Plinth

In a sense, this girl’s death marks the start of modernity. She was not the first young woman to perish from self-starvation, of course. But she is the first ‘recorded case’; the first emaciated girl with 'passions of her mind' to be officially medicalised. Her death marks the start of a modern age in which girls like skeletons 'only clad with skin' are transformed into patients. The mysterious 'consumption' that Morton encountered in the 1680s will, in a blink of century or so, be classified and categorised, with anorexia nervosa entered into the pantheon of ‘nervous diseases’ afflicting ‘the feminine sex’ – likened to hysteria, hypochondria and even nymphomania, due to the anorexic’s frequent penchant for hyperactivity. But, before all this, there were other starving girls. And before they were diagnosed, they were next to godliness. Before they were patients, they were martyrs, mystics, saints.

In one of Natalia González Martin’s new paintings, currently on display in Table Manners at Hannah Barry Gallery, a dark haired woman clutches a swath of deep red fabric against her naked body – hand splayed across her midriff, one breast exposed. Her flesh is far from 'flaccid and loose'; her skin is smooth and seems to emit a luminous glow, as if she isn’t made of flesh at all, but some kind of hard material that has been buffed to a sheen. Her face is twisted into her neck, her hair falls across her brow and shoulder in wavering strands. Pearlescent tears fall from her eyes, shining as if solid on her cheek, near her mouth. Who is this weeping statue? A clue lies by her foot, where a single pale flower sprouts impossibly from grey stone: the white lily of Saint Catherine of Siena – a symbol of purity for a saint who starved herself to death, and to canonisation.

Saint Catherine was born in 1347. She was the 24th child born to her mother, who was 40 years old. Catherine was born a twin, but her sister died soon after birth. When she was 16, her older sister died in childbirth. Catherine’s parents proposed she marry her dead sister’s widower. Instead, she cut off her hair and began fasting. Her refusal to eat and her refusal to marry were fused with intense piety, but she also refused to enter a convent. Eventually her parents relented, and permitted her to live as she pleased, unmarried. She joined the ‘Mantellate’, the local association of devout women, who taught her how to read. One night, Catherine was visited by Jesus who invited her to drink the blood gushing out of his pierced side. It was with this visitation that her stomach 'no longer had need of food and no longer could digest'. From this point on, she supposedly only consumed the Eucharist, sustaining herself on Christ’s flesh alone. She died in 1380, at the age of 33, after having refused the order of her confessor, Raymond of Capua, to eat. Once, she advised Raymond to do as she had done during her teenage years, in times of trouble: 'Build a cell inside your mind, from which you can never flee.'

In modern times, the act of refusing food is understood as a turning away from the world – a turning inward that is also an internal attack. An imprisonment in a cell of your own making. Yet, by refusing food, Catherine was able to enter the world in a way that was usually prohibited for women. Her initial fast can even be seen as a hunger strike against forced marriage, and a life confined by endless cycles of childbearing, where at any time she may die (as her sister had in childbirth) or her children may die (as half her mother’s had). After all, in the mediaeval Catholic culture in which Catherine was raised, food, sex, femininity, pain, death, damnation and salvation were intimately connected. Original sin came from a woman taking an illicit bite, and pain in childbirth was women’s punishment. Rejecting food and rejecting sex, Catherine escaped women’s embodied, sin-stricken realm. Doing so, she gained a sort of freedom, power and influence that has resonated through centuries. The patron saint of nurses, the sick, and those ridiculed for their piety, in 1970 Catherine was given the title of Doctor of the Church – one of only four women ever to be so named. Her 'cares and passions' killed her, but self-starvation was also her salvation – her hard-won ticket into the disembodied realm of faith, thought, politics, and, eventually, the holy kingdom. The only cost was pleasure. And, of course, her life.

'The suppression of physical urges and basic feelings – fatigue, sexual drive, hunger, pain – frees the body to achieve heroic feats and the soul to commune with God. Or so I shall propose,' writes Rudolph M. Bell in Holy Anorexia. This 1985 work of mediaeval social history was one of the first to link ascetic saints with modern anorexics – to root them in common ground. With a second chapter devoted to Catherine’s story, Bell’s book is also one of the foundational texts for González Martin’s new works, in which women, food, sex, pain, pleasure and bodily autonomy are also held together in fraught intimacy.

