I spend my days collecting stories about food—mostly fish-belly-pale girls starving their way to holiness. I study a painted face, a starry diadem resting atop blonde curls. The altarpiece pane depicts one of many female saints, each holding some sign of their suffering. I track them: the bread, a pomegranate, a lick of white tempera highlighting the shine of an egg.
The goal is to create case studies where art demonstrates the Renaissance female relationship to corporeality and religion. I think my advisor, a Harvard-taught Raphael and Michelangelo scholar, hoped that I’d be translating papal dispensations. Instead, I am drawn to the mundane and the disgusting, the little details tucked away in footnotes: bleeding Eucharistic hosts, visions of Christ drinking from the putrid wounds of nuns. It is, perhaps, too large an endeavor. Instead of focusing on the expansive, richly painted frescoes in famous Florentine public chapels, I study artworks made for the cells and dining spaces in nunneries, paintings whose colors have lost their pigment, faded with age and decay, the gold leaf flecked with brown stains.
A problem distracts, however: I haven’t stopped bleeding in three months. It starts in July, just as the new semester begins, at first a slow brown drip in my underwear, and then a red bloom.
The clots are the real surprise, the size of my palm, slipping from my body slick as a goldfish. This feels like whole chunks of my insides free-falling out, like all of my organs were shedding an entire layer. Anything feels possible—that this might go on forever, that something is broken beyond repair. Most nights I am scared to sleep, convinced I am dying.
I am a second-year MA student in a program designed to train PhD-worthy students, a feeder to further studies. Our program was founded by two leading feminist scholars who studied female painters—Artemisia Gentileschi and Mary Cassat. I read their articles feverishly in my undergraduate art history classes, in awe of the possibilities that they encouraged in a field of study typically focused on male artists and male scholars. When I arrive at the program, I find, however, that the founders have retired. In their place, our current faculty bring a rigorous desire to complicate the great (male) masters of the canon, and a deep-rooted jealousy of bigger schools with larger endowments. They speak honestly with us about being overlooked for prizes and speaking opportunities. Their research is brilliant, on the Sistine Ceiling, on Rodin’s sculptures of dancers, on portraits of Northern German kings and queens.
Where my classmates thrive, I flounder, awash in the sense that I don’t actually know what I’m doing. “You need to return to the art,” I hear, again and again. Despite a healthy respect for the art object, I return again and again instead to the people, the social histories. And worse, to the obscure artists in the margins, small salt-crusted frescoes in chapels long gone to seed, and altarpieces not worth the money to keep whole in one museum. Many of my classmates focus on one artist, one artwork—but I can’t, don’t; I gather many to me, reveling in each new image. If the point of grad school is to become an expert in something, well, I am becoming an expert in the iconography of Renaissance food objects, depicted by the dozen.
My advisor and I fight over the body of the Virgin Mary. If she had a body. Or rather if Renaissance nuns believed she had a body.
“You’re focused too much on this,” she says, shuffling the red-marked pages of my printed thesis draft, “and not spending enough time with the art.” I knew this was coming, and I feel my shoulders go rigid. She is right: my visual analysis is a mess, not enough focus on iconography. I take her notes, her handwritten suggestions sprawled across the papers.
I fill pad after pad, bleeding through them into my jeans.
My research points me to a Florentine convent, Santa Elisabetta delle Convertite, which housed both repentant prostitutes and a Botticelli altarpiece (the Pala delle Convertite) depicting the life of Mary Magdalene. The main panel is standard fare: the crucified Christ, a small trickle of blood from wounds in his hands, feet, and side. Next to him stands an array of saints, including Mary Magdalene, wizened and clothed in waves of hair falling to her feet. But the predella paintings most interested me: four panels at the bottom of the main altar that crystalize and clarify the top image. In these delicate paintings, Mary Magdalene is a red flame and gasp of gold hair. She takes to the desert, needing no food but that is handed to her daily by angels. The prostitutes-turned-nuns, having no such option, are fed poorly, and told to follow her example.
Unfortunately, the altarpiece is considered a minor Botticelli, not one of his gold goddesses, and not his later hell-and-brimstone works. I search desperately for more information about the women of Santa Elisabetta delle Convertite, why the work was created, and how it fits into their lives, but come up empty. I find other Magdalene images: a wooden statue, haggard face and scraggy hair; a painting, her hair-covered body lifted by six angels, one holding the Eucharistic host.
