Gay renaissance painting

If you’ve wandered through a museum’s Renaissance collection, eyed off the number of writhing, muscular male bodies and thought that they felt rather homoerotic, you wouldn’t be alone. Michelangelo was one of the greatest masters of the High Renaissance, and his sexuality has been a subject of debate for centuries. The great and monumental Michelangelo, master of the High Renaissance, produced some of the most famous and impressive artworks of all time. From his colossal statue of David to the incredible Sistine Chapel ceiling, his artwork is a testament to the scope and ambition of human achievement.

Giovanni Bazzi, also known as Il Sodoma. (A mocking name aimed at Bazzi’s homosexuality that Bazzi later began to embrace) was a painter of the Italian renaissance, born in Savoy, Italy. He was influenced by the prior works of Leonardo Da Vinci and Raphael in his historical, mythical, and religious frescoes. Inside Linearity. In this article. In the next and last installment of our Pride Month series, we'll cover the subject of queer art history.

Renaissance Italy is popularly portrayed as a realm of carnal debauchery. One only needs to watch Tom Fontana’s Borgia () to understand common conceptions of Renaissance Italy as a realm of brutal acts, orgies, and affairs. Yet, is there any truth to these depictions?. The Renaissance encouraged individual thinking, so there was bound to be homosexual art work. Many painters knowingly added homoerotic undertones to their art, some even going as far as to paint same sex relationships on canvas. As Sappho said, "Someone, I tell you, will remember us even in another time.

Michelangelo Merisi (), better known as Caravaggio, wasn’t just a notorious gay artist, but the leader of a veritable queer artistic revolution who enjoyed breaking the rules of traditional iconography while refusing to follow the teachings all artists were given. A tiny caveat to your lucid and interesting discussion: The term "Renaissance" for the period of rebirth of secular culture at the end of the Middle Ages did not come into general use or, so far as I can find, even into existence, at least in English until the 19th century. Please, if you have a source for the Italians themselves calling it the Renaissance, share it with me : I will let the folks now teaching the Humanities course I used to teach know, so they can update their materials. The Fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in is one, sending Byzantine refugees fleeing to all corners of Europe, but notably to Italy, due not only to simple proximity, but also to the fact that both Venice and Genoa had substantial access to, and traffic with, the Black Sea region and Constantinople itself.

If you’ve wandered through a museum’s Renaissance collection, eyed off the number of writhing, muscular male bodies and thought that they felt rather homoerotic, you wouldn’t be alone. In fact, there’s an excellent explanation for why even the most sacred religious figures have been depicted in a way that to our modern eyes feels more gay bathhouse than Sunday service. Happy Pride! As Pride Month kicks off we at Abir Pothi compiled a list of paintings in art history that are, well, just a little bit fruity. Or you could just enjoy the beauty and affection in these artworks which they are meant to represent at their very core.

Significance to Queer Art History: Durer’s Bath House explores a homosocial environment of drinking, playing music, and flirting that illustrates Dürer’s experiences in bath houses and similar areas. That ardent lover was Michelangelo , who described Cavalieri in these glowing words in a letter from If only a portrait of Tommaso survived we could have seen his face, which the fiftysomething artist claimed in a poem was so beautiful it gave him a glimpse of paradise itself. Michelangelo did not just announce his love for this young upper-class citizen of Rome — who knew the pope and prominent cardinals socially — in verse and prose.

Arts & Entertainment 15 Gay Romances of the Renaissance Era Some of the greatest thinkers, artists, and royals in European history had same-sex relationships. .

By the late nineteenth century, Antinous had come to replace Ganymede as the icon of choice for gay art collectors. The troubling paedophilia aspect of the Ganymede myth was in some ways eclipsed by images of Antinous – a handsome young man instead of a cherubic child. Yet the stories of these two gay icons continued to speak to gay men. .