Gifted with an exquisite feeling for the beauty of the human body, Sodoma excelled himself when he was contented with a single igure. His “S. Sebastian,” notwithstanding its wan and faded coloring, is still the very best that has been painted.Suffering, refined and spiritual, without contortion or spasm, could not be presented with more pathos in a form of more surpassing loveliness. This is a truly demonic picture in the fascination it exercises and the memory it leaves upon the mind. Part of its unanalysable charm may be due to the bold thought of combining the beauty of a Greek Hylas with the Christian sentiment of martyrdom.Only the Renaissance could have produced a hybrid so successful, because so deeply felt.
—John Addington Symonds, Renaissance in Italy
§1. Hegel’s philosophy was often identified with conservative cultural politics in its country of origin. But in the second half of the nineteenth century it also warranted art and social criticism that was identified with progressive cultural politics, especially in Britain. Indeed, Hegelian argumentation provided a specifically homoeroticist cultural politics with a way to regard itself as a more—even the most—advanced stage of modern consciousness. By the 1860s and seventies, the antiquarian outlook of Winckelmann (chapter 1) had become a liability for writers such as John Addington Symonds, Oscar Wilde, and Edward Carpenter. But late-nineteenth-century Hegelianism challenged Winckelmannian nostalgia. And it suggested the futuristic idea that the evolution of human consciousness might some day catch up with the premature occurrence of its advanced form in a few current misfits—misfits including artists or the “artistical,” to use Wilde’s characteristically sardonic term for men and women fitted out to recognize beauty.
Nonetheless the Hegelian dialectic has always been a double-edged sword. The Winckelmannian homoeroticist was born too late as it were; in that cultural-temporal position he could only seek to emulate the aesthetically supreme culture of an ancient (and erotically more complete) civilization. By contrast, the Hegelian homoeroticist—as it were an advanced misfit—must have been born too early. And his dialectical position was not fully clear. His form of life might exemplify progress in human consciousness, a movement toward the Absolute in Hegel’s sense. According to Symonds, for example, a Winckelmannian “taste for statues” (or certain statues at any rate) could be seen as one of the leading edges of human culture. But the same form of life might represent the most unadvanced possibilities. According to Darwinian and Freudian theory, the same taste for the very same statues might well be a case of sexual selection run amok, of sexuality oriented in the wrong direction (chapters 5 and 6), or a symptom of autoeroticism gone astray (chapters 6 and 7). Maybe it was a pathology or a degeneration; certainly it could be described as an infantilism or a regression. The line between these dialectical possibilities—progressive and regressive, transcendent and decadent—was very fine. Everything turned on nuances of the artist’s or the art lover’s erotic and ethical interests.
§2. In March 1873 Symonds was anxiously correcting the proofs of his Studies of the Greek Poets, soon to be published in London. He was thirty-three years old and a schoolmaster at Clifton College outside Bristol, the city where he had been born. The publication would be his first truly scholarly book. He was well aware that the last chapter, “The Genius of Greek Art,” could lead to trouble. To help describe the Lysippan Apoxyomenos in the Vatican (figure 19), for example, he had quoted the first line of a couplet in the Greek Anthology: “Blessed is he who, being in love, practices gymnastic exercises.” (The Apoxyomenos is presented in the act of scraping oil from his body after a bout at the wrestling grounds or a similar exertion; it fitted, virtually exemplified, the Winckelmannian teleology of erotic and artistic Nachahmung considered in chapter 1.) Now, however, Symonds was worried, as he told his friend Henry Graham Dakyns, a fellow master, that some “malevolent critic [might] hint what the ending of that couplet is”: “Then coming home, [he] sleeps all day long with his handsome boy.” Because Symonds did not want “wantonly to offend” his readers, he considered substituting another poem for the lines he had quoted. But in the end he let the text stand as it had been written.1
It would be some time before his fears proved justified. But early in 1877, St. John Tyrwhitt (a minor expert in art criticism among other things) published a hard-hitting essay on the “Greek Spirit in Modern Literature.” Reviewing Symonds’s second series of Studies of the Greek Poets, published in 1876, as well as the first, published in 1873, he accused their author of having been seduced by the phallicism and sensuality of Greek sculpture and the immoral poetry of Walt Whitman, which Symonds had cited as a modern equivalent (though not a modern imitation) of the Greek spirit in art.2 Among the touchy materials, the second volume contained an essay on Achilles that dealt with the hero’s “chivalrous” love for Patroklos (this essay, the earliest in the group, had been held back from the first series) as well as an essay on Hero and Leander in which Symonds dwelled rapturously on the supposed ideal beauty of the legendary youth.
FIGURE 19. Lysippus (c. 270–300 BC), Apoxyomenos (“The Scraper”), Roman copy of bronze original (c. 325–300 BC). Marble, ht. 205.7 cm. Vatican Museums, Vatican State. Courtesy Alinari/Art Resource, New York.
Tyrwhitt’s damning essay set the terms for much of the public reception of Symonds’s work for the rest of his life and beyond. In June 1895, for example, shortly after Symonds’s death, an unsigned essay appeared in the Quarterly Review under the title “Latter-Day Pagans.” (The article was based on the recent publication of Horatio Brown’s biography of Symonds.) The latter-day pagans of the title probably denoted the contemporary circle around Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas; Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray had been published in June 1890, and in March 1895 he had brought his ill-advised suit for libel against the Marquess of Queensberry. But the essay in the Quarterly Review attributed the animating philosophy of the group largely to Symonds, though probably its author did not know that Wilde was an admirer of Symonds’s Studies of the Greek Poets. Like Tyrwhitt, the author complained that in Symonds’s writing “the sacred name of friendship is profaned on the abused authority of Plato.”3 In 1877 Tyrwhitt’s essay probably had a good deal to do with Symonds’s failure to secure the professorship of poetry at Oxford; as Symonds recognized, the review was a “good party move in the matter.”4 Symonds felt compelled to reply at length in a new conclusion to Studies of the Greek Poets. (It would appear in 1879 as the final chapter for the second edition of the second series.) There he tried to distinguish between the real-life “morality” of the Greeks (that is to say, their documented sex life) and their “moral attitude,” trying to condemn certain aspects of the former while continuing to affirm the latter—to underline, in fact, what “Christians still have to learn from the Greeks.” But by then the damage was done, and Symonds never fully recovered.
In the meantime, however, in a burst of energy between 1873 and 1877, Symonds conceived, wrote, and published the first three volumes of Renaissance in Italy, his most enduring work of historical scholarship and criticism.5 Compared to Charles C. Perkins’s Italian Sculptors and J. A. Crowe and J. B. Cavalcaselle’s History of Painting in Italy, his principal sources, Symonds’s volume on The Fine Arts, the third volume of Renaissance in Italy, did not contain much new evidence. Sometimes, in fact, he parroted the opinions of earlier writers, especially John Ruskin. Still, in Stones of Venice, published between 1851 and 1853, Ruskin had deplored the strands of classicistic Hellenism in Renaissance art, whereas Symonds, a classicist, sometimes wanted to approve them in The Fine Arts. In working out his own narrative in the wake of Ruskin’s, then, his criticism often had to be original. Certainly he had inspected most of the works of painting and sculpture (sometimes in the company of Ruskin himself) that he described.
On the basis of his impressions, he presented an astute overview. It took aim at his main antagonists, Alexis-François Rio’s De la poésie chrétienne of 1836 (expanded in 1861–67 as De l ’art chrétienne) and Lord Lindsay’s Sketches of the History of Christian Art of 1847. These histories of Christian art in the later Middle Ages had been written from ultramontane points of view. In fact, they urged that the secular drift of Renaissance art, as Symonds put it, was “a plain decline from good to bad” (135). For every spiritual lapse or degeneration noted by Rio and Lord Lindsay, however, Symonds discovered an artistic success, whether or not it was spiritually satisfactory in Rio’s or Lord Lindsay’s terms, that is, properly Catholic. At crucial points Symonds took a firm stand on points of scholarly dispute, offering new reasons to adopt certain historical perspectives. Probably the most influential was his proof that some of the sonnets of Michelangelo Buonarotti had been written to a young nobleman, Tommaso Cavalieri, and not, as Michelangelo’s grandnephew and other modern editors had supposed, to the artist’s spiritual friend, Countess Vittoria Colonna. Editing the sonnets in 1623, the younger Michelangelo “did not hesitate to introduce such alterations as destroyed their obvious intention” (375; he had changed the gender of several pronouns from male to female).6
In The Fine Arts, then, Symonds’s contributions to scholarship were quite substantial. But more important for my purposes, Symonds implied that at its very foundation modern art involved the literal incorporation of homoeroticism, a love of man for man that was both spiritual and sensual in nature (though only occasionally sexual). Symonds did not work this thesis out explicitly, nor could he state it directly. But it animated the dialectics presented in The Fine Arts.
