by Jon Lackman | 9 August 2010 | Books, Renaissance
Diane Wolfthal, author of the widely reviewed books The Beginnings of Netherlandish Canvas Painting, 1400-1530 (1989) and Images of Rape: The “Heroic Tradition” and its Alternatives (1999), now has a new book out – In and Out of the Marital Bed: Seeing Sex in Renaissance Europe. “This book explores images whose sexual content has all too often been either ignored or denied,” examining canonical and obscure art as well as material culture. “[It] demonstrates that the insistence that sexual intercourse should be confined to marriage, performed in a particular manner and reserved for the purpose of procreation was subverted and undermined both in the visual culture of the period and in reality.”
In the Renaissance, much like today, viewers were confronted with a growth in the number and variety of sexual images. One finds an abundance of same-sex desire, adultery, prostitution, and violence. The images made and consumed by certain individuals of that era reveal them to have been more frank and open-minded sexually than many 21st-century westerners. One drypoint etching she discusses, from 1485, depicts a man and a woman, an engaged couple most likely. It contains several traditional symbols of love – the touch of the hand, the turning of the head, the walk together, the wreath, the falcon. This same artist produced, at the same time, in the same style, an etching of two men hunting. They walk, they touch, one turns his head toward the other, he wears a wreath, there is a falcon. This is also an amorous couple. There are minor differences between the two images, but the artist’s intent is clear, Wolfthal says – to depict the two couples as identical, and therefore equal. This is a powerful visual statement, and she strikingly compares it with the events of September 1, 2002, when the The New York Times began including in its Weddings pages notices of same-sex marriages (and commitment ceremonies). The image that these pages presented – photographs of gay and straight couples in identical poses and outfits – inspired double takes in readers and energized supporters and opponents of gay marriage alike.
[...] Another book I can’t wait to read (what a title, ahem), via an indispensable blog. [...]