The origins of this denomination are uncertain - nothing is known about the martyrdom of St. Erasmus (or Elmo) in A.D. 303; quite likely it is an allusion to "St. Elmo’s fire", the spectacular electromagnetic phenomenon that seems to envelop the masts and spars of sailing ships in sparks and fire under certain atmospheric conditions. The sue and effects of this device seem obvious and not in need of comment.

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Cold or red-hot, the four claws slowly ripped to formless masses the breasts of countless women condemned for heresy, bloasphemy, adultry and many other "libidinous acts", self-induced abortion, erotic white magic and other crimes. In various places at various times -in some regions of France and Germany until the early nineteenth century- a "bite" with a red-hot ripper was inflicted upon one breast of unmarried mothers, often whilst their creatures, splattered with maternal blood, writhed on the ground at their feet.

Besides the punitive function, breast-ripping also served as an interrogational and juridical procedure.

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These devices, which existed in a vast profusion of fantastical and sometimes downright artistic styles from about 1500 to 1800, were used to punish those who, by their words, had transgressed against prevailing conventions, against the arrogance of the male power structure, or against the state of things in general. In the course of four centuries, millions of women decried as scolds and shrews because domestic slavery and incessant pregnancy had reduced and tortured; political power thus held up to public ridicule the petty disobedient and the nonconformists; ecclesiastical power thus punished a long list of lesser infractions.

The overwhelming majority of victims were always women, and the operative principle was mulier taceat in ecclesia, "Let the woman be silent in church", "church" here meaning the ruling ecclesiastical and secular hierarchies, both constitutionally gynaecophobic; the sense was thus "Let the woman be silent in the presence of the male". Many branks had inner iron projections that were forced into the victim’s mouth, and some of these permanently mutilated the tongue with sharp spikes and blades.

The victims, locked into the masks and staked out in the town square, were also treated roughly by the crowd. Painful beatings, besmearing with faeces and urine, and serious, sometimes fatal wounding -especially in the breasts and pubes- was their lot.

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About as large as four fingers of a man’s hand, these devices, usually attached to a short handle, served to rip the victim’s flesh to shreds and to strip it off the bones, in any part: face, abdomen, back, limbs, breasts.

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Included in the present exhibition are: a chain flail made of razor-sharp, flat oval links; another with "laurels", i.e. pointed, sharp-edged, leaf-shaped metal blades set into the chain; another with a double chain terminating in four massive iron "stars"; and a fragment of a 14th-century "crown of thorns" flail. As has been observed in other contexts in this Commentary, modern torture for the most part requires methods that leave no marks on the victim, for reasons of propaganda. Nevertheless, heavy, bloody, crushing, mediaeval systems do still find ample employment, especially when the object is execution rather than enquiry.

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Although indelibly associated in literature, the cinema, television and the European cultural tradition generally with the French Revolution, 1789-93, and with the death penalty in France, the machine that beheads by means of a bIade that falls between two grooved vertical columns is in reality much older. Small primitive versions were used for the execution of nobles as early as the fourteenth century, especially in Scotland.

It was the French physician Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, born in Saintes in 1738 and elected to the National Assembly in 1789, who first promoted a law that required that all executions, even those of commoners and plebeians, be carried out by means of a "machine that beheads painlessly". An easy death -so to speak- was no longer to be the prerogative of nobles. After a series of experiments on cadavers taken from a public hospital, the first of these machines -in all essentials identical to the one here- was put up in the Place de Grève in Paris on 4 April 1792, and the first execution "in the event, of a very plebeian highwayman- took place on the 25th of the same month. Soon this invention was to become the hallmark of the years 1792-94.

Science quickly now discovered a new and surprising fact (confirmed since by modern neurophysiology): a head cut off by a swift slash of axe or guillotine knows that it is a beheaded head whilst it rolls along the ground or into the basket -consciousness survives long enough for such a perception.

After the execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette on 21 January 1793, the "machine", called only thus until these two events, became known also as "la louisette" or "le louison"; only after 1800 did the term "la guillotine" became established. As such it remained in use in many countries, including the Papal States and the kingdoms of Piedmont and Bourbon Naples until 1860; it was used in France until the abolition of the death penalty under Mitterrand in 1981. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin died peacefully in 1821, at the age of eighty three.

