The mythology on which much of ancient as well as Italian Renaissance art depends is linked to the societies which gave rise to them both. Of all these ancient texts, few translated into the realm of Renaissance social and sexual experience as closely as the trove of sexual unorthodoxies and homoerotic idioms contained in Ovid’s first-century narrative poem Metamorphoses, which features love between divinities and mortals as its central topic.30 The subject of metamorphosis was at home in a climate evolving out of medieval scholasticism towards its own cultural and intellectual flowering. But, more specifically Ovid’s epic poem, as well the discovery of ancient homoerotically themed artifacts, revealed a pattern that informed and recorded pederasty as the highest and most intense type of male bonding. During the Renaissance, religious subject matter was undeniably limited in its range and without much scope for sexual love unless it was considered within the wider framework of divine providence. Therefore, for Renaissance males with a desire to invoke a sense of bridging the past and present in a manner that suited the needs of their period, such explicit literary and visual sources as
Metamorphoses revealed that their counterparts in ancient Greece and Rome did not
attract social disapproval for expression of sexual desire for another male, so long as the object of their desire was an adolescent whom the adult loved within the context of a codified and positively valued relationship.31 Consequently, Ovid’s mythical narratives
30 Ovid, Metamorphoses, Books IX-XV, trans. Frank Justus Miller, Cambridge, Mass., 1977.
31 Pederasty entailed a formal bond between an adult man and an adolescent boy which consisted of loving and
provided Renaissance audiences with a familiar language with which to talk about human relationships and human experience in hitherto unknown richness and depth. As Ewin Panofsky remarked: ‘no other classical author treated so great a variety of
mythological subject matter or was so assiduously read, translated, paraphrased, commented upon and illustrated’.32
Renaissance society had sex and gender norms, but numerous individuals lived at variance with those perceived norms. Yet, same-sex desire has never mapped easily onto traditional notions concerned with the discursive field of art history. Libidinal interpretations of homoerotically charged imagery have often been problematized by the unrecognised historical and cultural specificity of sexuality and gender. As a
consequence, for nearly a century, homoerotic relationships have been investigated by social scientists but homoerotically-themed art produced in the early modern period has received almost no attention from art historians, who seem to have neglected,
overlooked or been circumspect about examining the topic because of the attached stigma.33 Nonetheless, I maintain that art historians are behoved to recognise that
personal sexual behaviour is shaped by and shapes the wider social and political milieu that generates visual culture. However, not all societies permit expression of all varieties of erotic disposition. Men who characteristically prefer relations with youths are
considered in our culture deserving of sanction, if not outright condemnation. In many other cultures, particularly classical antiquity and the Italian Renaissance, pederastic relations were considered to be a transient and natural stage in the lives of both adults
as a means of teaching the young and conveying to them important cultural values such as courage, respect and restraint. See J. Saslow, Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, London, 1989 and G. Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice, Oxford, 1985.
32 E. Panofsky, Problems in Titian, Mostly Iconographic, New York, 1969, p. 140. 33 For an account of previous scholarship, see above notes 5, 6 and 7.
and youths.34 While pederasty does not necessarily fit into our habitual categories of understanding age-asymmetrical sexual relationships, in classical antiquity, and later in Renaissance Italy, it was often seen as an educational institution for the inculcation of moral and cultural values by the older man to the younger, as well as a form of sexual expression.35 Such homoerotic themes were popular in Renaissance art commissioned in the court circles of northern Italy with pederasty first entering representation in the visual domain of fifteenth-century Italy when the period saw a rediscovery and renewed interest in the literature, philosophy and art of classical antiquity. In fact, there are over one hundred extant representations featuring Ganymede as the boy abducted by Zeus to become cup bearer to the gods and his own beloved.36
Images which appear to depict pederasty can, therefore, offer a rich contribution to art historical discourse because they bear directly on the matter of how Western society and its erotically themed art are both products of rapidly changing attitudes about sex, and how a major factor in this change can be attributed to a growing
recognition of the variety possible in human sexuality. The works under discussion are Benvenuto Cellini’s (1500-71) marble statue of Apollo and Hyacinth (Figs. 1a-c), and Giulio Romano’s (1499-1546) ink drawing of Apollo and Cyparissus (Fig. 2). In this chapter I concentrate on the primary theme of these case studies as pederastic exemplars of the superordinate adult Apollo with his subordinate adolescent male beloveds.