It is hard to concentrate when blood flows so freely and in such huge amounts that you’re worried you’ll ruin all the furniture. So, it makes sense that my visual analysis of the selected works of art feel like small asides, leapfrogging from leaf to leaf. I analyze last supper frescoes, studying the iconographic difference between a cherry, a plum, a handful of figs. I feel like I am floundering in a shallow body of water, reaching out my hands for visual evidence of an idea I don’t quite grasp yet. All I do is gather the stories, and try to manage the bleed.
My mother was raised Catholic, and kept a beautifully illustrated book from her Sunday school days, Saints for Girls. The stories captivated me as a child, all those princesses able to hear the voices of angels. Their suffering fascinated me, grotesque as it was, through starvation or torture, lakes of fire and stoning—their own fathers throwing them in prison for their beliefs. It’s no surprise, then, that when I took my first art history class in college, I was drawn to medieval and Renaissance art, altarpieces featuring the saints from my mother’s book. I liked Lucy the best, holding her eyes on a tray, and Saint Agatha, offering the viewer her excised breasts in both hands.
A wildly popular book in the Renaissance was the Golden Legend, which told saints’ life stories. I thumb through it, looking for my starving girls— and there they are, nearly all teenaged and virginal. Many of them experienced visions, told the future with God whispering in their ear. There’s a point in my research where the sainted and the common nuns I study merge together, all of them pious, all of them demonstrating their faith by renouncing the corporeal world—convents become famous for their especially devout members, the ones who deny their bodily needs the most and the longest. I pour over logs of these women, line after line.
I go to a new gynecologist recommended to me, Dr. A, who does not seem perturbed about this tidal wave of blood, even after I tell her about the time I stood up following a lecture and felt the mass of blood trickle all the way down to my knees, staining my jeans. Dr. A tells me I have a “medically crazy” uterus and that it will need time to adjust to hormonal birth control. She shows me a diagram with pink waves demonstrating levels of uterine wall growth and their correlating hormone levels. She writes me a script and sends me away for three months. So I dutifully swallow the pills and bleed: through September, October, November. Sometimes, it slows to a trickle, or disappears entirely. Sometimes it’s just the clots, bright and slick as jellyfish.
The Golden Legend features the story of the Magdalene, and fills in some of the missing predella scenes. She became a follower of Christ and cast aside her wealth to serve him, washing his feet with her tears, drying them with her hair. At some point in the early church, her story is conflated with that of another Biblical woman, a repentant prostitute with the same name, and so Mary’s lascivious nature becomes one more thing to give up in the face of devotion. After Christ’s Ascension, she was set adrift in a boat, left to the waves. Miraculously, Mary made it to shore, going on to live in solitude in the desert, renouncing all food and physical needs. The last predella panel shows her final moments, no longer the beautiful blonde, but an ascetic saint clothed in her hair, gaunt and grim. The only visible part of her body, besides her face, are her skeletal hands and feet. The ocean shines behind her, the shoreline and sea a faded blue-white. Angels lift her into the air, giving nourishment. In the second half of the panel, she appears inside a chapel. Whittled and bent by hunger, she takes communion from a priest; if Botticelli had painted the next moment, she would be dead on the ground, lips stained with Christ’s blood.
One of the first things you learn when you start a Renaissance art history class is transubstantiation—the Catholic belief that the bread and wine of the Eucharist transforms into the actual human body and blood of Christ. A foundational idea, one the Church commissioned artists to depict. As such, most of the famous works of art in the Italian Renaissance used imagery of transubstantiation; so a study of the art of the renaissance is, in some ways, always a means of thinking about blood and consumption.
When I am not reading or writing, I worry about the bleeding, cancelling plans and forgoing long stretches in the library. I’m bleeding in the bathroom of a suburban chain restaurant, sitting on the toilet for twenty minutes before a friend comes to check on me. The blood is coming out in such large quantities that I don’t even want to sit at the table, concerned I’ll leave stains everywhere. Part of me believes, maybe, that spending so much time reading about blood and the body has unlocked this in myself, caused this flood. I worry that this is my life, forever.
My advisor and I fight again. Or rather, I fight with her. I’m selected to give a paper at a graduate student talk, one of four students from the whole program, and though they won’t say it, the faculty are fiercely competitive. They want us to dazzle, especially compared to that other university, which boasts a well-known male art historian as its Chair, as close to a celebrity as a historian can be. The best student will be chosen by the faculty to give the paper at a conference at the National Gallery of Art, in Washington D.C.; our program is only given one slot every two years. We all covet the opportunity, desperately.
