The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion

"Leo Steinberg —I emphasise that name—he was a fascinating guy. He was a tough character, a kind of fussy old codger at the time I knew him. I used to have students of mine call him and ask him questions about the book and he would yell at them for interrupting his nap, but then he would go on and give brilliant answers. I emphasise Steinberg because what’s interesting about the book is not necessarily what’s immediately obvious. The book is about—my students call it “the Jesus penis book”—about the fact that Jesus’s genitalia, either juvenile or adult, are emphasised and focussed upon—literally as the conversion point of the orthogonals—in many works of renaissance art, and that this had a particular function and meaning. It was about humanation, it was about the maleness of Christ, and it had particular parallels in sermonic literature, homiletic literature. All that has been lost in modernity—nobody noticed it—and Steinberg noticed it and began to discuss it and of course he got all kinds of flak and he responded to the flak by writing a second part of the book, which is a response to all his critics. I’m interested in the book for a very specific reason. It has less to do with the content, than the fact that this guy noticed. In the course of my thinking about what I would do myself as a medieval art historian if the art was so pervasively Christian I began to think about the fact that, almost without exception, all the famous, important, innovative art historians of medieval Christian art in the twentieth-century in the post-war period were emigré Jews. Whether it was Warburg, or Gombrich, or Krautheimer, you can’t name a name that’s not a German Jewish name. Someone once said that art history in the post-war period consisted of Jewish professors teaching Catholic art to Protestant students. I began to think why this should be, and particularly why such innovative observations—from people like Meyer Shapiro—were made, and I remembered going to art museums with my father—who was this Yeshiva boy manqué—looking at these paintings. There’d be a huge crucifixion scene with about a million people in it, a Northern Renaissance crucifixion scene, and I’d be interested in Jesus—I was six or seven years old—”What did he do? Why is he up there?” My father once in a while would say to me, “That’s what happens to bad little Jewish boys,” but by-and-large he would say something like, “Look over here, down here, far to the left. Do you see that fat man in the red hat? He looks just like his horse, doesn’t he?” My father taught me to avoid the main subject, which was so Christian, and to look at the peripheral and the apparently random or indeterminate, or unimportant. And I realised this: all these German émigré art historians—and you could name 15 or 20—came from households in which there were observant Jewish parents, or maximially, grandparents. They themselves were cosmopolitan citizens of the world, they’d left that all behind, and yet they couldn’t bring themselves to look at medieval Christian art from a devotional perspective, so they had to find alternative perspective. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Steinberg for me is representative of the idea that you look at something that people who are in the business—say, of Christianity—have not looked at, and you, because you are on the edge, see it in a different way. That’s why the fact that Steinberg was a Jew was so important. Because, let me tell you, very few people with Christian backgrounds or even secularised, nominally Christian backgrounds are going to be doing very much thinking about Jesus’s penis. Steinberg, as what we used to call a “confirmed batchelor” and a Jewish man, was able to see things other people weren’t. If we did that we would be mistaken. There are two equally infelicitous alternatives: people who say, “I can’t say anything about an image unless I have a text to pin it on,” and people who say, “Images exists completely independently in the artist’s mind from texts.” It’s not that images are wedded to texts, but images are wedded to culture, and culture is influenced by texts, and by sermons, and by conversations that people have in the street. It would be a mistake to think about looking at art completely divorced from its cultural contexts. But it would also be a mistake to say, “Here we have a picture of x, y, z and here I found the text that explains it exactly, thank you very much.” First of all it’s really boring, but secondly it’s very reductionist. Steinberg helps us to move toward looking at the image. But when you look at the image, you realise people were saying things in sermons like, “Jesus’s maleness is important, Jesus’s humanity , his maleness is part of his humanity, etc., etc.”"