were chosen were not those that most markedly echo Caravaggio’s
style; rather, each chapter seeks to focus on a theoretical and practical
problem shared by Caravaggio’s aesthetic revolution and humanitarian
visual culture. Fourth, none of the studies offered in this book aspires to
exhaustiveness; and, fifth, an inquiry of this kind does not contain a hard-­
and-­fast conclusion—it can only arrive at a provisional outcome.
By placing Caravaggio’s paintings alongside a group of images of suf-
fering that have been produced over recent decades, a twofold force will
be exerted on the respective fields in which these images tend to be
placed and archived: the history of art and humanitarian visual culture.
Exerting this type of force will produce a specific effect that bears empha-
sizing: it will denaturalize the various attempts to introduce Caravaggio’s
works into humanitarian discourse. By so doing, it will address the rela-
tionship between the historic and artistic heritage of the West and the
forms of expression and media portrayals of suffering in the contempo-
rary world.
Based on these premises, the following pages articulate the theoretical
paradigm of displacement by crossing a series of works by Caravaggio with
a series of humanitarian-themed images, putting each of them “out of

51
Mieke Bal, Double Exposures: The Subject of Cultural Analysis (New York and London:
Routledge, 1996), 197.
24 F. ZUCCONI

place.” All this will be done while never forgetting, down to the last page,
the specific form of political violence that is expressed in the concept of
displacement.

* * *

The second chapter is a contribution to the contentious issue of the ori-

gins of humanitarianism, by way of art history and theory. After briefly
summarizing the most important changes that influenced the iconography
of the works of mercy between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries, it
highlights how the types of assistance depicted as part of this theme pro-
vide an effective typology for describing and understanding humanitarian
communications. The theoretical arguments that give substance to an
approach of this kind, beyond any purely superficial evidence, are then
examined. The chapter concludes by looking at Caravaggio’s The Seven
Works of Mercy. More specifically, it stresses the artist’s ability to represent
the state of those who, stripped of everything, stretched out on the
ground, express a form of existence that is similar to what contemporary
political philosophy has defined as “bare life.”
Picking up from where the previous chapter leaves off, the third chapter
opens with a reflection on the ability to produce a representation of “life”
that is as direct as possible—an ability that runs through Caravaggio’s
works—particularly focusing on the surfaces of bodies, on the skin. This
question is then used as a key to understand some long-standing rhetorical
devices underlying humanitarian photography. An analysis of a few famous
shots and of some lesser-known and less widely circulated images offers
the opportunity to draw a comparison with postcolonial studies and, in
this way, to reflect on the relationship between systems of representation
of the colonial past and those of the humanitarian present.
Through a series of heterogeneous examples, the fourth chapter
examines the interweaving between the immanence of gestures loaded
with pathos that take shape under catastrophic circumstances and the
transcendence of the representative models through which suffering and
precariousness have taken form in the West over the course of centuries.
Humanitarian communications, it is shown, can be conceived of and
investigated as a form of “secularization” of Christian iconography. The
chapter concludes with three photographs explicitly inspired by works
by Caravaggio that best express the temporality and spatiality—the ges-
tures, often insignificant ones—that typify “everyday life.” Humanitarian
 INTRODUCTION 25

photography, too, is shown to promote the immanence of intersubjec-

tive relations: the small gestures of people living under emergency
conditions.
The fifth chapter addresses the relationship between NGO communica-
tions and the rise of new technologies that promise to enhance the specta-
tor experience, thereby raising awareness of humanitarian operations. The
study focuses particularly on UN projects in virtual reality cinema.
Following the principle of displacement that guides the entire book, a
comparison is drawn between the compositional and experiential charac-
teristics of virtual reality (VR) cinema, the humanitarian applications of
the lantern-slide lectures at the beginning of the twentieth century, and
the tradition of “candlelit painting” that was introduced by Caravaggio
and further developed by the so-called Caravaggisti in the seventeenth
century. In developing this cross analysis, a few answers are suggested to
the main questions regarding the viewer experience of humanitarian-­
themed VR cinema. To what extent do these immersive devices facilitate
spectators in developing a “witnessing gaze”? Under what conditions does
the gesture of putting on a virtual reality headset, conveniently in one’s
own home, take on an ethical and political value in the face of catastrophic
events that devastate entire populations around the world?
The sixth chapter is written as if standing in front of Caravaggio’s
Sleeping Cupid, in the Lampedusa exhibition. It describes the installation
constructed around the painting in the island museum and reflects criti-
cally on the juxtaposition introduced in media discourse between
Caravaggio’s painting and the photograph of Alan Kurdi as well as on the
iconography of childhood in humanitarian communications. The chapter
examines the potentialities and limits of efforts by scholars, exhibitions,
and communications to engage the history of art with current events in
the news and on the world geographic and political scene.
The seventh and last chapter reflects on the possibility—beyond the
“case of Caravaggio”—of conceptualizing displacement as a useful critical
paradigm for mobilizing the artistic and historic heritage of the West in
response to the urgent demands of our contemporary world.
 CHAPTER 2

Humanitarian Archeology

A Hegemony of Passions
Scholars who have dedicated themselves to human rights have clashed and
divided over how relevant the Christian tradition was to the rise of mod-
ern humanitarian culture. In some cases, when it comes to identifying the
exact moment of the foundation of human rights, the tendency is mostly
to maintain a clear distinction between the two traditions. In other cases,
when the historiography tends toward the “archaeological” approach, fol-
lowing Michel Foucault’s influential model, it becomes possible to iden-
tify forms of continuity in the discontinuity.1
Although the historian Lawrence M. Friedman, for example, perceived
the need to address the issue, the position he takes is geared toward dis-
continuity: “The gap between what Plato advocated, or St. Thomas
Aquinas, and modern liberal conceptions of human rights, is almost
equally enormous. Historically speaking, the menu of modern rights was
almost completely absent from the West until relatively recently.”2 A lead-
ing scholar of human rights such as Samuel Moyn—who has also devoted
close attention to the relationship between religion and politics in the
development of humanitarianism—has underlined that “the mere fact of
Christian universalism is no argument for awarding credit to the religion

1
The reference is to the classic study by Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge,
trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Routledge, 2002).
2
Lawrence M. Friedman, The Human Rights Cultures: A Study in History and Context
(New Orleans: Quid Pro Books, 2011), 71.

© The Author(s) 2018 27

F. Zucconi, Displacing Caravaggio,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93378-8_2
28 F. ZUCCONI

for the conceptual or political possibility of human rights.”3 Before focus-

ing on some of the cultural objects—the eighteenth-century epistolary
novel, for one—that have helped to create a humanitarian sensibility, the
opening pages of Lynn Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights: A History
emphasize instead that the development of the modern conception of
human rights can be identified as originating in a sentence by Thomas
Jefferson, in the American Declaration of Independence of 1776: “We
hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that
they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that
among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”4 The histori-
cal importance of this statement radiates beyond the event that inspired it,
so much so that it exerted an influence on the Déclaration des droits de
l’homme et du citoyen, drafted in Paris in 1789 under full revolutionary
fervor; and again on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, signed
in Paris on December 10, 1948, under the auspices of the United Nations.
In an almost parallel fashion, it might be recalled, during the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries the world witnessed the gradual emergence of
various nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) modeled on the
International Red Cross, which was founded by Jean-Henri Dunant in
1863.5 These associations were partly religious and partly secular, and
their activity was, and continues to be, directed towards assisting and pro-
tecting victims of natural or human-made disasters.
Didier Fassin’s perspective, explicitly inspired by Foucault’s archeology,
has allowed a few traits of historical discontinuity to be brought to light
but also a possible genealogical continuity between the Christian model
and humanitarian values. As the French anthropologist writes in one of
the concluding pages of his inquiry into “humanitarian reason,”

Historically, but also genealogically, humanitarian reason thus defined is

embedded in a Western sociodicy. Historically because its key episodes—
from the abolitionist movement in Britain two centuries ago to the U.S.
interventionism of the past two decades, from the founding of the Red
Cross to the birth of Médecins Sans Frontières—belong to the history of