Those of us selected to present participate in a dress rehearsal where we all receive withering feedback. I am particularly stung by my advisor’s directive to remove a paragraph about female nuns eating their own scabs to attain a closer relationship to Christ. She grimaces as she gives her thoughts—focus on the convent, their lived experiences as nuns, their sightlines of the artworks in question. Focus on their prayers, the rituals of the Church. I disagree. The bodily mortification illustrates the desperation to see your own flesh as something you could use and abuse to attain the closest thing to holiness available to you. My advisor claims that their practice has nothing to do with my argument.
The months of bleeding start to take a toll. At first, it is the weight of my legs, or rather the work of my legs to carry the weight of my body. To walk to the bus stop, I go slow, stopping every few steps, the effort causing sweat to bead at my forehead and under my coat. The sidewalk stretches like taffy, longer than ever before, and I can only go step-by-step, slower even than the elderly woman going up the block with her wheeled shopping cart.
At the street corner, I wait to cross, and have to lean all of my weight against the streetlamp. I think I am going to faint. All I want is to make it to the bus shelter bench to sit. I breathe heavy, deep breaths, like I’ve just gone for a run. Dr. A acknowledges that I may be experiencing some of the more pressing symptoms of anemia, but without a diagnosis my terrible student insurance won’t cover an iron infusion. I return to her office, but the result is the same: more birth control. An ultrasound’s pulsing black and gray images show nothing. I swallow disappointment; I wanted visual evidence of what was wrong with my body just as much as I sought it out in my paintings. On my phone are emails from my advisor, overdue notices from the library, notes to myself jotted down in the waiting room, desperate lines that don’t quite connect when I get back to my desk. I decide I have no choice but to push through—to make it to the end of the year, to turn in the paper, and then figure it out.
Perhaps inspired by my own, unending bleeding (or the copious images of babies in both the doctor’s office and my books), I waste an afternoon crafting a single footnote about the Virgin Mary’s menstrual cycle. This is a question that, surprisingly, medieval theologians were deeply concerned about. Religion, science, and culture collided, creating a web of questions: what did the Song of Songs mean when it read, “thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee.” Wouldn’t Mary’s Immaculate Conception exempt her from the period, widely believed to be the punishment of Eve? I can’t stop thinking about it, searching fruitlessly for more.
I contemplate a 1391 Madonna and Child, a lone disembodied breast in her hand. It’s the only evidence of her body; the rest is just a mass of fabric, no press of the knee against her skirt, no second breast. If Mary had a body, how could her virginity remain intact through childbirth? How could she have “no spot” and still bleed monthly? Without menstruation, how would she have the raw matter to create a human life? Medieval doctors and theologians worried that she must have bled, because the popular thought at the time was that breast milk was purified and re-routed menstrual matter. I muddle through the records from conferences convened to discuss the issue. It’s just another example of blood and food being conflated, one exchanged for the other in early-modern thought, one more way the body of a woman becomes a religious object.
I’m back in my advisor’s office, a low hum of exhaustion wrapping around me like a blanket. She pulls books off her shelves for me, wants me to focus on the physicality of space: the location of these altarpieces and frescoes, their architecture, how sightline changes their meaning. I don’t know if its stubbornness, or the bone-deep tiredness I feel upon waking up each morning, or the exhaustion settling into my legs after climbing a flight of stairs to get to her—I can’t imagine studying the cold marble halls, mapping out who sat where and who could lock eyes with this character during a church service. We settle on the refectories—dining spaces where the nuns gathered daily for their food.
My mind is a wash of fog. A watercolor impression of what I want to say floats up, and then is gone before I can grasp it. The depletion I feel in the evenings is so thick and heavy, I feel like it’s coated each of my bones. Instead of reading, or translating the stacks of papers piling up on my desk, I fall asleep in my chair, waking up when my legs and back cramp up and force me into bed. The beat of my heart sounds like waves hitting sand in my eardrums.
