How sex ruined the art world: the STD that created a movement

Europe and art history, from the Mannerist period onwards, were never the same after the first outbreak of syphilis in Naples in 1494.

Francesco del Cossa, Allegory of April, c. 1470, Ferrara, Palazzo Schifanoia

Eros in art

Part 6: Mannerism

The union of Ares and Aphrodite, or Mars and Venus in Latin, representing respectively the masculine force of strife and the feminine force of attraction, produced a daughter called Harmonia. The symbolism appealed to the Neoplatonic thinkers and the artists they influenced, such as Mantegna in his Parnassus, discussed here a couple of weeks ago. Botticelli painted a picture of Venus with the sleeping Mars – here going beyond balance to suggest the dominion of love – and so did Piero di Cosimo and others. It even became common to have wedding portraits painted in the characters of the two complementary divinities.

For artists of the early Renaissance, love is generally a joyful theme, the natural expression of that “rediscovery of man and the world”, as Burckhardt writes in his Civilisation of the

Agnolo Bronzino, Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time, c. 1545. London, National Gallery

Renaissance in Italy (1860). If anything that exuberance is even more apparent in the work of the less philosophically sophisticated Francesco del Cossa, in his Allegory of April in Palazzo Schifanoia at Ferrara (c. 1470). In the centre is a Triumph of Love motif, with Venus drawn by swans on an implausible float, Mars kneeling chained before her; on the upper right are the three Graces and all around are young aristocrats flirting and making love.

All this carefree fun was brought to an end a quarter-century later, when Columbus’s ships brought back a terrible new disease from the Caribbean: syphilis, which made a horrifying appearance among the troops on both sides in the French siege of Naples in 1494. The Italians, blaming the French troops, called it il mal francese, while the French, holding the women of Naples responsible, called it le mal Italian or le mal de Naples. As always seems to happen when a new disease strikes a population without previous exposure, the symptoms were far worse in the first generations: contemporary illustrations show pustules covering the whole body, and even much later it could cause terrible and permanent disfigurement. Syphilis was all the more terrifying for being – like the bubonic plague in the 14th century – unknown to the ancients and therefore not listed in the medical textbooks.

Bartholomeus Spraenger, Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, 1580-82. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum

The disease was named by the Veronese physician Girolamo Fracostoro – the pioneer of germ theory of contagion – in his Latin poem Syphilis, sive morbus gallicus (1530), which speaks in its first line of the “semina morbum”, the seeds (germs) of diseases. In the poem, Syphilus is named as the first to suffer the disease. (For any interested reader, the German 1830 edition of the Latin text can be found on that extraordinary web resource, Internet Archive.) A previously overlooked portrait in the National Gallery in London was identified in 2013 as Titian’s portrait of the famous scholar in a coat of lynx fur.

Fracastoro also wrote of cures for the disease, the most effective of which seems to have been mercury, already recommended by another great medical authority, Paracelsus, against leprosy. The treatment, in effect an early form of chemotherapy, was of course very toxic; originally it involved rubbing the body all over in mercury ointment and then sitting in a sauna-like hot room to encourage profuse sweating. Hair fell out, teeth turned black and the patient suffered terrible headaches.

This is most likely the subject of an otherwise enigmatic allegorical composition by the Mannerist painter Bronzino, Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time (c. 1545). The principal figures are Venus kissing her son Cupid. Another putto is about to shower them with rose-petals, symbolising sexual pleasure. The old man at the back drawing back a curtain is the personification of Time uncovering hidden transgression.

Titian, Portrait of Fracastoro, c. 1528, London, National Gallery

On the right is a girl with a sphinx’s body and snake-like tail, recalling representations of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, holding a honeycomb for pleasure in one hand and a scorpion, for the sting of retribution, in the other; her hands are reversed, clearly a sinister sign, perhaps with satanic associations. All of this symbolism is fairly unambiguous. Less certain is the identification of the haggard female figure on the left: it has been plausibly suggested that she evokes the sufferings of a patient undergoing mercury treatment.

From now on, the sweetness of pleasure is shadowed not only by the fear of punishment in the next life but by the very real dread of a terrible disease in this one. Syphilis has been called the AIDS of the 16th century, tearing away the privacy of private lives, and exposing the sick to shame and opprobrium in addition to their physical sufferings. Hellfire preachers declared that the new disease was the just penalty visited by an angry God upon a generation of inveterate fornicators.

The horrifying appearance of syphilis brings an end to a joyful celebration of the body inspired by the example of antiquity. But in addition to the gloom of sin and guilt and the threat of disease and public exposure, several other factors contributed to the end of the High Renaissance. The most dramatic and sudden one was the Sack of Rome in 1527, an event that must have been all the more traumatic because it was once again German barbarians sacking a city that was at last rising from its ruins.

