Aquamanile in the Form of Aristotle and Phyllis
South Netherlandish
late 14th or early 15th century
text by Hank Manning
The Met Cloisters, a replica of a medieval castle atop a hill in Manhattan’s northernmost neighborhood, has collected more than fifty items from Western Europe, produced between the 13th and 15th centuries, to reanalyze them through modern queer theory. The collection—including statues, manuscripts, jewelry, and household items—reveals that, although the church wielded immense power during this period—and with this came restrictive laws on sex and marriage—gender fluidity, androgeny, and same-sex relations were neither hidden nor uniformly stigmatized in art.
Christ and Saint John the Evangelist
German
1300-1320
Much of Spectrum of Desire’s art considers the complex ways in which artists have interpreted Jesus Christ’s gender and relationships. Christians’ relationship with Jesus is paramount, and artists often framed this in erotic terms. Nuns forsake romantic relations on Earth and instead devote themselves spiritually to Jesus. This takes on another dimension in the frequent portrayal of Jesus as a handsome baby. Men, too, form special relationships with the prophet, such as Saint John the Evangelist, depicted in a 14th-century German statue in which the two men pose like a married couple, with right hands joined and Jesus’s left hand hugging John’s shoulder. (In another piece, the Virgin Mary appears in a similar union with her cousin Elizabeth.) Artists considered the fluidity of Jesus’s gender. After all, why should an image of God, creator of all people, conform to only one gender? His wound on the crucifix often resembles a vulva; his suffering is compared to birthing pangs, and the entire experience is said to be the birth of a religion.
Two Riddles of the Queen of Sheba
Upper Rhenish
circa 1490–1500
Artists of the time held broad perspectives on gender fluidity, even though they did not have anything approximating this modern term. At least thirty Christian saints changed their gender appearance, most from female to male. Considering how frequently God is depicted as a man, as well as the universal specter of patriarchy, it is not surprising that some considered it advantageous, maybe even a move closer to God, to become more masculine. Saint Wilgefortis begged God to make her less attractive, and God granted her request by giving her a beard. Saint Theodora of Alexandria became Theodore merely by changing her clothing and stated identity. Others believed that behavior, rather than appearance, determines gender. In Two Riddles of the Queen of Sheba, King Solomon explains that girls intrinsically catch apples in the laps of their dresses.
In other cases, androgyny was encouraged. Thomas Aquinas argued that angels do not assume bodies and thus transcend traditional gender categories. To become more angelic, therefore, men could make their gender more ambiguous. Some theologians, including Saint Augustine, considered chastity more virtuous even than sex within a marriage. To encourage this, some men endured castration, becoming eunuchs who then developed more feminine features. The 1533 Book of Hours illustrates the baptism of an Ethiopian eunuch, a tale from the New Testament.
Plate with Wife Beating Husband
Netherlandish
circa 1480
Gender role reversals were sometimes a source of humor or a warning of female power. Saint Jerome’s peers swapped his robes for a blue dress to publicly humiliate him. A copper water pitcher depicts a confident Phyllis on a confused Aristotle, grabbing his hair and sitting on his back as he crawls on all fours. A similar depiction on a Belgian plate shows a wife beating her husband’s exposed backside with a broom.
Base for a Statuette
South Netherlandish
1470–80
To be sure, much European medieval art portrayed sex as a dangerous temptation. A French health guide from the 1440s shows a fully clothed couple in missionary position and warns that too much sex causes weak kidneys and bad breath. A South Netherlandish statue, from around 1470, posits that the original sin came from same-sex attraction: it shows Eve in the Garden of Eden lured by an anthropomorphized female snake named Lilith. Courtly art sometimes associated eroticism with humiliation and cruelty. In the fable of Febilla and Virgil, drawn on a 14th-century French ivory tablet, both suffer. After Febilla publicly mocks Virgil’s advances, the poet—here also a sorcerer—extinguishes all the fires in the city—except for a candle stuck up the genitals of Febilla, who must then allow the entire populace to rekindle their flames through her. Even with positive connotations, love and pain often went hand in hand in the medieval imagination, as in a depiction of Jesus as Cupid, slinging a “javelin of love” at devotees.
Walking through the exhibition, it is readily clear that gender fluidity is neither a new invention nor inherently antithetical to Christianity. 700 years ago, although artists did not categorize their subjects as they do today, opinions on sex and gender were nonetheless varied and complex. While some today argue that gender re-assignment and fluidity are affronts to God’s will, many historic Christian saints saw these as ways to become closer to God. Philosophers and artists, whether aligned with the church or otherwise, presented equally wide-ranging perspectives on our relationships with our own identities, each other, and the divine.
Spectrum of Desire: Love, Sex, and Gender in the Middle Ages is on view through March 29 at the Met Cloisters, 99 Margaret Corbin Drive, New York