34 The seminal sociological texts which this chapter will draw upon are those by Rocke (1996), and G. Ruggiero,
The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice, Oxford, 1985. For further historical reading on societal attitudes towards sexuality, see V.L. Bullough, Sexual Variance in Society and History, Chicago and London, 1976. Also see Halperin, 1990.
35 The term derives from the combination of pais (Greek for boy) and erastēs (Greek for lover). The Oxford
English Dictionary defines pederasty as ‘homosexual relations between a man and boy: homosexual anal intercourse, usually with a boy or younger man as the passive partner’. However, the Encyclopaedia of
Homosexuality offers a more accurate definition: ‘Pederasty is the erotic relationship between an adult male and a boy, generally one between the ages of twelve and seventeen, in which the older partner is attracted to the younger one who returns his affection, whether or not the liaison leads to overt sexual contact’.
(http://www.williamapercy.com/wiki/index.php/Encyclopaedia of Homosexuality).
Particular attention is paid to the manner in which these images appear to embody a complex set of messages that encoded issues of gender behaviour and performance in the context of intergenerational same-sex erotic relationships during the Italian Renaissance.37
These interrelated themes of pederasty between an adult male Apollo and his respective juvenile lovers will be developed in two parts. Firstly, there is analysis and discussion of Cellini’s marble Apollo and Hyacinth, thought to be executed in
anticipation of its purchase by Duke Cosimo de’ Medici (1519-74). The second part of this chapter presents a case study of Romano’s ink drawing of Apollo and Cyparissus, for the papal chancellor Baldassarre Turini. Primacy is given to these works of art because they embody the manner in which the variety of sexual behaviour and experience which prevailed between age-asymmetrical males in the Renaissance, as well as the psychological meanings, patterns and identities assigned to those acts, found expression in the visual domain of the period. To date, both these images have been studied but in the most cursory fashion. But, in this chapter I employ pictorial analysis, social history, as well as gender and sexuality studies to suggest new possibilities for thinking about the works in congruence with the sexual and cultural mores of the period. Analysis of Apollo and Hyacinth’s and Apollo and Cyparissus’s literary source is undertaken, together with consideration of the moral and intellectual implications each work might have held for both their creators and their intended audiences in an era when rigid social stratification was the pillar of all institutions.38
No text, visual or written, is comprehensible without a close consideration of
contemporary interests and practices. Therefore, this chapter seeks to define and explain
37 See D. Halperin, Hidden from History, (ed.), London, 1989, pp. 37-53. Also see Rocke, 1996, p. 97. 38 See R. Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity, Oxford, 1969.
the broader conceptual and institutional conditions, together with the rigid behavioural expectations, which appear to be encoded within these two remarkable depictions of male erotics. Furthermore, with recourse to Rocke’s aforementioned sociological discourse, I explore the extent to which both Cellini’s sculptural group of Apollo and
Hyacinth and Romano’s drawing of Apollo and Cyparissus appear to substantiate
surviving judicial records.39 These images are evaluated in light of Rocke’s proposition that ‘at one time or another and with varying significance and degrees of involvement, pederastic relations formed part of the life experience of many Italian males of the late medieval and early modern period’.40 Consideration is given to the extent to which these works conform both thematically and compositionally to the behavioural codes of masculinity, sexual and social comportment and the articulation of Renaissance power dynamics, differentials and constructs. Nuanced study and reappraisal of the allegorical and iconographic elements encapsulated in these case studies aims to achieve closer engagement with how the male body could function in Renaissance visual and political culture. Furthermore, I explore the ways in which these works could have provided structured initiatory and pedagogical models connected to rites that mark the passage from youth to adulthood at a time when lived eroticism conformed to rules of social hierarchy with sexual roles tied to age as well as class. Absolutely fundamental to my core arguments is the proposition that in these two representations Apollo’s young lovers, Hyacinth and Cyparissus, do not literally transform into botanical entities as
39 The fundamental mores and social configurations of same-sex erotic relations are discussed in Rocke,
Forbidden Friendships, 1996, pp. 87-101.
such. I instead argue that these youths who die as juveniles by Apollo’s own hands, now await not literal metamorphosis into flowers or trees but accession to adulthood.41