3
Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge and London:
Harvard University Press, 2010), 15.
4
See Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York and London:
W.W. Norton & Company, 2007), 15.
5
See the war memoire by Henri Dunant, A Memory of Solferino (Geneva: International
Committee of the Red Cross, 1986).
 HUMANITARIAN ARCHEOLOGY 29

Europe and North America. And genealogically because the ethos from
which it proceeds has its source in the Christian world—in terms of both the
sacralization of life and the valorization of suffering—although, of course,
there are other traditions of compassion and charity, from Islam to
Confucianism to Buddhism.6

An examination of the interweaving between Christianity and humani-

tarianism is particularly complex in an investigation like the one conducted
in this book, since some of the earliest known humanitarian photographs
were taken as part of missionary initiatives in Asia and Africa. As has been
noted, these images were inscribed in a framework of values and discourse
in which fulfilling “Christian duties” was more important than safeguard-
ing rights.7
Beyond this overlapping, the hypothesis that will be fleshed out over
the next few pages is that the relationship between humanitarian commu-
nications and the realm of Christianity should not be confined to the mis-
sionary undertakings of the early twentieth century; nor should this
relationship be equated exclusively with NGOs that are explicitly faith-­
based. Rather, it extends across the whole range of humanitarian organiza-
tions and UN agencies operating in the aid sector. Contrary to the
tendency to analyze the relationship between past and present from the
perspective of complete rupture or complete continuity, it would seem
that the horizon of values and practices falling under the category of
“humanitarianism” could not fail to create its visual culture with the forms
of Christian pathos in mind. This is the case despite the fact that humani-
tarianism is largely traceable to the Enlightenment spirit and to a set of
emancipatory political drives. To state it more bluntly, the visual culture of
humanitarianism was fashioned in relation to an iconography of passions
that Christianity took over historically as a hegemonic force. Even more
specifically, the cultural and theological watershed of the Renaissance and
the Council of Trent (1545–1563) offers an effective term of visual com-
parison: this is when religious icons were viewed as something active, with
the capacity to convey values and teach behaviors, as imagines agentes.8

6
Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present, trans by Rachel
Gomme (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011), 248.
7
Kevin Grant, “The Limits of Exposure: Atrocity Photographs in the Congo Reform
Campaign,” in Humanitarian Photography, 65.
8
As general references on the relationship between the effectiveness of images and wor-
ship, see Hans Belting, Das echte Bild. Bildfragen als Glaubensfragen (Munich: Beck, 2005),
30 F. ZUCCONI

While the ability of images to arouse worshippers’ emotions and elicit their
moral conformity was valued and exploited in this context, the develop-
ment of humanitarian communications also followed a similar arc: they
too aimed at arousing moral feelings toward victims, and for the most part
overlooked the political causes underlying this condition of subordination,
not to mention the risk of further reproducing it. As will be shown, this
phenomenon is strictly inherent to visual culture and is at the same time
symptomatic of many issues related to contemporary humanitarianism.
The next few pages give a broad historical overview of the iconographic
theme of the works of mercy, tracing out its changes and developments up
to Caravaggio’s time. The purpose of this discussion—beyond the possi-
bility of establishing a simplistic correspondence between mercy and
humanitarian assistance—is to deepen the inquiry by bringing in a few
philosophical questions. These regard the situation of people who are
affected by a disaster, living under emergency conditions, or in structural
poverty, whose legal and political status as citizens slips away, until their
only remaining form of recognition and protection is as “human persons.”
These questions will be particularly helpful when it comes to observing
Caravaggio’s The Seven Works of Mercy from the point of view of humani-
tarian communications or, conversely, to identifying the characteristic
theoretical issues of humanitarian visual culture through his paintings.

Types of Mercy
In a seminal study on forms of “distant suffering,” the French sociologist
Luc Boltanski identifies a series of actorial and actantial roles that appear
in the Gospel parable of the Good Samaritan (Lk 10, 25–37).9 Transmitted
through the centuries and through discursive systems, these roles do not

and Hans Belting, Bild und Kult: Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst
(Munich: Beck, 2011). On the relationship between image, emotion, and worship, see David
Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1989). Specifically on the Counter-Reformation context, see
Giovanni Careri, Bernini: Flights of Love, the Art of Devotion, trans. Linda Lappin (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994), and Victor I. Stoichita, Visionary Experience in the
Golden Age of Spanish Art, trans. Anne-Marie Glasheen (London: Reaktion Books, 1997).
9
Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering. In his work, the French sociologist explicitly makes use
of the idea of “discursiveness” and the concept of “actant,” which were developed in the field
of semiotics, in order to analyze cultural and social phenomena. For more on these method-
ological points, see Algirdas Julien Greimas, On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic
Theory, trans. by Paul J. Perron and Frank H. Collins, with a foreword by Fredric Jameson
 HUMANITARIAN ARCHEOLOGY 31

necessarily maintain their religious descent—and sometimes even disclaim

it. Moreover, when examining recent humanitarian crises, several scholars
have identified the persistence of Christological and evangelical types in
media coverage and in the development of public awareness campaigns.10
While in agreement with the expediency of these findings, which are
confirmed by some of the humanitarian campaigns studied in the chapters
to follow, the intention here is to take a sideways step: to shift attention
away from Christ’s most famous parables and from the themes that mark
his life, toward the iconography of the works of mercy. Although little
explored as yet, the relationship between humanitarian communications
and this iconographic theme holds great potential. This point has not
escaped the art historian Federico Botana, who, in concluding his study on
the works of mercy in the Middle Ages, raises the question of its “afterlife”
in the Renaissance and Baroque periods, through to the “photographic
campaigns of international organizations, such as UNICEF, Médecins
sans Frontières (MSF), and Amnesty International, and in the vivid reports
of wars and natural catastrophes on television. These images are tuned to
our own mentality: charity is no longer a religious or civic matter, but a
purely humanitarian one.”11 These are the concluding remarks in a major
study that will be referred to on multiple occasions in this chapter—
although the clear-cut opposition that Botana makes between religious
images and “purely humanitarian” ones will be probed and questioned.
While countless invitations to espouse the mercy of God appear in the
Old Testament (Is 58, 7–10), the Gospel of Matthew is where the corpo-
ral works of mercy are explicitly described as being six in number: “For I
was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me some-
thing to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me; I was naked and
you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison

and an introduction by Paul J. Perron (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1987),

106–120.
10
See, for example, Terence Wright, “Moving Images: The Media Representation of
Refugees,” Visual Studies 17, no. 1 (2002): 53–66, and Valérie Gorin, “La photographie de
presse au service de l’humanitaire. Rhétorique compassionnelle et iconography de la Pitié,”
in Photo de presse. Usages et pratiques, ed. Gianni Haver (Lausanne: Antipodes, 2009),
141–152. On the recurrence of the Passion and the parable of the Good Samaritan in social
discourses and new media, see Michele Lancione, “The Spectacle of the Poor. Or ‘Wow!!
Awesome. Nice to Know that People Care!’,” Social & Cultural Geography 7, (2014):
693–713.
11
Federico Botana, The Works of Mercy in Italian Medieval Art (c. 1050–1400) (Turnhout:
Brepols, 2011), 230.
32 F. ZUCCONI

and you visited me.”12 Indirect versions can be located in various passages
of the sacred texts, especially in the First Letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor
6, 19); nevertheless, the seventh work, “to bury the dead,” gained cre-
dence only in the thirteenth century, fully taking root only in the four-
teenth. Similarly, the spiritual works of mercy are not explicitly listed in the
Gospels and only take expression starting in the thirteenth century:
“counsel the doubtful”; “instruct the ignorant”; “advise the sinner”;
“comfort the sorrowful”; “forgive injuries”; “bear wrongs patiently”;
“pray to God for the living and the dead.”13
The origins of the corporal works tradition is a particularly complex and
controversial subject.14 Given the impossibility of providing even a sum-
mary treatment here, it suffices to recall that the works of mercy first
appeared as a theme in the Psalter of Queen Melisenda—an illuminated
manuscript produced between 1131 and 1144—if not earlier in the wood
panel of the Last Judgment, which dates from 1061 to 1071 and is pre-
served in the Vatican Museums. This painting explicitly depicts the acts of
clothing the naked, visiting the imprisoned, and giving drink to the thirsty.
The first time all six works are shown together is, therefore, in a sculpture
by Benedetto Antelami, on the west-facing jambs of the Baptistery of
Parma (1196–1216). Here, a single “beatus” performs the different
actions in aid of the needy.15 After Antelami, the tradition of the works of
mercy takes expression in various forms, on a European scale: from the
rose window of the Cathedral of Freiburg to the stained-glass windows of
the Church of Saint Elizabeth at Marburg; from the panels by Olivuccio
di Ciccarello (1410–1420), preserved in the Vatican Pinacoteca, to the
works depicted by Vrancke van der Stockt at the Ayuntamiento de Valencia
(1460), and the seven panels by the Master of Alkmaar (1504), preserved
at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, as well as others in different parts of
Europe.