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Until the end of the eighteenth century, European urban and suburban panoramas abounded in iron and wooden cages attached to the outsides of town halls and ducal palaces, to halls of justice and cathedrals and to city walls, and swaying from tall iron gibbets set up outside the walls near a main crossroad; often there were several cages in a row. A good many examples survive today (e.g., on the ducal palace of Mantua, on the apse of the cathedral of Moutier/Münster in Germany, and many more still, in every country). In Florence, presumed city of origin of the present two-legged specimen, there were two sites for cages: one the corner of the Bargello at Via Anguillara and Piazza San Firenze, the other a gibbet on San Gaggio Hill, beyond the Porta Romana, on the Siena highroad. In Venice, homeland of the rectangular box specimen, the cages hung from the Bridge of Sighs and from the walls of the Arsenal.

The naked or nearly naked victims were locked into the cages and hung up. They perished of hunger and thirst, a fate seconded in winter by storm and cold, in summer by heatstroke and sunburn; often they had been tortured and mutilated, to make more edifying examples. The putrefying cadavers were generally left in place until the bones fell apart.

No more than a plausible family tradition associates the present iron cage with the Florentine Bargello. Although there are no supporting documents, the story told in the family for generations recounts how it was taken down in 1750-52, the years in which the second Lorenese grand duke of Tuscany, Pietro Leopoldo, had all the instruments of torture and execution destroyed, and that it has been conserved in the family palace ever since.

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Recorded in sources dating as early as the Middle Ages, head crushers enjoy the esteem of the authorities in many parts of the world today. The victim’s chin is placed on the lower bar, and the cap forced down by the screw.

All comment seems superfluous. First the teeth are crushed into their sockets and smash the surrounding bone, then the eyes are forced out of their sockets, and finally the brain squirts through the fragmented skull.

Although nowadays no longer a means of capital punishment, head crushers are still used for interrogation. The modern caps and chin rests are padded with soft materials so as.to leave no mark on the victim.

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Beheading by sword or axe, a public entertainment in central and northern Europe until a hundred and fifty years ago, but in many extra-European countries to this very day, is done with a horizontal slash. The axe was preferred in Gallic and Mediterranean Europe; it, too, remains in use today. A long apprenticeship is needed for perfecting aim and force; executioners kept in trim by practicing on animals in slaughter houses, and on dummies fitted with pumpkin heads.

Beheading, an "easy" death if carried out with skill, was reserved exclusively for condemned nobles or people of importance ...plebeians were executed -and we are speaking now only of those executions that did not intentionally prescribe painful methods- in ways that caused prolonged agonies. The most common of these was, and still is, ordinary hanging, by which the victim is pulled up and left to strangle (as compared to the so-called "English drop", which lets the victim fall to the end of the slack in the rope so that his neck and spinal cord will be severed, most of the time).

A head cut off with a swift and neat slash is fully aware of its fate as it rolls along the ground or falls into the basket. Perception is extinguished only after a few seconds.

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With the four sharp points rammed deep into the flesh under the chin and into the bone of the sternum, the fork prevented all movement of the head and allowed the victim only to murmur, in a barely audible voice, "abiuro" ("I recant", engraved on one side of the fork). If instead he still refused, and if the Inquisition was the Spanish one, he was held to be an "impenitent heretic" and, dressed in the characteristic costume, was led to the stake, but with the consolation of the sacrament if extreme unction; if instead it was the Roman one, he was hanged or burnt, without the benefit of the pretty costume but still with that of proper Christian rites.

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The history of torture records many devices that worked on the principle of the anthropomorphic container with two doors, fitted with spikes on the inside that pierced the victim upon the doors being shut. The most famous example has always been the so called "Iron Maiden of Nuremberg", destroyed in the air raids of 1944.

It is difficult to separate legend from fact concerning this contrivance because most published material is based on nineteenth century research distorted by romanticisms and by fanciful popular tradition. The first reference to an execution with the Maiden that has yet come to light stems from August 14, 1515, although the instrument had been in use for several decades by then. That day a forger of coins was placed inside, and the doors shut "slowly, so that the very sharp points penetrated his arms, and his legs in several places, and his belly and chest, and his bladder and the root of his member, and his eyes, and his shoulders, and his buttocks, but not enough to kill him; and so he remained making great cry and lament for two days, after which he died". Probably the spikes of that time were movable among various sockets drilled into different places on the inside, more or less lethal, more or less mutilating, according to the requirements of the sentence.

