Rape of the Sabine Women

Rape of the Sabine Women, 1990 is a powerful triptych from Andres Serrano’s iconic ‘Immersions’ series. Serrano, a photographer who has never shied away from controversy, is most infamous for his 1987 ‘Immersion’ work Piss Christ: a close-up shot of a plastic Crucifixion submerged in a glass of the artist’s own urine. With Rape of the Sabine Women, he takes up the same method. In a single photograph split over three vertical panels, a dime-store statue of the Roman mythological story – a subject beloved of Renaissance painters and sculptors – is given an otherworldly yellow glow. The image is monumental, atmospheric and formally beautiful. The muscular Roman soldier rears up powerfully in the women’s midst; twinkling golden bubbles cling to flowing drapery and anguished faces. If we were unaware of Serrano’s singular technique, the sculpture might appear to be cast in warm twilight or suspended in amber. A devout Catholic, Serrano has always claimed that Piss Christ is not blasphemous. While maintaining the work’s ambiguity, he has hinted at a critique of the crass commodification of the image of the Saviour. In Rape of the Sabine Women (as with another ‘Immersion’ work that employs a miniature copy of Rodin’s The Thinker) Serrano perhaps makes a comparable statement, foregrounding the reduction of great art to cheap souvenir: blown up to a grand scale, it becomes clear that the figures in this Rape of the Sabine Women are no feat of virtuoso marble sculpture but rather a plastic imitation, with a grainy surface and crudely moulded features. Serrano brings together conflicting registers of beauty and degradation, colliding the sacred and the profane in a complex and captivating photograph.