12
See Mt 25, 35–36. From the New Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition: https://
www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+25&version=NRSVCE.
13
For more on the theological sources of the works of mercy, see Dictionnaire de spiritu-
alité, ascétique et mystique: doctrine et Histoire, ed. Marcel Villers (Paris: Beauchesne, 1979),
X, 1327–1350.
14
On the problematic relationship between the textual sources and the rise of the icono-
graphic theme, see Botana, The Works of Mercy, 15–48.
15
Albert Dietl, “La decorazione plastica del battistero e il suo programma. Parenesi e iniz-
iazione in un comune dell’Italia settentrionale,” in Benedetto Antelami e il Battistero di
Parma, ed. Chiara Frugoni (Turin: Einaudi, 1995), 75.
 HUMANITARIAN ARCHEOLOGY 33

Especially between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, the theme is

portrayed in relation to the iconography of the Last Judgment, according to
a relationship of final destination and punishment.16 This proximity would
seem to express the fact that the works of mercy are an instance of the
worldly expression of Christology, to the extent that they incorporate the
values of the Sacred Scripture into daily practice; they therefore affirm the
cultural and social capacity of Christianity to articulate a “high” and a “low”
register. This iconographic montage can be viewed as conveying a mecha-
nism characteristic of Christian culture, which Erich Auerbach has defined
as “figural prophecy”: that which “consists in an interpretation of one inner-
worldly event by another. The first event points to the second, the second
fulfills the first.”17 Until the time is ripe, writes Auerbach, the event “remains
open and uncertain, pointing to something that is still obscure. The relation
of the living individual towards events of the kind is that of someone who is
being tested and who lives in a state of hope, belief, and expectancy.”18
Without pulling free from the power of this theological mechanism,
which functions even in the absence of an explicit iconographic juxtaposi-
tion, starting from the thirteenth century the representation of the works
of mercy began to separate from the depiction of the Last Judgment. With
increasing frequency, the works of mercy depicted the activities performed
by the confraternities and charitable associations, which were gaining
prominence during the age of the Communes. In this same context, the
iconography of the works became intertwined with that of the Madonna
of Mercy, who welcomes and protects townspeople and the town as a
whole under her long cloak: from the fresco of 1342, produced by
Bernardo Daddi’s followers for the Compagnia di Santa Maria della
Misericordia in Florence, to the Polyptych of Mercy (1444–1464) by Piero
della Francesca, to mention only a few examples.19 The figure of Mary of

16
On this issue and on the theological and social implications of this relationship, please
refer to Botana, The Works of Mercy, 11–12 and 198–225. Botana’s study refers in its turn to
an unpublished doctoral thesis by the American historian of art William Levin, which focuses
on the relationship between the practice of the works, the Last Judgment, and the question
of salvation.
17
Erich Auerbach, Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach, ed. and
with an introduction by James I. Porter, trans. Jane O. Newman (Princeton and Oxford:
Princeton University Press, 2014), 100.
18
Ibid.
19
For a reconstruction of the iconographic theme, see Claudia Cieri Via, “Tradizione e
iconografia della Madonna della Misericordia nell’arte italiana,” in La Misericordia nell’arte.
Itinerario Giubilare tra i Capolavori dei grandi Artisti italiani, eds. Maria Grazia Bernardini
and Mario Lolli Ghetti (Rome: Gangemi, 2016), 19–30.
34 F. ZUCCONI

Mercy, writes Katherine T. Brown in an extensive study, “spurred lay con-

fraternities often associated with monastic orders […] to adopt this easy
recognizable image as a subject for altarpieces, wall paintings in chapels
and oratories, reliquaries, stained glass windows, architectural relief, and
gonfalons (processional standards).”20 Described in anachronistic terms,
the figure can be conceived of as “a public call, similar to an advertise-
ment, for all residents to give alms to the poor, care for the sick, protect
foundlings, and bury the dead, as civic duties.”21
In the sixteenth century, even in Reformation territories, the iconogra-
phy of the works broke away from that of the Last Judgment, in order to
deny the Church’s mediatory role in the exercise of mercy. Contrary to the
Catholic world, where the idea reigned of man’s salvation through “fide
viva,” by performing works of mercy, the Reformation introduced an idea
of salvation based on “fide sola”—the idea that individual actions are not
instrumental for inheriting eternal life. In such a context, the iconography
of the works of mercy was refashioned in relation to a form of bourgeois
worldliness. As far as the orientation of the frame is concerned, it tended
to shift from vertical to horizontal. Charity remained but lost its ritual
aspect, dropping its explicit function of moralizing spectators and wor-
shippers. With these developments, charity seemingly took on the form of
one social practice among others, that is, a way of regulating relations
between townspeople and country folk.22
Caravaggio’s The Seven Works of Mercy (Fig. 2.1) matured in the context
of the Counter-Reformation, with the flourishing of the confraternities—
also called Societas, Compagnie, Fraternities, or Scholae. These institu-
tions responded to two urgent demands: on the one hand, the Catholic
Church’s need to reassert an idea of justification “by works,” in opposition
to the spirit of the Reformation; on the other hand, the growing need for
assistance on the part of widening segments of the population.23 The com-
mission that Caravaggio received from the Confraternity of the Pio Monte

20
Katherine T. Brown, Mary of Mercy in Medieval and Renaissance Italian Art: Devotional
Image and Civic Emblem (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 11.
21
Ibid.
22
For more on how the works of mercy theme was depicted in this context, see Pacelli,
Caravaggio: Sette Opere di Misericordia, 23–31 and 58–73.
23
For a historical survey of the iconography of mercy in connection with the theological
and political changes that took place between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, see
Maria Grazia Bernardini, “Le ‘Opere di Misericordia’, testimonianze artistiche da Benedetto
Antelami a Caravaggio,” in La Misericordia nell’arte, 56–57.
 HUMANITARIAN ARCHEOLOGY 35

Fig. 2.1 Caravaggio, The Seven Works of Mercy, 1606–1607, Pio Monte della
Misericordia, Naples, courtesy of Alamy
36 F. ZUCCONI

della Misericordia of Naples prompted him to come up with an original

graft between the theme of corporal works and that of the Madonna of
Mercy, based on a previously established hybridization model.24
The Virgin and Child can be recognized in the upper part, surrounded
by two angels with long wings that extend all the way down to make con-
tact with the earthly part of the picture. This scheme differs from the
iconography of the Madonna of Mercy who protects the townspeople
under her mantle-roof; however, the structural composition of the paint-
ing suggests a system that englobes the figures positioned in the lower
part. The angels’ wings mark out a sort of protected area, while the black
background, which is a distinguishing trait of Caravaggio’s paintings, here
becomes a sort of ledger space in which are recorded the bodies of those
who receive assistance.25
On the left side, one makes out several figures that are placed very close
together, and which at first glance seem to be taking part in the same
action. On closer inspection of the small space, though, three separate
works can be discerned: starting from the figure in the background, almost
hidden from the others, one sees the duty “to give drink to the thirsty,”
portrayed by Caravaggio through a reference to the story of Samson (who
slaked his thirst from the jawbone of an ass), which was taken from the
Book of Judges (15, 14–19). Immediately in front of this, there is the
three-quarter figure of a host. With his left hand, he is making a welcom-
ing gesture to a man who appears in front of him, most likely a pilgrim.
Still on the left side, but more visible, there is a male character with a
feathered hat who twists his torso to reach out toward the figures lying on
the ground. The composition highlights the moment when the dark red
blanket is being passed from one hand to the other. This is a reference to
the tradition of Saint Martin of Tours, who shared his coat with a beggar,
and an explicit representation of the duty to “clothe the naked.” Right
next to the naked figure, on the left, one barely makes out another figure
on the ground, who is carrying a crutch, and which refers to the duty of
“visiting the sick.”

