Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found

by Frances Larson

  The guillotine and the camera, as machines of science, claimed to be in the business of producing the truth: they marked the cessation of time and the simultaneous isolation of their subject for inspection. Machines like these claimed not to have opinions, but simply to document events as they unfolded. As a mechanical device for creating a series of severed heads, each to be held aloft by the executioner for all to see, the guillotine produced the ‘proof’ or ‘print’ of a traitor, as each victim in turn was transformed from a person into a type: the criminal type.

  In the late nineteenth century, photography was enlisted to produce scientific facts about people’s constitutions, and the ‘head shot’ was central to this task. New camera technologies, coupled with the popularity of physiognomy, which propounded a direct link between the exterior appearance of a person’s face and the interior constitution of their character, ensured that head shots became potent scientific tools. By isolating their subject in time and space, thanks to the laws of physics alone, they seemed to provide a definite record of reality. And so countless criminals, lunatics, paupers and foreigners were positioned in front of measuring grids and rulers, at an exact distance from the camera, to provide full-face and profile head shots for comparative purposes. The illusion of truth bestowed a power on the person behind the camera, who diligently turned individuals into racial and social ‘types’, stripped of their personalities and reduced to a single defining characteristic – ‘A typical native’ or ‘Men convicted of larceny without violence’ – just as the guillotine was in the business of producing traitors.

  In earlier decades the guillotine had directly inspired documentary artists, mostly engravers, who seized the opportunity to make money by selling cheap, simple line drawings of recently severed heads. It proved to be a good business strategy, because few people could resist taking a closer look at the latest traitor’s face, especially when even those in the crowd on execution day found it hard to catch a glimpse of what was going on at the centre of things. A portrait de guillotiné was fast to produce and supposedly unmediated by the creative pretensions of the artist. It reduced the scene to its barest essentials: there was no background, there were no clothes or props, and the victim’s body was not shown. It transformed the drama of the event into an announcement that the job had been done.

  A portrait de guillotiné engraving by Villeneuve, ‘A matter for crowned mountebanks to consider’, 1793.

  Guillotine portraits followed a conventional format: in each case, the executioner’s hand was shown holding the head aloft by its hair, while the recently sliced neck dripped with blood beneath. The blood was an artistic touch designed to prove that this was a record of the exact moment of death. The portrait de guillotiné looked as though it had been ‘taken from life’ at the precise point its subject was, actually, taken from life.

  Engravings, plaster casts and photographs were all pale imitations of the guillotine itself, which fixed the expression of the face by a neutral mechanical technique. Death by the guillotine stripped away the ambiguities – of evidence and motive and judgement – from the story of the victim’s life, leaving only one important character trait behind: that this person had been executed for crimes against the state. Spectators could witness the creation of a criminal type. ‘Behold, the head of a traitor!’

  The guillotine stopped time on the most important stage of all, in front of avid spectators; it produced an ‘ultimate portrait’, made of real tissue and skin, and removed from the constraints of artistic interpretation. If the guillotine was the definitive portrait machine – one that certainly drew the crowds – could its work ever be described as beautiful?

  Marc Quinn explores the boundaries between the grotesque and the beautiful, and invites us to see beauty in the human body as an organic substance as well as an aesthetic ideal. He has been likened to a modern-day Caravaggio, drawn to the human body in extremis. Caravaggio liked to condemn his half-headless subjects to hang forever in that excruciating moment between life and death. In his Beheading of St John, the hapless prisoner’s neck is severed but not struck through, and his executioner reaches for a knife to finish the job, but of course, the knife will always be just out of reach. Meanwhile, Salome’s maid leans in towards the dying man to offer her silver platter for the head, but she cannot bear to look. Or perhaps, despite the bloody horror before her, she is still drawn in close to the action.