Investigative torture fell slowly into disuse in Nuremberg with the passing of the eighteenth century, so that a tourist guide of 1784 speaks of "the Iron Maiden, that abominable work of horror (dieses abscheuliche Greulwerk) that goes back to the times of Frederick Barbarossa", an error of almost four centuries but one that proves that the Maiden had already been relegated to the museum. Nevertheless, in spite of this comment, even in 1788 -a portentious year, at the apex of the Enlightenment, in France a time of revolutionary ferment, in England of well-advanced industrialism, in the New World of enthusiastic republicanism- sentences of drawing-and-quartering, of breaking on the wheel and of the cutting-off of tongues and hands were carried out in Nuremberg.

Punishments handed down from mediaeval times were to remain in legal force throughout the greater part of Catholic Europe until after the end of the Napoleonic era, especially in Austria, Bavaria, Italy (except Tuscany, Lucca and Parma), and of course in Spain.

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This procedure has remained essentially unchanged from the Middle Ages until today. The victim is hoisted up in the manner shown in the accompanying illustration, and lowered onto the point of the pyramid in such a way that his weight rests on the point positioned in the anus, in the vagina, under the scrotum or under the coccyx (the last two or three vertebrae). The executioner, according to the pleasure of the interrogators, can vary the pressure from zero to that of total body weight. The victim can be rocked, or made to fall repeatedly onto the point. The Judas cradle was thus called also in Italian (culla di Giuda) and German (Judaswiege), but in French it was known as la veille, "the wake" or "nightwatch". Nowadays this method enjoys the favour of not a few governments in Latin America and elsewhere, with and without improvements like electrified waist rings and pyramid points.

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These instruments were used -and still are, no longer ornamented but otherwise not much changed- in oral and rectal formats, like the present specimen, and in the larger vaginal one. They are forced into the mouth, rectum or vagina of the victim and there expanded by force of the screw to the maximum aperture of the segments. The inside of the cavity in question is irremediably mutilated, nearly always fatally so. The pointed prongs at the end of the segments serve better to rip into the throat, the intestines or the cervix.

The oral pear was often inflicted on heretical preachers, but also on lay persons guilty of unorthodox tendencies; the rectal pear awaited passive male homosexuals, and the vaginal one women guilty of sexual union with Satan or his familiars.

Mutilation of breasts and female genitalia has been an omnipresent and constant usage throughout history. Insomuch as the soul of torture is male, male organs have always enjoyed the benefit of a species of immunity Inotwithstanding certain exceptions, a fact that leads to the hypothesis of a fraternal understanding between male victim and male judge-torturer, an understanding that must have been welded into the nascent primordial mind aeons ago. And since the soul of torture is male, and in the tenebrosity of his unilluminable nature the male is terrified by the mysteries of the female's cycles and fecundity, but above all by her inherent intellectual, emotional and sexual superiority, those organs that define her essence have forever been subjected to his most savage ferocity, he being superior only in physical strength. Hence centuries of witch hunts, with unspeakable methods.

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The victim, with his or her hands and feet locked into the pertinent holes and bracket irons, was set out in the square, where the mob, in the mildest of cases, poked him, slapped him and besmirched him with faeces and urine: substances supplied by the ubiquitous chamber pots and open jakes, and smeared into his mouth, ears, nose, hair; but in many instances he -more often she- was beaten badly, stoned, burnt, cut and even severley mutilated. Incessant tickling on the soles of the feet and in the flanks also soon became unbearable. Only the most innocuous transgressors could hope to get away with no more than a few black-and-blue marks and a couple of bumps.

Children’s books, cinema, television and the modern image industry generally often portray the stocks in humourous colours, centred on a grumpy victim being cajoled and reviled, but always benevolently, by his rough-and-tumble neighbours. Reality was different.

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There is not much that need be said after having examined the accompanying illustrations. The saw here on view is antique but cannot be associated specifically with the homonymous torture, a process that can be carried out with any large-toothed, four-handed woodsman’s saw. The present example is such a one, and certainly a couple of centuries old, or more.