24
For the historical backdrop of the founding of the Pio Monte della Misericordia and
details about Caravaggio’s commission, see the articles by Michele Miele and Ferdinando
Bologna in Il Pio Monte della Misericordia di Napoli nel quarto centenario, 79–98 and
173–189.
25
On this point, see the observations of Lucia Corrain, in “Rappresentare le opere di
misericordia,” in Li avrete sempre con voi. Povertà antiche e nuove, ed. Vincenzo Lagioia
(Bologna: Pitagora, 2010), 273–281.
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United States (which, after the expiration of its national charter, had
become a State corporation chartered by the Legislature of
Pennsylvania in January, 1836) for the purpose of restoring
themselves to power. The whole proceeding became clear to those
who could see nothing while it was in progress. Even those of the
democratic party whose votes had helped to do the mischief, could
now see that the attempt to deposit forty millions with the States was
destruction to the deposit banks; that the repeal of President
Jackson’s order, known as the “specie circular”—requiring payment
for public lands to be in coin—was to fill the treasury with paper
money, to be found useless when wanted; that distress was purposely
created to throw blame of it upon the party in power; that the
promptitude with which the Bank of the United States had been
brought forward as a remedy for the distress, showed that it had
been held in reserve for that purpose; and the delight with which the
whig party saluted the general calamity, showed that they considered
it their own passport to power. Financial embarrassment and general
stagnation of business diminished the current receipts from lands
and customs, and actually caused an absolute deficit in the public
treasury. In consequence, the President found it an inexorable
necessity to issue his proclamation convening Congress in extra
session.
The first session of the twenty-fifth Congress met in extra session,
at the call of the President, on the first Monday of September, 1837.
The message was a review of the events and causes which had
brought about the panic; a defense of the policy of the “specie
circular,” and a recommendation to break off all connection with any
bank of issue in any form; looking to the establishment of an
Independent Treasury, and that the Government provide for the
deficit in the treasury by the issue of treasury notes and by
withholding the deposit due to the States under the act then in force.
The message and its recommendations were violently assailed both
in the Senate and House by able and effective speakers, notably by
Messrs. Clay and Webster, and also by Mr. Caleb Cushing, of
Massachusetts, who made a formal and elaborate reply to the whole
document under thirty-two distinct heads, and reciting therein all
the points of accusation against the democratic policy from the
beginning of the government down to that day. The result was that
the measures proposed by the Executive were in substance enacted;
and their passage marks an era in our financial history—making a
total and complete separation of Bank and State, and firmly
establishing the principle that the government revenues should be
receivable in coin only.
The measures of consequence discussed and adopted at this
session, were the graduation of price of public lands under the pre-
emption system, which was adopted; the bill to create an
independent Treasury, which passed the Senate, but failed in the
House; and the question of the re-charter of the district banks, the
proportion for reserve, and the establishment of such institutions on
a specie basis. The slavery question was again agitated in
consequence of petitions from citizens and societies in the Northern
States, and a memorial from the General Assembly of Vermont,
praying for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia and
territories, and for the exclusion of future slave states from the
Union. These petitions and memorials were disposed of adversely;
and Mr. Calhoun, representing the ultra-Southern interest, in several
able speeches, approved of the Missouri compromise, he urged and
obtained of the Senate several resolutions declaring that the federal
government had no power to interfere with slavery in the States; and
that it would be inexpedient and impolitic to interfere, abolish or
control it in the District of Columbia and the territories. These
movements for and against slavery in the session of 1837–38 deserve
to be noticed, as of disturbing effect at the time, and as having
acquired new importance from subsequent events.
The first session of the twenty-sixth Congress opened December,
1839. The organization of the House was delayed by a closely and
earnestly contested election from the State of New Jersey. Five
Democrats claiming seats as against an equal number of Whigs.
Neither set was admitted until after the election of Speaker, which
resulted in the choice of Robert M. T. Hunter, of Virginia, the Whig
candidate, who was elected by the full Whig vote with the aid of a few
democrats—friends of Mr. Calhoun, who had for several previous
sessions been acting with the Whigs on several occasions. The House
excluding the five contested seats from New Jersey, was really
Democratic; having 122 members, and the Whigs 113 members. The
contest for the Speakership was long and arduous, neither party
adhering to its original caucus candidate. Twenty scattering votes,
eleven of whom were classed as Whigs, and nine as Democrats,
prevented a choice on the earlier ballots, and it was really Mr.
Calhoun’s Democratic friends uniting with a solid Whig vote on the
final ballot that gained that party the election. The issue involved was
a vital party question as involving the organization of the House. The
chief measure, of public importance, adopted at this session of
Congress was an act to provide for the collection, safe-keeping, and
disbursing of the public money. It practically revolutionized the
system previously in force, and was a complete and effectual
separation of the federal treasury and the Government, from the
banks and moneyed corporations of the States. It was violently
opposed by the Whig members, led by Mr. Clay, and supported by
Mr. Cushing, but was finally passed in both Houses by a close vote.
At this time, and in the House of Representatives, was exhibited
for the first time in the history of Congress, the present practice of
members “pairing off,” as it is called; that is to say, two members of
opposite political parties, or of opposite views on any particular
subject, agreeing to absent themselves from the duties of the House,
for the time being. The practice was condemned on the floor of the
House by Mr. John Quincy Adams, who introduced a resolution:
“That the practice, first openly avowed at the present session of
Congress, of pairing off, involves, on the part of the members
resorting to it, the violation of the Constitution of the United States,
of an express rule of this House, and of the duties of both parties in
the transaction, to their immediate constituents, to this House, and
to their country.” This resolution was placed in the calendar to take
its turn, but not being reached during the session, was not voted on.
That was the first instance of this justly condemned practice, fifty
years after the establishment of the Government; but since then it
has become common, even inveterate, and is now carried to great
lengths.
The last session of the twenty-sixth Congress was barren of
measures, and necessarily so, as being the last of our administration
superseded by the popular voice, and soon to expire; and therefore
restricted by a sense of propriety, during the brief remainder of its
existence, to the details of business and the routine of service. The
cause of this was the result of the presidential election of 1840. The
same candidates who fought the battle of 1836 were again in the
field. Mr. Van Buren was the Democratic candidate. His
administration had been satisfactory to his party, and his
nomination for a second term was commended by the party in the
different States in appointing their delegates; so that the proceedings
of the convention which nominated him were entirely harmonious
and formal in their nature. Mr. Richard M. Johnson, the actual Vice-
President, was also nominated for Vice-President.
On the Whig ticket, General William Henry Harrison, of Ohio, was
the candidate for President, and Mr. John Tyler, of Virginia, for Vice-
President. The leading statesmen of the Whig party were again put
aside, to make way for a military man, prompted by the example in
the nomination of General Jackson, the men who managed
presidential elections believing then as now that military renown was
a passport to popularity and rendered a candidate more sure of
election. Availability—for the purpose—was the only ability asked for.
Mr. Clay, the most prominent Whig in the country, and the
acknowledged head of the party, was not deemed available; and
though Mr. Clay was a candidate before the convention, the
proceedings were so regulated that his nomination was referred to a
committee, ingeniously devised and directed for the afterwards
avowed purpose of preventing his nomination and securing that of
General Harrison; and of producing the intended result without
showing the design, and without leaving a trace behind to show what
was done. The scheme (a modification of which has since been
applied to subsequent national conventions, and out of which many
bitter dissensions have again and again arisen) is embodied and was
executed in and by means of the following resolution adopted by the
convention: “Ordered, That the delegates from each State be
requested to assemble as a delegation, and appoint a committee, not
exceeding three in number, to receive the views and opinions of such
delegation, and communicate the same to the assembled committees
of all the delegations, to be by them respectively reported to their
principals; and that thereupon the delegates from each State be