  Incongruous though it may seem, decapitation has often been seen as an erotic act. The biblical stories of Judith and Salome allude to the frisson of a severed head, and both stories have been revisited again and again by artists drawn to their dramatic power: a seductive dance, a brutal execution, a silver platter bearing a freshly sliced head. In the New Testament, Herod’s step-daughter, commonly identified as Salome, dances at his birthday feast. Entranced by her performance, he offers her anything she desires, and after consulting with her mother, Salome asks for the head of John the Baptist on a plate. Herod is perturbed, but he grants Salome’s request. John, who had denounced Herod’s marriage to Salome’s mother, is executed in prison and his head is brought to Salome on a charger.

  The story of Judith also centres on the dangerously seductive powers of a woman, but Judith is a very different kind of woman: where Salome is young and naïve, Judith is experienced and calculating. A wealthy and beautiful Jewish widow, Judith leaves her besieged city, Bethulia, planning to charm Holofernes and overthrow his Assyrian army. Promising to tell Holofernes the secrets of her people, she wins his trust, and when he falls into a drunken sleep, she takes his sword and cuts off his head, taking it back to her people as a sign. The Assyrian army, finding Holofernes slain, flees in terror.

  A sense of intimacy unites the stories of Salome and Judith. Both women are consistently shown handling a severed head; Judith cuts one off with her bare hands. Before the executioner’s axe and the guillotine’s blade, severed heads were necessarily intimate objects. Women who handled heads, who sliced through men’s necks, were mythologized as seductive almost by necessity. They might not be able to overpower a man by brute force, but they could disarm him with their beauty.

  The opportunity to contrast a beautiful woman with a dead man’s head ensured that both Judith and Salome appeared in works of art throughout the Renaissance: Michelangelo, Caravaggio and Donatello all conjured Judith; for the first she was elegant, for the second she was bloody, for the third, victorious. Painting a severed head could bring practical challenges, since mortally wounded models were hard to come by and artists generally had to settle for people whose heads were firmly secured. Halfway through his painting, Caravaggio realized that he had got the angle of Holoferne’s head wrong, since it was meant to be half-severed. X-rays show that he painted out the first head, reposed his model and painted it in again, to give it a suitably slackened angle.

  By the turn of the twentieth century, Salome had become an intensely sexual character, appearing in musical halls, early films and paintings by artists like Gustav Klimt and Franz Stuck as a half-naked, self-satisfied and defiant temptress bearing her grisly prize. On the eve of the First World War, Salome was viewed as a woman who had more cunning than intellect, and who was empowered by her sexual charms. It is no coincidence that Salome had become a sexual monster in the eyes of many artists at a time when real women were deserting their ‘proper nature’ by seeking education, employment and equal rights in greater numbers than ever before. Salome’s prize of a severed head on its silver platter now stood for everything that men might lose in the face of women’s emancipation – the head she held so close represented men’s leadership, their authority, their intellectual and professional hegemony – while she, as its new mistress, danced on in a state of ecstatic vindication.

  Biblical stories gave artists an opportunity to try cutting off someone’s head imaginatively. In the early seventeenth century, the Italian artist Artemisia Gentileschi painted a more muscular and determined Judith than Caravaggio had done, although she was cl
early mirroring his work. Gentileschi was raped by her mentor, the artist Agostino Tassi, and some art historians have seen her Judith as autobiographical: the painting gave her a chance to get her revenge on her rapist and express her rage by cutting off his head on canvas. Certainly, the women in Gentileschi’s painting engage Holofernes with a physicality that makes Caravaggio’s scene seem quaint.

  Carrying out a fictitious beheading could offer even more fantastical freedoms than this: if the decapitation was a flight of fancy, why not try severing your own head? Many artists did. They set their paint brushes to work on themselves and stared into the eyes of their own severed heads as they worked. Lucas Cranach, Cristofano Allori, Caravaggio, Edvard Munch and Paul Gaugin all decapitated themselves in their works of art. Some painted themselves as Holofernes, some as John the Baptist; Caravaggio saw himself as the dripping head of Goliath, held up, almost regretfully, by the boy David. More usually, the male artist saw himself as a victim of the female temptress. Allori painted his mistress as Judith and his own head as Holofernes; Munch envisioned himself as John the Baptist in a sea of blood, with Salome reduced to a few androgynous tendrils of hair. It was hardly a happy commentary on passion. The surrealist writer George Bataille maintained that art ‘is born of a wound that does not heal’, implying that mutilation is a precondition for the artistic undertaking. Art also makes the eternal wound possible. Decapitation opened up a space for artists to wrestle with their demons and contemplate their own mortality.

