But they include his own poetry teacher Brunetto Latini, towards whom he feels nothing but gratitude and love for “that sweet image, gentle and paternal, / you were to me in the world when hour by hour / you taught me how man makes himself eternal.” The same lucidity with which Dante describes gay identity in The Inferno gives Giotto’s 700-year-old masterpiece its erotic frisson. For Giotto’s contemporary Dante writes explicitly of men who love men in his Christian epic The Inferno. And it was not in some kind of pre-modern, pre-sexual way. Giotto must have seen men kiss, or kissed men himself, to paint this. It is also loving and accepting – and touched with passion. The look in Christ’s eyes is not just angry or condemnatory.
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This is a kiss of betrayal, the sign to arrest Christ – but it is astonishingly intimate.Ī fine artistic tradition … the illustration of Wiccan and Hulkling from Avengers: The Children’s Crusade.
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As Judas comes in with his lips pursed to plant a kiss on Jesus’s mouth, the Lord looks straight into his eyes with blazing intensity. As early as 1304, Giotto portrayed an incandescent moment between Judas and Christ in his frescoes in the Arena Chapel in Padua. Michelangelo could do this because Renaissance Italy had a surprisingly modern understanding of sexual identity. It would do today’s church, as well as the mayor of Rio, a lot of good to acknowledge and embrace the gay message of the greatest of all Catholic artists. These men express their love openly and proudly – in the house of God. The kissing couples in the Sistine Chapel are his ultimate defiance of prejudice.
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In poems addressed to his beloved Tommaso dei Cavalieri he argues that by loving male beauty he adores God. A fervent Catholic, Michelangelo was also a philosophically inclined poet whose writings try to reconcile christianity with his sexuality. It is time the church acknowledged the central place of homosexuality in his art. Michelangelo was known, as he acknowledged to his biographer Ascanio Condivi, to love the male body, and was accused of turning the Sistine into a “bathhouse” with all his male nudes. Anything but chaste … detail of The Last Judgment by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, Rome.