Homosexuality during the Renaissance  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop


Featured:

Leonardo da Vinci's personal life, homosexuality

The Renaissance, inspired by the rediscovery of the philosophy and art of the Classical period, was also a new dawn for homoerotic expression. A male's desire for another male was primarily constructed as an adult's desire for an adolescent, beardless youth. Consequently, pederastic aesthetics influenced art and literature throughout Europe.

Among the luminaries of the time who praised or depicted romantic liaisons with youths were Théophile de Viau, Marsilio Ficino, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Benvenuto Cellini, and Caravaggio. A philosophic defense — possibly tongue-in-cheek — of the practice was mounted by Antonio Rocco, in his infamous L'Alcibiade, fanciullo a scola (Alcibiades the Schoolboy) a reasoned polemic in which a schoolmaster gradually overcomes his handsome pupil's objections to carnal relations.

During the Renaissance, wealthy cities in northern Italy—Florence and Venice in particular—were renowned for their widespread practice of same-sex love, engaged in by a considerable part of the male population and constructed along the classical pattern of Greece and Rome. But even as many of the male population were engaging in same-sex relationships, the authorities, under the aegis of the Officers of the Night court, were prosecuting, fining, and imprisoning a good portion of that population. The eclipse of this period of relative artistic and erotic freedom was precipitated by the rise to power of the moralizing monk Girolamo Savonarola. In northern Europe the artistic discourse on sodomy was turned against its proponents by artists such as Rembrandt, who in his Rape of Ganymede no longer depicted Ganymede as a willing youth, but as a squalling baby attacked by a rapacious bird of prey.

Contents

The Church

At the same time, the Roman Catholic Church, working through the Inquisition courts as well as through the civil judiciary, used every means at its disposal to fight what it considered to be the "corruption of sodomy". Men were fined or jailed; boys were flogged. The harshest punishments, such as burning at the stake, were usually reserved for crimes committed against the very young, or by violence. Not infrequently this was an internecine struggle, as those pursued were often enough men of the cloth. At the time of the Fifth Council of the Lateran the "monkish canonist" Bermondus Choveronius attacked pederasty, claiming that because of the diversion of seed from procreation a pederast "destroys the whole human race."

Florentine pederasty

Florence was famed for its widespread homosexual culture, which manifested as a normative pederasty involving boys between the ages of thirteen and eighteen in relationship with adult men. This reputation was so much that in 1432 the city established "Gli Ufficiali di Notte" (The Officers of the Night) to root out the practice of sodomy. From that year until 1502, the number of men charged with sodomy numbered greater than 17,000, of which 3,000 were convicted. However this number also includes heterosexual sodomy.

This also gave rise to a number of proverbs illuminating the views of the common people towards the practice. Among them are If you crave joys, tumble some boys.

This reputation is also reflected in the fact that the Germans adopted the word Florenzer, when they were talking about a pederast. The Neapolitans on the other hand when speaking of pederasty, called it Il vizio inglese, "the English vice".

In the visual arts

Renaissance artists known to have had homosexual relationships and whose work displays a homoerotic subtext include Pontormo (1494 — 1557), Cellini (1500 – 1571) (Cellini's Perseus), Bronzino (1503 -1572) (Andrea Doria as Neptune[1], Cosimo I de' Medici as Orpheus[2] and Portrait of a Young Man[3]), Caravaggio (1571 – 1610) (Bacchus, Boy Bitten by a Lizard, Narcissus)

Caravaggio also explored heterosexual themes such as his roman charity detail from the Seven Misericords.

But also pederastic ones such as Amor Vincit Omnia and Madonna and Christ Child with St Anne and Serpent.


See also





Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Homosexuality during the Renaissance" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Personal tools