requested to assemble as a delegation, and ballot for candidates for
the offices of President and Vice-President, and having done so, to
commit the ballot designating the votes of each candidate, and by
whom given, to its committee, and thereupon all the committees
shall assemble and compare the several ballots, and report the result
of the same to their several delegations, together with such facts as
may bear upon the nomination; and said delegation shall forthwith
reassemble and ballot again for candidates for the above offices, and
again commit the result to the above committees, and if it shall
appear that a majority of the ballots are for any one man for
candidate for President, said committee shall report the result to the
convention for its consideration; but if there shall be no such
majority, then the delegation shall repeat the balloting until such a
majority shall be obtained, and then report the same to the
convention for its consideration. That the vote of a majority of each
delegation shall be reported as the vote of that State; and each State
represented here shall vote its full electoral vote by such delegation
in the committee.” This was a sum in political algebra, whose
quotient was known, but the quantity unknown except to those who
planned it; and the result was—for General Scott, 16 votes; for Mr.
Clay, 90 votes; for General Harrison, 148 votes. And as the law of the
convention impliedly requires the absorption of all minorities, the
106 votes were swallowed up by the 148 votes and made to count for
General Harrison, presenting him as the unanimity candidate of the
convention, and the defeated candidates and all their friends bound
to join in his support. And in this way the election of 1840 was
effected—a process certainly not within the purview of those framers
of the constitution who supposed they were giving to the nation the
choice of its own chief magistrate.
The contest before the people was a long and bitter one, the
severest ever known in the country, up to that time, and scarcely
equalled since. The whole Whig party and the large league of
suspended banks, headed by the Bank of the United States making
its last struggle for a new national charter in the effort to elect a
President friendly to it, were arrayed against the Democrats, whose
hard-money policy and independent treasury schemes, met with
little favor in the then depressed condition of the country. Meetings
were held in every State, county and town; the people thoroughly
aroused; and every argument made in favor of the respective
candidates and parties, which could possibly have any effect upon
the voters. The canvass was a thorough one, and the election was
carried for the Whig candidates, who received 234 electoral votes
coming from 19 States. The remaining 60 electoral votes of the other
9 States, were given to the Democratic candidate; though the popular
vote was not so unevenly divided; the actual figures being 1,275,611
for the Whig ticket, against 1,135,761 for the Democratic ticket. It was
a complete rout of the Democratic party, but without the moral effect
of victory.
On March 4, 1841, was inaugurated as President, Gen’l Wm. H.
Harrison, the first Chief Magistrate elected by the Whig party, and
the first President who was not a Democrat, since the installation of
Gen’l Jackson, March 4, 1829. His term was a short one. He issued a
call for a special session of Congress to convene the 31st of May
following, to consider the condition of the revenue and finances of
the country, but did not live to meet it. Taken ill with a fatal malady
during the last days of March, he died on the 4th of April following,
having been in office just one month. He was succeeded by the Vice-
President, John Tyler. Then, for the first time in our history as a
government, the person elected to the Vice-Presidency of the United
States, by the happening of a contingency provided for in the
constitution, had devolved upon him the Presidential office.
The twenty-seventh Congress opened in extra session at the call of
the late President, May 31, 1841. A Whig member—Mr. White of
Kentucky—was elected Speaker of the House of Representatives. The
Whigs had a majority of forty-seven in the House and of seven in the
Senate, and with the President and Cabinet of the same political
party presented a harmony of aspect frequently wanting during the
three previous administrations. The first measure of the new
dominant party was the repeal of the independent treasury act
passed at the previous session; and the next in order were bills to
establish a system of bankruptcy, and for distribution of public land
revenue. The former was more than a bankrupt law; it was practically
an insolvent law for the abolition of debts at the will of the debtor. It
applied to all persons in debt, allowed them to institute the
proceedings in the district where the petitioner resided, allowed
constructive notices to creditors in newspapers—declared the
abolition of the debt where effects were surrendered and fraud not
proved; and gave exclusive jurisdiction to the federal courts, at the
will of the debtor. It was framed upon the model of the English
insolvent debtors’ act of George the Fourth, and embodied most of
the provisions of that act, but substituting a release from the debt
instead of a release from imprisonment. The bill passed by a close
vote in both Houses.
 The land revenue distribution bill of this session had its origin in
the fact that the States and corporations owed about two hundred
millions to creditors in Europe. These debts were in stocks, much
depreciated by the failure in many instances to pay the accruing
interest—in some instances failure to provide for the principal. These
creditors, becoming uneasy, wished the federal government to
assume their debts. The suggestion was made as early as 1838,
renewed in 1839, and in 1840 became a regular question mixed up
with the Presidential election of that year, and openly engaging the
active exertions of foreigners. Direct assumption was not urged;
indirect by giving the public land revenue to the States was the mode
pursued, and the one recommended in the message of President
Tyler. Mr. Calhoun spoke against the measure with more than usual
force and clearness, claiming that it was unconstitutional and
without warrant. Mr. Benton on the same side called it a squandering
of the public patrimony, and pointed out its inexpediency in the
depleted state of the treasury, apart from its other objectionable
features. It passed by a party vote.
This session is remarkable for the institution of the hour rule in
the House of Representatives—a very great limitation upon the
freedom of debate. It was a Whig measure, adopted to prevent delay
in the enactment of pending bills. It was a rigorous limitation,
frequently acting as a bar to profitable debate and checking members
in speeches which really impart information valuable to the House
and the country. No doubt the license of debate has been frequently
abused in Congress, as in all other deliberative assemblies, but the
incessant use of the previous question, which cuts off all debate,
added to the hour rule which limits a speech to sixty minutes
(constantly reduced by interruptions) frequently results in the
transaction of business in ignorance of what they are about by those
who are doing it.
The rule worked so well in the House, for the purpose for which it
was devised—made the majority absolute master of the body—that
Mr. Clay undertook to have the same rule adopted in the Senate; but
the determined opposition to it, both by his political opponents and
friends, led to the abandonment of the attempt in that chamber.
Much discussion took place at this session, over the bill offered in
the House of Representatives, for the relief of the widow of the late
President—General Harrison—appropriating one year’s salary. It was
strenuously opposed by the Democratic members, as
unconstitutional, on account of its principle, as creating a private
pension list, and as a dangerous precedent. Many able speeches were
made against the bill, both in the Senate and House; among others,
the following extract from the speech of an able Senator contains
some interesting facts. He said: “Look at the case of Mr. Jefferson, a
man than whom no one that ever existed on God’s earth were the
human family more indebted to. His furniture and his estate were
sold to satisfy his creditors. His posterity was driven from house and
home, and his bones now lay in soil owned by a stranger. His family
are scattered: some of his descendants are married in foreign lands.
Look at Monroe—the able, the patriotic Monroe, whose services were
revolutionary, whose blood was spilt in the war of Independence,
whose life was worn out in civil service, and whose estate has been
sold for debt, his family scattered, and his daughter buried in a
foreign land. Look at Madison, the model of every virtue, public or
private, and he would only mention in connection with this subject,
his love of order, his economy, and his systematic regularity in all his
habits of business. He, when his term of eight years had expired, sent
a letter to a gentleman (a son of whom is now on this floor) [Mr.
Preston], enclosing a note of five thousand dollars, which he
requested him to endorse, and raise the money in Virginia, so as to
enable him to leave this city, and return to his modest retreat—his
patrimonial inheritance—in that State. General Jackson drew upon
the consignee of his cotton crop in New Orleans for six thousand
dollars to enable him to leave the seat of government without leaving
creditors behind him. These were honored leaders of the republican
party. They had all been Presidents. They had made great sacrifices,
and left the presidency deeply embarrassed; and yet the republican
party who had the power and the strongest disposition to relieve
their necessities, felt they had no right to do so by appropriating
money from the public Treasury. Democracy would not do this. It
