This article is part of the Fine Arts & Exhibits special section on how creativity can inspire in challenging times.
The couple’s pose looks as if it could be from a soft-core porn film or a dominatrix’s website: A man, his trousers dropped, crouches as a woman sits on his shoulders, paddling his bare backside with a small, bushy broom.
This is not, however, an image of contemporary naughtiness, but rather a scene on a large copper-alloy dish made near present-day Belgium around 1480. Aptly titled “Plate With Wife Beating Husband,” it appears in “Spectrum of Desire: Love, Sex and Gender in the Middle Ages,” an exhibition that opens on Friday and that runs through March 29 at the Met Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s castle-like medieval branch.
With more than 50 pieces from Western Europe created during the 13th through 15th centuries — paintings, statuettes, illuminated manuscripts, textiles, household items and jewelry — the show demonstrates that modern times have no monopoly on sexual humor, gender fluidity or boundary-crossing artwork. Focusing on an era when religion was art’s most frequent subject, the exhibition investigates often overlooked themes of gender and sexuality that scholars say lie beneath these objects’ surfaces.
“People have, ultimately, quite a narrow understanding of the medieval world,” said Melanie Holcomb, a curator in the Met’s department of medieval art, who organized “Spectrum of Desire” with Nancy Thebaut, an associate professor of history of art at the University of Oxford. In an interview at the Cloisters in Upper Manhattan, Holcomb added, “We were very keen to kind of show you all the ways that it’s not what you think.”
According to the curators and the accompanying catalog for “Spectrum of Desire,” labeling people as heterosexual or not or defining experiences as wholly secular or wholly spiritual would not have made sense to medieval Europeans. Examining artwork without modern preconceptions permits broader interpretations of its sexual aspects, Thebaut said in a video interview.
In the exhibition’s section titled “Objects of Desire,” the copper plate — or “spanky plate,” as Holcomb calls it — demonstrates how period artists could reverse gender roles to create domestic satire. But other pieces, like a vividly painted page from the 14th-century prayer book of Bonne of Luxembourg, Duchess of Normandy, show, she said, that a blurring of masculine and feminine qualities could also be serious and sacred.
This manuscript page, in the show’s section “Beautiful Bodies,” graphically portrays the laceration in the crucified Christ’s side. It reflects, Thebaut said, a theme in many medieval texts, which compare that wound to a womb.
“I think if people enter the show with an open mind, they’ll see that we’re not overreading here,” said Thebaut, who, with Holcomb, sought feedback on the exhibition from an advisory committee of community leaders, scholars and members of the clergy, including a Roman Catholic priest.
Roland Betancourt, a professor of art history at the University of California, Irvine, who was consulted in the show’s early planning stages, said written historical evidence that medieval conceptions of gender were fluid was “often pretty spectacular.”
Contemplations of this subject appear “in literary texts,” he added. “We have them in medical manuals. We have these in theological works as well.” But museum shows, he said, rarely reveal them to the public.
“Spectrum of Desire,” which focuses largely on the Met’s collection but also incorporates loans from other institutions, “represents not only years of scholarship, but really allows new perspectives to come to the fore,” said Max Hollein, the Met’s director and chief executive, during a video call.
It’s possible to see that gender binaries, for instance, were often “thrown out the window,” Thebaut observed, in the show’s delicately carved ivory pieces, where it is difficult to tell who’s male and who’s female. In the section “Marriage, Sex and Chastity,” a richly decorated 15th-century saddle includes both courtly and bawdy images, including one in which a woman clutches a man’s chest from behind.
“Spectrum of Desire,” however, does not deny that Church law became increasingly restrictive during the Middle Ages. Women were subordinate, and sex that was not marital and procreative was considered sinful. But artists sometimes operated outside the norms, creating objects that affirmed these tightening religious standards while also mocking them slyly.
Consider a cleverly constructed bronze aquamanile, or water pitcher, that depicts the fictional tale of Aristotle and Phyllis, Alexander the Great’s lover. In the story, Aristotle warns Alexander not to let her distract him. Phyllis, however, succeeds in beguiling even Aristotle by offering him sex if he will let her ride on his back like a horse. The vessel, from the late 14th or early 15th century, takes the shape of the philosopher on his hands and knees as Phyllis sits on his back, yanking his hair.
While the medieval Church censured purely carnal lust, the show’s curators stressed that much religious writing exalted desire when the faithful were seeking communion with the divine.
“The vocabulary of earthly relationships, of sex, of the erotic, frequently appears in highly devotional images and in really powerful ways,” Thebaut said.
In the section “Mystical Unions,” a manuscript page from the “Rothschild Canticles,” created around 1300, pictures a woman lying on rumpled sheets as a male celestial figure hovers above. Holcomb also pointed out the physicality of Giovanni di Paolo’s 15th-century painting “Saint Catherine of Siena Receiving the Stigmata,” in which the saint raises her palms ecstatically to the crucified Christ.
Many works of this type were housed in convents, where they encouraged nuns to think of Christ as their bridegroom. It is no accident, the curators explained, that the artists often portrayed such holy figures as uncommonly alluring. A late-15th-century statuette of the martyred St. Sebastian shows off a glorious physique, despite his wounds. Sebastian has been shot with arrows, but so have many of the courtly couples portrayed in the exhibition, victims of the god of love. One German 15th-century statuette, “Christ Child With an Apple,” makes Jesus himself look like an adorable cupid.
Another statue, from the early 1300s, “Christ and Saint John the Evangelist,” depicts these male figures with their right hands clasped — an indication of marriage in many medieval portrayals of couples — and with John resting his head tenderly on Jesus’ shoulder. Holcomb called it “one of the most gender-bending objects I know of.”
The show also reveals that many saints (more than 30, Thebaut said) changed their gender presentation during their lifetimes, usually from female to male. This reflected “these inherent ideas of masculine traits being seen as higher and closer to God,” Betancourt, the medieval scholar, noted.
Thebaut said she thought the exhibition would surprise museumgoers. “I think that one of the main takeaways for a lot of people, probably, when they visit this show is going to be like, ‘Wow,’” she observed. “A lot of this does seem to resonate with the present day, the interest that people have today in sex and gender.”
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