I use the term dialectics advisedly. The most immediate stimulations for The Fine Arts included not only the research that Symonds was conducting on Italian humanism. It also involved a renewed engagement with the philosophy of Hegel. Symonds’s interest dated to the mid-1860s, when the Hegelian philosopher Thomas H. Green supervised a course of reading for him in philosophical idealism. Since then, Symonds had likely continued to have discussions about Hegel with Green, who had meanwhile become his brother-in-law, and with his friend Henry Sidgwick, a moral philosopher he much admired. (It is doubtful that the special systems of these mentors had much influence on him; for him, they were exponents of Hegelianism.) Both friends also served as counselors to him in times of crisis. Sidgwick, for example, recommended that he destroy his homoerotic verses and put the interests that they relayed entirely out of his mind—advice he did not and could not take. At any rate, in October and November of 1875, and “taking a holiday from [his] labours at Italian History,” Symonds was reading Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics and Logic and planned to read—probably did read—the Phenomenology of Spirit.
As Symonds told correspondents, he read Hegel’s Aesthetics “with great pleasure and profit,” for it was “very like reading poetry: it is so fascinating, so free, & so splendid.”7 He especially approved Hegel’s discussions of Classical Greek art and literature, which struck him as “luminous in the last degree.”8 But he had reservations about Hegel’s general philosophy of the place of art in the development of Spirit.
It does not help one much about the problem of Art and Morality, or about the Canon of beauty—what beauty is.… I have not yet appropriated [Hegel’s] book or thought my own difficulties out enough to state this criticism forcibly. But, as far as I can see, a student may absorb all that Hegel says, and yet obtain no guide to his taste, no culture of his [senseperception]—in other words he will have no compass by which to steer his course in the Pitti or the Vatican, though he can sit at home and write fine paragraphs about das sinnliche Scheinen der Idee.9
In The Fine Arts, Symonds adopted a Hegelian scheme for the history of Renaissance art. But he also tried to be a guide to taste. Some of his critical judgments were at odds with the dialetical scheme, while others were essential to it. Regardless, and as critics like Tyrwhitt complained, many seemed to be opportunities for Symonds to dilate on homoerotically attractive works. The Fine Arts continually pointed out the beautiful or handsome boys, youths, men, and angels who appear throughout Renaissance sculpture and painting; indeed, the book was a virtual cicerone for the homoeroticist tourist. Often Symonds’s observations appeared in asides because they could not be fully integrated into the Hegelian history narrated in the book: the squires and pages in the backgrounds of Carpaccio’s paintings, with “all the charm of similar subordinate personages in Pinturicchio, with none of his affectation” (266), or his beautiful angiolini, “with long flakes of flaxen hair falling from their foreheads” (267); the shepherd in the mysterious Greeting by Giorgione (the figure “has a whole Arcadia of intense yearning in the eyes of sympathy he fixes on the two lovers” in the scene; 270; the painting, thought to be a Meeting of Jacob and Rachael, is now attributed to Palma Vecchio); the ranks of boys behind the central group in Michelangelo’s Madonna with Jesus and St. John (290); the young musicians at the marriage feast of Mary in Luini’s fresco at Brera (“in idyllic painting of a truly great type I know of nothing more delightful”); or the ivy-crowned Genius at the foot of the cross in the same painter’s fresco at Lugano (355).
At one point, Symonds was carried away. He was fascinated by the painter Luca Signorelli, who supposedly focused on the naked male body “without sentiment, without voluptuousness, without any second intention whatsoever” (208).
When Luca Signorelli drew naked young men for a background to his picture of Madonna and the infant Christ, he created for the student a symbol of the attitude assumed by fine art in its liberty of outlook over the whole range of human interests. Standing before this picture in the Uffizi, we feel that the Church, while hoping to adorn her cherished dogmas with aesthetic beauty, had encouraged a power antagonistic to her own, a power that liberated the spirit she sought to enthral, restoring to mankind the earthly paradise from which monasticism had expelled it.
(17)
Signorelli’s liberation attained its zenith, Symonds thought, in a picture of his son Antonio, dead of the plague. According to Giorgio Vasari’s life of the painter, Signorelli modeled the figure of the dead Christ in a large Lamentation directly from the boy’s naked cooling corpse. Although the painter rendered the lifeless body of the muscular youth with minute care and tenderness, and the picture expressed “the whole range of human interests,” for obvious reasons it could hardly be said to be erotic. It is not clear whether Symonds had seen the painting, now in Cortona. But in a footnote, and in order “to emphasize and illustrate Renaissance feeling,” he went so far as to append a version of his own poem on this strange subject (204–5). What mattered to him in the story of the painting was the way in which Signorelli supposedly translated both his familial love and his Christian faith into art. Presumably the painter had set both love and faith aside for art.
Nonetheless a reader might feel that Symonds was overly interested in Signorelli’s interests in the figuration of male bodies. In a long paragraph, for example, Symonds classified Signorelli’s treatments of the male figure into four types: the demoniac (the fiends of the Inferno at Orvieto); the “abstract,” which seems to denote the nakedness of bodies not always to be appreciated as beautiful (some of the figures in the Resurrection at Orvieto); the adolescent, depicting the “beauty of young men copied from choice models,” that is, the soldiers, princelings, and other “lawless young men… in their pure untempered character” whom Signorelli loved to paint in their colorful dress; and the angelic, fair, grave, swift, and deadly, in turn divided into five carefully observed subtypes, the heralds, the sentinels, the musicians, the executioners, and the messengers of God (209–10). All this variety ostensibly relayed Signorelli’s concept of the human body “as the supreme decorative principle” (290). But it also created a concentrated, composite image of a particular body—an imago behind all the types and subtypes—that supposedly had really delighted the artist and (in an obvious transference) had transfixed Symonds himself: “the firmly planted calves and brawny thighs, the thick hair, broad shoulders, spare flanks, and massive gluteal muscles of a man of twenty-two or upwards, whose growth has been confined to the development of animal force” (210). Symonds probably had in mind many of the nude men in the Resurrection; some of them face away from the observer, thus presenting their “massive gluteal muscles.” But the description could be extended to angels and young townsmen in other works by the artist, such as a puzzling drawing of a young man carrying the dying or dead body of another man (figure 20), and even to the stricken body of the painter’s son.
FIGURE 20. Luca Signorelli (1442–1524), Nude Man Bearing A Corpse, c. 1500. Black chalk and ink on yellow paper, 32.5 × 25.5 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Michèle Bellot. Courtesy Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, New York.
In his unpublished autobiographical memoir, Symonds admitted that he “used to brood over the forcible spasmodic vigor” of the bodies of the damned Signorelli had painted at Orvieto, which he had known since childhood in photographs bought by his father. Early on, then, they had created what might be called a fantasmatic iconicity (chapter 10).10
The aesthetic and moral question—the real question for criticism—was whether the animal force and sensuality of this fascinating body, this imago, had been rendered with self-conscious homoerotic intention. Despite Signorelli’s “liberty of outlook over the whole range of human interests,” his paintings of male bodies, according to Symonds, had no “second intention”: they had no sexual implications despite their sensuous interest in the bodies of naked young men and indeed despite the fact that they harbored and repeated a fantasmatic ideal of such bodies. It was precisely for this reason, in fact, that the modern critic could safely dwell on them. But if there was supposedly no troublesome “second intention” in Signorelli’s paintings, it was hard to know how to describe their primary intention without introducing homoerotic motivation. And whatever Signorelli’s intentions, it was not easy to dispose of the parallel issue of the critic’s motivation. Symonds’s homoerotic judgment of taste was clearly supposed to be aligned in some way with a homoerotic history in Renaissance art—to be aesthetic recognition of that history.
§3. In making discriminations about the erotic and moral intentions of Signorelli, in the early 1870s Symonds could not have availed himself of the concept of homosexuality. This was a newly invented category to which he would devote sustained attention a few years later, especially in A Problem in Modern Ethics, an essay privately printed in 1893. In the early 1870s Symonds had gone only so far as to collect and collate the evidence bearing on the nature and history of ancient Greek pederasty, an inquiry privately printed as A Problem in Greek Ethics in 1883. Still, in writing The Fine Arts he did have a substantial psychological framework for thinking about eroticism—a framework apposite to the questions of aesthetics and art criticism.
Symonds’s father, Dr. John Addington Symonds, a well-known general practitioner, had helped to refine the theory of mania sine delirio, as it was called in 1801 by Philippe Pinel, or “moral insanity,” to use the term applied by James Cowles Prichard, a doctor (famous for his Researches Into the Physical History of Man, published in 1813) who had been Dr. Symonds’s mentor. “Mania without delirium” or “moral insanity” designated the supposed fact that human feelings could be perverted without any organic correlate or obvious perceptual disturbance—no “lesion of judgment,” as Dr. Symonds put it. The rubric could be applied to depression, addiction, brutality, jealousy, temper, and financial or like recklessness.11 But excessive fascination with sexual matters and perversions of erotic interest were sometimes hinted at.
