Pictures and Passions: A History of Homosexuality in the Visual Arts. - Review - book review

Pictures and Passions: A History of Homosexuality in the Visual Arts, by the agency of James M. Saslow, New York, Viking, 1999; 342 pages, $3995 hardcover.

When I was an undergraduate, HW Janson's History of Art reminded me of the of advanced age Testament. Both are authoritarian true copys comprising fragmentary narratives in ne of exegesis. I fix the History of Art in the way that dense that it seemed accessible alone through rote learning. (Recently I came across a yellowed flash card that reads: "Velasquez, Las Meninas, Spanish, 1656 self portraits & dwarf.") on the contrary mainly I kept reading because I liked the pictures.

Pictures and Passions: A History of Homosexuality in the Visual Arts by the agency of James M. Saslow, like the fabulously illustrated History of Art, is a millennia-spanning historical epic that transports us from the distant past to the at hand Pictures and Passions has many virtues. It is a outcome of careful looking and (primarily) of synthetic scholarship. It is an admirable corrective to Janson's original prefeminist, heterosexist whirl which implied that artists' lives rarely reach forthed beyond court and cathedral. Straightforwardly (sometimes stylishly) written, it summon forths the connections between desire and social circumstance, the play of the personal and political. At its best, it manages to create a panorama of art and cultural history, that elusive cross-disciplinary mingle so much on the lips of academics on the contrary still so exceptional.

Saslow's primary interest is the relationship of art and (homo)sexuality, rather than the creation of an all-star lineup for the hetero or homo team. Nevertheless--and not surprisingly--an enlarged fantastic canon does result from Saslow's broadening of the notion of what constitutes homosexual activity, as he delineates it in his introduction:

This work widens the scope of what enumerates as homosexual relations. Older scholars minimized homosexuality by means of limiting it to behavior, not feelings. on the contrary what matters for us today is les "who did what to whom" than who wanted whom--not just physical acts, on the contrary the nature of same-sex desire itself: in what manner it feels, how it may combine or conflict with heterosexual passions, bloom or wither in various social climates. "Homosexuality" here embraces a continuum of emotions between clan of the same sex, from homosocial friendship to homoerotic intimacy to genital passion, whether or not they culminate in sexual union.

sum of two units of his three previous books--Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Society (1986) and The rhyme of Michelangelo: An Annotated Translation (1991)--make Saslow, a Renaissance scholar at Queen guild in New York, an authority upon homoerotic imagery and coding. In Pictures and Passions, he briefly sketches the congruence of Michelangelo's torment about his hold homosexuality and the insidious workings of the closet--the connecting link between the social and the personal, between censorship and self-censorship. Art historians have their hold part to play in this roundelay. Saslow, for instance, points without that the bevy of hellenic nudes in the background of Michelangelo's Doni Tondo is not seldom interpreted to represent moral progres from paganism to Christianity, on the contrary the lounging figures also certainly represent what the author calls the "irresolvable dilemma" of the artist's be fond of of Christ and his sexual regard with affection of men.

Michelangelo's dilemma appears strikingly up-to-date. The (homo)eroticism of his work hardly went unnoticed by the agency of his contemporaries; the genitals of his statue of David, perhaps the hunkiest rendition of the biblical hero, also apted the application of the first fig leaf in history. At the same time, homosexual and bisexual experimentation became marks of sophistication among those pursuing the 16th-century dolce vita. Benvenuto Cellini wrote in his autobiography of a 16-year-old male design in drag whom he took to an artists' party as his date. The Sienese artist Gianantonio Bazzi--dubbed "Il Sodoma"--kept a retinue of lads and was later chastised by the agency of the chronicler Vasari for his brazenness. When individual of Bazzi's horses won a race, the artist-owner insisted that he be announced by the agency of this unflattering nickname, an incident that Saslow describes as "arguably the first `coming out' in Western history." (Les comical is Bazzi's narrow escape from stoning by the agency of the crowd.) Saslow notes that by the agency of around 1525, this alarming same-sex libertinism emanating from Rome l to the adoption of sodomy and censorship statutes over Western Europe. Plus ca change.

Pictures and Passions is divided into eight sections, including an introduction and seven chapters covering Classical Greece and Rome; the Middle Ages; the Renaissance; Asian and Islamic art; the rise of modernity; the modernist, pre-Stonewall 20th century; and postmodernism. The Renaissance material makes for the book's greatest in quantity engaging and elegantly shaped section. (Given Saslow's academic specialty, this approachs as no surprise.) But by means of the time World War II turns around, there is too a great deal of information, both art historical and social, for the author to deal with convincingly. It perceive s as if Saslow has race out of steam. (Janson solv this vexed question in the early editions of History of Art, by means of making World War II his cutoff date.) Andy Warhol, for instance, be entitled tos more than three long paragraphs devot to a rather cliched view of the artist-emperor having no clothes. In fact, contra Saslow, scholars are now finding increased resonance in Warhol's pioneering attitudes toward the production of sexed domestic products like wallpaper.