Art of the Misbegotten: Physicality and the Divine in Renaissance Images
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MARILYN ARONBERG LAVIN Art of the Misbegotten: Physicality and the Divine in Renaissance Images Introduction pose; and to be seen in plain view, often by the general pub lic. While the works are eye-catching because they involve the Traditionally, we were told that the word "Art" is to be display of sex organs and/or sexual activity, my analysis will associated with good taste, decorous behavior, and the repre point to ulterior meanings of a higher order than at first appear. sentation of ideal versions of natural things. Indeed, that was In fact, it will reveal an aspect of Renaissance naturalism that largely the case until, in the twentieth century, the definition of challenges polite decorum. I hope to show that the suggestive "art" and of "artist" expanded to include all kinds of people, actions depicted incorporate a self-confident vision of religion, places, actions, structures, and subjects that were objectively intellectual learning, and social interaction, into one, cohesive anti-art, un-art, unbeautiful, not to say purposely offensive. unit. 1 Consciously unnatural and degrading styles, themes, and ma To be sure, many of the actual subjects find precedents in terials were no longer limited to broadsides, caricatures, or the Middle Ages. Capitals and surfaces of Romanesque and primitivistic polemics, but were enacted, displayed, priced at Gothic ecclesiastical buildings are often covered with sexual high value, and even accepted as the norm. In this study I will images: figures with large genitalia, male and female in acro examine some works of art that at first glance seem equally batic poses, even couples in the act of fornicating. 2 Manu debased: they all concern bodily functions - elimination, mas scripts of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and beyond are turbation, copulation and the like. The difference is that the illuminated with marginalia full of bodily exposure, both pruri works I will speak of come not from modern times but from ent and grotesque. Most of these small-scale creatures are at Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the "fine first titillating but soon unveil themselves as frightening threats arts" (belle arti) and their values were in the process of being to the immoral viewer. 3 Even as they step onto the pages of defined. This means that the items I will discuss were made pornographic literature, which surged in the Renaissance, they by artists who had followed the rules and prescribed proce tout themselves as low art. For example, there was the 1524 dures of the profession. They produced the works according publication called I modi, illustrated with engraving by Marcan to the normal Renaissance procedures of art making: legally tonio Raimondi (after designs by Giulio Romano), accompa contracted for (commissioned); made to serve a specific pur- nied by sonnets by Pietro Aretino. Here, word and image 191 MARILYN ARONBERG LAVIN represent extreme positions of sexual intercourse described in as far as I know, rarely if ever seen in previous art.7 To ask why breathtakingly graphic and deliberately vulgar poetic form.4 Michelangelo chose to make this representation and what he On the other hand, during the very same period – the decades meant to convey with it, is to step back and ask more generally in which the Reform and Counter-reform were consolidating – about the representation of penises in the Renaissance. what was and was not unacceptably risqué in public art evinced When we do, we fi nd that Giotto di Bondone, as in so many extended debate. Clearly, no one questioned the heroic nudity other things, may have set the tone. He was surely the fi rst, in of Michelangelo’s gigantic statue of David, or the Old Testa- a monumental, public work of art, to use the male member as ment characters and allegories (the ignudi) on the Sistine ceil- an expressive agent.8 In the great fresco of the Last Judgment ing. But some twenty-fi ve years later the insistently nude in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua (1308–1312?), he introduced fi gures in his Last Judgment (1537–1541) in the same chapel a number of motifs directly representative of sexual sins. The called forth vehement disapproval. When Pope Paul III came particularly vivid image of a condemned soul shows a man just with his Master of Ceremonies, Biagio di Cesena, to inspect entering the underworld who is being stripped of his clothes Michelangelo’s Last Judgment while it was in progress, the by two demons [Fig. 2]. As he struggles to resist, his penis is latter voiced the opinion that “[…] it was a very improper thing displayed as blood-red at the tip where it has been hacked off. to paint