Le mascolinità nella storiografia dell'arte italiana

Speranza

"Make my whole body nothing but an eye."

So wrote Michelangelo as he fervently adored his long-time beloved, the handsome nobleman Tommaso de' Cavalieri.

For those who remember only Irving Stone's safe hetero version of this great artist, the fact that he spent his life expressing same-sex desire in art and poetry comes as something of a shock.

It also requires specifically homoerotic art historians to properly decode his work, viewed now from this unsuppressed perspective.

Such is the task undertaken by James Saslow in his fascinating and readable survey, Pictures and Passions: A History of masculine sexuality in the Visual Arts (Viking, 1999).

That sexuality is a major, legitimate strand in western visual art is a thesis that could be developed only recently, after Stonewall.

Earlier critics like Walter Pater could only effuse in coy, heavily-coded terms.

Non homoerotic art historians, as Saslow says, limited sexuality "to behavior, not feelings. But what matters [to the homoerotic art historian] today is less who did what to whom than who wanted whomnot just physical acts, but the nature of same-sex desire itself."


Saslow begins at the easiest part, the biggest cache of homoerotic-friendly evidence: Greek and Roman art.

Artists in this period had any number of famous mythical and heroic examples of same-sex devotion to illustrate.

GANIMEDE
GIACINTO
NARCISO
ERCOLE
APOLLO
ANTINO
and so on.


In the Middle Ages that followed, such desires were obliged to dive underground, depicted only as examples of sin, thanks to Christian homophobia, which developed from hostility to all forms of sex outside of marriage and reproduction.

But in the Italian Renaissance, efforts to revive the pagan classical past put same-sex subject matter back on the table, and Saslow presents many examples of artists who took up that pictorial challenge.


It was in the Italian Renaissance, Saslow's academic specialty, that artists broke through to an accurate standard of drafting for the male naked body, so that adoration of male beauty became persuasive again for the first time since antiquity.

And with Michelangelo, we encounter a profound turning point whose real significance is only being properly decoded now, primarily by homoerotic art historians.

Take the history of depictions of David in sculpture, from the Biblical contest of David and Goliath.

Donatello (1440) and Verrocchio (1470) presented David as a boy, slender and saucy like some under-age street hustler (which often was the case with the model in question).

Then in 1504, Michelangelo unveils David as a colossal young man, strong and fierce, yet also showing a degree of feminine mystery as well.

This artist went on to fill his Sistine ceiling with more of these updated visions of masculinity.

Michelangelo's Adam is as humpy as a bodybuilder but if you look closely at his face you are looking at Lauren Bacall.

What a homoerotic connoisseur sees is not the straight understanding of homoeroticism as pederasty, which is what Donatello's twink David suggests, but a modern version of same-sex desire that adores strong males who embody both masculine and feminine qualities.

This is maleness as seen by someone who doesn't need to love women, who savours the full spectrum of gender qualities in one male body, a perspective that straights can't understand easily.

In Michelangelo's work, we go from what heteros think homoerotic males like to what homoerotic males actually like.

To appreciate such paradigm shifts requires homoerotic art historians and justifies their work.

After Michelangelo, it was Caravaggio who "straddled the intersection of a declining Renaissance and a rising modernity."

A painter who filled his Biblical scenes with street hustlers he preferred as models, "Caravaggio's life reveals the foundations of a new social, sexual, and artistic order. As cities grew, the urban homosexual subculture that coalesced in the entourage of a few wealthy Roman aristocrats expanded beyond a learned elite to become increasingly visible and intermingled with the middle and working classes." Saslow adds, "These networks werewidespread and energetically creative."

But straights were not passive.

They brutally censored such expressions of same-sex desire in all the arts right up to the mid-twentieth century.

But homoerotic art never disappeared and it left plenty of evidence for new homoerotic art historians like Saslow to re-collect and ponder.

As shown in this fine survey, there is a busy role now for homoerotic art history, and Saslow's Pictures and Passions is a fine place to get started.