harllatham: nudus nudum Christum sequi

nudus nudum Christum sequi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Steinberg
The whole of the Summer, 1983, issue of the journal October was dedicated to Steinberg's essay The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, later published as a book by Random House and by publishers in other countries. In that essay, Steinberg examined a previously ignored pattern in Renaissance art: the prominent display of the genitals of the infant Christ and the attention also drawn to that area in images of Christ near the end of his life, in both cases for specific theological reasons involving the concept of the Incarnation – the word of God made flesh

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/pope-francis-and-the-naked-christ
Thirty years ago, the art scholar Leo Steinberg published “The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion,” a book that does much to explain the connection between Pope Francis’s passionate devotion to the poor and afflicted and his seeming openness to gay Catholics. In “The Sexuality of Christ,” Steinberg argues that as a result of the rise of the Franciscan order, around 1260, an emphasis on Christ’s nakedness, and, thus, on his humanity, joined compassion to an acceptance of the role of sexuality in human life.
A credo of the Franciscan order was 'nudus nudum Christum sequi' (“follow naked the naked Christ”). It was a radical call to cast aside worldly wealth and belongings and acknowledge the fragile, fallen nature of all men and women. But in casting aside Christ’s garments, the Franciscans made Christ’s nude body a focal point. As a result, according to Steinberg, from about the middle of the thirteenth century until the sixteenth century artists lavished particular care on Christ’s penis, the part of Christ’s body that made him most mortal, and which proved his union with humankind. “One must recognize,” wrote Steinberg, “an ostentatio genitalium comparable to the canonic ostentatio vulnerum, the showing forth of the wounds.”

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harllatham
2020-06-09 14:11 (ссылка)

To bring to the surface this suppressed artistic trend, Steinberg reproduced dozens of paintings and drawings in which Christ’s genitalia are indisputably a central thematic concern. There are paintings of the Christ child touching his penis, and of the Virgin handling the infant Christ’s penis. In some pictures, the Christ child exhibits his genitals in a style similar to Venus displaying her sex. “Again and again,” Steinberg writes, “we see the young God-man parading his nakedness, or even flaunting his sex in ways normally reserved for female enticements.”
Many representations of the Three Magi show one of the foreign kings closely inspecting the infant Christ’s genitalia. Depictions of Christ on the cross and of the dead Christ lying in the Virgin’s arms clearly portray Christ with an erection. In some images, which Steinberg calls “psychologically troubling,” the divine Father touches his Son’s penis, “a conciliation,” Steinberg writes, “which stands for the atonement, the being-at-one, of man and God. For this atonement, on which hinges the Christian hope of salvation, Northern Renaissance art found the painfully intimate metaphor of the Father’s hand on the groin of the Son, breaching a universal taboo as the fittest symbol of reconcilement.”

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harllatham
2020-06-09 14:23 (ссылка)

For Steinberg, however, theological motives were preëminent. He held that artists used the evidence of Christ’s genitals to prove that Christ submitted to becoming human before returning to the godhead. The revelation of his penis demonstrates, as Steinberg puts it, Christ’s “humanation,” that moment of incarnation which proved Christ’s love for humankind. And the many representations of the Christ child’s circumcision are important as foretellings of his crucifixion—the blood of Christ’s penis is fulfilled in the blood from Christ’s wounds.
Entering with obvious relish the realm of Christian sexual hermeneutics, Steinberg relies on St. Augustine, who emphasized his surrender to and then escape from the “fleshpots of Carthage,” to argue that Christ’s erection was a singular way to demonstrate Christ’s chastity. Without the capacity to yield to lust, Christ’s triumph over carnal desire would have no human meaning. Unlike men after the fall of Adam, who fell victim to lust, Christ willed his erection; it was not an involuntary physiological event. By both willing and resisting it, he declared his victory over the stain of sin bequeathed to humanity by Adam and Eve, and over the death that their carnal weakness brought into the world. That, after all, is the significance of the resurrection.

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harllatham
2020-06-09 14:24 (ссылка)

To drive this point home, Steinberg had to prove that during the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance the word “resurrection” could be used as a double entendre, connoting both the divine event and the humble mortal fact of an erection. Steinberg quotes from one of Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century tales in the Decameron, in which a pious young girl inflames the desire of a monk named Rustico, causing in the latter a “resurrection of the flesh.” Steinberg notes that it was not until modern times that the original phrase was accurately translated from Italian, a censoring that he sees as analogous to the later bowdlerization of Christ’s penis in Renaissance paintings.

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harllatham
2020-06-09 14:32 (ссылка)

The most cogent criticism of Steinberg’s book came from Caroline Bynum, a feminist scholar. Bynum pointed out that in medieval texts Christ was often portrayed in feminine terms, and she gave as evidence paintings in which a feminized Christ appears. Steinberg conceded that Christ was sometimes portrayed as both male and female—“In one category of metaphors, the wound [in his side] is said to lactate and give birth”—but responded that this did not diminish the universal resonance of phallic imagery, nor did it lessen the impact of the other paintings he offered as evidence. Steinberg’s and Bynum’s arguments do not appear to be mutually exclusive. An androgynous Christ with a highly symbolic phallus does not seem out of the question.

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	k_d_s 2020-06-10 04:30 (ссылка)
	>Depictions of Christ on the cross and of the dead Christ lying in the Virgin’s arms clearly portray Christ with an erection. Подрочи послушными руками Своему непослушному Христу. (Ответить) (Уровень выше)