In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag, in a way, indicts those who seek out depictions of violence without the intention or ability to provide aid to those being harmed: “Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of…extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it…or those who could learn from it…The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we…

We agreed before that everything that exists is unitary, and that oneness itself is good. It then follows that everything, because it exists, is good. And it also follows that whatever falls from goodness ceases to exist, and that evil men cease to be what they were, having by their wickedness lost their human nature, although they still survive in the form of the human body (118). – Boethius, The…

When I saw Bartolommeo Bulgarini’s The Crucifixion in the Smart Museum, one big question stuck out to me. Why does it look like that? The heads of the characters seem slightly out of proportion, lodged at awkward and unnatural angles; their hands are rendered in awkward and contrived poses; and Jesus’s torso and legs seemed oddly elongated and alien. These kinds of representational inconsistencies were present in the illustrations we…