was left for the era of federal rule and federal supremacy—who are
now rushing the country with steam power into all the abuses and
corruptions of a monarchy, with its pensioned aristocracy—and to
entail upon the country a civil pension list.”
There was an impatient majority in the House in favor of the
passage of the bill. The circumstances were averse to deliberation—a
victorious party, come into power after a heated election, seeing their
elected candidate dying on the threshold of his administration, poor
and beloved: it was a case for feeling more than of judgment,
especially with the political friends of the deceased—but few of whom
could follow the counsels of the head against the impulsions of the
heart.
The bill passed, and was approved; and as predicted, it established
a precedent which has since been followed in every similar case.
The subject of naval pensions received more than usual
consideration at this session. The question arose on the discussion of
the appropriation bill for that purpose. A difference about a navy—on
the point of how much and what kind—had always been a point of
difference between the two great political parties of the Union,
which, under whatsoever names, are always the same, each
preserving its identity in principles and policy, but here the two
parties divided upon an abuse which no one could deny or defend. A
navy pension fund had been established under the act of 1832, which
was a just and proper law, but on the 3d of March, 1837, an act was
passed entitled “An act for the more equitable distribution of the
Navy Pension Fund.” That act provided: I. That Invalid naval
pensions should commence and date back to the time of receiving
the inability, instead of completing the proof. II. It extended the
pensions for death to all cases of death, whether incurred in the line
of duty or not. III. It extended the widow’s pensions for life, when
five years had been the law both in the army and navy. IV. It adopted
the English system of pensioning children of deceased marines until
they attained their majority.
The effect of this law was to absorb and bankrupt the navy pension
fund, a meritorious fund created out of the government share of
prize money, relinquished for that purpose, and to throw the
pensions, arrears as well as current and future, upon the public
treasury, where it was never intended they were to be. It was to
repeal this act, that an amendment was introduced at this session on
the bringing forward of the annual appropriation bill for navy
pensions, and long and earnest were the debates upon it. The
amendment was lost, the Senate dividing on party lines, the Whigs
against and the Democrats for the amendment. The subject is
instructive, as then was practically ratified and re-enacted the
pernicious practice authorized by the act of 1837, of granting
pensions to date from the time of injury and not from the time of
proof; and has grown up to such proportions in recent years that the
last act of Congress appropriating money for arrears of pensions,
provided for the payment of such an enormous sum of money that it
would have appalled the original projectors of the act of 1837 could
they have seen to what their system has led.
Again, at this session, the object of the tariff occupied the attention
of Congress. The compromise act, as it was called, of 1833, which was
composed of two parts—one to last nine years, for the benefit of
manufactures; the other to last for ever, for the benefit of the
planting and consuming interest—was passed, as hereinbefore
stated, in pursuance of an agreement between Mr. Clay and Mr.
Calhoun and their respective friends, at the time the former was
urging the necessity for a continuance of high tariff for protection
and revenue, and the latter was presenting and justifying before
Congress the nullification ordinance adopted by the Legislature of
South Carolina. To Mr. Clay and Mr. Calhoun it was a political
necessity, one to get rid of a stumbling-block (which protective tariff
had become); the other to escape a personal peril which his
nullifying ordinance had brought upon him, and with both, it was a
piece of policy, to enable them to combine against Mr. Van Buren, by
postponing their own contention; and a device on the part of its
author (Mr. Clayton, of Delaware) and Mr. Clay to preserve the
protective system. It provided for a reduction of a certain per centage
each year, on the duties for the ensuing nine years, until the revenue
was reduced to 20 per cent. ad valorem on all articles imported into
the country. In consequence the revenue was so reduced that in the
last year, there was little more than half what the exigencies of the
government required, and different modes, by loans and otherwise,
were suggested to meet the deficiency. The Secretary of the Treasury
had declared the necessity of loans and taxes to carry on the
government; a loan bill for twelve millions had been passed; a tariff
bill to raise fourteen millions was depending; and the chairman of
the Committee of Ways and Means, Mr. Millard Fillmore, defended
its necessity in an able speech. His bill proposed twenty per cent.
additional to the existing duty on certain specified articles, sufficient
to make up the amount wanted. This encroachment on a measure so
much vaunted when passed, and which had been kept inviolate while
operating in favor of one of the parties to it, naturally excited
complaint and opposition from the other, and Mr. Gilmer, of
Virginia, in a speech against the new bill, said: “In referring to the
compromise act, the true characteristics of that act which
recommended it strongly to him, were that it contemplated that
duties were to be levied for revenue only, and in the next place to the
amount only necessary to the supply of the economical wants of the
government. He begged leave to call the attention of the committee
to the principle recognized as the language of the compromise, a
principle which ought to be recognized in all time to come by every
department of the government. It is, that duties to be raised for
revenue are to be raised to such an amount only as is necessary for
an economical administration of the government. Some incidental
protection must necessarily be given, and he, for one, coming from
an anti-tariff portion of the country, would not object to it.”
The bill went to the Senate where it found Mr. Clay and Mr.
Calhoun in positions very different from what they occupied when
the compromise act was passed—then united, now divided—then
concurrent, now antagonistic, and the antagonism general, upon all
measures, was to be special upon this one. Their connection with the
subject made it their function to lead off in its consideration; and
their antagonist positions promised sharp encounters, which did not
fail to come. Mr. Clay said that he “observed that the Senator from
South Carolina based his abstractions on the theories of books on
English authorities, and on the arguments urged in favor of free
trade by a certain party in the British Parliament. Now he, (Mr.
Clay,) and his friends would not admit of these authorities being
entitled to as much weight as the universal practice of nations, which
in all parts of the world was found to be in favor of protecting home
manufactures to an extent sufficient to keep them in a flourishing
condition. This was the whole difference. The Senator was in favor of
book theory and abstractions: he (Mr. Clay) and his friends, were in
favor of the universal practice of nations, and the wholesome and
necessary protection of domestic manufactures.”
Mr. Calhoun in reply, referring to his allusion to the success in the
late election of the tory party in England, said: “The interests,
objects, and aims of the tory party there and the whig party here, are
identical. The identity of the two parties is remarkable. The tory
party are the patrons of corporate monopolies; and are not you?
They are advocates of a high tariff; and are not you? They are
supporters of a national bank; and are not you? They are for corn
laws—laws oppressive to the masses of the people, and favorable to
their own power; and are not you? Witness this bill.*** The success
of that party in England, and of the whig party here, is the success of
the great money power, which concentrates the interests of the two
parties, and identifies their principles.”
The bill was passed by a large majority, upon the general ground
that the government must have revenue.
The chief measure of the session, and the great object of the whig
party—the one for which it had labored for ten years—was for the re-
charter of a national bank. Without this all other measures would be
deemed to be incomplete, and the victorious election itself but little
better than a defeat. The President, while a member of the
Democratic party, had been opposed to the United States Bank; and
to overcome any objections he might have the bill was carefully
prepared, and studiously contrived to avoid the President’s
objections, and save his consistency—a point upon which he was
exceedingly sensitive. The democratic members resisted strenuously,
in order to make the measure odious, but successful resistance was
impossible. It passed both houses by a close vote; and contrary to all
expectation the President disapproved the act, but with such
expressions of readiness to approve another bill which should be free
from the objections which he named, as still to keep his party
together, and to prevent the resignation of his cabinet. In his veto
message the President fell back upon his early opinions against the
constitutionality of a national bank, so often and so publicly
expressed.
The veto caused consternation among the whig members; and Mr.
Clay openly gave expression to his dissatisfaction, in the debate on
the veto message, in terms to assert that President Tyler had violated
his faith to the whig party, and had been led off from them by new
associations. He said: “And why should not President Tyler have
