Lauren’s Beans

Ok, so I think I need to qualify some of my thoughts from my last post.  Mostly about exceptions! Exceptions are usually so much more interesting than the norm! 

The exceptions…. Greek and Roman art, Early to High Renaissance sculpture (the David of course is obviously not clothed) and well …  I can’t think of an and right now so I’ll just write about those.  (oh I just remembered a good and! ceiling frescos as a general genre. Though a lot of times I think that those go in the category of bad but very well executed joke) 

Ok so as preface I think that our opinions as art historians and popular culture are often more telling about our own culture than about the past ones that they are attempting to analyze or comment on. 

For the exceptions Greek and Roman and the Early to High Renaissance there is one popular modern explanation for the presence of men as nude subject, homosexuality.  So Greek and Roman art has beautiful men because those were societies in which homosexual behavior was acceptable and enshrined in art.  And Early to High Renaissance is copying meticulously their newly found discoveries, though it is telling that in the case of one of the most prominent artists of the Renaissance, Michelangelo, the very man himself, his tendency to portray men (and even his women as men) is attributed to his own homosexual tendencies.  He portrayed men as beautiful so to a modern art historian this reveals to us an important part of his personality while explaining the presence of beautiful men in his art.

What I find particularly interesting about this is not that Michelangelo or the Greeks were or might have been gay. The greeks did indulge in homosexual behavior and Michelangelo very well might have but, I find it more intriguing that this is the primary reasoning we as modern viewers and critics latch on to.  It shows our incapability to separate admiration from sexual desire in our own society, particularly when it comes to male bodies.  Like I was discussing before the same does not seem to be true of female bodies for our modern society. I tend to think that perhaps the absolute connection between admiration and sexual desire in regards to male nakedness is in fact a result of our own culture and perhaps wasn’t an issue in ancient Greece.  Women who admire and produce art with naked women in it aren’t considered immediately lesbian in our society so I don’t really see why it must follow that men who produced or admired art with naked men in it in ancient Greece were necessarily homosexual. And the same goes for Michelangelo in my book. 

This brings in a host of interesting questions though that in my opinion are far more interesting than speculation about people’s sexual orientation. What about the Greek society was different so that portraying men was ok? Why if it is now generally culturally acceptable to be gay do we not have the same attitude as the Greeks in art? What is it about our own society that makes male beauty tabu?

P.S. I’m not intending to become a famous artist, so the worst you will probably ever see from me is a art book on the subject that will become the mate to “The Breast in Art” a book I found in the art section of the book store the other day.