Homosexuality in Art: A visual history of Love and Identity

The text below is the excerpt of the book Homosexuality in Art (ISBN: 9781783107278), written by James Smalls, published by Parkstone International.

From the middle of the eighteenth century until the middle of the nineteenth century, a community of intellectuals and artists throughout Europe will “marshal history and aesthetics as a means to self-understanding and justification. Homosexual painters, poets, and theorists played prominent roles in creating both neoclassicism and romanticism, the twin artistic movements that would dominate the century between 1750 and 1850.” Neoclassicism was a movement of classical revival in the arts in most countries in Western Europe. In France, it was a sobering response to the suggestively erotic and perfumed art of the previous rococo period. In England, it became part of an entire network of art collecting, forgery of the antique, and dissemination for both capitalist gain and to promote British dominance in industry and empire. In general, neoclassicism sought moral uplift and used a combination of sentiment and rationalization to accomplish its goals. The movement was fostered by the discovery of artifacts from the Roman city of Pompeii beginning in 1748, that had been covered and preserved in lava with the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. These discoveries as well as the discovery of Latin texts indicated that the ancients lived by an admirable moral code that encouraged not only civic responsibility among its citizens, but also gave primacy to the power of art as a didactic tool in promoting good taste and behavior.

The neoclassical program adhered to approaches to nature and the antique as part of the education of a male artist. Perhaps the most important influence in the development of a homoerotic aesthetic within neoclassicism was the aesthetic philosophy of the German art historian, archaeologist, and head librarian of the Vatican, Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768). Winckelmann, a passionate admirer of the art and social structure of the ancients, subsumed his own homoerotic propensities into florid descriptions of classical Greek art. Interestingly, he has been dubbed the founding father of modern-day art history and archaeology. Winckelmann was attracted to androgynous-looking younger men and transferred this infatuation into his passionate obsession with Greek male statues. For example, of the corporeal beauty of the Apollo Belevedere, he effused: “an eternal springtime like that which reigns in the happy fields of Elysium, [that] clothes his body with the charms of youth and softly shines on the proud structure of his limbs.” Winckelmann’s major work was his History of the Art of Antiquity, published in 1764. This book constituted “a compendium of individual artworks, placing them in the service of aesthetic, art-historical, and cultural observation and theorization.” (Simon Richter, “Johann Joachim Winckelmann,” in Haggerty) The central statue of History is the Laocoön which is described in highly erotic terms as the ideal of male beauty. Winckelmann’s general erudition and immense knowledge of antiquity earned him a prestigious post as librarian and confidante to Cardinal Alessandro Albani. At Albani’s Roman villa, Wincklemann catalogued the cardinal’s vast collection of art and archaeological artifacts. While in Rome, he also indulged in discreet sexual and erotic acts with young men and youths.

By praising the androgynous male as beautiful and desirable over the female, Winckelmann was not only following the sensibilities of the ancient Greeks themselves, but was also infusing modern art history with a homoerotic sensibility. The effects of this are still felt today, even though many art historians choose to deny or reject homosexuality/homoeroticism as legitimate forces in artistic creativity. By 1768 Winckelmann had achieved great fame and was visited by members of royal courts, luminaries, and dignitaries from all over the world. He was murdered in Trieste in 1768 at the hands of a young love interest set on robbery. Winckelmann became an important role model for subsequent artists and critics who privately identified with homosexuality. Both in his life and in his florid prose, Winckelmann gave voice to homoerotic desire.

Before, during, and after the time Winckelmann’s theories caught on, many young male artists embarked upon the mandatory Grand Tour to Italy to learn firsthand about ancient art and lifestyles. Completion of the Grand Tour was expected as a way of rounding out a young gentleman’s education. Not only were original works of antique sculptures, paintings, and ruins readily available for study, but so too were opportunities available for homosexuality and homoerotic exploits. The Italian portrait painter Pompeo Batoni made a fortune from painting portraits of young aristocratic men posing besides ruins or indoors leaning against antique vases or columns. These portraits functioned as mementoes of a young man’s experiences brought back to their native countries and hung on the walls of their country estates. One such typical portrait shows a young wigged noble, looking like a bookish dandy showing off a copy of the Antinous relief then in Cardinal Albani’s villa.

Male homosexuality and its erotic currents played a major role in the formation and content of neoclassicism as an aesthetic. (Smalls in Haggerty) The pent-up undercurrents of homoerotic desire were perhaps most strongly felt in France, where Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) and his pupils dominated the content and dissemination of neoclassicism. French neoclassicism is linked with combined political and moral considerations arising out of specific historical events – namely, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. David’s most famous neoclassical paintings with homoerotic content include the Oath of the Horatii (Louvre, Paris, 1784), Death of Socrates (Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, 1787), Death of Bara (Musée Calvet, Avignon, 1794), Leonidas at Thermopylae (Musée du Louvre, Paris, 1814). These and other works tend to sharply divide the appearance and role of the sexes, underscored in terms of style. Davidian neoclassicism is often referred to as a masculine art form in terms of subject matter and style. Stylistically, there is a stress on linearity, direct lighting, rational composition, and sharp coloration. Male figures are typically shown in public roles and are given qualities of heroism, resolve, physical and moral strength. Conversely, female figures and those qualities deemed feminine are relegated to the realm of the private, domestic, and passive. Male figures are often given hard, angular, and sculptural qualities, whereas women and children are rendered in soft, melting, curvilinear forms. These works are concerned with the male nude as a site of a combined interest in heroic action and erotic contemplation. The male body and masculine deeds and desires are put forth as the critical site for a variety of meanings ranging from the political to the sexual or erotic.

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