The Book of Human Skin (67 page)

Venice’s written and painted history suffered too. Both the archives and the great art treasures of the churches and convents had been emptied into state galleries like the Accademia, into damp warehouses and wrecked churches, or carried off to Paris. Many items never returned, or were damaged beyond repair by careless storage.

As this story records, the convent of the Penitential Sisters of Saint Dominic in Venice (known as Corpus Domini) was closed in 1810 on the orders of Napoleon and demolished not long afterwards.

What happened to the thousands of nuns evicted when Napoleon closed the convents is a mystery that has never been properly investigated. The scholar Silvia Evangelisti, author of
Nuns, A History of Convent Life, 1450–1700
(2007), suggests that they were returned to their families, some with and some without pensions. In other places nuns were allowed to live in the convents until they died – if those convent buildings escaped the pickaxes of Napoleon’s demolition teams. The convents were then renamed ‘
conservatori
’. There are accounts of parents hiring a building so the nuns could live in secular communities almost identical to their former religious ones.

When researching this book I wondered if many of the unwanted noble nuns might have ended up as ‘
dozzinanti
’, noble paid-for guests on San Servolo. But when I examined the admission records of the asylum during Napoleonic times, it appeared that very few of the nuns were sent there.

Napoleon’s health

Santo’s observations are based on the dictator’s actual medical records. I found immensely useful for my research the following books: Napoleon Bonaparte’s own (or at least attributed)
Manuscript of St Helena
(written in 1817), translated from the French by Willard Parker (1924); Arno Karlen’s
Napoleon’s Glands and Other Ventures in Biohistory
(1984); David J. Markham’s
Napoleon and Doctor Verling on St Helena
(2005); and George B. McClellan’s
Venice and Bonaparte
(1931).

Napoleon died on May 5th 1821 on the South Atlantic island of St Helena, where he had been sent into perpetual exile by the British. Many colourful theories about the cause of his death have been promoted by different historians – notably one about wallpaper poisoned with arsenic – but it is now generally agreed that he died of stomach cancer, as his father had done before him.

San Servolo and the Archipelago of Maladies

The Archipelago of Maladies was as described by Minguillo and Santo.

San Servolo was in 1714 a military hospital for ‘
reduci
’ (amputees). It was run by the
Fatebenefratelli
, originally from Portugal. In 1804 the island became the city’s insane asylum for both male and female patients. The female lunatics were moved to the Ospedale Civile in 1834 and to the nearby island of San Clemente in 1873.

L’archivio della follia
, edited by M. Galzigna and H. Terzian (1980), examines the rich archive of documents including ‘
cartelle cliniche
’ of patients at San Servolo, and provides excellent background to the practices and people on San Servolo. The museum of asylum artefacts, which opened in 2006, was also very helpful in my research.

The
cartelle cliniche
were introduced in the 1820s (so I have anticipated them in this book) and gradually became more and more prescriptive, so that by filling them out the doctors ended up with a diagnosis. It was probably better for the patients in earlier days when the doctor-priests started with a blank sheet of paper and an open mind.

The admission book was as I describe, kindly shown to me by Professor Luigi Armiato when I first visited the archives of San Servolo for research in 2007. Also the documents of admission, with their logo of the
Regno d’Italia
, are as seen by Marcella.

The idea of isolating lunatics for their own good is a longstanding one. At the time this book is set, Venice herself might have been described as mentally unstable. She had in a dozen years been a Republic, a
Municipalità Provisoria
, French, Austrian, French again, and now she was a feather in the hat of the inglorious
Regno d’Italia
. So, I suspect, it was all the more important to keep any individuals with visible mental fissures from presenting themselves as metaphors for the city’s cracked and limping existence. The police were ordered, by each successive authority, to be vigilant for such elements and to hustle them speedily across the lagoon and out of sight.

Many of the people confined at San Servolo suffered from physical illnesses that threw up symptoms of mental disorientation – pellagra, scurvy and rickets, all of which were endemic among the poor underfed classes. A wholesome diet at the island soon cured them.

The practice of isolation remained prevalent through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was only in the last quarter of the twentieth century that it became fashionable, or perhaps expedient, to release the patients of mental asylums ‘into the community’. This occurred in Italy in 1978 and in the United Kingdom in the 1980s.

William P. Letchworth, in
The Insane in Foreign Countries
(1889), wrote: ‘In Ireland, there was Glen-na-galt, or the “Valley of the Lunatics”, beautifully situated in County Kerry, not far from Tralee. To this vale it was believed that every lunatic would eventually gravitate if left to himself. The process of cure consisted in drinking the cooling waters and eating the cresses that grew beside the spring.’

Cold-water cures were also identified in the same source: ‘It is recorded, that, not many years since, lunatics were denuded and thrice dipped at midnight in Lochmanur, in the far north of Scotland.’

Philippe Pinel (1745–1826) is regarded as the father of modern treatment for the insane. He was the first to institute a relatively humane regime at the infamous Bicêtre and La Salpêtrière hospitals in Paris. Under his care, patients suffering from what was then diagnosed as nymphomania were not shackled, purged or bled as a matter of course. Pinel also made a practice of talking to them about their problems.

George Man Burrows, in his 1828 work
Commentaries on the Causes, Forms, Symptoms, and Treatment, Moral and Medical, of Insanity
, observed that all lunatics had a ‘peculiar odour’. He said, ‘It has been compared to the scent of henbane in a state of fermentation; but I know nothing which it resembles . . . I consider it a pathognomonic symptom so unerring, that if I detected it in any person, I should not hesitate to pronounce him insane, even though I had no other proof of it.’

