2023-07-01 13:35:18
DIVERSE LOVE
By Ignacio Moreno Segarra and María Bastarós
In diverse love, a new look, different from the one provided until now by traditional historiography, settles on the works. We propose an account of the collection based on some of the themes, icons and characters related to the sensitivity, culture and experiences of the LGTBI collective (lesbians, gays, transsexuals, bisexuals and intersex) that have always been present in art but that they have been invisible over time. We will approach this tour following the organization of the museum’s collection based on the chronology and cultural spheres of Western art. The first part focuses on the old masters, mainly from the Renaissance to the end of the 19th century. The iconography of the works, added to the artists’ own lives, reveals itself as a way to discover non-normative sensibilities, identities and desires, not only from a sensual perspective, but also from a social one. The second part explores how these ways of feeling and thinking are being defined with the development of modern societies. From the birth of the contemporary conception of homosexuality and the importance of the spaces of freedom that big cities represented, going through gender identity or the lack of a lesbian iconography of its own, the works show us a diversity of experiences framed in an environment that will be, with ups and downs, increasingly permissive. In the articulation of these sexual, affective and social demands, art will play a very active role.
Saint Sebastian it is an indisputable icon for the gay community that has acquired various nuances over the centuries. The history of Saint Sebastian, like that of many other saints, comes from a large number of sources that will shape the official history of the saint. Sebastian was a general of archers in the personal guard of Emperor Diocletian; When he converted to Christianity, he not only took it upon himself to spread his new faith, but also destroyed pagan symbols, for which he was sentenced to be tied to a tree and shot by his companions.
According to Professor Helena Carvajal González, the importance of the saint in the Middle Ages, in addition to being the patron saint of iron trades, lies in his protective character against the plague, a disease that was represented as a rain of arrows. During this period iconographically the saint was shown as a man of a certain age, reflecting his position in the army and carrying the instruments and palm of martyrdom. Between the 13th and 14th centuries he began to be portrayed as a beautiful adolescent boy, and we find him like this in Renaissance works. This figure made it possible to unite the protective character of Christian culture and that of the rediscovered classical culture. His physical appearance and nudity took such prominence that they eclipsed his moral and protective qualities.
There is no doubt that the restoration of the Medici dynasty in 1537 in the figure of Cosimo I will foster an art that will continue in the wake of the Florentine Neoplatonic academy of Ficino, not exempt in its recovery from Antiquity from evident homoerotic references. Cosme I surrounded himself with artists who knew these Neoplatonic theories and applied them to their lives. Among these artists it is worth mentioning the sculptor and goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini, the painter Gianantonio Bazzi, known as “Il Sodoma”, or the historian and poet Benedetto Varchi.
However, regarding homosexuality, the duchy of Cosme I was plagued with contradictions. The old tolerance of the Medicis will not be reflected in his mandate. On the one hand, he abolished the civic court in charge of prosecuting homosexuality, which had some seventeen thousand complaints behind it, including those of Leonardo da Vinci or Sandro Botticelli. On the other, the historian of the time Bernardo Segni said that, being an authoritarian and superstitious man, he promulgated other severe laws, one against sodomy, which was ineffective more due to the lack of zeal of the magistrates than of the duke himself, and under the which Cellini will be tried in 1557. Cosimo, who had publicly celebrated many of Cellini’s occurrences —such as when a rival called him a sodomite and he replied that this was a vice of gods, kings and emperors and that he did not practice it because he considered himself “a humble man” – commuted the four years in jail for four years of house arrest. Despite this, Cellini never regained the grand duke’s favor.
For his part, Bronzino, creator of the official image of the Grand Duke of Florence, had maintained a sentimental relationship with his teacher Pontormo.
These types of contradictions are those that occurred between two groups: the artists, an intellectual elite with the category of artisans and who, with the rise of the cities, were weaving homosexual networks that were certainly amorphous and daily (in, for example, their workshops) and who could live their affections more or less publicly thanks to their powerful friends, and their employers, well-educated men, promoters of the arts and courtly life but who could not renounce the powerful weapon of social and political control that it meant to pursue the homosexuality.
Hercules. The episode of Hercules in the court of Omphalia is perhaps one of the best-known examples of transvestism in Antiquity and refers to that chapter in the hero’s life in which he, in a fit of madness, murders Ifito, for what he is punished by the oracle at Delphi to serve for three years as a slave. Hercules will carry out this task under the command of the Lydian queen Omphalia, in a captivity described in this way by Ovid in his Letters of the heroines through the voice of Deianira, wife of Hercules:
Were you not ashamed to surround your strong arms with gold / and put jewels on your strong muscles? […] / And don’t you think that you dishonor yourself by putting on a girdle following the Meonian fashion of lascivious young women? […] / May Anteo tear those flaps from your rough neck so that he doesn’t regret having fallen into the hands of an effeminate man.