Dr. Symonds probably regarded Charles Vaughan, his son’s headmaster at Harrow in the mid-1850s, to have been suffering a diminishment of moral self-control (and therefore of criminal responsibility) when he had an affair with one of Symonds’s classmates—an offense reported to his father by the younger Symonds. Instead of pursuing the public destruction of Vaughan, however, Dr. Symonds acted as if he were obliged to treat him for moral insanity; he hoped to see Vaughan get well, though he did block his further promotion in the Anglican hierarchy. This episode helped define Symonds’s sense of himself as divided or even duplicitous: at the time, he experienced feelings that he equated with Vaughan’s, for whom he felt “dumb persistent sympathy” (as well as a “keen inquisitive interest” in the liaison with Symonds’s classmate). Virtually at the same time as the Vaughan affair unfolded at school, in fact, Dr. Symonds had to insist that his son avoid a Bristol choirboy, Willie Dyer, on whom he had fixated. (The usual treatment for moral insanity was to isolate the patient from the stimulations that provoked him, committing him to care—the asylum—if needed.) He disobeyed his father and continued to try to see Willie in secret. As he wrote later in his memoirs, “this deceit, and the encouragement of what I then recognized as an immoral impulse, brought me cruel wrong.” Nevertheless, and as he wrote of another clandestine affair, “vicious act is not so baleful to the soul as vitiated fancy.”12
Echoes of his father’s psychological opinions continued to resonate in the thought of the younger Symonds long after the doctrines had been superseded by the medical psychology and psychopathology of the 1870s and eighties (see chapter 7). Symonds differed from his father chiefly in concluding that homoerotic affection, even if it was a moral insanity, did involve delirio, that is, misguided or incorrect thought tending toward delusion. Insofar as homoerotic feelings became homosexual or imagined homosexual consummation, they involved, he thought, a belief in something unreal—an image or vision, a virtual hallucination, of what could not possibly be, what should not exist. Homoerotic moral insanity, then, shaded into actual perceptual and cognitive disturbance. Throughout his life, Symonds took himself to suffer acutely from the latter condition; he associated constant painful difficulties with his eyesight, possibly a migraine condition of some kind, with the “black broad-arrow of [moral] insanity” that marked him (he imagined) like a brand.13 By the same token, however, the mania could be the source of original seeing. It could open the way to insight into a new world or a new self—a world and a self perhaps impossible to realize fully in life but nonetheless virtualized within fantasy and art. In fact, it was along such paths of visualization and virtualization that homoeroticism primally enters the world. And if it enters the world in the right kind of way, it can change the world—the world not limited to the inner world, the depths of the mind, of the subject. It can realize itself or come into being.
Symonds took his “deceit” in pursuing clandestine homoerotic romances to be an aspect of his “double consciousness” or “duality,” a partial selfunconsciousness typically manifested in intense erotic reveries, in waking dreams, and in hypnagogic fantasies. Again, Dr. Symonds’s vocabulary shaped his own. His father had practically specialized in questions of hallucination, spectral apparition, and somnabulism. (Perhaps this was because his own young son, his namesake, had fantastical dreams, imagined ghostly companions, and sleepwalked incorrigibly.) As a boy, moreover, the younger Symonds had been deeply affected by reading articles and books in his father’s library on ghosts: these writings “took hold of my imagination,” he wrote in his memoirs, and “worked potently and injuriously on my brain.”14
As Dr. Symonds described the “unusual state” of double consciousness:
The individual, though awake, perceives objects only in relation to the new phase of the mind, which has lost its habitual memories, and emotions, and sentiments, and is the temporary subject of a different group,—so different, that they change for the time the mental identity; for identity is the me,—the ego, around which remembered objects and ideas are clustered, while they are at the same time interpenetrated with an infinite variety of emotions and sentiments, and harmoniously mingled with present perceptions.15
Dr. Symonds could have written these lines about his son. Until his twenty-eighth year, the younger Symonds suffered from a recurring “trance,” as he named it, that consisted in a “graduate but swiftly progressive obliteration of space, time, sensation, and the multitudinous factors of experience which seemed to qualify what we are pleased to call ourself.” As he went on to say, “In proportion as these conditions of ordinary consciousness were subtracted, the sense of an underlying or essential consciousness acquired intensity. At last nothing remained but a pure, absolute, abstract self.”16
In his memoirs, Symonds asserted that the trance was fundamentally a “doubt about reality”—as it were “an initiation into the mysteries of scepticism.” “Often I have asked myself with anguish, on awakening from that formless state of denuded keenly sentient being, which is the unreality: the trance of fiery vacant apprehensive sceptical self from which I issue, or these surrounding phenomena and habits which veil that inner self and build a self of flesh-and-blood conventionality?” The trance seemed to suggest, in other words, that waking life could be the dream. In fact, it might be possible that “another garment of sensitive experience [could] clothe again that germ of self” that had originally emerged in the trance. And this new self, Symonds thought, might be more real than the “daily experiences—physical, moral, intellectual, emotional, practical, with which [he] compared it.” This notion impressed the growing boy; it had, he said in retrospect, a “permanent effect” on his later intellectual and aesthetic outlook.17
The trance itself did not actually provide a concrete vision of the new “garment of sensitive experience” that would reclothe the “pure, absolute, abstract self.” If it dissolved the existing world of sensible appearances and empirical interactions, it did not replace them with new impressions—a vision of another empirical reality. Still, the trance was only one aspect of young Symonds’s life of baroque reveries. And these also included frankly erotic, indeed brutally sexual, “waking dreams” or hypnagogic visions; he dated them to the seventh or eighth year of his childhood if not earlier. In Sexual Inversion, cowritten with Havelock Ellis in the early 1890s, Symonds recounted the earliest of these homosexual dream visions, a scene of masochistic and fetishistic sexual subservience to a “company of naked adult men: sailors, such as I had seen about the streets of Bristol”; this account was the centerpiece of his case study of himself.18
Moreover, the mere occurrence of the trance seems to have led him to begin imagining, to begin imaging, what might lie on the other side of his psychic break with the world—to begin to discover the shadowy outlines of other worlds. Specifically, it provoked Symonds to recognize the role of literary and pictorial arts in his life—his need for them. And it was soon fleshed out in dreams and reveries that actually drew on the forms and images of artworks—poems, paintings, and sculptures—in young Symonds’s world. For this very reason, in turn, artistic statements of the sentiment or meaning of the trance, or seeming fulfillments of its vacant visions in representational projections (often homoerotic), inevitably thrilled the young man when he encountered them in his reading, education, and travels. The Lysippan Apoxyomenos in the Vatican (see figure 19) was a prime example. Among other things, it reminded him of a seductive (and sexually available) young man in Bristol whom he had shyly adored from afar—in turn a replication of Willie, of the original sailors, and of other shadowy figures of the inner world.
In sum, then, in an obscure way Symonds could connect—evidently did connect—the reductions of double consciousness (or what might be called the “transcendental ego” in Edmund Husserl’s sense) with the emergence of something akin to Hegel’s absolute Spirit or at least akin to the progress of Spirit in fully realizing itself in the world and as the world. But in Symonds’s own time and place he could not, of course, effect a fully systematic calibration of Hegelian and psychopathological terms, let alone appeal to the later philosophical phenomenology or psychoanalysis that his own thinking partly prefigured. (In this respect we might compare—I will compare—the more academic and “theoretical” work of Michel Foucault [chapter 9].) Rather it was in his art history and criticism that he labored to express himself on these matters.
§4. Symonds narrated the development of Renaissance art in Italy according to a striking scheme. According to The Fine Arts, and like Symonds himself, the Italian Renaissance (and in particular the artists of the Renaissance) had a divided, “double” spirit. Symonds used the term Spirit (Geist) in a Hegelian sense to denote the mind or consciousness of an era. But his readers needed to beware a second sense of spirit: namely, spirituality (religious faith, unworldliness, or saintliness), that is, Spirit unfolding toward its Absolute in a specifically Christian consciousness after art. The shuttle between these definitions of spirit partly enabled Symonds’s argument. But it also created some confusion. To be specific, Spirit in the Renaissance was caught between the attractions of classicism, modeled on the arts of Greco-Roman antiquity, with an attendant, but modern, paganism, on the one hand, and an essentially medieval Christianity and its attendant spirituality on the other hand. Of course, this was not a new observation, even though it was offered by Symonds as a corrective to Rio and Lord Lindsay. In fact, it was a cliché. But by giving it particularity in Hegelian terms Symonds extracted a rich history of art from it.
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit dealt with the history of Spirit as such. And in this history Greek art, or “religion in the form of art,” occupied a middle place between mere artificing in the pre-Greek world and abstract (though still Christian) theophilosophy in the modern world. Hegel’s Aesthetics, however, dealt largely with the history of Spirt in art, whether produced in the pre-Greek world, in Hegel’s modern world, or anywhere in between. And in this history the early Renaissance art addressed in Symonds’s book was not well located by Hegel. In turn, then, Symonds’s integration of the two overlapped and interlocked Hegelian art-historical systems could lead to surprises and puzzles. Renaissance art was not simply unfolding toward the philosophical and Christian horizons of the modern consciousness, superseding the fully self-conscious Greek spirit in art, that is, the supposed premodern completion of the work of Spirit in art. It was also partly moving away from medieval Christian spirituality and toward the work of a modern Spirit in art. (Vide Signorelli’s anatomically exact painting of his plague-stricken son as the dead Christ.) And in doing so it was in part recalling the ancient Spirit in art, and possibly reaffirming its pagan philosophy of nature—that is, its actual historical nature cults as distinct from its anthropomorphic “religion in the form of art.” Renaissance art was moving in both directions simultaneously, though in large measure unwittingly.