suffered the bill to become a law without his signature? Without
meaning the slightest possible disrespect to him (nothing is further
from my heart than the exhibition of any such feeling towards that
distinguished citizen, long my personal friend), it cannot be
forgotten that he came into his present office under peculiar
circumstances. The people did not foresee the contingency which has
happened. They voted for him as Vice-President. They did not,
therefore, scrutinize his opinions with the care which they probably
ought to have done, and would have done, if they could have looked
into futurity. If the present state of the fact could have been
anticipated—if at Harrisburg, or at the polls, it had been foreseen
that General Harrison would die in one short month after the
commencement of his administration; so that Vice-President Tyler
would be elevated to the presidential chair; that a bill passed by
decisive majorities of the first whig Congress, chartering a national
bank, would be presented for his sanction; and that he would veto
the bill, do I hazard anything when I express the conviction that he
would not have received a solitary vote in the nominating
convention, nor one solitary electoral vote in any State in the
Union?”
The vote was taken on the bill over again, as required by the
constitution, and so far from receiving a two-thirds vote, it received
only a bare majority, and was returned to the House with a message
stating his objections to it, where it gave rise to some violent
speaking, more directed to the personal conduct of the President
than to the objections to the bill stated in his message. The veto was
sustained; and so ended the second attempt to resuscitate the old
United States Bank under a new name. This second movement to
establish the bank has a secret history. It almost caused the
establishment of a new party, with Mr. Tyler as its head; earnest
efforts having been made in that behalf by many prominent Whigs
and Democrats. The entire cabinet, with the exception of Mr.
Webster, resigned within a few days after the second veto. It was a
natural thing for them to do, and was not unexpected. Indeed Mr.
Webster had resolved to tender his resignation also, but on
reconsideration determined to remain and publish his reasons
therefor in a letter to the National Intelligencer, in the following
words:
“Lest any misapprehension should exist, as to the reasons which
led me to differ from the course pursued by my late colleagues, I wish
to say that I remain in my place, first, because I have seen no
sufficient reasons for the dissolution of the late Cabinet, by the
voluntary act of its own members. I am perfectly persuaded of the
absolute necessity of an institution, under the authority of Congress,
to aid revenue and financial operations, and to give the country the
blessings of a good currency and cheap exchanges. Notwithstanding
what has passed, I have confidence that the President will co-operate
with the legislature in overcoming all difficulties in the attainment of
these objects; and it is to the union of the Whig party—by which I
mean the whole party, the Whig President, the Whig Congress, and
the Whig people—that I look for a realization of our wishes. I can
look nowhere else. In the second place if I had seen reasons to resign
my office, I should not have done so, without giving the President
reasonable notice, and affording him time to select the hands to
which he should confide the delicate and important affairs now
pending in this department.”
The conduct of the President in the matter of the vetoes of the two
bank bills produced revolt against him in the party; and the Whigs of
the two Houses of Congress held several formal meetings to consider
what they should do in the new condition of affairs. An address to the
people of the United States was resolved upon. The rejection of the
bank bill gave great vexation to one side, and equal exultation to the
other. The subject was not permitted to rest, however; a national
bank was the life—the vital principle—of the Whig party, without
which it could not live as a party; it was the power which was to give
them power and the political and financial control of the Union. A
second attempt was made, four days after the veto, to accomplish the
end by amendments to a bill relating to the currency, which had been
introduced early in the session. Mr. Sargeant of Pennsylvania, moved
to strike out all after the enacting clause, and insert his amendments,
which were substantially the same as the vetoed bill, except changing
the amount of capital and prohibiting discounts on notes other than
bills of exchange. The bill was pushed to a vote with astonishing
rapidity, and passed by a decided majority. In the Senate the bill
went to a select committee which reported it back without alteration,
as had been foreseen, the committee consisting entirely of friends of
the measure; and there was a majority for it on final passage.
Concurred in by the Senate without alteration, it was returned to the
House, and thence referred to the President for his approval or
disapproval. It was disapproved and it was promulgated in language
intended to mean a repudiation of the President, a permanent
separation of the Whig party from him, and to wash their hands of all
accountability for his acts. An opening paragraph of the address set
forth that, for twelve years the Whigs had carried on a contest for the
regulation of the currency, the equalization of exchanges, the
economical administration of the finances, and the advancement of
industry—all to be accomplished by means of a national bank—
declaring these objects to be misunderstood by no one and the bank
itself held to be secured in the Presidential election, and its
establishment the main object of the extra session. The address then
proceeds to state how these plans were frustrated:
“It is with profound and poignant regret that we find ourselves
called upon to invoke your attention to this point. Upon the great
and leading measure touching this question, our anxious endeavors
to respond to the earnest prayers of the nation have been frustrated
by an act as unlooked for as it is to be lamented. We grieve to say to
you that by the exercise of that power in the constitution which has
ever been regarded with suspicion, and often with odium, by the
people—a power which we had hoped was never to be exhibited on
this subject, by a Whig President—we have been defeated in two
attempts to create a fiscal agent, which the wants of the country had
demonstrated to us, in the most absolute form of proof to be
eminently necessary and proper in the present emergency. Twice
have we with the utmost diligence and deliberation matured a plan
for the collection, safe-keeping and disbursing of the public moneys
through the agency of a corporation adapted to that end, and twice
has it been our fate to encounter the opposition of the President,
through the application of the veto power.*** We are constrained to
say that we find no ground to justify us in the conviction that the veto
of the President has been interposed on this question solely upon
conscientious and well-considered opinions of constitutional scruple
as to his duty in the case presented. On the contrary, too many proofs
have been forced upon our observation to leave us free from the
apprehension that the President has permitted himself to be beguiled
into an opinion that by this exhibition of his prerogative he might be
able to divert the policy of his administration into a channel which
should lead to new political combinations, and accomplish results
which must overthrow the present divisions of party in the country;
and finally produce a state of things which those who elected him, at
least, have never contemplated.
 “In this state of things, the Whigs will naturally look with anxiety
to the future, and inquire what are the actual relations between the
President and those who brought him into power; and what, in the
opinion of their friends in Congress, should be their course
hereafter.*** The President by his withdrawal of confidence from his
real friends in Congress and from the members of his cabinet; by his
bestowal of it upon others notwithstanding their notorious
opposition to leading measures of his administrations has voluntarily
separated himself from those by whose exertions and suffrage he was
elevated to that office through which he has reached his present
exalted station.*** The consequence is, that those who brought the
President into power can be no longer, in any manner or degree,
justly held responsible or blamed for the administration of the
executive branch of the government; and the President and his
advisers should be exclusively hereafter deemed accountable.*** The
conduct of the President has occasioned bitter mortification and
deep regret. Shall the party, therefore, yielding to sentiments of
despair, abandon its duty, and submit to defeat and disgrace? Far
from suffering such dishonorable consequences, the very
disappointment which it has unfortunately experienced should serve
only to redouble its exertions, and to inspire it with fresh courage to
persevere with a spirit unsubdued and a resolution unshaken, until
the prosperity of the country is fully re-established, and its liberties
firmly secured against all danger from the abuses, encroachments or
usurpations of the executive department of the government.”
This was the manifesto, so far as it concerns the repudiation of
President Tyler, which Whig members of Congress put forth: it was
answered (under the name of an address to his constituents) by Mr.
Cushing, in a counter special plea—counter to it on all points—
especially on the main question of which party the President was to
belong to; the manifesto of the Whigs assigning him to the
democracy—the address of Mr. Cushing, claiming him for the Whigs.
It was especially severe on Mr. Clay, as setting up a caucus
dictatorship to coerce the President; and charged that the address
emanated from this caucus, and did not embody or represent the