In this way, while Hercules wore feminine clothes and worked making baskets, Onfalia dedicated herself to wearing the characteristic attributes of the hero: the lion’s skin, the mace and the bow, and to enjoying her sexual potency, since, as the scholar points out Robert Bell, Omphalia bought Hercules as a sexual object and not as a servant; Once he became her lover, he conceived four of her children and got a slave pregnant.
Homosexuality is not something alien to the Hercules tradition, both in its Greek and Roman aspects. Why the hero wears the saffron-colored robe appropriate for women is something that, according to historian Nicole Leroux, anthropologists have tried to explain from many angles. On the one hand, it has been linked to the homosexuality of the Greek tradition, which would be related to pedophilia in the relationship between student and teacher and, therefore, far from the effeminacy of Hercules, which would be an addition to the Roman tradition. Hercules has also been linked to the marriage rite, where the exchange of gifts, including peplos, was something institutionalized in a tradition that will be picked up in Petrarch’s poetry and used, for example, in the decoration of the Ducal Palace in Urbino. to celebrate the marriage between Federico de Montefeltro and Battista Sforza in 1440. Finally, Nicole Leroux herself links this aspect to Hercules’ relationship with the effeminate Dionysus. In the Dionysian celebrations the women left the looms and hunted in the mountains and the men wore feminine clothes. The custom of transvestism linked to Dionysian festivities will last until its prohibition in the year 692.
In it XVII century the moral climate imposed by the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation generated a halo of silence around the sexuality of both the artists of the time—broken only by the noise of the scandalous trials—and those of the previous century. A phenomenon that was exemplified in the censored publications of Michelangelo’s sonnets or Shakespeare’s poems, the interested translations of Sappho’s poems or the whitewashed versions of the great myths such as the kidnapping of Ganymede or the Orpheus of Monteverdi, which excludes the homosexual conversion of the hero of previous versions.
XIX century. The transition from the 19th to the 20th century was an exciting time when it came to the history of sexualities. Fin de siecle decadence went hand in hand with Victorian double standards and was fed by the urban explosion in a period of recent European history known as the Belle Époque in France and the Edwardian era in England, where an economic and cultural elite was creating a new world. .
The Belle Epoque, which runs from the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 to the outbreak of the First World War, marked a high point in terms of culture in general and homosexuality in particular in the French capital. Paris is now the world’s epicenter of culture, home to intellectuals and a center of artistic experimentation like no other. In addition, according to Florence Tamagne, a French historian specializing in the study of homosexuality and its cultural representations, tells us, Paris was also the European center of LGTBI culture, characterized by a hedonistic spirit and a bohemian lifestyle that opened the doors to the sexual experimentation and new non-heteronormative forms of eroticism. In short, Paris becomes what we might call “the European capital of pleasure,” and in a relatively underground but accessible sphere a large number of lounges, bars, cafes, bathhouses, and clubs begin to emerge—especially around Montmartre and Les Halles— which welcome and develop this new LGTBI culture.
Twentieth century. Until the outbreak of the First World War, Paris remained the capital of freedom. Another example of these new spaces was the literary salon run by Natalie Clifford Barney, an openly lesbian American writer and poet living in the French capital. For more than sixty years, Barney was in charge of organizing this room, holding meetings where his guests could socialize and discuss literature, art, music and other topics of interest. Joan Schenkar, a celebrated Seattle-born contemporary writer and playwright known for her works based on women’s lives, described Barney’s salon as “a place where lesbian assignments and academic appointments could coexist in a kind of lively, fertile, and plural cognitive dissonance. The visibility of love relationships between women has, in fact, experienced a great increase since the end of the 19th century in Paris, which in the words of the scholar Catherine Van Casselear becomes “the undisputed world capital of lesbianism”.
Obviously, this new idiosyncrasy acquired by the city was not welcomed by everyone, and the conservative sector condemned it by calling for order and designating Paris as the “New Babylon”. Although in the interwar years Berlin would take the lead as the homosexual capital of Europe, Paris remained an interesting center for the development of leisure, socialization and LGTBI culture.
With the Nazi occupation of France, this entire process of making visible and demanding freedoms suffered a fatal collapse: the venues that promoted LGTBI culture closed and homosexuality was classified as a crime punishable by law, thus opening one of the darkest and harshest stages. for the LGTBI collective in France.
Diverse love, Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, Madrid. From June 1 to August 31, 2023.
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