According to a gross or simplified Hegelian logic derived from the Phenomenology of Spirit, when Spirit remains “divided” in this way, it must fail to become fully self-conscious—self-conscious both of itself and of its productions. It remains “Egyptian” instead of becoming “Greek.” (According to the Phenomenology of Spirit, the Egyptian artificer, unlike the Greek sculptor, architect, or dramatist, supposedly did not fully recognize himself in the objects he made in his own image.) Indeed, in “The Genius of Greek Art” in Studies of the Greek Poets, Symonds had written, following Hegel, that “the Egyptians had not discovered the magic word by means of which the world might be translated into the language of mankind: their art still remained within the sphere of symbolism which excludes true sympathy.” If the magic word speaks of “true sympathy,” especially in the sense given to that phrase by Symonds’s modern artistic hero, the poet Walt Whitman, it must be eros—a word not really to be found in Hegel’s description of the foundations of Greek culture. As Symonds went on to explain, the defining characteristic of Greek eros was its naturalness; though fully conscious, it was not self-conscious in the sense of being overselfaware and therefore self-policed or self-sanctioning. In fact, its origins and continued vitality, Symonds thought, lay in an uninhibited pagan worship of nature, not least the sexual functions personified by the fauns and maenads, by Hermaphrodite and Priapus, and by Ganymede and the beautiful young men who were the real-life objects of the “dedicatory epigrams of the Anthology,” such as the epigram Symonds had self-consciously quoted to explicate the Lysippan Apoxyomenos.19 But the modern spirit in Renaissance art was not conscious in this way—that is, naturally but not excessively self-conscious. Rather it was a post-Greek (or as it were neoclassical) variant or dialectical efflorescence of the pre-Greek “Egyptian” condition of consciousness. It differed from an “Egyptian” symbolism mostly in the fact that its failure to achieve natural self-consciousness was due to its overself-consciousness—an overself-consciousness specifically of its (self-)anthropomorphic imaging. As we will see, in crucial respects this overawareness was equivalent to a kind of becoming-unconscious as well.
If Renaissance art was only partly conscious, of course, its becoming-self-conscious, its margin or horizon of self-consciousness, might be attributed to its (new) classicism. According to Hegel’s scheme in the Phenomenology of Spirit, the Greek artists had self-consciously recognized themselves in the images they had made (and as their makers), including images of nature and the gods. Therefore the pressing question must be what Greek art was (or what it knew) that had impelled Renaissance art toward increasing self-consciousness when it came to know it too. The historical recursion was fully clear to Symonds: Renaissance in Italy was in large measure the question of Greek art in Italy. And in “Achilles,” “The Genius of Greek Art,” and elsewhere, Symonds had already addressed what Greek art knew—what it loved—that had constituted its self-consciousness in image making. Not to put too fine a point on it, it was homoerotic eros or “true sympathy,” the romantic chivalry of an Achilles: that love of man for himself and for other men both depicted in the Lysippan Apoxyomenos and needed (in pederasty) to create it.20
At the same time, of course, the other pole of the double mind of Renaissance art, as it came to know what Greek art was, what it knew, and what it loved, must have been unable to be fully conscious of it. Indeed, it refused it: its love of man could not be quite the same as the love sung in the Musa Puerilis and incarnated in the Apoxyomenos. Nevertheless this becoming-unconscious of homoerotic consciousness could likewise be described as self-consciousness. Christian spirituality made certain homoerotic possibilities (namely, any self-conscious enactment of them in the actual manner of the Greeks) spiritually impossible by manifestly speaking against them—by trying to shame them. Cultural historians after Symonds, notably Foucault, developed their own versions of this story (see chapter 9). To an extent it has become cliché. In his time, however, Symonds was trying to engage questions that had rarely been framed. And here we have the beginning of the key to the critical and historical puzzle of Signorelli and many other Renaissance artists as Symonds saw them. Without too much artificiality we might describe it (though Symonds did not) as the double bind of the double mind of the Renaissance spirit in art.
Admittedly the story was complex. In the context of the general or gross division or doubleness, the dialectic I have sketched supposedly unfolded historically as a threefold development of Renaissance art from the mid-thirteenth to the mid-sixteenth century. In the first phase classicism revitalized—or “idealized”—Christian art. In the second phase Christianity and an absorbed classicism achieved a kind of balance. In the third phase classicism, taken too far, defeated itself; it required agents of the Church (echoed by the present-day critics of later Renaissance art such as Rio, Ruskin, and the others) to reassert the Christian ideal. Each of these phases was unstable, internally contradictory; each produced great originality and progress in art as well as inert and unhealthy aesthetic failures. Throughout its development, then, Renaissance art had the “defects of its qualities” (130), though Symonds could never quite clarify whether this derived from the double (and antithetical) orientations of Spirit in art or from the incoherence (or contradictoriness) of each successive synthesis in its unfolding. Moreover, and creating an art-historical kaleidoscope, Symonds did not want to tell this story exclusively from the side of classicism, of newly “Greek” self-consciousness in modern culture—the kind of progressive line of development in ancient culture that Hegel had pursued in the Phenomenology of Spirit. This story could readily become a tale merely of the putative modern renaissance of Greek culture, especially of its erotic and ethical institutions. Aside from being factually tendentious (there was no renaissance of the principal erotic institutions of canonical Greek ethics), this history would be as one-sided as the histories of art penned by Rio and Lord Lindsay. Precisely because Symonds was dealing with a modern culture (that is, art after the Greeks), he also wanted—he needed—to tell the Christian side of the story. And this was not only because he was morally uncertain, as a Christian, about ancient Greek ethics, though indeed he was. He was also sometimes aesthetically displeased with neo-Greek art.
§5. All this was especially visible in Symonds’s chapter on Renaissance sculpture in Italy, which he considered in a self-contained chapter in The Fine Arts (73–130). In particular, it was in sculpture (and as a function of its emulation of the sensuously naturalistic anthropomorphic figures produced in Greek sculpture) that homoeroticism inserted itself into modern art and literally drove its subsequent dialectical unfolding. This was not quite the same thing as saying that we can see or discover homoerotic beauty in modern art, though we can often do so, as Symonds’s litany of examples attested. Rather it was to say that modern art took the historical form that it did because it engaged the homoerotic beauty of its models.
In this light the first truly Renaissance sculpture identified in Symonds’s history assumed great and tendentious importance. Modern art might well have been launched in Nicola Pisano’s Deposition, a sculpture in high relief for the lunette of one of the side doors of San Martino at Lucca, dated by scholarly authorities to 1233 or 1237 (figure 21). For Symonds, the work displayed noble forms, largeness of style, breadth of drapery, freedom of action, and, above all, unity of design (78). But the origin of this unity was uncertain. Symonds preferred a source in Greco-Roman art; when compared with early Christian sarcophagi, “where each figure stands up stiff and separate,” Pisano’s relief seems to have required a model dated to (or before) the Hadrianic period, “when a Bithynian slave by his beauty gave a final impetus to the Genius of Greece” (79). It was not obvious, however, that Pisano’s composition was original in this sense or that it had originated in this way, especially in the literal replication of a figure of Antinous, the Bithynian slave who became the emperor Hadrian’s sexual favorite. Symonds acknowledged that the semicircular shape of the lunette had forced the sculptor to arrange his figures in a smooth gradation of scale from the center to the sides. Thus Symonds suggested (his logic was not entirely clear) that the work must have been made toward the end of Pisano’s career, that is, in the late 1260s or early 1270s. If the classical largeness and unity of the relief betokened the sculptor’s artistic maturity, its absolute subservience to the architectural constraint exemplified the primitive conditions of this art, that is, the relative youth of the sculptor’s new spirit. All in all, the Deposition at Lucca was at one and the same time utterly unoriginal and totally new, thoroughly Christian and manifestly classical, wholly childish and extremely mature, unselfconscious and religious in spirit and “conscious and scientific” (77). Christian and classical opposites were suspended in it in a perfect equilibrium. But this equilibrium was static: its poles did not subsist in dialectical tension with one another but were simply poised as two great antithetical possibilities immanent in Pisano’s spirit. What, then, might be the mechanism or engine of its history—the history that enabled Symonds critically to locate the Deposition as early or late in Pisano’s career and medieval or Renaissance in spirit—and to be quite definite about the empirical question of its real date? Already, of course, Symonds insinuated the suggestion that we must credit the role of homoeroticism: Pisano must have inherited an impetus impelled in turn by the Roman sculptors’s image of the beauty of Antinous loved by Hadrian.
FIGURE 21. Nicola Pisano (c. 1220/25–c. 1287), The Deposition, “c. 1234.” Overdoor lunette at Cathedral of San Martino, Lucca. From Charles C. Perkins, Tuscan Sculptors: Their Lives, Works, and Times, 2 vols. (London, 1864), 1:13.
