Cloister: Spectrum of Desire

Written By Alan Yang

Medieval

#2

Medieval #2

Through March 29, 2025

Desire in the Middle Ages was multifaceted. It could be courtly or carnal, sacred or subversive, and expressed as a kind of longing, suffering, or joy. Medieval artists could be both deeply serious and comical in their evocations of these feelings. Drawing on decades of scholarship, Spectrum of Desire opens up new ways of seeing the past through stirring works of art that inspire us to think more expansively about people who lived in the Middle Ages, their relationships, and the artworks they produced.

warn of the carnal lust that arise from comfortable beddings, delicious and soft shirts, and pleasurable robes of scarlet.

  • carnal

Overturning of traditional gender roles as Medieval joke

  • domineering

  • hapless

Aristotle and Phyllis

Angels do not assume bodies and thus transcend traditional gender categories (theologies like Thomas Aquinas)

Christ and disciple John

  • abandoned his earthly bride in favor of a spiritual marriage with Jesus

  • Monastics, especially Dominican revere their relationships

Gender variance is a cause for mockery

  • St Jerome signature brown robe swapped with a blue dress,  then wore the dress and “derided” by the crowed and fled the monastery

Virgil and Febilla

  • Not a Punitive message, but sexually violent fable

  • risqué exploration of sadomasochism

  • Acts of humiliation and cruelty tinged with eroticism were not unusual in courtly art

St Sebastian

  • tortured by an onslaught of arrows

  • depict as youthful beauty to underscore his imperviousness to suffering

  • Today, Sebastian is an emblem of queer beauty, erotic vulnerability, and hope in the face of suffering

Man of Sorrow

  • Medieval artists believed that Christ has female aspect

  • wound likened to a lactating breast or womb that gave birth to the Church

  • Vinegar soaked sponge and Roman lace alongside Christ’s Passion - further association between pain and love

Sketchbook

  • Coyly face each other

Parable of the Prodigal Son

  • Revel in the vices the parable so famously renounces: scenes of drinking, strip chess, 

Crucifixion with a Carthusian Monk

  • the pleasure of looking is harnessed in this painting

  • Invite a slow perusal of Christ’s dead body: the diaphanous loincloth, blood pouring down

  • Some other Carthusian warn against looking at naked Christ for impure thoughts 

  • / the saints are not looking

Wound of Christ

  • Resemblance to a vulva enhance its efficacy as an object of devotion

  • Medical Christians were instructed to find refuge in’s Christmas side as if it were a womb

  • some writings compare Christ’s suffering to the pangs of birth

The Visitation

  • Virgin Maemae and her cousin Elizabeth join  hands in a gesture resonant of a betrothal

Joachim and Anne

  • tender interaction shows the miraculous moment of the Virgin’s conception: a chaste integration enacted by drapery 

  • Joachim La cloak guard their intimacy and telegraph a suggestive energy

The Loving Soul Wounding Christ

  • Christ body: slender physiques shapely legs, radiant skin - aristocratic male beauty praised by poets

Writing Tablet Cover

Pad with Crucifixion

2003.131.3a,b

1970.324.9

Christ play the role of “Cupid”

  • In the medieval imagination, love and pain go hand in hand. 

  • When the god of love shoots arrows into the hearts of humans, he induces the sweet agony of desire.

Philip the Deacon baptize Simeon Bachos

  • castrated body akin to that of an angel

Saint Wilgefortis - grow beard

Saints change gender presentation over lifetime

  • over 30 instances

  • Almost all female to masculine

    • Saint Marino

    • \ relate to the country?

Saddle

  • then as now, the vocabulary of riding lends itself to double entendre

Women look askance as they light their candles inside Febilla

Remind people church’s centrality in delineating and arbitrating social roles

Moment Eve emerge from Adam’s rib

  • medieval theologian call it the perfect hermaphroditus- intersex body

  • Adam and Eve in two colors:

    • men are hot and dry

    • Women are cool and moist

  • Another object, Statuette base: Eve tempted by Lilith, female head serpent 

  • Eve eat forbidden fruit is the very cause of Sodomia - collection of sins include same sex desire 

Strip of her finery

Alan Yang
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