Burrows was among those that claimed that hysteria (aggravations of the womb) could manifest in excessive saliva, tears and urine. ‘Affusion of cold water’ was one of his recommended cures.

Jean-Étienne Esquirol (1772–1840), Pinel’s student and successor, noted bad breath among his patients at La Salpêtrière, but this might have had something to do with rampant scurvy there due to the poor diet: the disease causes rotting of the gums.

In
Practical Remarks on Insanity
(1811), Bryan Crowther urged close supervision of the excretory functions of all lunatics, who were inclined to withhold bowel movements and urine. Applying leeches to the pubis was suggested by John Millar, in his essay on amenorrhoea, ‘Hints on Insanity’ (1861).

The custom of putting inconvenient women in mental asylums has been observed in fact and fiction before. William P. Letchworth, in his aforementioned work, noted, ‘A grave abuse connected with these receptacles for the insane lay in the fact that they were resorted to by the powerful and unscrupulous as conveniences for getting rid of any relative who might happen to stand in the way of their selfish aims.’

The notion that certain physiological traits predisposed women to immorality was championed by the nineteenth-century Italian psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso. His ideas were similar to those cited by Minguillo, although he is of a later epoch.

The chain device that Minguillo designs for Marcella is based on the equipment used to confine an unfortunate prisoner known as James Norris at Bethlem Royal Hospital, London, for fourteen years.

My descriptions of the postures of the mad were partly inspired by Raymond Depardon’s moving black-and-white photographs of the inmates of San Clemente towards the end of the last century.

Santa Catalina (St Catherine of Siena)

Catalina Benincasa was born in 1347, the twenty-third child of a family that lived near the Dominican church in Siena. She became a nun in 1363. She never learned to read or write but dictated a visionary work known as
The Dialogue
to her followers. She crusaded to bring Pope Gregory XI back from Avignon to Rome.

Sor Loreta’s account of Santa Catalina conforms to the hagiographies written in or close to the saint’s time. Catalina threw herself into a boiling spa in order to disfigure her face and body and thereby discourage future suitors. She deprived herself of sleep and ate almost nothing, sometimes sucking the juice from vegetables before spitting out the pulp. One witness described her pushing twigs down her throat to help her vomit up food.

Fasting appeared to lessen her need for sleep. She poured her energy into great feats of housework, rather like Sor Loreta’s cleaning of the convent. Despite her own eating ‘infirmity’, as she herself described it, she performed feeding miracles for the destitute and also fed them with charity. She drank the pus of a diseased tertiary, describing it as exquisite. Yet the odour of her own body and of her clothes was always described as remarkably sweet. Santa Catalina claimed to have received the stigmata, though no one saw the marks until after her death. At times she would drink only the blood of Christ, in other words, the Eucharist wine. She also had visions in which she was encouraged by Christ to suckle on the wound in his side.

In 1366 she had a vision of a mystical marriage to Christ, in which he offered her a wedding ring made of his circumcised foreskin. Santa Catalina’s marriage is depicted in paintings by Michelino da Besozzo (at the Pinacoteca in Siena), Barna da Siena (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), Giovanni di Paolo (Metropolitan Museum, New York), several by Lorenzo Lotto (Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Rome, and the Alte Pinakothek, Munich) and Filippino Lippi (San Domenico, Bologna), among others. Some show Catalina marrying a baby Jesus; in others her bridegroom is adult. Saint Catherine of Alexandria also had a mystical wedding with Christ, often shown in art.

Santa Catalina died at the age of thirty-three, after a fast in which she gave up even water.

Santa Rosa of Lima

Isabel De Flores y Del Oliva was born in Lima, Peru on April 20th 1586, and died there on August 30th 1617. It is thought that Rosa modelled herself on Santa Catalina of Siena. She was beatified by Clement IX in 1668, and canonized in 1671 by Clement X, the first saint of the New World. She is the patron saint of Lima and Peru, and also of the Philippines, India, florists, gardeners and people ridiculed for their piety. She is often depicted with a wreath of roses around her head and keeping company with the Christ Child. One account of Santa Rosa records how when she gazed adoringly at a portrait of Christ, the painting began to sweat.

Fasting and fast-tracking to sainthood

If Sor Loreta had lived in the sixteenth century or earlier she might have actually succeeded in getting herself beatified.

Some mediaeval Catholics believed that it was Adam and Eve’s sensual gluttony, in eating the forbidden apple, that had humankind exiled from Paradise. Therefore to refrain from food was to ‘feed’ Christ, who had fed mankind by literally sacrificing his body for its redemption. Some female saints, including Catalina of Siena, believed that by suffering bodily torment like Christ’s they would be able to save souls, just as he had.

Central to Christian ritual is the concept that Christ literally fed his followers directly from his body. Partaking of Christ’s sacrifice is symbolized in the consumption of the wine and wafer, his body and blood, at the Eucharist.

In Venice, Quirizio da Murano (fl. late fifteenth century) painted Christ offering a Eucharistic wafer and also opening his robe to show the wound at his breast to an eager praying woman, as if inviting her to suckle. Other paintings show Christ projecting the blood from his wound directly into a communion chalice.

In mediaeval times, a woman was not permitted even to touch the Host, yet the visions of many female saints portrayed them grasping it. Several saints, ‘purified’ to a state of heightened perception through starvation, claimed to be able to distinguish a false Host from a real one, as Sor Loreta does. Benvenuta Bojani claimed that she received her only food from an angel who dispensed it with his own fingers from a luminous vase.

Through such audacious visions, women created an opportunity to dictate or write religious tracts, positioning themselves somewhere between God and humanity, acting as his primary messenger. This was a role denied to most women by the patriarchal church up until very modern times. It is still denied in some places.