  Théodore Géricault is responsible for the most startling paintings of severed heads ever created. His oil paintings Têtes coupées, now in the Nationalmuseum Stockholm, and Head of a Guillotined Man, in the Art Institute of Chicago, are brutally unapologetic works. The heads lie in folds of bloody white cloth. One is slack-mouthed and wide-eyed, shocked by its own violent death. In these startlingly attentive works, Géricault communicated his fascination with unrepentant precision.

  Têtes coupées by Théodore Géricault, 1818.

  Géricault produced these paintings in late 1818 or early 1819, when he was twenty-seven years old. He was working on The Raft of Medusa, a canvas measuring nearly five metres by seven, for which he had rented a large, quiet studio in the Faubourg de Roule and ‘shut his door to his accustomed life’. The Medusa portrayed the wooden raft of survivors from the wreck of the French naval frigate the Méduse, who were adrift in the Atlantic for twelve days in July 1816. Only fifteen of the 147 castaways had survived, and five more died within

  months of their rescue. The story of the Méduse was an extraordinary tale of starvation, dehydration, cannibalism and madness which had captivated the French public in late 1816, when it was first reported, and through 1817, when the ship’s captain was court-martialled on charges of negligence and abandoning his ship.

  The wreck of the Méduse offered the young Géricault an opportunity to secure his reputation as an artist. Here was a contemporary event, full of physical and emotional drama, that had seized the public’s imagination and lent itself to a painting on an ambitious scale for the Paris Salon. Géricault set about preparing to paint a monumental canvas and, ever the perfectionist, he researched every aspect of the story. He gathered books and newspaper cuttings; he met, and befriended, survivors from the wreck, including the carpenter who had engineered the raft and who made Géricault a scale model; and he studied the effect of death on the human body. In fact, Géricault turned his studio into a morgue, collecting body parts from the local hospitals and studying them as they decomposed, until even his closest friends could hardly bear to go into his studio.

  Géricault’s studio was near the Hôpital Beaujon. Here, he could study the physical decline of patients who were dying, and the bodies of those who had died. He came to an arrangement with the nurses and medical students so that he could visit the hospital dissecting rooms and take amputated body parts back to his studio. Presumably he had to smuggle the legs and heads out, because exhumation and dissection were forbidden outside the medical profession at the time. These activities were not for the faint-hearted. A medical student remembered his first visit to Beaujon’s dissecting rooms:

  … this human charnel house, scattered members, grimacing heads, skulls half open, the bloody cesspool in which we trod, the revolting odour … filled me with such fright that, jumping through the window of the amphitheatre, I escaped as fast as I could and ran panting to my place, as if death and its dreadful cortege were hot on my heels.

  This was where Géricault sketched and learned the anatomy of the traumatized body. He also visited the Paris morgue, where unclaimed corpses were laid out on marble slabs for public viewing.

  It may sound improbable, but the morgue was one of the most popular public attractions in Paris in the nineteenth century. It even featured on the Thomas Cook tour of the city, and with as many as one million visitors to it a year, one newspaper claimed, ‘It would be difficult to find a Parisian, native or transplanted, who does not make his pilgrimage.’ There was a spacious, well-lit ‘exhibit room’ where visitors could see the cadavers laid out, naked except for a loincloth, behind large glass windows, and when a death caught the attention of the press – for example, when a child was found floating in the river – thousands came to see the body for themselves. So Géricault’s curiosity for the dead was not unusual in itself, although the intensity of his investigations certainly set him apart.

  Géricault immersed both his mind and his body in the subject for months, smelling and feeling the realities of physical trauma and decay. He poured over every detail of the story of the raft and lived with death as his subjects had done. He shaved his hair and cut himself off from society, allowing only a small number of close friends to visit him at his studio, and arranging for his food to be brought to him there. It was during this time of voluntary isolation that he produced his paintings and drawings of severed heads.