My advisor sends me on another desperate hunt for the food records of Santa Elisabetta. It’s impossible—short of me going to Florence, an expense neither I or the program see as a possibility. Instead, I shift my attention to Andrea del Castagno’s refectory fresco in the convent of Sant’ Apollonia, a much wealthier convent popular with the Florentine elite. I am able to pour over ledgers and lists of the foods that each new nun brought into the house with her, a gift from her family to the Benedictine church: cheese, nuts, fresh fruits, flowering trees, flour for bread. Those nuns even received special dispensation from the Pope to eat meat on holy days, a testament to their reputation for being especially pious, and their influence in Florentine holy life. I picture these well-fed women, their sprawling estate decorated in rich frescos. I try to imagine the hungry women of Santa Elisabetta, whose population swelled as the keeping and spiritual health of former prostitutes became a chief civic concern, but whose community remained one of the poorest in Florence, depending on acts of charity to clothe and feed themselves.
By 1500 CE, Florence was nicknamed the “city of refectory last suppers.” In essence a glorified dining hall, the refectory was also where pain and punishment occurred, where women fasted for holidays and to atone for their sins. Common punishments for Benedictine women would be forced fasting, or eating from the cold floor, watched by all, under the painted eyes of Christ and his disciples sitting for their final meal.
I leave my body gradually and then at once, starting awake on the floor of my building’s elevator. I must have passed out; I can feel a blanket of sweat on my neck and chest, a wet both warm and iced at the same time. My heart races. I stumble into my apartment and collapse on the couch, breathing heavily. While it takes an hour for my heart rate to slow, I pull out my articles, underlining the same sentences over and over again. Just get through, I tell myself, just get through, willing my body into submission.
Sant’ Apollonia hosts another fresco, by Paolo Schiavo; in it, angels flit around with chalices, catching Christ’s dripping blood from his side as he hangs crucified. The refectory last supper images remind the viewer of the importance of the Eucharist; the nuns ate meager meals while gazing at the frescoes depicting the bread and wine, Christ’s body and blood.
I present my research at the conference to a tepid response, reading my paper as the images fill the screen behind me. One of the respondents asks about Leonardo da Vinci’s more famous refectory last supper. Another asks about a book, Holy Anorexia, from 1985. My advisor and I both wince, the shadow of a famous historian casting this cloud on my work, and I give an answer about anachronistic language. And anyway, I add, what matters isn’t what medical diagnoses we would ascribe to them today. No, what matters is “the why”—that this was their only way to express devotion in a tumultuous time for the church, that these convents vied for recognition, that the nuns weren’t allowed to touch the Host during the Eucharist, that the bread was placed on their tongues by a priest. Their devotion is what matters, I argue, not a scientific diagnosis. The rejection of the body as the only means to attain spiritual power in a church designed not to hand it to a woman.
Even my childhood of communions and Sunday school does not prepare me for the volume of Eucharistic miracles present in the stories of saints and nuns. I write down example after example, their devotion, their dependence, and try to pair it with the politics of the Church. I read proclamations of certain convents allowed to perform the Eucharist year-round, and others only allowed once a year. I find images of Saint Barbara, tortured and mutilated for her love of Christ, holding the chalice of wine and a communion wafer, an offering for those dying and needing final sustenance.
The paintings remain, paint and gilding, the frescoes, my little predella panels. I print out the image, one for each of my case studies, the size of a notecard to hang on a wall in my apartment. I scribble notes to myself, lists of sources to return to, arguments to make, ways to convince my advisor that this isn’t all fruitless, that the art I’m studying is worth a look. In the Noli me tangere, before the Magdalene becomes an ascetic saint, the bloom of her red cloak is replaced by a mottled purple. She is halfway between a body and a breath, a curved comma reaching out a single hand to touch the hem of Christ’s robe.
The birth control starts to do something, so now instead of wave after wave of heavy clots and thick tissue, the bleeding turns into a slow sludge. It continues day after day, until it feels routine, almost normal—like this is how all bodies work, like this is what all women experience, a rare day with no bleed, maybe two, maybe four, before it all starts over again.
Dr. A relents and calls for new bloodwork, admitting that my face has gone pale, verging on jaundice. The email announcing the results has bright red letters that flash in front of my eyes, a new language to learn: ferritin, hemoglobin, platelet numbers. All low, the lowest ranges, a fat L next to each number. Though she doesn’t want to change course, believing in her tiny pills, she does shuttle me toward a hematologist for next steps.