At this point in Symonds’s narrative, Nicola Pisano’s pulpit for the Cathedral at Pisa, dated to 1260 (that is, before the newly attributed date of the Deposition), emerged as the first work in which “the old world and the new shook hands” (78). (Symonds devoted a special appendix to this question [371–74].) Crowe and Cavalcaselle, he noted, contemptuously dismissed the Vasarian tradition that in making the pulpit Nicola had studied the Roman sarcophagi and other ancient bas-reliefs in the Campo Santo at Pisa. The two art historians acknowledged that Nicola “follow[ed] without hesitation the old Roman system of sculpture,” but they thought that he could not have worked directly from the models immediately available in his city. At the very least, his confident work, they believed, must have been preceded by earlier Tuscan experiments in emulation. But, they asserted, “testimony of this kind is absolutely wanting”; earlier Pisan sculpture displayed no engagement with Greco-Roman art.21 Crowe and Cavalcaselle endorsed an elaborate argument, then, that Nicola, though Pisan, had been trained in the south of Italy, where he would have been exposed to classicizing ancient works and where local sculptors had already learned some lessons from them. On this account, of course, Nicola’s artistic originality would have to be downgraded. But it could be explained historically.
By contrast, Symonds saw no reason to reject the tradition. He did not quite address Crowe and Cavalcaselle’s point that Vasari had mistaken the particular ancient object or objects in the Campo Santo that Nicola had seen and copied.22 But it did not follow that the biographer’s account was simply a legend. Here Symonds followed another one of his principal sources for The Fine Arts. Perkins, an expert on Tuscan sculpture of the period, had already located three different ancient sources in the Campo Santo for Nicola’s pulpit. In Nicola’s Nativity, the Virgin “looks more like an Ariadne,” though Perkins identified no specific ancient prototype. In Nicola’s Adoration of the Magi, the seated Madonna, Perkins urged, was “as identical with the Phaedra in a bas-relief upon an old sarcophagus in the Campo Santo, as the sculptor with his imperfect education could make her.” (The reliefs on this sarcophagus represented Phaedra and Hippolytus, not, as Vasari thought, a Chase of Meleager.) And in Nicola’s Circumcision, the pair of bearded figure (i.e., the Jewish high priest) leaning on a youth were “evidently inspired” by the pair of bearded Dionysus and naked boy on an ancient marble vase in the Campo Santo.23
These were not new propositions. Supplementing the garbled Vasarian tradition, both the sarcophagus and the vase had been noted in early-nineteenth-century guidebooks to the Campo Santo as having served as Nicola’s sources.24 But Symonds added a fourth parallel, not noted by Perkins. The naked body of Hippolytus on the sarcophagus was echoed in the young “Hercules,” that is, the personification of Fortitude, on a bracket of Nicola’s pulpit that faced the nave (figure 22). As Symonds put it, by “studying the heroic nudities and noble attitudes of this bas-relief Niccola rediscovered the right way of art—not by merely copying his model, but by divining the secret of the grand style” (78). The “grand style” was classicistic, of course. But in spiritual terms it consisted in the representation of human beings “satisfied with their own goodliness” (78)—the haughty nobility of Phaedra/Madonna and the “naked vigour” of Hippolytus/Fortitude as it were fantasmatically matched by their late-thirteenth-century beholders.
FIGURE 22. Nicola Pisano (c. 1220/25-c. 1287), Fortitude (“Hercules”), c. 1260. Detail of bracket from marble pulpit, ht. approx. 82 cm. Baptistery, Pisa. Courtesy Alinari/Art Resource, New York.
This grand style, however, was also the site of the pulpit’s contradictory or self-divided spirit. “Christianity and Hellenism [had] kissed each other” in the domain of sculptural art; they were “fused externally.” But the two impulses remained divided spiritually, impossible fully to acknowledge self-consciously and to reconcile, when “monks leaning from Pisano’s pulpit preached the sinfulness of natural pleasure to women whose eyes were fixed on the adolescent beauty of an athlete” (78). If Nicola’s Fortitude had taken up the spirit of the last great period of Greek art (in the Hadrianic revival impelled by the actual beauty of the real Antinous) by copying the ancient sculptural figure of Hippolytus, this impulse could not be fully reproduced in the modern, Christian world. One part of the audience could not publicly admire the image in the spirit in which it had been made. More exactly, officially the women in the nave could not yet fully admire anything in the adolescent beauty of a naked athlete other than an inner symbolism (absent in Classical art) of the sinfulness of their flesh (insofar as they lusted for the youth’s). But Symonds’s point, of course, was that the figure was not merely a vessel of this spiritual message even for the female viewers. The female viewers probably had some self-conscious awareness of their own erotic feelings in relation to the sensuous figuration—namely, that it was “goodly.”
The position of a male viewer of Nicola’s sculpture was left ambiguous. On the one hand, he must have been even further divided from the Greek spirit in Nicola’s pulpit than a female viewer. Unlike the concupiscence condemned by the monks preaching from the pulpit, his sin in lusting after Antinous-Hippolytus-Fortitude cannot even be named among Christians. To name it would be discursively to admit its possibility, to call the “unthinkable” into being, as Foucault later explained with reference to examples just like this one (see chapter 9). On the other hand, it was “satisfaction in the goodliness” of an idealized image of the male body that had been made visible in Nicola’s pulpit. Before encountering the pulpit, the male Christian viewer, like the female, might be unconscious of male beauty in itself and for him. But in admiring the pulpit he could become self-conscious—aware it was the goodliness of the naked male body that would be sinful for women (and for him) to admire too much for its own sake. Symonds left the point open-ended, but we can fairly conclude that in his eyes the pulpit did not entirely practice sensuously what it preached spiritually and that its male viewer, at least, had been launched willy-nilly on a path of thought, of syntheses of Spirit, in which he self-consciously considered himself erotically—as an erotic object for the sculptor, for the women, for other male beholders, and for himself. Despite its sturdy, solemn classicism, then, the pulpit enabled a kind of slide through increasingly un-Christian possibilities of sensuality, of concupiscence both hetero-and homoerotic, motivated in part by the very contradictoriness of its sensuous and spiritual aspects.
If the dialectical position of the male viewer of the pulpit was ambiguous, the position of Nicola was especially so. A degree of self-consciousness of the goodliness of the human body, of the naked male body, supposedly was the result of the completed pulpit and the subsequent development of its spirit in its beholders. What, then, enabled Nicola to make the pulpit in the first place? When he encountered the ancient sculptures in the Campo Santo, he could only have been constituted subjectively like the beholders who encountered his pulpit in the Cathedral for the first time: not initially self-conscious, his viewing of the completed image he had made—his admiration—could stimulate him to become so. But how, then, or of what, was he self-conscious avant la lettre when he decided to emulate the ancient forms in a modern refiguration?
Symonds had essentially the same final answer as Winckelmann, who had struggled with similar causal and critical problems more than a century earlier. In a backhanded way, he admitted, Crowe and Cavalcaselle were right to “refuse to believe that by simply imitating carvings found casually on ancient tombs [Nicola] ascended to the position of ‘best sculptor of his age.’”25 For Nicola was not simply imitating carvings. Imitation was only the mechanism of the transfer of forms from ancient to modern art. And according to Symonds its very possibility derived from Nicola’s native aesthetic sense.
What Niccola added of indefeasibly his own to the style of [the] continuators of a dead tradition, was feeling for the beauty of classical work in a good age, and through that feeling a more perfect sympathy with nature. It is just at this point that the old tale about the sarcophagus of Countess Beatrice [i.e., the sarcophagus with Phaedra and Hippolytus in the Campo Santo] conveys not only the letter but the spirit of the fact.
(374)
In other words, Nicola appears to have been a late medieval instance of the young man, exemplified by Friedrich von Berg, whom Winckelmann had imagined to be endowed with “the ability to perceive the beautiful in art,” and specifically to be able to appreciate classical work of a “good age,” Phidian, Augustan, or Hadrianic (see chapter 1). Winckelmannian homoerotic aesthetics had already addressed the massive question-begging embedded here: it could only get itself off the ground, as we have seen, by assuming its own intrinsic or inborn nature. The ability to perceive the beautiful in art manifested itself, as Winckelmann described it, in vague, confused, murky thoughts, a psychic “soaring and twitching” like an itch in the skin. For Symonds, as we have seen in §3 of this chapter, it was manifest in nuce in yearnings and fantasies that spun out a personal hallucinatory iconography, an image of ideal homoerotic beauty (not usually to be found in any single work of art) that was stabilized between spiritual and sensual eroticism in something like the way that Nicola’s Deposition was stabilized between Christian and classical poles of Spirit in art. In either case, it is a world of imagos of homoerotically desirable beauty. Each image constitutes a natural ground in consciousness (and in the culture it creates and embraces) for succeeding ones, though the earliest homoerotic affections of all (in Symonds’s case, the earliest apparitions of the sensuous beauty and erotic desirability of other men) remain inaccessible to self-conscious recollection and reconstitution. Symonds did not, of course, have an explicit theory of the psychic and cultural structure of these circuits of replication. We have to supply a sketch of a theory that makes sense of his criticism. Actual images encountered in art will be approached both as the realization of the imagos and as the source of an ideal form for imagos. In turn, the native mnemic imagos relay a self-image—an autoaffection organized in the loves that have been given to the self. Therefore the discovery of an imago realized in the forms and figures of art must inevitably tend toward a heightening of self-consciousness, even as that phenomenon might be also described as the emergence of an unconscious—a self-consciousness partly unaware of part of itself. Or so it might be possible to reconstruct the incipiently Freudian trend of Symonds’s amorphous thought in this arena.
