Images of Sex and Desire in Renaissance Art and Modern Historiography

Angeliki Pollali, Berthold Hub

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351578790
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

Studies on gender and sexuality have proliferated in the last decades, covering a wide spectrum of disciplines. This collection of essays offers a metanarrative of sexuality as it has been recently embedded in the art historical discourse of the European Renaissance. It revisits 'canonical' forms of visual culture, such as painting, sculpture and a number of emblematic manuscripts. The contributors focus on one image—either actual or thematic—and examine it against its historiographic assumptions. Through the use of interdisciplinary approaches, the essays propose to unmask the ideology(ies) of representation of sexuality and suggest a richer image of the ever-shifting identities of gender. The collection focuses on the Italian Renaissance, but also includes case studies from Germany and France.

Part I

The Politics of Desire

Stereotypes and Ambiguity of Gender Identity

1 Body Language in Dürer’s

Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand Christians

Linda C. Hults

Figure 1.1 Albrecht Dürer, The Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand Christians, 1508. Oil on panel, transferred to canvas, 99 × 87 cm. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, 835.

Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York.

What space is left for the female martyr, when male and female have already been appropriated?

—Catherine Conybeare.¹

Dürer and Christian Masculinity

Albrecht Dürer depicted male bodies with an intense engagement and a formal and iconographic variety not paralleled in his female figures.² From his self–portraits and male portraits, to the heroic, nude Apollos and Adams in his early work, to the nuanced figure of Christ in his graphic Passions, published in 1511–12, to the Four Holy Men (1526, Alte Pinakothek, Munich), in which physical bodies are subsumed under the abstract power of the Word, Dürer sustained a dialogue with the male body that affirms his artistic and personal investment in its potential to convey meaning. Such a large body of work on male bodies begs consideration in terms of masculinity.

Early modern ideas about manhood were drawn from many discourses. Theories of human physiology from the Hippocratic writers, Aristotle and Galen postulated a cool, moist female body and a superior hotter, drier male body that corresponded to the presumed weakness and inwardness of women and the greater energy and extroversion of men, whether in sexual intercourse or intellectual and public achievements. Similarly, ancient theories of human generation confined the female role entirely or largely to material sustenance, in contrast to the male’s contribution of spirit.³ Although these ideas from antiquity were ubiquitous in Early Modern Europe, they were filtered through Christian ideals of masculinity, grounded in a paradoxical man/God whose terrible suffering and ignoble death epitomized the passivity usually attributed to women, while simultaneously evoking the taciturn, heroic endurance touted by the ancient Stoics. Christ was and remains an extremely complicated masculine model. In his life and ministry, he subverted certain Jewish and Roman ideals of manhood (e.g. his rejection of marriage and family) while exemplifying others (e.g. his assumption of an authoritative, public role).⁴ As a rabbi and minister, Jesus modeled reason and moderation—key markers of ideal masculinity in early modern Europe.⁵ However, as the apocalyptic Lamb/Son of Man, he was an imperialistic conqueror presiding over a hyperbolic, retributory violence surpassing the bloody spectacles of the Roman arena.⁶

Dürer envisioned these contradictory ideas of Christian masculinity in his art. In this essay, I focus on his Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand Christians (1508, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), a work comprised solely of male bodies (Figure 1.1). It exemplifies late medieval piety in its fostering of saint and relic worship and the imitation of Christ. The martyrs reenact Christ’s Passion by suffering their own, and Dürer and his contemporaries witness that suffering, all to gain access to the salvific power of the body of Christ. Not only was that access increasingly contested within Christendom in the period before the Reformation, but Christendom itself was also confronted by an outside enemy: the Ottoman Turks, who shared with Christians and Jews an eschatological preoccupation with a violent end time.⁷ In Dürer’s painting, male bodies are the expressive vehicles for this highly gendered and politicized piety.

The Iconography and Context of the Painting

Frederick the Wise of Saxony commissioned the painting to venerate the relics of the ten thousand martyrs: symbols of Saxon piety and power enshrined resplendently in his castle church and documented in 1508 in a speech by Christoph Scheurl, a Nuremberg lawyer and Dürer’s friend, and Lucas Cranach the Elder’s woodcut guide to the Wittenberg relics (1509). The legend of the martyrs originated in the twelfth century and was recounted with variations in late fifteenth-century texts such as the Heiligenleben (Augsburg, 1472), the Lübecker Passional (c. 1480), the Bamberg Breviary used in Nuremberg Churches (1484), the Nuremberg Passional, published by Dürer’s godfather Anton Koberger in 1488 and Hartmann Schedel’s Nuremberg Chronicle (1493), illustrated with woodcuts by Michael Wolgemut and workshop, where Dürer was apprenticed.⁸ The tale begins with nine thousand of Hadrian’s soldiers, fighting rebels in the Euphrates region, converting to Christianity, and achieving victory with the help of an angel, who then led them to be baptized on Mount Ararat. Despite the soldiers’ victory on Rome’s behalf, a tribunal of Hadrian’s allies ordered that they be brutally tortured until they recanted their faith. In their refusal, the soldiers became surrogates for the suffering Christ, inspiring a thousand additional men to join them; afterwards, all were martyred. The baptism of the soldiers on Mount Ararat, where Noah’s ark rested, linked the Old Testament covenant to Christ’s salvific suffering, its reenactment by the martyrs, and further to European Christians, descendants of Noah’s son Japheth.⁹