sentiments of all Whig leaders; and referred to Mr. Webster’s letter,
and his remaining in the cabinet as proof of this. But it was without
avail against the concurrent statements of the retiring senators, and
the confirmatory statements of many members of Congress. The
Whig party recoiled from the President, and instead of the unity
predicted by Mr. Webster, there was diversity and widespread
dissension. The Whig party remained with Mr. Clay; Mr. Webster
retired, Mr. Cushing was sent on a foreign mission, and the
President, seeking to enter the democratic ranks, was refused by
them, and left to seek consolation in privacy, for his political errors
and omissions.
The extra session, called by President Harrison, held under Mr.
Tyler, dominated by Mr. Clay, commenced May 31, and ended Sept.
13, 1841—and was replete with disappointed calculations, and nearly
barren of permanent results. The purposes for which it was called
into being, failed. The first annual message of President Tyler, at the
opening of the regular session in December, 1841, coming in so soon
after the termination of the extra session, was brief and meagre of
topics, with few points of interest.
In the month of March, 1842, Mr. Henry Clay resigned his place in
the Senate, and delivered a valedictory address to that body. He had
intended this step upon the close of the previous presidential
campaign, but had postponed it to take personal charge of the
several measures which would be brought before Congress at the
special session—the calling of which he foresaw would be necessary.
He resigned not on account of age, or infirmity, or disinclination for
public life; but out of disgust—profound and inextinguishable. He
had been basely defeated for the Presidential nomination, against the
wishes of the Whig party, of which he was the acknowledged head—
he had seen his leading measures vetoed by the President whom his
party had elected—the downfall of the Bank for which he had so
often pledged himself—and the insolent attacks of the petty
adherents of the administration in the two Houses: all these causes
acting on his proud and lofty spirit, induced this withdrawal from
public life for which he was so well fitted.
The address opened with a retrospect of his early entrance into the
Senate, and a grand encomium upon its powers and dignity as he
had found it, and left it. Memory went back to that early year, 1806,
when just past thirty years of age, he entered the United States
Senate, and commenced his high career—a wide and luminous
horizon before him, and will and talent to fill it. He said: “From the
year 1806, the period of my entering upon this noble theatre of my
public service, with but short intervals, down to the present time, I
have been engaged in the service of my country. Of the nature and
value of those services, which I may have rendered during my long
career of public life, it does not become me to speak. History, if she
deigns to notice me, and posterity—if a recollection of any humble
service which I may have rendered, shall be transmitted to posterity
—will be the best, truest, and most impartial judges; and to them I
defer for a decision upon their value. But, upon one subject, I may be
allowed to speak. As to my public acts and public conduct, they are
for the judgment of my fellow-citizens; but my private motives of
action—that which prompted me to take the part which I may have
done, upon great measures during their progress in the national
councils, can be known only to the Great Searcher of the human
heart and myself; and I trust I shall be pardoned for repeating again
a declaration which I made thirty years ago: that whatever error I
may have committed—and doubtless I have committed many during
my public service—I may appeal to the Divine Searcher of hearts for
the truth of the declaration which I now make, with pride and
confidence, that I have been actuated by no personal motives—that I
have sought no personal aggrandizement—no promotion from the
advocacy of those various measures on which I have been called to
act—that I have had an eye, a single eye, a heart, a single heart, ever
devoted to what appeared to be the best interests of the country.”
Mr. Clay led a great party, and for a long time, whether he dictated
to it or not, and kept it well bound together, without the usual means
of forming and leading parties. It was surprising that, without power
and patronage, he was able so long and so undividedly to keep so
great a party together, and lead it so unresistingly. He had great
talents, but not equal to some whom he led. He had eloquence—
superior in popular effect, but not equal in high oratory to that of
some others. But his temperament was fervid, his will was strong,
and his courage daring; and these qualities, added to his talents, gave
him the lead and supremacy in his party, where he was always
dominant. The farewell address made a deep impression upon the
Senators present; and after its close, Mr. Preston brought the
ceremony to a conclusion, by moving an adjournment, which was
agreed to.
 Again at this session was the subject of the tariff considered, but
this time, as a matter of absolute necessity, to provide a revenue.
Never before were the coffers and the credit of the treasury at so low
an ebb. A deficit of fourteen millions in the treasury—a total inability
to borrow, either at home or abroad, the amount of the loan of twelve
millions authorized the year before—the treasury notes below par,
and the revenues from imports inadequate and decreasing.
The compromise act of 1833 in reducing the duties gradually
through nine years, to a fixed low rate; the act of 1837 in distributing
the surplus revenue; and the continual and continued distribution of
the land revenue, had brought about this condition of things. The
remedy was sought in a bill increasing the tariff, and suspending the
land revenue distribution. Two such bills were passed in a single
month, and both vetoed by the President. It was now near the end of
August. Congress had been in session for an unprecedentedly long
time. Adjournment could not be deferred, and could not take place
without providing for the Treasury. The compromise act and the land
distribution were the stumbling-blocks: it was resolved to sacrifice
them together; and a bill was introduced raising the duties above the
fixed rate of twenty per cent., and that breach of the mutual
assurance in relation to the compromise, immediately in terms of the
assurance, suspended the land revenue distribution—to continue it
suspended while duties above the compromise limit continued to be
levied. And as that has been the case ever since, the distribution of
the land revenue has been suspended ever since. The bill was passed,
and approved by the President, and Congress thereupon adjourned.
The subject of the navy was also under consideration at this
session. The naval policy of the United States was a question of party
division from the origin of parties in the early years of the
government—the Federal party favoring a strong and splendid navy,
the Republican a moderate establishment, adapted to the purposes
of defense more than of offense. And this line of division has
continued. Under the Whig regime the policy for a great navy
developed itself. The Secretary of the Navy recommended a large
increase of ships, seamen and officers, involving a heavy expense,
though the government was not in a condition to warrant any such
expenditure, and no emergency required an increase in that branch
of the public service. The vote was taken upon the increase proposed
by the Secretary of the Navy, and recommended by the President;
and it was carried, the yeas and nays being well defined by the party
line.
The first session of the twenty-eighth Congress, which convened
December 1843, exhibited in its political complexion, serious losses
in the Whig following. The Democratic candidate for Speaker of the
House of Representatives, was elected over the Whig candidate—the
vote standing 128 to 59. Thus an adverse majority of more than two
to one was the result to the Whig party at the first election after the
extra session of 1841. The President’s message referred to the treaty
which had lately been concluded with Great Britain relative to the
northwestern territory extending to the Columbia river, including
Oregon and settling the boundary lines; and also to a pending treaty
with Texas for her annexation to the United States; and concluded
with a recommendation for the establishment of a paper currency to
be issued and controlled by the Federal government.
For more than a year before the meeting of the Democratic
Presidential Convention in Baltimore, in May 1844, it was evident to
leading Democrats that Martin Van Buren was the choice of the
party. To overcome this popular current and turn the tide in favor of
Mr. Calhoun, who desired the nomination, resort was had to the
pending question of the annexation of Texas. Mr. Van Buren was
known to be against it, and Mr. Calhoun for it. To gain time, the
meeting of the convention was postponed from December previous,
which had been the usual time for holding such elections, until the
following May. The convention met, and consisted of two hundred
and sixty-six delegates, a decided majority of whom were for Mr. Van
Buren, and cast their votes accordingly on the first ballot. But a
chairman had been selected, who was adverse to his nomination; and
aided by a rule adopted by the convention, which required a
concurrence of two-thirds to effect a nomination, the opponents of
Mr. Van Buren were able to accomplish his defeat. Mr. Calhoun had,
before the meeting of the convention, made known his
determination, in a public address, not to suffer his name to go
before that assemblage as a candidate for the presidency, and stated
his reasons for so doing, which were founded mainly on the manner
in which the convention was constituted; his objections being to the
mode of choosing delegates, and the manner of their giving in their