Essentially, then, Symonds imagined Nicola to have been a thirteenth-century version of the man he imagined himself to be, of the spirit or soul he believed himself to have. In pining after one lad at Clifton College, for example, he felt, as he told Dakyns, that even the torture of unrequited love could not “efface these frailest etchings made as it were through some chemical spiritual action upon the sensitive paper of the Soul by the image cast off from a distant object!”26 Whatever these frail etchings might have been in his case—ephemeral daydreams, inconclusive efforts at poetry—Symonds did not believe that they could produce or sustain great art made by him. But because Nicola “had received at his birth the gift of a creative genius,” he could actually effect the transformations that became available to him and for any other true creative master “into whose soul the beauty of a fragment of Greek art had sunk” (374). The ultimate question of causation in the dialectic, then, was not the question of the fragment itself—the question of where it came from and how the subject found it. These were circumstantial considerations. The question was why his soul should be predisposed to admire it. More dramatically, it was whether his soul was so constituted, his spirit so placed, as to be able to (re)create it naturally—without the stimulus of a prototype. This was the question for modern art in Symonds’s own day, as he saw it. And logically, retrorecursively, it must have been the question for Nicola, that is, for the first modern artist. Nicola must be supposed to be an artist who fantasmatically was at least partly “Greek” within himself, regardless of the bits and pieces of ancient statuary and furniture that he might have found lying about in the Campo Santo.
§6. Nicola’s classicism constituted the first moment of the Renaissance spirit in sculpture. Spanning the later fourteenth and the fifteenth century, the second moment, according to Symonds, was the sculptural naturalism that emerged in Nicola’s wake. The preeminent sculptors of its first generation, Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378–1455) and Donatello (1386– 1466), displayed no “imitative formalism,” however—no duplication of the classical style. Instead they achieved a kind of natural classicism (129). In a sense, then, it was as if these great masters of the second moment of Renaissance sculpture were reborn Greeks, like Nicola Pisano in the first moment. If Nicola had been a Hellenic Christian, however, Ghiberti and Donatello were the opposite. They were Christian Hellenes. Pisano had invented his art in an original imitation of ancient art, in a classicism. Ghiberti and Donatello, however, were not merely neoclassical, reproducing the classical imitation. Rather, they established their art in relation to nature, as Pisano had not. At this point in the development of the Renaissance spirit in art, “contact with the antique world served only to stimulate original endeavour, by leading the student back to the fountain of all excellence in nature, and by exhibiting types of perfection in technical processes” (99). More exactly, if Nicola had established his art in imitation of the corporeal configurations and human character that had been idealized by classical art, Ghiberti and Donatello founded their art in the identities that had been idealized by Christian art. And that art did not imitate.
By this point in Symonds’s narrative, the art-historical dialectics were becoming quite tortuous. Accordingly Symonds’s aesthetic criticism (and its accompanying psychobiography of the artists in question) carried the burden of the Hegelian history. In Ghiberti’s case,
[when] the “Hermaphrodite” was discovered in the vineyard of S. Celso, Ghiberti’s admiration found vent in exclamations like the following: “No tongue could describe the learning and art displayed in it, or do justice to its masterly style.” Another antique, found near Florence, must, he conjectures, have been hidden out of harm’s away by “some gentle spirit in the early days of Christianity.” “The touch only,” he adds, “can discover its beauties, which escape the sense of sight in any light.” It would be impossible to express a reverential love of ancient art more tenderly than is done in these sentences. So intense was Ghiberti’s passion for the Greeks that he abandoned Christian chronology and reckoned by Olympiads.… In spite of this devotion, he never appears to have set himself consciously to reproduce the style of Greek sculpture, or to have set forth Hellenic ideas. He remained unaffectedly natural, and in a true sense Christian. The paganism of the Renaissance is a phrase with no more meaning for him than for that still more delicate Florentine spirit, Luca della Robbia; and if his works are classical, they are so only in Goethe’s sense, when he pronounced, “the point is for a work to be thoroughly good, and then it is sure to be classical.”27
(98– 99)
If Ghiberti had a “reverential love” for a work like the Hermaphrodite from San Celso, nonetheless “to bring to life again the gods who died with Pan” and “set forth Hellenic ideas” was not his conscious aim. How so? Though consciously Hellenizing in his own life, as an “unaffected” Christian believer he was unconsciously Hellenic in Symonds’s deeper sense—unconscious except in his tenderness toward ancient sculptures that Christians must abhor (or secretly put “out of harm’s way,” as in the case of the early Christian beholder who saved the ancient marble). It is difficult to make complete sense of Ghiberti’s position. But above all he was good: reverential, tender, unaffected, natural, and true. Im ganzen guten Schönen / Resolut zu leben: “to live with steady purpose in the Whole, the Good, the Beautiful,” as Goethe had it, was virtually Symonds’s own motto, often repeated (he used it as the epigraph, for example, for Studies of the Greek Poets).28 Ghiberti virtually incarnated the midpoint, then, between an early Christian’s moment of goodness in a quiet, secret, tender encounter with ancient beauty and Goethe’s own large, generous, modern spirit—the spirit that Symonds himself hoped to share. In the sculptor’s approach to the naturalistic art of ancient paganism, at any rate, he exemplified the coming-into-self-consciousness of the tolerance and temperateness of an ideal modern goodness.
Where Ghiberti’s naturalism was tender and unaffected, Donatello’s—equally good—was “masculine and honest,” “straightforward and truthful.” Like Ghiberti, Donatello did not imitate classical art; he simply produced sculptures “concordant with the spirit of Greek method” (103). But, in relation to the first moment of Renaissance sculpture, Donatello’s naturalism was more spiritual than Ghiberti’s. Therefore his homoeroticism was more visible than Ghiberti’s: he unselfconsciously converted sensual naturalism into a spiritual presentation of male beauty.
Without striving to idealize his models, the sculptor has expressed in both (the St. George at Orsanmichele and the David in the Bargello) the Christian conception of heroism, fearless in the face of danger, and sustained by faith. The naked beauty of the boy David and the mailed manhood of St. George [figure 23] are raised to a spiritual region by the type of feature and the pose of body selected to interpret their animating impulse. These are no mere portraits of wrestlers, such as peopled the groves of Altis at Olympia, no ideals of physical strength translated into brass and marble, like the “Hercules” of Naples or the Vatican. The one [figure 23] is a Christian soldier ready to engage Apollyon in battle to the death; the other the boy-hero of a marvellous romance. The body in both is but the shrine of an indwelling soul, the instrument and agent of a faith-directed will; and the crown of their conflict is no wreath of laurel or of parsley. In other words, the value of St. George and David to the sculptor lay not in their strength and youthful beauty—though he has endowed them with these excellent gifts—so much as in their significance for the eternal struggle of the soul with evil.
(160– 61)
FIGURE 23. Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi, known as Donatello (1378–1455), St. George, c. 1416–20. Marble, lifesize; installed in a niche, exterior façade of Orsanmichele, Florence. Photograph in situ c. 1890. Courtesy Alinari/Art Resource, New York.
The spirit of Christian faith embodied by Donatello’s youths enabled them to transcend Greek type, sculptures of athletes and heroes that could not be the “instrument and agent” of God because they idealized the human body alone, and even though this very type (Symonds said) had revitalized Christian art in the first moment. At the same time, however, St. George and David did not become mere icons. They remained naturalistic images, the sensuous idea, of “strength and youthful beauty.” Again, it must have been the sculptor’s goodness that made the difference; supposedly “men loved his sweet and cheerful temper" (102). The originality of Donatello consisted, then, in realizing the spirit of Nicola's sculpture at Pisa without involving the dangers of its sensuous idealization—its corporeal sensuality and erotic beauty. Figuratively it represented the transcendence of these dangers. Thus it reconciled the contradiction of the first moment in the Aufhebung, the synthesis-progress, of a later spiritual age.
The dialectical antithesis of Ghiberti’s and Donatello’s naturalisms, and the source of the instability of the second moment of Renaissance spirit in sculpture, was the “realism” of Andrea Verrochio (1435–88) and Antonio del Pollaiuolo (1429–98). Verocchio’s Incredulity of Thomas, Symonds suggested, was “spoiled by heaviness and angularity of drapery.” And his David, “a lad of seventeen years, has the lean, veined arms of a stone-hewer or gold-beater”; the statue was no more than “a faithful portrait of the first Florentine prentice who came to hand” (103–4). (This must be contrasted with Donatello’s David and St. George; in their ideal spirituality they were not “mere portraits” of warriors and athletes [101].) Dialectically, then, Donatello’s David naturally could be an ideally beautiful naked boy, but Verocchio’s David must self-consciously be seen self-consciously to hide his realistic nudity (modeled on the physique of an actual young man known to the sculptor) in “the awkward cuirass and kilt that partly drape the figure” (104). For the spirit of realism here was also possibly the spirit of pederasty or homosexual sodomy, of the sculptor’s self-conscious but unidealized and nonspiritual—thoroughly sensuous and carnal—relation to his young helper.