Dürer had depicted this legend in an earlier woodcut (c. 1496, Figure 1.2), but he made significant changes in the painted version. Since a particle of Christ’s Crown of Thorns, given by Louis VI of France to Rudolf I of Saxony, was the most treasured Saxon relic, Dürer featured thorny crowns prominently in the painting. Frederick’s collection also included relic particles of the martyrs’ military leader, St. Achatius, and St. Hermolaus, a bishop mentioned in the Bamberg Breviary account who had been assimilated, like other bishops, into the original legend as the baptizer of the martyrs prior to their deaths.¹⁰ In the woodcut, Dürer included Hadrian as a king in the left foreground and Achatius as the central Christlike figure tied to a tree. Bishop Hermolaus (if he can indeed be identified) has his eyes bored out at the right. In the painting, Dürer omitted Hadrian and the blinding of the bishop, who now appears in the left middle ground being confronted by his persecutors. Beneath him is Achatius, wearing a thorny crown and green robe, and now looking even more like Christ. Displacing the central group of martyrs in the woodcut are full-length portraits of the artist and German poet laureate Conrad Celtis, first identified by Erwin Panofsky.¹¹

The painting constantly evokes Christ’s Passion with the procession toward impalement on the right, visual echoes of Christ being mocked and beaten, the Christlike figure of Achatius, two crucifixions at the left and the presence of torturers throughout. Christ’s bodily suffering is multiplied and diffused into the exposed, vulnerable bodies of the martyrs, and the cruelly ingenious variety of torments suggests the Roman arena. The martial and public, spectacular nature of their martyrdom—more characteristic of male saints—would seem to make them particularly appealing objects of devotion for Christian men.¹² Indeed, John Frederick I, son of John the Steadfast, Frederick the Wise’s brother and co-regent, took the painting to Brussels when he was imprisoned by Charles V after the Protestant defeat at the Battle of Mühlberg (1547). This circumstance is one reason, along with the checkered building history of the Wittenberg church, that the painting’s architectural context is uncertain.¹³

Figure 1.2 Albrecht Dürer, The Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand Christians, c. 1496. Woodcut, 387 × 284 mm. Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art, Rosenwald Collection, 1943.3.3563.

Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.

It has been assumed that Dürer’s work was a wingless altarpiece that was part of the reliquary shrine in the Castle Church, described with pride in Wittenberg classicist Andreas Meinhardi’s Dialogus (1508).¹⁴ However, because of the bold centrality of the artist and the recently deceased poet, Doris Kutschbach suggested that the Martyrdom could not have been an altarpiece, but was possibly a cover or shutter for another work.¹⁵ Paul Bacon has recently argued convincingly that Dürer’s painting was probably not commissioned for the main space of the church at all, but for the Princes’ Choir in the second-floor gallery on its west end: a private space linking the church and the castle for the use of Dukes Frederick and John and their families. Meinhardi did not mention Dürer’s Martyrdom, unfinished as he was writing, but he did describe the current decoration of this space, with its scenes from Roman history and mythology and its portraits of Wettin princes, including Dürer’s tempera-on-linen portrait of Frederick the Wise (1496, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin). The iconography of the decoration, Bacon notes, emphasized the traditional role of the Saxon princes as defenders of the faith against pagans and Jews.¹⁶ Thus, the Martyrdom functioned as a meditative devotional image that specifically linked Christ’s suffering and its reenactment by the ten thousand male martyrs with Saxon political power and Christian hegemony.

By mimicking the position of Christ or the martyred saints in altarpieces, the quasi-sacramental centrality of the two friends intensifies the theme of imitatio Christi, much like Dürer’s merging of his own image with the Holy Face in the Munich Self Portrait of 1500.¹⁷ Probably C...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Renaissance Sexuality and Myth Making
• Part I The Politics of Desire: Stereotypes and Ambiguity of Gender Identity
• Part II Mechanisms for Actualizing Desire: From Seduction to ‘Post-Coital Man’
• Part III Beyond the ‘Pleasure Principle’ or the Polysemy of Desire
• Bibliography
• Index