The Daily Telegraph - Features
Why the fuss about homoerotic Jesus? Artists have always made him sexy
This week, the more conservative echelons of Spanish society have been restive. For Easter Week in Seville, artist Salustiano García has produced a portrait of Jesus Christ that critics have described as “effeminate” – a word I hadn’t heard for about 25 years. García’s portrait is fairly horrid: a Calvin Klein model of a Messiah pouting against a crimson background, with a ruched cloth covering his modesty. Yet the outcry is – well, you might say “anachronistic”, were it not for the fact that the protests would have felt anachronistic in 1450.
For artistic depictions of Christ have, since the Renaissance, erred towards the risqué. At first, influenced by neoclassical ideas, and thus appreciative of ancient Greek art in all its glorious nudity, artists sought to make Jesus a glowing figure of taut muscle and sinew – someone to adore, but also someone to objectify. The list of examples could be endless. Take Michelangelo’s Cristo della Minerva (1521), which shows a hunky Jesus holding the cross like a modern-day Gladiator with a pugil stick. Or Caravaggio, one of the most famously gay artists in history, whose Incredulità di San Tommaso (c1601-2) shows the doubting apostle poking his finger into Christ’s flesh. The painting exists in two versions: in the one now known as “secular”, you can see Jesus’s exposed thigh, though even the “ecclesiastical” rendering has light falling upon him in such a way that his physicality dominates the work. (And the understanding of Christ’s wounds as genital symbols is one of the oldest in art history.)
Nor is it only Jesus who’s subject to homoerotic interpretation. Leonardo’s John the Baptist (1513) is certainly suggestive, armed with a coy smile and a finger pointing upwards. When you know that the sitter was Gian Giacomo Caprotti, Leonardo’s lover, the intimacy between artist and subject becomes clear, and the modern viewer might wonder which Heaven, exactly, John is pointing at. Then there’s St Sebastian, portrayed by Guido Reni as a curly haired moppet, and still a poster boy for gay desire for everyone from TS Eliot to the Pet Shop Boys.
I realise that a lot of what I’m describing is in the eye of the beholder; that in more devout times, many viewers would have looked at Michelangelo’s depiction of Jesus’s thighs and not salivated. Yet the link between spiritual and physical worship must have been tacitly considered.
And given the controversy that García’s depiction has caused among Spanish Catholics, it’s worth mentioning that the Catholics are partly to blame, or thank, for Jesus’s objectification. If we look at the Catholic Counter-Reformation, it’s clear that the Church’s push for artistic representations of Christ, intended to inspire devotion in the face of Protestantism, led to a fetishisation that served only to cement Renaissance ideals of the male body. Think of Velázquez, whose Christ Contemplated through the Christian Soul (c1628-9) depicts a tortured, exhausted figure seemingly pondering his faith. Yes, he’s in torment, but he also looks sensually charged, the intensity of his stare beguiling the susceptible viewer.
Even Christ post-crucifixion has often been suffused with erotic power. Charles LeBrun’s Dead Christ on the Knees of the Virgin Pieta (1645) sees his lifeless body splayed, that all-important muscle tone still intact. Of course, there’s an explicit link between sex and death: Freud told us as much, that our drive towards death, though the polar opposite of the procreational activity of sex, is bound up in the same compulsive tendencies. In a more officially repressed age such as the Baroque, it’s tempting to see such paintings as outlets for forbidden desire.
It took the repression of Victorian England to allow Jesus to be something else – to bundle his clothes back on and desexualise him. The pre-Raphaelites did this with everyone, but their depictions of Jesus are particularly striking when you consider what had gone before. William Holman Hunt’s The Light of the World (c1851-3), perhaps the greatest painting of the age, has Jesus bathed in a light around his head that’s meant to represent salvation – a very Victorian preoccupation bound up with doing good. Yet I’ve always found Hunt’s Jesus to be forbidding, a gatekeeper fixing his eyes intently on you and considering his judgment of your actions.
Today, in a secular age, Jesus can be anything to artists, sexual or otherwise, though predictably, it’s always the sexualisation that causes a stir. Piss Christ (1987), the controversial photograph by Andres Serrano, showing a crucified Jesus submerged in a tank of the artist’s own urine, takes fetishisation to the extreme with the idea that Jesus is at the mercy of someone’s bodily fluids (despite the artist’s statement that it’s about showing the extreme suffering of Christ).
Hence, since the Second World War, we’ve had BDSM Jesus, cross-dressing Jesus and gay-biker Jesus. In our age of mass consumerism, he’s a reusable cultural icon, fit for any occasion. In fact, there’s now speculation over his historical sexuality. Whereas Jesus’s celibacy was once accepted, even celebrated, fringe theories have since entered the mainstream. In a world where we’re all armchair psychologists, debate can be found raging as to whether Jesus was actually gay.
Because of all this, the current debate in Seville seems a little quaint. While I wouldn’t want to insult anyone’s faith – in fact, I admire the sincerity of the conservative outrage – I think we can learn a lot from works such as García’s, despite our personal beliefs. Through the centuries, the perpetuation of Jesus’s image, often coupled with the subversive expression of feelings that contemporary mores may not have encouraged, is precisely what has allowed that image to endure – and our own interpretations, homoerotic or not, will always be crucial to that.
At first, artists sought to make Jesus a glowing figure of taut muscle and sinew