Rembrandt van Rijn, The Blinding of Samson, 1636

Rembrandt's Blinding of Samson is one of many by the artist that create a particularly evocative experience for the viewer.  Samson, whose grimace and kick contain such strength and doom, is completely helpless to his situation. We see Delilah running out of the cave with Samson's source of strength, the hair that she cut from his head.  A beam of light shines down on Samson and his predicament is forced upon the viewer.

Many viewers have recorded experiences of simultaneously having trouble looking and having trouble looking away.  I attribute this not only to the violence of the picture, but also to the fact that as a painting is an object that is created specifically to be looked at, the viewer is engaging the very sense that he/she is observing Samson having obliterated.  The act of using your eye to watch the violent destruction of someone else's eyes is unsettling, to say the least.

Upon viewing Rembrandt's Blinding of Samson, the Bulgarian writer Elias Canetti had an unforgettable reaction...

It was Rembrandt's huge painting The Blinding of Samson that terrified me, 

tormented me, and kept me on a string.  I saw it as though it were taking 

place before my very eyes; and since it was the moment when Samson lost 

his eyesight, I bore witness in the most horrible way.  I had always been 

timid about blind people and never looked at them to long, even though they 

fascinated me.  Since they couldn't see, I felt guilty toward them.  However, 

this canvas depicted not the condition, not blindness, but the blinding 

itself...it is impossible to look away: this blinding is not yet blindness; it will 

become blindness, and it expects neither leniency nor quarter.  This blinding 

wants to be seen; and everyone who sees it knows the blinding and one sees it 

everywhere.

References:

Bal, Mieke. Reading Rembrandt: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Canetti, Elias. The Torch in My Ear.  Trans. Joachim Neugroschel.  New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc., 1982.

Art:

Städel Museum, Frankfurt