Aesthetic practices centered on visual representations of saints in a visible state of corporeal turmoil and dissolution are closely connected with the imagery of Christ’s passion. Depictions of both St. Sebastian and St. Roch often feature Christ-like characteristics, such as the slightly tilted head and mild, sorrowful expression of St. Roch in the RISD Museum, but also the showing of wounds. Detailed depictions of Christ’s suffering and death became overwhelmingly popular during the later Middle Ages, allowing for new ways of experiencing and expressing religious devotion.¹⁵ Many practices of piety became associated with mental exercises aimed at bringing forth images of the passion in front of the inner eye. These images, focusing, in turn, on different aspects of the physical and emotional pain endured by Christ and his mother, were emotionally charged. During these exercises, the believer’s body itself became a pictorial medium. For example, the physiological processes underlying the so-called imagination theory, which came to prominence during the later Middle Ages, were thought to bring into effect material changes within the body based on optical perceptions, but also mental images, dreams, visions, and feelings.¹⁶ Religious practices such as the compassionate contemplation of vulnerable bodies, including those of Christ and his saints, served to instill a longing for assimilation and interconnectedness through shared pain. They also created valued knowledge pertaining to specific forms of embodiment that were characterized by dissolving boundaries, fragmentation, and dissolution.

These practices, and the specific knowledge they generated, are centered on various forms of what we could describe as disability experience.¹⁷ We can therefore try to study them as premodern disability aesthetics. Margrit Shildrick, among others, has pointed out that in modern Western thought, illness, impairment, and disability are defined by a lack of corporeal boundaries: being sick or disabled is understood as a state of dissolution that has to be overcome. Consequently, health and well-being are constructed as attributes of a subject that is defined by its boundaries and its consolidation as a unified entity.¹⁸ By contrast, premodern concepts of corporeality consider all human bodies instable, permeable, and changeable. To varying degrees, all human beings were thought to share in this inherent vulnerability. In some respects, inhabiting a body shaped by illness, impairment, injury, or pain was a state to aspire to, either by following Christ’s suffering directly, like saints and martyrs, or through empathetic acts of assimilation through visual practices.   

Crucially, the act of immersing oneself in passion imagery and the suffering of saints could then become a powerful protection against illness. To look upon an image of St. Roch, for example, was to honor and share in the pain of the saint, but also, in turn, to evoke his intercession and protection. Engaging with images was to communicate with them, to offer oneself up to painful experiences that had elevated the saint almost to the level of Christ. From this position, St. Roch and other saints were accessible as intermediaries. Can we also approach them as representatives of premodern disability experience?

It should be pointed out that the concepts of interconnectedness and intercorporeality described above could also result in prejudice against and social rejection of sick and disabled people. This extended to the very act of seeing itself, which was understood as an active material process. In this regard, certain illnesses and conditions—among them the plague—were thought to be transmissible through vision. At least in part, this notion might have been based on the intromission theory, according to which visual “objects sent forth rays that were ‘captured’ by the eye.” It is therefore not unlikely that during plague epidemics, sick people were isolated due to a fear of their spreading infection merely through their visibility: “Part of this notion was that the object (in this case the sick person) emitted a ‘species’ or ‘likeness’ into the air that would be carried right to the eye of the beholder. The rays from the object of sight fall on the spherical surface of the pupil and then penetrate through the three humors of the eye and along the optic nerve. It was reputed that these rays had the potential to transmit the disease.”¹⁹ In times of crisis, it is rather likely that these fears were projected onto strangers, especially those with conspicuous bodily or mental characteristics. This experience is also central to the narrative and iconographic traditions of the cult of St. Roch: not only is he usually depicted as a pilgrim, but one of the most prominent aspects of his biography is that he supposedly died a stranger in a prison at or close to his hometown, made unrecognizable and “other” through his illness and isolation.

The statue of St. Roch in the RISD Museum addresses this inherent ambivalence by highlighting the saint’s social isolation, exemplified by the moving image of the dog as his only companion. At the same time, the gesture relating to the plague wound already indicates his elevated position as an intercessor for humankind. In turn, audiences who first approached the statue might have experienced a complex array of conflicting emotions and maybe even physical reactions. In order to explore them in greater detail, more research is needed. To this end, studying premodern disability aesthetics can help us to reconsider our own perspectives and become defamiliarized with our own unquestioned habits of “seeing.” By cripping representations such as the statue of St. Roch, diverse and, to us, non-normative forms of embodiment find a new place within art history and visual studies: not in the margins, but the very center.