At first glance, what can be seen is an exquisite image. The orator is a master musician, his body a lyre as Cicero describes him “playing it” during a rhetorical performance by striking the chords of its harp:

Cicero is talking about delivery (actio, pronuntiatio, or hypokrisis), the rhetorical canon which classified and hierarchized a vast repertoire of non-verbal signs by virtue of their power to communicate effectively and pleasurably.

But some six centuries later, Isidore of Seville would speak of a different kind of bodily harp in his discussion of torture. In the vast cultural compendium captured by his widely disseminated Etymologiarum, the victim of a particular sort of “questioning” is brutalized by means of the stringed instrument known as the fidiculae: “Haec est fidiculae, quia his rei in eculeo torquentur, ut fides inveniatur” (And these things are called the strings or the reins, because, in order that the truth may be found, these kings are tormented on the rack). Later still, Hildegard of Bingen finds in her Causae et curae that the woman's body is “open like a wooden frame (lignum) in which strings have been fastened for strumming (ad citharizandum)”; while, in the devotional context of his Speculum caritatis, Aelred of Rivaulx notes with alarm that the singing voice was often twisted, even “tortured” (torquetur et retorquetur) into unnatural histrionic acts as “the whole body is agitated by theatrical gestures, the lips are twisted, the eyes roll, the shoulders are shrugged, and the fingers bent responsive to every note.” Finally, in the fifteenth-c. Passion d’Auvergne, the rounding up of martyrs for persecution inspires torturer Maulbec to teach his cronies the words of a hunting song which imitates the cries of wounded animals.