It’s 11p.m., and I’m in the library, watching the cursor of my mouse blink on the screen. I have writer’s block. It all seems like a contradiction—the saints who renounce food and have to be forced by their families into getting something vaguely nutritional down their throats. The nuns, who eat horribly both out of poverty and because food is one of the best vehicles for them to express their devotion to the Church. The Virgin Mary, kind faced and pink cheeked, offering nutrition to her son and his followers. I wish I could articulate—what exactly? That the dominant thought regarding female piety was to renounce their corporeal bodies, while at the same time the very bodily act of menstruation and lactation were dissected and written about, a theological problem to be solved and argued. That some of the nuns wrote about desiring Christ’s flesh as if it was food, and were sustained through their desire for a spiritual closeness to him.
Just as there are stories of food miracles, there are stories of blood miracles. Saint Catherine of Siena often described the Eucharist host transforming into blood when it hit her tongue.
I read of nuns who refused to eat food, and who, forced to do so when overcome with hunger, mixed ashes into their meal so as to not enjoy it.
I read of nuns who had visions of nursing the Christ child at their own breasts, and then received back from him sweet milk and bread.
I read of nuns who claimed that Christ himself appeared and gave them wine, and that when it touched their lips it turned into his blood, metallic and rich.
I read of the unclean woman, who suffered from menstrual bleeding for 12 years without end, and finally, desperate to be purified, touched the robe of Christ as he walked in a crowd. In some tellings, Jesus responded in anger, shaming her in front of a crowd of worshippers—and I ache for this nameless woman, and this last attempt for a cure. I see myself in her misery and despair, know too well the days that stretch on in one, neverending flow.
The muscles in my legs ache at night, when I finally lay down to sleep. My calves feel like little pinpricked pieces of meat. There is a deep soreness, a slow fire that I can only partially extinguish by moving. When I do finally fall asleep, I wake back up to the muscles of my shins and calves cramping up, twisting violently, sometimes so painfully that I have to scream into a pillow.
The professors selected the sole male student in the cohort to present his paper at the National Gallery conference. We share an advisor and trade pages, often, keeping track of each other’s research. But I don’t understand why the professors are so taken with his argument, a reexamination of Michelangelo’s David. I am quite sure that there is no more to say than what has already been said, but our advisor is giddy when they discuss the sculpture’s contrapposto pose.
The sleepless nights make the days stretch hazy and bubbly, and soon I can’t remember when I wrote what, what I read, which scholar I’m citing even as their words leave my mouth. I write line after line of garbled muck, long sentences that use the word “corporeal” and “somatic” over and over again.
The male student’s conference paper is, of course, brilliant. As he speaks, huge images of David light up the lecture hall’s screen—the perfect male body, exemplary, clean, pristine.
The hematologist’s nurse taps the vein in my arm, rolling the blue lines in the crook of my elbow before sliding in a needle. Iron, thick and coppery, fills the line. After a transfusion, some patients walk for miles, she says. Others feel more awake than they have in days. I try not to listen to the promise of what I could experience after this transfusion, and instead watch the iron move through the tube, slow and steady. My mouth tastes like blood, like pennies and sea salt.
My advisor asks what I want to do with my research, in a way where I know she’s asking about my life, my plans. We’re sitting in her office, books covering the desk between us. They’re for her projects—she’s heading to Rome soon, a whirlwind research trip to study Raphael’s frescoes. It makes more sense, sitting there, looking down at the books with the pearly faces of the Madonna, the black and white reproductions of the chapel walls that she’s marked up with red pen, why she loves the male student’s research so much. They both love an art history that is about the ceremony, the regalia of the church. The artists whose legacies are tied up in Papal elections, artists who paint their bodies like sculptures. The deeper into my project I go, the farther away I tread from this type of scholarship. The bodies I want to study are the messy ones, the deformed, the bleeding.
I try to explain to her: that I’ve trained for years for this program, and what comes next—the PhD program, the research conferences, teaching. I stumble—I believe in these images, in what they can tell us about the past, about myself. Surely, that’s important too, this study. Not just the greatness of art, but its miseries. She looks at me in silence, and it is a kindness that she doesn’t say out loud what we both know: that these last two months, before I turn in this thesis, are the last I’ll have in academia. There’s a place for me and these paintings, but right now, it’s not applications and more school. My tired brain rejoices at this recognition.
I sit in her office, and bleed, bleed, bleed.
In the final predella panel, the Magdalene bends before a priest and his acolytes as they hold forward the communion plate toward her, the chalice of wine waiting. She’s painted so faintly, I can almost see the stones painted behind her through the gold of her hair. She’s already half-haze, less than a body, in this final, holy moment.