  In the past these paintings have been referred to as preparatory studies, although no heads were included in his final composition for the Raft of the Medusa and all the figures in the painting, including the corpses, were painted from live models. Rather than preparatory studies, Géricault’s heads appear to have been private explorations into the emotional and physical consequences of decapitation, since they were never shown in public. They were part of his deeper meditation on human suffering and its limits – part of his determination to have lived what he was to paint.

  Géricault’s paintings of heads have received a lot of attention from art historians, along with his studies of amputated limbs, but they still raise more questions than they answer. Unlike his other studies for the Medusa, they are fully realized and carefully composed works of art, but they are also full of contradictions and ambiguities. Shockingly realistic, they were partly works of imagination, since at least one of the supposedly severed heads was drawn from a live model in Géricault’s studio, and even the painting of an actual severed head – belonging to a thief who had been executed at Bicêtre – benefited from enhanced details, like the fresh blood, which must have been added, since the head itself would have been completely drained of blood by the time Géricault came to paint it. All of which means that, although piercingly realistic and born of Géricault’s fascination with the dissecting room, these paintings were much more than anatomical studies. They were also reveries that played on the dark presence of the guillotine in French society. Perhaps Géricault beheaded his models with his brush in an attempt to realize the full horror of ‘the national razor’.

  Géricault laid bare the bloody neck-stumps of his heads and thrust them forward so there was nowhere for his viewers to hide. He was unforgivingly explicit, but he was also caught up in the emotional resonances of death by beheading, because he seems to have portrayed different moments in the execution process: while one of his heads expresses the anguish of decapitation, another, the female head, shows the sleep-like peace of death after the brutal event. Géricault’s message is ambiguous: was he denouncing the horror o
f the guillotine, or revelling in it?

  Géricault almost certainly opposed the death penalty. Several of his friends and patrons were members of a liberal political organization, the Société de la Morale Chrétienne, which campaigned for its repeal, and art historians agree that it is likely that he was sympathetic to this cause, but his paintings are not overtly political. Compare them, for example, with Jacques-Raymont Brascassat’s painting of the would-be assassin Guiseppe Fieschi, painted more than fifteen years later.

  Fieschi was guillotined in 1836 for his role in an assassination attempt on King Louis-Philippe, and Brascassat painted a portrait of Fieschi’s severed head. He painted the head propped up on draperies and, although bloody, the lacerated neck is tucked away underneath and almost out of sight. Bathed in light from above, Fieschi’s expression is defeated but dignified. He looks almost peaceful. Brascassat also painted the guillotine, looming in the shadows behind Fieschi’s head, and a blood-red dedication to the executed radical, which echoes Jacques-Louis David’s dedication to Marat, and frames Feischi as a martyr to government oppression. In short, Brascassat tidied up his severed head, and reassured his viewers that a worthy political cause justified his shocking choice of subject. There is no such reassurance for Géricault’s audience. His subjects are anonymous and viciously mutilated for no known reason.

  Instead of explaining the horror in his painting, Géricault lingers over it. His paintings are carefully staged and dramatically lit: emerging from the gloom of a darkened room, the heads, male and female, cushioned and reclining side by side, evoke a deathly marital bed, while, in other works, disarticulated arms and legs gracefully entwine in a warm light and suggest an erotic embrace. Géricault interrupts our expectations, and delights in our shock. His paintings are indulgent, and in this they reflect the tenor of their times. Géricault was not alone in being drawn to the darker realities of life and death. Horror was big business in early-nineteenth century France. Cheap horror novels were bestsellers, while sinister theatre shows played to packed audiences, and the ‘horror chambers’ found in waxwork museums, as well as the fantasmagorie magic lantern shows that featured skeletons and corpses raised from the dead, drew the crowds, not to mention the genuine article on display at the city morgue, or the regular performances of the guillotine itself, which always ensured a large turnout. Géricault’s paintings of severed heads and amputated limbs are part of this infatuation with the horrific, but they also mock it by grounding it in the harsh reality of human life and death.