History abounds in martyrs -religious, lay and antireligious- who suffered this fate, one that may be worse even than being burnt at the stake with a slow, small fire, or being dipped into boiling oil. Owing to his inverted position, which assures ample oxygenation of the brain and impedes the general loss of blood, the victim does not lose consciousness until the saw reaches the navel -and even the breast, if one is to believe accounts of the early eighteen-hundreds.

The Bible tells us (II Samuel 12:31} that David, Hebrew king and Christian saint, exterminated the inhabitants of Rabbah and all the other Ammonite cities by putting man, woman and child "under saws, and under hatrows of iron, and under axes of iron, and made them pass through the brick-kiln". This species of just slightly less than divine approbation has greatly contributed to the favour that the saw, axe and stake have always enjoyed among the Righteous, so much so that the saw was often meted out to homosexuals of both sexes, though predominantly to men. In Spain la sierra was a means of execution in the armed forces until the end of the eighteenth century, according to contemporary references which however do not cite any factual data. In Catalonia, during Napoleon’s and Wellington’s peninsular campaigns in 1808-14, the Catalonian guerillas subjected tens and perhaps hundreds of French, Spanish and British officers to the saw, little caring for the alliances of the moment. In Lutheran Germany the saw awaited the leaders of rebellious peasants, and in France witches pregnant by Satan.

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Simple and very efficient, the crushing of the knuckles, phalanges and nails of fingers and toes is among the oldest of tortures. The returns in terms of agony inflicted in ratio to effort invested and time lost are, from the torture’s point of view, highly satisfactory, particularly where complex and costly equipment is wanting.

The Venetian instrument with three crossbars can accommodate two thumbs and four fingers, but it is a crude affair compared to the Austrian device that accompanies it in this collection.

A work of art within its species, this latter is made to very high technical standards, and conforms in all details to the specifications prescribed by the Constitutio Criminalis Theresiana, the anachronistic code for inquisitorial procedures and tortures promulgated by the empress Maria Theresia and published in Vienna in 1769, a time when torture had been abolished for decades in England, Prussia, Tuscany and several minor principalities (in Tuscany the death penalty, too, had been done away with, for the first time in European history). This manual required all the courts of the Austrian crown to subject everyone accused of any misdeed, and unwilling to confess freely, to the peinliche Fragen, the "painful questions" -that is, the extortion of confessions by means of a graduated series of torments that were described and illustrated with precision and scientific rationalism, down to the finest details, including the thicknesses of cords, the number of knots in a fetter, the lengths of nails and screws, the degrees of permanent mutilation permissible for various degrees of accusations.

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After hanging, "breaking with the wheel" was the most common means of execution throughout Germanic Europe from the early Middle Ages to the beginning of the eighteenth century; in Gallic and Latin Europe the breaking was done with massive iron bars and with maces instead of wheels.

The victim, naked, was stretched out supine on the ground or on the execution dock, with his or her limbs spread, and tied to stakes or iron rings. Stout wooden crosspieces were placed under the wrists, elbows, ankles, knees and hips. The executioner then smashed limb after limb and joint after joint, including the shoulders and hips, with the iron-tyred edge of the wheel, but avoiding fatal blows. The victim was transformed, according to the observations of a seventeenth-century German chronicler, "into a sort of huge screaming puppet writhing in rivulets of blood, a puppet with four tentacles, like a sea monster, of raw, slimy and shapeless flesh (rohw, schleymig und formlos Fleisch wie di Schleuch eines Tündenfischs) mixed up with splinters of smashed bones". Thereafter the shattered limbs were "braided" into the spokes of the large wheel, and the victim hoisted up horizontally to the top of a pole, where the crows ripped away bits of flesh and pecked out eyes. Death came after what was probably the longest and most atrocious agony that the ingenuousness of the power structure could inflict.

Together with burning at the stake and drawing-and-quartering, this was one of the most popular spectacles among the many similar ones that took place in all the squares of Europe more or less every day. Hundreds of depictions from the span 1450-1750 show throngs of plebeians and the well-born lost in rapt delight around a good wheeling, better if a woman, best of all if several women in a row.