The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion by Leo Steinberg (Pantheon, 1983, 222 pp.)
by Dr. Ralph Blair
Every fundamentalist owns a Bible containing Luke 2:21 and thus has a proof-text for the fact that Jesus had a penis. Christians say we believe that “the Word was made flesh”, that Jesus was born with a human body and “grew in stature” in that body. It was in that body that he lived, suffered and died for us. We ddon’t doubt that Jesus’ ears worked, that his circulatory system functioned according to the Creator’s design, or that his kidneys, bladder and urethra did what they were made to do (and though many Christians can’t picture Jesus urinating, neither can they picture Queen Victoria doing so). But hardest of all is acknowledging that Jesus’ circulatory system pumped blood into the arteries of his penis, swelling it to full erection. Christians can become singularly Docetic when it comes to this part of Jesus’ functioning anatomy. Our sex-negative society has a very difficult time with even a limp penis, let alone an erect one. As children, we were taught that our ears are our “ears”, our nose is our “nose” but that our penis is our “wee-wee” or one of many other euphemisms. I know of a grandfather who almost fell out of his chair when he overheard his six-year-old granddaughter casually report: “My vagina itches.” Christians who are squeamish about sex organs overlook the revealed fact that God commanded that his covenant6 with Abraham be memorialized in, of all places, the head of every penis! To be sure, other ancient peoples (e.g., Egyptians, Edomites, Ethiopians, Ammonites, Moabites) also practiced circumcision, but not for the same reason. Outside Israel, the rite was often related to phallus worship. In the New Testament, Paul uses terms of circumcision to speak of our relationship to Christ.
Now comes Leo Steinberg, a much honored art historian at the University of Pennsylvania, with a fully illustrated text presenting “a long-suppressed matter of fact: that Renaissance art … produced a large body of devotional imagery in which the genitalia of the Christ Child, or of the dead Christ, receive such demonstrative emphasis that one must recognize an ostentatio genitalium comparable to the canonic ostentatio vulnerum, the showing forth of the wounds”. Throughout the book, Steinberg argues that it was in an orthodox effort to demonstrate the full implications of incarnation and resurrection that this “necessary exhibit” of the genitals of Jesus Christ was celebrated and that “it was not the aesthetics of the nude figure that gave us” such display – the “last phase of Christian art that can claim full Christian orthodoxy”. In fact, as he notes, the “dramatization of nudity in high art is profoundly unclassical”. He offers many Renaissance examples of such orthodox emphasis on Christ’s genitals, beginning with Mary’s “unveil[ing] the Child or deck[ing] its loins with attention-gathering ceremony” and Jesus’ genital manipulation by himself and others (“the only baby in Western art so entertained”). Steinberg discusses Luther’s friends Cranach and Durer, and their depiction of the device of Christ’s banner or flying loinclogh as well as more explicit portrayals of the erection motif of the risen Lord by Heemskerck, Krug, Gellange and others in their efforts to communicate “the body’s best show of power” in proof of the resurrection. Ironically, one of Steinberg’s prime examples of this “erection-resurrection equation” is from the Bob Jones University Art Collection. Another aspect of Jesus’ relating to his genitals is that of “the groin-searching hand” – Jesus’ groin; either his or another’s hand – following the crucifixion. Says Steinberg: “To me it now seems that the dead Christ touching his groin is visualized in the totality of a promise fulfilled. His Passion completed, he points back to its beginning, much as his blood runs from the last wound back to the first [circumcision] – as if to say, consummatum est. In the joining of the first and last, the Passion is brought to perfection”.
From an artistic viewpoint, Steinberg judges some of these artists’ efforts to have failed “because the pictorial economy is thrown off balance by the genital symbol. Inordinately affective in psychic impact, [such depiction] remains exiguous on the scale of the picture – one either misses iut, or sees nothing else; so that the failure is ultimately a failure of art”. He sees the use of the flying loincloth as “an inspired invention” to correct for some of this artistic failure.
Whether or not Steinberg is correct in every interpretation – and there are problems – is much beside a most important point. If this book has no other effect than to serve as a trigger to get Christians in touch with the gap between our biblical insistence upon God’s having come “in the flesh” and our unbiblical uncomfortablness with the “flesh” in which God came, it is a useful book.