Giulio Romano, Pasiphae getting into the cow, (Sala di Psiche), 1526-28, Mantua, Palazzo de Te

Behind that disaster in turn lay one of the greatest dramas of the century: the Reformation, tearing Christendom apart, provoking rage and terror – each side believing the other to be heretics doomed to damnation – and then 100 years of bitter warfare across Europe from the mid-16th century until the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648. The longer-term effect of this initial rupture and the subsequent fracturing into ever-smaller groups was the gradual decline of Christianity itself.

Meanwhile the boundaries of the world had exploded with the great age of exploration: Europe opened the whole Earth to trade and exchange, and over the next couple of centuries mapped the globe for the first time in an objective and scientific way. At the same time the new heliocentric astronomy reshaped understanding of the cosmos itself. In all these ways, the world of the early 16th century was turned upside-down, ending the bold confidence of the High Renaissance and inaugurating the period of uncertainty, self-consciousness, curiosity and doubt that we call Mannerism, the culture to which Shakespeare’s Hamlet is heir.

In this world, sexuality becomes more complicated and darker than before. We saw a couple of weeks ago the games that Raphael’s assistant Giovanni da Udine played with erotic fruit in the festoons of the Villa Farnesina; another of his most important assistants, Giulio Romano, went further in evoking erotic themes at the Palazzo del Te in Mantua, including his explicit fresco of Jupiter seducing Olympia, the mother of Alexander the Great, part of the incredibly elaborate scheme of the Sala di Psiche (1526-28). Jupiter’s excited state is probably unsuitable for publication in this paper, so readers will have to look it up for themselves.

Less explicit but more disturbing by implication is another mythological subject which is in the same room, and indeed just above the next window from the Olympia fresco. The subject is King Minos’s wife Pasiphae, who has been stricken with lust for a beautiful bull. Dedalus, the great artificer, contrives a way for her to satisfy her longing: he builds a wonderfully realistic model of a heifer into which we see Pasiphae stepping with his help. On the right, the white bull is seen waiting and watching with interest. The result of the union will be the monstrous Minotaur, which Dedalus will be called on again to imprison in the labyrinth.

This is an example of the kind of subject which can be alluded to in literature but is seldom represented in art because images are more immediate to the mind than words; Horace had made the point in his Ars poetica and there were as a result two different standards of decorum, one governing what can be written, the other what can be shown: we have the same thing today with film and video media.

This is probably a subject that would not have been painted in any other period; and although in this case the story is implied rather than explicitly shown, Romano still takes pains to make what is about to happen as graphically clear as he can. Interestingly another member of Raphael’s team, his engraver Marcantonio Raimondi, printed a series of 16 images of couples making love in various positions based on designs by Giulio Romano, which became known as I Modi, “the ways” (1524). Printmaking was not subject to quite the same rules of decorum as paintings – especially in the case of book illustrations – but these prints went too far; the edition was confiscated and burned and Raimondi briefly imprisoned.

The project subsequently came to the attention of the writer Pietro Aretino, the friend and promoter of Titian and enemy of Michelangelo. Both painted his portrait: Michelangelo depicted him as Saint Bartholomew in the Last Judgment, holding a skin with a self-portrait; and Titian painted the magnificent portrait which is now in the Pitti Palace in Florence. Aretino sponsored a reprint, accompanied by 16 erotic sonnets of his own composition on the different sexual positions, and secured Raimondi’s release.

This edition was also seized and suppressed in 1527, although no one was imprisoned – perhaps the Pope had other things on his mind in the tragic year of the Sack of Rome – but fragments are still held in the British Museum and at least one set must have survived to be copied in a cruder woodcut version that came out in Venice in 1550. The designs were also reproduced later in the century by Agostino Carracci, whose edition in turn is best known from another version engraved in France in 1798.

A generally uneasy, curious and transgressive attitude to erotic themes thus seems to have arisen in the shadow of syphilis, and this tendency will continue into the baroque period and beyond, as we discuss the work of Annibale Carracci, brother of Agostino, and of course Caravaggio. But Mannerist ambiguity is particularly epitomised in the subject of the Hermaphrodite, and no painting evokes that subject better than the one by a German artist at the court of the Emperor Rudolf II in Prague, Bartholomeus Spranger.

According to the myth and as recounted by Ovid in Metamorphoses IV, 285 ff., Hermaphroditus was the son of Aphrodite and Hermes. The nymph Salmacis one day saw him bathing and was struck by his beauty; she attempts to seduce him, but forces herself upon him – a rare example in mythology of a girl ravishing a boy – and finally prays that they may be united into a single being. And so they are – but it is a very different union from the harmonious equilibrium of Mars and Venus or indeed the philosophical concept of the Hermaphrodite in alchemical theory.