Downstairs at Hannah Barry gallery, Table Manners is arranged like a church – González Martin’s baroque oil paintings taking the shape of altarpieces. Catherine, weeping and clutching her blood red cloth, flanks a central horizontal panel depicting a table covered in white cloth and laden with fruits. Women’s hands lunge into the scene: grasping a peach; fingering a torn hunk of pomegranate, spilling with blood-red seeds; pouring a single shimmering drop of liquid over gleaming strawberries (another white flower in their midst). One final hand hovers at the far edge, cradling a bitten apple in the palm. It is a work of glimmering allure and beauty but also carries distinct threat. A knife balances precariously on the table’s edge, pointing its blade inwards. Violence sits close to appetite at this feast. On the other side of this table of temptation (which González Martin titles Palpable Consolation) another statuesque woman is draped in folds of fabric – deep blue to Catherine’s deep red. In this painting too there is a saintly symbol that functions like a clue. In one hand this figure holds what looks, at first, like pearls. But a drop of blood falls from her index finger; the ‘pearls’ are gory too. Look closer – these ‘pearls’ are teeth, and, in the same spot where Catherine’s white lily bloomed, three molars lie at this saint’s feet. She is Apollonia – another virgin martyr, whose canonisation was secured through bodily suffering. Her torture included having all of her teeth pulled out or shattered. So, she is popularly regarded as the patroness of dentistry, teeth and toothache, her pain and the violence of her death eternally memorialised in what looks, to secular eyes, like a darkly ironic designation. The heavenly protector of that which was ripped from her by force. González Martin gives this heady complex a further, modern spin, layering a Freudian connotation to the saint’s story with her painting’s title: Oral Fixation.

Is psychoanalysis modernity’s religion? In both Freudian theory and the Catholic faith body parts and their excretions take on an outsized role. A mouth is not simply a mouth; a breast is not simply a breast. They may be separated by centuries, but mediaeval saints and modern anorexics were all weaned in a culture that treats bodily processes and urges with suspicion, while valorising self-deprivation as virtue. Violence and appetite still sit close, as do desire, guilt, anxiety and shame. In González Martin’s paintings, they blur and alternate in one symbolic present, as in a dream. Bodies resemble objects and fruits, and fruits and objects resemble bodies. Figs ejaculate, peaches sweat, and a terracotta vase bleeds in globules that look like jewels or drips of jam. Upstairs at Hannah Barry, a second new body of works lies in wait in a hushed, carpeted room – a series of miniature egg tempera illuminations that González Martin made during her 2024 residency at Castello San Basilico, a 10th century monastery in southern Italy. The works are small, but framed with large white borders around them, which function like walls. The borders create the sensation of peeking through a narrow window. Is it these figures that are enclosed, or is it us? A ripe fig, a single tear or a wound is illuminated, in alluring, glimmering fragments. Yet the whole picture cannot be fully grasped – all we are able to see are tantalising, partial glimpses. The symbolism of each and every image proliferates, their meanings fracturing and multiplying kaleidoscopically.

One painting spins González Martin’s myriad concerns together in a particularly ingenious way. Agatha, the patron saint of breast cancer patients, rape victims, martyrs, wet nurses, bell-founders, and bakers is here conjured through her namesake delicacy, ‘minne di Sant'Agata’ – a Sicilian pastry made of sponge cake filled with ricotta. Like Apollonia, Agatha was tortured to death, but, instead of tearing out her teeth with pliers, her torturers tore off her breasts with tongs. So, ‘in her honour’, each cake is topped with a candied cherry, so as to resemble a severed breast, served up on a platter. In Her Table is Hunger, two cakes rest on a pale tablecloth, Agatha’s torture transformed into disembodied delicacies. Two titbits.

Once, when Catherine was tending to a woman with cancerous breast sores, she found she could not overcome her revulsion. Determined to get control over her disgust, she gathered the sores’ pus into a ladle and drank it all. That was the night Jesus invited her to drink the blood gushing from his wounded side, from which time she 'no longer had need of food'. Looking at González Martin’s oozing fruits, speckled with ants, and at her ricotta cakes that conjure the yank of tongs, it seems clear that the viewer has not only entered a surreal Church’s altar, but also the cell that Catherine built in her mind. We are seeing through her eyes. Here, her depiction is titled Filled with Warm Pleasure, as if her tears were an overflow of ecstatic joy; as if suffering and pleasure were one, and she need not be sustained by anything else. Nearby, a single peach that sweats, cums or weeps is titled It was the Pleasure of Taste that Drove Us from Paradise. Pleasure and pain, ecstasy and sacrifice are all brought together in a holy matrimony, where overcoming disgust, hunger and pain spells freedom.

'Holy anorexia involves a need to establish a sense of self, a contest of wills, a quest for autonomy,' Bell writes. In her book Holy Feast and Holy Fast, which González Martin also drew from for these new works, the historian Dr Caroline Bynum concludes 'the twentieth-century girl refused food in order to assert control over her body; the fourteenth-century saint refused food in order to eat God and feed her fellow sinner'. Yet, does this not underestimate the fact that, for modern girls as well as mediaeval saints, the body is not a bounded thing, but a kaleidoscope of potent symbols? For the twentieth and twenty-first century girl too, ‘control over her body’ is merely an outward sign (a stigmata, a stigma) of a deeper desire to control the world. She may not put it in so many words, but the modern anorexic wants to eat God too – to consume and so become him. She does not desire to be thin, but to be hardened, all-powerful and undesiring; without need or urge, as if she were not a body at all. She may look like a 'skeleton only clad with skin' but, in the cell she has built in her mind from which she cannot flee, her refusals transform her into a statue, buffed to a sheen.

By Eloise Hendy

Cover image: Natalia González Martín, Palpable Consolation, 2024. Oil on panel. 60 x 160 x 3.2 cm