Saints & Martyrs

This image has been a long time coming.

I wrote on here over six months ago about some of the early planning for this piece, and how a lot of the early inspiration came from Paul Koudounaris’ 2013 book Heavenly Bodies: Cult Treasures & Spectacular Saints from the Catacombs (and a parallel with the siren from the Jibaro episode of Love, Death & Robots).

But finally here it is (click the image for the larger pic in my gallery pages).

The original “catacomb saints” were the bones of early Christian martyrs (a very dubious claim, as Paul Koudounaris discovers in his book) disinterred from their burial places beneath Rome, and shipped out to Catholic churches and religious houses in German-speaking Europe to replace holy relics destroying during the Protestant Reformation. These human remains were decorated with brocade and jewellery by their recipients, and put on display.

My photograph is part of my Acid Renaissance series which generally draws its imagery from English myth and folklore, so it may seem a bit out-of-place, but England was predominantly Catholic for around a thousand years, so the country’s history is steeped in the imagery of holy relics. Not all myth and folklore goes back to pre-Christian religions.

And then, from a completely different direction:

Andrew Eldritch of The Sisters of Mercy once told an interviewer asking about Jim Steinman’s production role on the 1987 single This Corrosion (from the album Floodland) I … explained that we needed something that sounded like a disco party run by the Borgias. And that’s what we got.

And a year before that song was released there’s a scene visually redolent of that in Derek Jarman’s 1986 film Caravaggio — albeit set about a century after the death of the Borgia Pope Alexander VI — where a party takes place in the tunnels and crypts beneath Rome, with catacomb saints on display.

And this alternative perspective, of a — literally — underground rave of the weird and the wonderful rapt in a collective psychedelic joy (and fear, when the trip turns bad) is also an essential part of this piece.