Pollaiuolo’s paintings and sculptures were constituted in (and projected) a moral character that was even more opposed to Ghiberti’s and Donatello’s. This artist’s portrayal of the naked male body, as Symonds had it, involved a “bizarre” physicality contaminated by “eccentric” emotions and “brutal” passions (figure 24).
What we chiefly notice… in his choice of subjects is a frenzy of murderous enthusiasm, a grimness of imagination, rare among Italian artists. The picture in the Uffizi of “Hercules and Antaeus” and the well-known engraving of naked men fighting a series of savage duels in a wood, might be chosen… The fiercest emotions of the Renaissance find expression in the clenched teeth, strained muscles, knitted brows, and tense nerves, depicted by Pollajuolo with eccentric energy. We seem to be assisting at some of those combats a steccato chiusi wherein Sixtus IV. delighted, or to have before our eyes a fray between Crocensi and Vallensi in the streets of Rome. [A terra-cotta relief in London] displays the struggles of twelve naked men, divided into six pairs of combatants. Two of the couples hold short chains with the left hand, and seek to stab each other with the right. In the case of another two couples the fight is over, and the victor is insulting his fallen foe. In each of the remaining pairs one gladiator is on the point of yielding to his adversary. There are thus three several moments of duel to the death, each illustrated by two couples. The mathematical distribution of these dreadful groups gives an effect of frozen passion; while the vigorous workmanship displays not only an enthusiasm for muscular anatomy, but a real sympathy with blood-fury in the artist.
(106–7)
FIGURE 24. Antonio del Pollaiolo (1429–1498), Hercules and Antaeus, c. 1475–80. Bronze, h. 71 cm. Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence. Photograph by Mauro Magliani. Courtesy Alinari/Art Resource, New York.
Indeed, Pollaiuolo infused the naked bodies of his fighters with the lowest animality: in Symonds’s description, at any rate, the sexual connotations of their postures and grimaces (a steccato chiusi—on the steps of the church) were barely contained. Evidently it was the moral character of Pollaiuolo that constituted or effected the difference between his unappealing and excessive “enthusiasm for muscular anatomy” and Donatello’s admirable attention to “strength and youthful beauty.” In chapters 7 and 8 I will look in more detail at this dynamic of interestedness—the grading of its intensiveness—in Freud’s model of the erotogenic course of homosexuality. Here it suffices to say that Symonds, like Freud, often defined homosexuality in terms of an excess in homoeroticism, as it were its dialectical one-sidedness. Characteristically, for example, he wrote that it was a “specific quality carried to excess” that had marred Sandro Botticelli’s “twined figures of Raphael and Tobias” with a “touch of affectation” (184): Symonds implied that insofar as the “twining” looked posed and unnatural, the painter had become overly conscious—double-mindedly self-conscious—about the possible meaning of the physical intimacy between the angel and the boy. Examples of this kind littered Symonds’s judgments of taste—his guide to taste—throughout The Fine Arts.
§7. According to Symonds, the beginning of the third and final phase of the Renaissance spirit in sculpture was marked by the work of the young Michelangelo (b. 1475). Still, the most visible new (or latest) originality, the complement of Nicola’s creativity in the first moment and Ghiberti’s and Donatello’s in the second, could be found in the work of Jacopo Tatti, called Sansovino (1477–1570), who cast a bronze copy of the Laocoön, excavated in Rome in 1506 at the apogee of Renaissance classicism (128). Sansovino and his close contemporaries embodied the vitality of neopagan spirit intruded in modern art (122). Indeed, Symonds went so far as to say that, for them, “a Greek myth and a Christian legend were all one.” The “Hermaphroditic statue” of St. Sebastian by Ippolito Lo Scalza was an apposite example (123). This “fair work” seems to have interested Symonds more for its intrinsic doubleness than for its replication of the voluptuous classical type. Like Hercules-Fortitude in the first moment, it was a Christian figure. But it was not made by a “Christian” artist; it did not have the unified beauty of Ghiberti’s Hermaphrodite. It was extreme and strained—both saint and pagan divinity, both statue and idol, both male and female. Occupying such a position, neopaganism could never recapture the originality of Nicola’s primal classicism, the ur-Hellenism of the Renaissance. But Sansovino’s best work, Symonds thought, sometimes managed to produce something more than a “lifeless or pedantic imitation of antique fragments.” Coming after the naturalisms achieved by Ghiberti and Donatello (second moment) but reviving (in the third moment) the classical sources that they did not need, even though they had been revealed by Nicola (first moment), Sansovino achieved “a real expression of the fervour with which the modern world hailed the discoveries revealed to it by [antiquarian] scholarship.” This was especially visible in one work:
The most beautiful and spirited pagan statue of the Renaissance period, justifying the estimate made here of Sansovino’s genius, is the “Bacchus” exhibited in the Bargello Museum [figure 25]. Both the Bacchus and the Satyriscus at his side are triumphs of realism, irradiated and idealised by the sculptor’s vivid sense of natural gladness.… While the mundane splendour of Venice gave body and fulness to Sansovino’s paganism, he missed the self-restraint and purity of taste peculiar to the studious shades of Florence.
(123)
Symonds clearly valued the dialectical originality of Sansovino’s Bacchus. Nonetheless he could neither rhapsodize about the sculpted youth’s attractiveness nor approve the sculptor’s morality, with its streaks of insincerity and ostentatiousness. In the end, then, it had to be admitted that Sansovino was not quite naturally original enough to “elevate the mixed motives of Renaissance sculpture by a powerful idealisation” (124).
FIGURE 25. Jacopo Sansovino (1486–1570), Bacchus, 1511–14. Marble, lifesize. Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence. Courtesy Alinari/Art Resource, New York.
In the third moment of Renaissance sculpture, Sansovino’s contemporaries and successors, such as Baccio Bandinelli (1493–1560) and Bartolommeo Ammanati (1511–92), dragged neopaganism into the gutters. According to Symonds, these artists indulged the wrong-headed belief that the ancient models “sanctioned [an] efflorescence of immorality,” the indulgence of all the “coarser passions,” including pederasty and sodomy: Symonds noted explicitly that these artists specifically wanted to imitate “the epigrams by Strato and Meleager” (i.e., the Musa Puerilis, book 12 of the Greek Anthology) and the “Hermaphrodites and Priapi of Rome” (127). How far the spirit of sculpture had declined since the Hermaphrodite tenderly preserved by an ancient Christian had been found by Ghiberti, or even since Lo Scalza had crafted the fair hermaphroditic Saint Sebastian! The neopagan sensualists could not actually revive the ancient religion of nature, in which images of fauns, satyrs, or giants had genuine spiritual meaning. And, without this, “paganism alone could give… nothing but its vices” (332). In fact, it was as if Bandinelli and Ammanati were not really imitating the antique at all. Bandinelli’s Hercules and Cacus (“the wrestling bout of a porter and a coal-heaver”; figure 26) and Ammanati’s Hercules and Antaeus (“where Hercules by squeezing the body of Antaeus makes the drinking water of a city spout from a giant’s mouth”) would have been incompatible with Greek taste. In these works Verocchio’s David (a common prentice) and Pollauiulo’s fighters (all physically idealized) had decayed into obvious sexual jokes—images of phallic contest and conquest.
FIGURE 26. Baccio Bandinelli (1488–1560), Hercules and Cacus, 1534. Marble, colossal size. Installed in front of the the Palazzo Vecchio, Piazza della Signoria, Florence. Courtesy Alinari/ Art Resource, New York.
Of course there were dialectical complements. Gian Bologna’s Mercury, for example, belonged to this period of the “pitiful misapplication” of antique themes (126). But it did not display the “lust, brutality, and animalism” for which Ammanati was said to have apologized to his countrymen (126, 128). In fact, according to Symonds, the Mercury displayed an “artistic purity not unworthy of a good Greek period.” Even though Gian Bologna’s inspiration was “factitious,” based on mere imitation of ancient myths rather than real belief, Symonds judged that “something of the genuine classic feeling had passed into his nature” (128). But at this point in Symonds’s exposition of the dialectic the explanation seems self-serving. Symonds patently wanted to admire a homoerotically appealing work without tangling it in dialectical knots. And if a dialectical position must be specified for it, it does not help to say that pederasty was beautified at this stage in the unfolding of Spirit. Symonds was not prepared to say, or to say publicly, that the neopagan spirit in Renaissance sculpture celebrated a queer beauty in the sense developed in chapter 1, that is, an idealization of manifestly pederastic or other homoerotic interests. But the Mercury was unintelligible without such a context if it was to be located as the antithesis—the idealization—of the crude neopagan phallicism exemplified by Bandinelli and Ammanati.
