As has become evident in the last posts, I have been re-reading a book I adore and hate at the same time, Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae. That is to say: I hate to have to agree with her most of the time, as I do, and would love to disagree with her more often, as I don't, alas (well, maybe it's my Mediterranean-Catholic upbringing, and subsequent pagan atheism ";o), that compel me to agree with her). No wonder she has managed to enrage so many feminists, gays, lesbians et alia over the years. Feminist fatale, feminist with balls, anti-feminist or lesbo barbata are all monikers that fail to do justice to her untamable political incorrectness and freethinking queerness.
Here is a favourite passage - incidentally, one of Paglia's tenets that has fuelled more controversy (I vividly recommend this interview with the author, a propos) - on the Greco-Roman tradition of the beautiful boy nude and the homoerotic imagination that soaks western art through and through.
Donatello's David [is] the first truly free-standing sculpture since the fall of Rome. Blatantly homosexual in inspiration, it shows David standing victorious over the severed head of Goliath, which he tramples underfoot. The story of David and Golliath [...] would become a political symbol of Florentine resistance to tyranny. Donatello's David is astonishingly young [...]. The hand on hip and cocked knee create an air of sexual solicitation. From the side, one is struck by the peachy buttocks, bony shoulderblades, and petulantly protruding boy-belly. The combination of child's physique with female body language is perverse and pederastic. Michelangelo is to adopt this erotic formula for his more athletic nudes, where it becomes overtly sadomasochistic.
For H. W. Janson, Donatello's David is "strangely androgynous," "le beau garçon sans merci, conscious only of his own sensuous beauty." [...] David has long feminine locks of hair, tangled with ribbons, and a splendidly raffished wreathed hat, a version of the traveller's hat of Hermes Psychopompos. But here is no traveller's cloak, only exquisitely etched leather buskins. A pornographic trope: the half-dressed is more erotic than the totally nude. [...]
I think Donatello's David, even more than the ancient Venus Pudica, was the true model for Boticelli's Venus. David, fusing Venus and Mars, skims into view on a swirl of the dreaming artist's fantasy, half spasmodic relief, half rising sigh. The David's shimmery, slithery bronze is a frozen wet dream, an Apollonian petrification. It is also a portrait of the artist, whose oppressed face appears like a signature at the bottom, another homoerotic motif borrowed by Michelangelo. [...]
David's brazen nudity is the impermeability of western personality. His compact frame is supercondensed by the aggressive western eye. He is personality as sex and power.
The beautiful boy is homosexuality's greatest contribution to western culture. Un-christian and anti-Christian, he is an iconic formalization of the relation between the eye and reality. Repeated in a thousand forms in Italian painting and sculpture, he is the ultimate symbol of Renaissance art. He is St. Sebastian, the Christian Adonis pierced by arrows, or ephebic St. Michael, whom the Renaissance took out of his Byzantine tunic and clad in silver armour. The Northern European Renaissance has few beautiful boys and no Apollonian grandeur. [...] Donatello's David stands on its own because it has rejected northern Gothicism for southern paganism. Its hardness and domination of space come from the artist's rediscovery of the authentically western will, inflexible and amoral. Art has rearmed itself with the pagan glorification of matter.
Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (London & New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 146-49.
Here is a favourite passage - incidentally, one of Paglia's tenets that has fuelled more controversy (I vividly recommend this interview with the author, a propos) - on the Greco-Roman tradition of the beautiful boy nude and the homoerotic imagination that soaks western art through and through.
Donatello's David [is] the first truly free-standing sculpture since the fall of Rome. Blatantly homosexual in inspiration, it shows David standing victorious over the severed head of Goliath, which he tramples underfoot. The story of David and Golliath [...] would become a political symbol of Florentine resistance to tyranny. Donatello's David is astonishingly young [...]. The hand on hip and cocked knee create an air of sexual solicitation. From the side, one is struck by the peachy buttocks, bony shoulderblades, and petulantly protruding boy-belly. The combination of child's physique with female body language is perverse and pederastic. Michelangelo is to adopt this erotic formula for his more athletic nudes, where it becomes overtly sadomasochistic.For H. W. Janson, Donatello's David is "strangely androgynous," "le beau garçon sans merci, conscious only of his own sensuous beauty." [...] David has long feminine locks of hair, tangled with ribbons, and a splendidly raffished wreathed hat, a version of the traveller's hat of Hermes Psychopompos. But here is no traveller's cloak, only exquisitely etched leather buskins. A pornographic trope: the half-dressed is more erotic than the totally nude. [...]
I think Donatello's David, even more than the ancient Venus Pudica, was the true model for Boticelli's Venus. David, fusing Venus and Mars, skims into view on a swirl of the dreaming artist's fantasy, half spasmodic relief, half rising sigh. The David's shimmery, slithery bronze is a frozen wet dream, an Apollonian petrification. It is also a portrait of the artist, whose oppressed face appears like a signature at the bottom, another homoerotic motif borrowed by Michelangelo. [...]
David's brazen nudity is the impermeability of western personality. His compact frame is supercondensed by the aggressive western eye. He is personality as sex and power.
The beautiful boy is homosexuality's greatest contribution to western culture. Un-christian and anti-Christian, he is an iconic formalization of the relation between the eye and reality. Repeated in a thousand forms in Italian painting and sculpture, he is the ultimate symbol of Renaissance art. He is St. Sebastian, the Christian Adonis pierced by arrows, or ephebic St. Michael, whom the Renaissance took out of his Byzantine tunic and clad in silver armour. The Northern European Renaissance has few beautiful boys and no Apollonian grandeur. [...] Donatello's David stands on its own because it has rejected northern Gothicism for southern paganism. Its hardness and domination of space come from the artist's rediscovery of the authentically western will, inflexible and amoral. Art has rearmed itself with the pagan glorification of matter.
Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (London & New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 146-49.
1 comment:
ways of looking are influenced by the general climate of informed opinion, but given that we are largely cultural creatures, I felt the same curiosity when I saw Kenneth Clarke s "Civilisation" in the 1970s... are we really that close to the Rennaisance ourselves atleast in our unguarded emotional responses
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