Can you make out what that is? For those of you playing at home, it's Jesus Christ's penis. And no, it's not some lazy stunt (or Hail Mary pass) to get half-hearted gasps out of bored journalists and doe-eyed evangelicals. Nor is it a scandal of Dan Brown proportions that threatens to rock the Catholic establishment to its foundation. No, it's from the Renaissance, and both patron and painter probably knew damn well what they were doing. And to top it all off, it's not some recently-unearthed scandalmaker, but rather it's been sitting for centuries in dusty archives and small collections, along with thousands of similar works, unknown and ignored, flying under the Modern West's theological radar.
This post is a cheer for a book I recently re-discovered; UPenn art historian Leo Steinberg's seminal The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and Modern Oblivion (1983). As the title suggests, the book is an exploration of several surprising (to "modern" conceptions at least) motifs which float largely ignored across the surface of Christianity's visual sign-universe. According to Steinberg, such paintings, which emphasize Jesus' sexual organs (and often the Virgin's hypnotic attraction to them) work to illustrate Christ's humanity. Here's how the hypothesis runs: to get the maximum theological punch out of the narrative, the sinless child born of a virgin had to be a fully-functioning, atomically-correct human, carrying the affects of humanity (forced to breed, doomed to die). In other words, he had to be pure, but with retained potential. As Renaissance masterpieces frequently doubled as teaching tools for the unwashed masses, such displays of Christ-dick relieved peasant concerns about Christ's privileged liminality within the order of things.
Some of the most famous examples of the sexualized Christ come from Michelangelo, with his Pieta (1499, above) oozing sexual tension between an anachronistically young Mary and the muscular, youthful Jesus draped across her lap. One way that this sculpture could be read is as a testament to Trinitarian logic; as the Bride of Christ, set upon by the Holy Spirit, Mary is both Jesus' mother and spouse, subject to the same sorts of correspondences, sexual or otherwise, that any married pair are. Of course, the kicker is that this relationship exists suspended and untouched, drenched in liminality, just like Jesus or the Blessed Virgin. Other less-seen examples include Anne putting her grandson's penis in her mouth (the same logic as biting a gold coin to see if it's real) and the crucified messiah brandishing a massive boner upon the cross. Hey, "ressurection" is pretty close to "erection," eh? Jesus' "humanity," active and alive, participates within the painted narrative, a sign displaying a sign.
As I said before, such ideas about Jesus run counter to contemporary ideas about how Christianity (and broadly, the West) developed, especially before what we like to call "modern times." Anyone familiar with the non-traditional, feces-based portraits of the Son of God currently circulating within the art world knows this. A genitalia-displaying Christ is to us something very "modern" (or at worst an ally), even though we're oblivious to the fact that ideas like this have existed and been exchanged within the Christian world for centuries.
If anything, it adds ammunition to the notion that Christian fundamentalism, "freethought," religious terrorism, and all the other (quasi-/anti-)religious forms that we encounter today on the news and circulating in the world are indeed modern forms, continuities from previous forms but nevertheless incredibly influenced by modern trajectories. We are shocked by these images, wondering how preindustrial "Christianity," as we understand it, could have produced such seemingly subversive works. Just as there could not have been an American-style fundamentalism in eras before the rise of secularism, the Christianity that produced such paintings as the ones discussed is a time-and-place-sensitive Christianity. But it's important to stress that it is still "a Christianity."
One idea that is sorely in need of greater circulation in modern culture is that religions are better thought of as traditions, clouds of signs with multiple trajectories and facets, rather than as unchanging structures. Therefore, the Christian tradition is defined as a collection of beliefs, practices, ideas, etc that all, in some way, relate to Jesus Christ as the Son of God. This can be applied to both geographic distinctions (Irish Catholicsm versus Latin-Mediterranean Catholicism) or temporal ones (extinct forms of Christianity, such as Arianism). I know that in the West, dogma and form is something we love to talk about, but it's just not useful for understanding religion as a social phenomenon.
I have more to say about this. Part 2 soon!!
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