FIGURE 27. Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571), Perseus, c. 1545. Wax, ht. approx. 60 cm; modello for the bronze statue (1541–54) installed in the Loggia dei Lanzi, Piazza della Signoria, Florence. Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence. Courtesy Alinari/Art Resource, New York.
Similar difficulties arose in the case of Benvenuto Cellini. The modeling and casting of Cellini’s Perseus, Symonds claimed, was the “great achievement” of the third moment of the Renaissance spirit in sculpture (349; figure 27). But he did not describe the statue beyond noting that it was “original and excellent” (127), much praised at the time.29 It was “as a man… more than as an artist” that Cellini can be said to excite our interest (350). As Edgar Quinet had put it, the sculptor, like Niccolà Machiavelli, recognized “no moral authority but the individual will.”30 And this was not admired, even at the time. Symonds was well aware of Cellini’s contemporary reputation as a sodomite (as well as a brawler, liar, and thief). Though the sculptor “carefully conceal[ed]” many facts about his life in his autobiography (349), Symonds recalled Cellini’s exchange with Bandinelli, in which the artist of Hercules and Cacus, stung by Cellini’s criticism of his work, retorted with “vulgar terms of insult”—“Oh sta cheto, soddomitaccio” (“Hold your tongue, dirty little bugger!” 349).31 And he could not resist repeating the story of Cellini’s Spanish catamite Diego: the sculptor brought the boy dressed as a maiden to a banquet, where “Diego, with regard doubtless to his dark and ruddy beauty, [was] unanimously proclaimed the fairest of the fair” (331). (This episode was the subject of a mildly erotic poem that Symonds wrote in the 1880s.) The reader cannot help but infer that the Perseus was modeled on Diego or some other male favorite in Cellini’s pederastic circle. In the third moment of the Renaissance spirit in art, then, Verocchio’s modeling of an apprentice whose physique he seems to have admired (in the second moment) was replicated by Cellini’s definitively pederastic creation.
Of course, the episode at the banquet might suggest not only that Cellini himself had tried to conceal his pederasty by disguising Diego as a maiden. It could also suggest that the artist did have a genuine “feeling for beauty.” After all, the disguised Diego was judged by everyone at the banquet to be the “fairest of the fair.” And the Perseus, even if modeled on Diego or his like, was universally admired at the time, a judgment in turn endorsed by modern critics. Whether or not Cellini’s interest in Diego and similar young men arose from lustfulness, from pederastic concupiscence, it seemed, then, that it could still be entered into a dynamic of idealization. Again an emergence of queer beauty might seem to have been possible—or more exactly, in this case, a dynamic of queering queer beauty itself, of “righting” or even “outing” it as it were. (If one did not know Diego to be a male catamite, one could not know Perseus to be a Diego.) Like Gian Bologna’s Mercury, at any rate, Cellini’s Perseus was not quite the same thing as Bandinelli’s or Ammanati’s phallic figures—dialectically one-dimensional conceits.
But unlike the “artistic purity” attributed to Gian Bologna, Cellini’s “mode of loving… never [rose] above animal appetite” (333). And though the Perseus was technically admirable, it remained aesthetically unconvincing precisely because really one did not not know the erotic identity of the natural model. It was plain even when hidden in the idealization. As Symonds put it in his translation of Cellini’s autobiography: “The loves to which [Cellini] yielded were animal, licentious, almost brutal; determined to some extent by an artist’s feeling for beauty, but controlled by no moral sense and elevated by no spiritual enthusiasm.”32 Indeed, at this point in the unfolding of Spirit it was virtually as if sculptural art had counterprogressed to a condition before or outside the very possibility of development—declining to what Symonds called, in Cellini’s case, a “soulless animalism” (332). In his late-dialectical-historical position, Cellini’s art was practically pre- or nondialectical. And this was a function of his self-proclaimed self-conscious sodomitical-artistic interests, even though this very cast of mind led aesthetically to the debasement of Spirit—to its virtual disappearance in animalistic regression.
At last it becomes clear that Symonds’s principle of genuine aesthetic creation imagined a homoeroticism that does not know itself as such, or as its own, and its artistic products as the result. It was this primal spiritual condition (what Hegel called “artificing” as distinct from art making) that is the beginning of the development of Spirit in art. But in the further development of Spirit, the becoming-conscious of an animating natural love of man—the “Genius of Greek art” natively reappearing in every epoch of Spirit in the unaffected aesthetics of its subjects—can lead to its undoing. “Pronouncing itself for sensuality,” to use Symonds’s description of lusty brutes such as Cellini (332), this Spirit self-conscious of its sensual nature (and accepting it as its nature) forfeited its spiritual progress—its moral advance. By contrast, the natural man, the artist who can generate as well as imitate, is not self-conscious of his sensual nature; his sensual nature is the ground, not the object, of his image making. In this very division his sensuality can find a spiritual image, as it were a redoubled love of man. His supposed primitive division of Spirit, then, is really a deeper unity, a pre- or unconscious reconciliation that in Symonds’s terms in the early 1870s could only or could best be called God given—somehow natural or in-dwelling.
§8. Despite the possibility of reconciliation immanent at the very beginning and possibly at the end of modern art and throughout it in the creation of its greatest works, the history projected in The Fine Arts suggested that any imitation of masculine beauty and desirability—any spiritual love of man translated into a sensuous form—will tend dialectically toward a corrupt and vicious aesthetics. In turn its materialization in double-minded (and inevitably provocative) works of art must ineluctably stain and compromise similar images, even those images produced in unselfconscious natural love of sensually beautiful objects. As we have seen, in every period of the unfolding of the Renaissance spirit in art there was a fine line, difficult to draw critically, between such works as Verocchio’s and Donatello’s David (second moment) or Gian Bologna’s Mercury and Cellini’s Perseus (third moment). I have tried to explicate Symonds’s historical logic and critical judgments in this very gray area. But it must be admitted that the reader of The Fine Arts might infer that the immanence of homoeroticism (at least beyond its mere immanence in a primal or original figure of artistic generativity like Nicola Pisano) becomes as much the deepest difficulty and deficit of modern art as the supposed ground of its originality and power.
This melancholic conclusion, seemingly unavoidable, was manifestly at odds with the goal of Symonds’s cultural history and later with his inquiries in psychopathology, which aimed to find creditable warrant—natural, historical, aesthetic, and moral justifications—for homoerotic affection and the artistic productions or projections it created and sustained. And it decisively distinguished Symonds’s art criticism from Winckelmann’s art history of homoerotic Nachahmung. Both writers observed the same basic mechanism of artistic generativity: the imitation of artistic ideals embodying idealized fantasmatic imagos. And both desired the same result from it: the generation of morally (and thus socially) acceptable homoerotic forms of life. For Symonds, however, the teleology could not take the course imagined by the earlier antiquarian, namely, the replicatory, recursive, but ultimately progressive path running from an inborn nature (intrinsically it produces fantasmatic imagos) through imitation of the ancient artistic ideals to a homoerotic renaissance (as it were a reincarnation and realization of the imagos). Whatever his inborn sensibility, the modern European artist, Symonds recognized, must always begin and end his work as a Christian, a fact that Winckelmann had merely deplored.
Winckelmann had embraced the notion that by way of an emulation of ancient art, of its aesthetics, the modern world might rediscover an ancient form of life, its erotics. But Symonds realized that the converse must be true. Despite Michelangelo’s “parade of classical style,” for example, the greatest modern artist still remained “separated from the Greek world by a gulf of Hebrew and Christian feeling” (284). Because the ancient form of life cannot be revived in the modern world, the emulation of ancient art cannot constitute a renaissance at all unless it arises spontaneously from a wholly Christian erotic sentiment grounded in the spirit of the modern age. This modern spirit must be motivated by a natural love for the good things that it knows God has made beautiful, what He loves, rather than by an unnatural desire of man for man. In Symonds’s scheme of history, in other words, the more that classical imitation could be assimilated to Christian naturalism, the more it could be judged to be regenerated and regenerative.
Or at least this seemed to be the inevitable conclusion for aesthetic and moral criticism. Later it would become possible for Symonds to imagine ways in which imitation (or more generally artistic generativity) could be assimilated to a naturalist naturalism, to an evolutionary science of nature or to a biology and psychology of man. In the end, evolutionary and psychogenetic theories of art would be more adequate than eschatology to Symonds’s underlying project in Studies of the Greek Poets and Renaissance in Italy: to retrieve the natural morality and the artistic generativity of homoeroticism. They would be more adequate, at any rate, than a sub-Kantian aesthetics of morally admirable artistic ideals regulating a quasi-Hegelian historicism of spiritual progress and counterprogress, of becoming and unbecoming. As we will see in chapter 6, Symonds’s later art theory explored the possibilities of this scientific or naturalist naturalism. (Other aestheticians, notably Vernon Lee and George Santayana, were able to go further.) But he was never quite able to say how nature naturally generates ideals that would seem to be against nature. In the end he continued to appeal to the dialectical reconcilation and transcendence, to Aufhebung in Hegel’s sense, supposedly to be found at work even within organic evolution.