so many nude forms, all showing their nakedness in In one image, Giotto thus not only identifi es the sin (lussuria, that shameless fashion, in so highly honored a place, and that lust), but also demonstrates the punishment.9 In this visual di- the work was better suited to a bathroom or a roadside wine rectness he was not quickly followed. shop, than a chapel of the pope”. By the same token, Pietro There had been a limited number of post-classical frontal Aretino, no prude as we have seen, called the fi nished fresco males with fully exposed genitalia produced in the late Middle “an impiety of irreligion only equaled by the perfection of [the] Ages – for example, by Nicolo Pisano, Nicolo di Pietro Lam- painting”. After another twenty years the fi nal blow fell: in Jan- berti, Lorenzo Ghiberti – in none of which is the organ shown uary of 1564, the members of the Council of Trent ordered the to have a particular iconographical purposes.10 By the early many fi gures in the great fresco considered to be licentious to 1420s, however, nudes in the fresco decoration of the Bran- be covered. Michelangelo objected but died two months later cacci Chapel, demonstrate a shift in which the Christian moti- and therefore never saw the many changes (among other vation for such exposure comes into focus. The frescoes begin things, the addition of the famous braghe or cashes-sexe) car- with a brief Old Testament cycle arranged in the Early Christian ried out almost immediately by a squadron of painters headed manner starting on the right wall.11 Masolino undertook the by Daniele da Volterra.5 crucial fi rst scene of the Temptation [Fig. 3], and gave to Adam, As far as I know, no such objections were voiced against along with Eve, the undisguised nudity of their innocence.12 In any of the works I will bring together, in spite of their emphasis their prelapsarian state the genitals of both partners are clearly on genitalia, scatology, and, overt sexuality. This acceptance defi ned but inert and unused. By contrast, Masaccio’s pair ex- was surely owing to the fact that they are unusual only in con- presses accomplished sexuality directly [Fig. 4]. Eve, evicted, veying their theological meaning in an explicitly corporeal and covers her sex with forced pudicity. Adam, now magnifi cently visceral manner not usually associated with the refi ned hu- endowed, shields his eyes from further temptation and shame. manist revival of the Renaissance.6 To describe this manner, Returning to the small scale, a superb continuation of the the reader is forewarned, I will not mince words. More exactly, theme appears in the early 1440s in one of Domenico Venezia- I will take for granted that I am writing for those who recognize no’s predella scenes on his St. Lucy Altarpiece, St. John the that the life of the mind functions well only when the body is Baptist in the Wilderness [Fig. 5]. The boy saint is shown dis- allowed to exercise its full potential. carding his worldly clothes while preparing to don his peni- tential camel’s hair raiment. In the moment of stasis before embarking on his holy mission his beautiful nude body with Divine Flesh fully articulated genitalia expresses the virtue of his decision.13 Nether parts exposed through the wearing of loose fi tting Some time early in the period between 1508 and 1512, Mi- clothes is a sub-set of full nudity. This type of consciously in- chel angelo Buonarroti painted the scenes of the Drunkenness advertent uncovering has a long history, seen as early as the and Derision of Noah in the Old Testament cycle on the ceiling archaic Greek Gigantomachy relief on the Siphnian Treasury at of the Sistine Chapel in which one of the nude fi gures is clearly Delphi where the masculine energy of a hoplite is expressed circumcised [Fig. 1]. This anatomical detail is not only unique through the parting of his skirt as he fl ings himself into action among the ubiquitous nudes in the artist’s oeuvre but it is also, [Fig. 6].14 Less exposed but defi ned as immoral is the boy-on-top 192 ART OF THE MISBEGOTTEN: PHYSICALITY AND THE DIVINE IN RENAISSANCE IMAGES 1) Michelangelo Buonarroti, «Drunkenness and Derision of Noah» (detail of Fig. 9), fresco, Città del Vaticano, Sistine Chapel, ceiling 193 MARILYN ARONBERG LAVIN 3 4 2 2) Giotto di Bondone, «Last Judgment» (detail), fresco, Padua, Scrovegni Chapel, interior façade 3) Masolino, «Temptation of Adam and Eve» (detail), fresco, Florence, Sta Maria del Carmine, Brancacci Chapel. Photo: Scala / Art Resource, NY 4) Masaccio, «Expulsion of Adam and Eve» (detail), fresco, Florence, Sta Maria del Carmine, Brancacci Chapel. Photo: Scala / Art Resource, NY 5) Domenico Veneziano, «St John in the Wilderness» (predella), c. 1445, tempera on wood, 28.5 × 32.5 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.