The subtle erotic and sexual themes within the works of Renaissance giants Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael

Close inspection of works by Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael reveals romantic and erotic clues within their mythological subjects

Detail: Raphael and studio,' Wedding Banquet of Cupid and Psyche,' Villa Farnesina, Rome, 1517

Classical mythology added greatly to the range of romantic and erotic subjects available to Renaissance artists and their patrons, reassured by the conviction that these myths conveyed deeper moral, philosophical or spiritual insights. Even seemingly shocking or reprehensible actions, like Apollo’s flaying of Marsyas, especially from a Neoplatonic perspective, could have a higher meaning. In fact the story of Marsyas had been understood in this sense already by Dante, who invokes it at the beginning of Paradiso as a metaphor for the highest level of inspiration.

These subjects were not as familiar to the broader population as those of the Bible, and yet it would be a mistake to think that they were entirely foreign to less educated people in the Renaissance. For the ancient gods had never really become extinct; they lived on in the names of the planets, and astrology was a fundamental part of the medieval world-view: the zodiac signs mark the calendar of the year on the great cathedrals, and the art of medicine took the importance of horoscopes for granted.

Astrology and astronomy, like chemistry and alchemy, were inseparable before the 17th century, and the basis of both lay in the work of Hellenistic scientists who understood that the world was round, assumed the orbits of the planets and the sun to be round as well, and divided the 360 degrees of the sun’s path into 12 houses, each associated with a constellation as well as with planetary rulers. The primary purpose of casting a horoscope was not to tell an individual’s future, but to understand his constitution and character; the church condemned the use of astrology for predicting the future as black magic, but did not question its scientific and medical

applications.

Detail: Leonardo da Vinci, Study for the Kneeling Leda, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 1507

Thanks to the pervasiveness of this system in medieval thought – which only became greater after the Crusades, when we encountered further elaborations that Islamic scholars had added to the Greek system – everyone knew about Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Mercury and Apollo. Hercules too was part of what one could call popular culture, and is often used to symbolise the virtue of fortitude in medieval churches.

In addition to this, everyone who went to school studied Latin and consequently read some Virgil and Ovid, as well as historical works like Livy. Thus they learned more about the gods as well as the stories of Aeneas and Dido, and episodes from the Trojan War. Ovid’s Metamorphoses, with its vivid, even sensational, yet witty and ironic telling of mythical tales, mostly concerned with love and desire, was a perennial favourite and the first reference book for artists painting mythological subjects.

The more highly-educated, and especially the few who had studied Greek, had a vastly greater knowledge of classical literature and the more complex nuances of mythology. So there were several levels of familiarity with ancient myth, from rudimentary to generic to sophisticated, and yet almost everyone knew at least the principal names. Probably much the same could be said of contemporary audiences’ acquaintance with the stories of the Old Testament: everyone knew something about Adam and Eve and Abraham and Moses, but few had read the texts themselves in the Latin Vulgate, let alone in the Greek of the Septuagint or the original Hebrew.

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, 'The Ignudi,' Sistine Chapel ceiling, 1512

Among the great artists of the High Renaissance – particularly the three biggest names, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael – mythological subjects do not at first sight seem as prominent as among those who came before and after them; but this is perhaps partly because many of their most important works were large, official commissions for the Vatican at the time when Rome was finally being rebuilt after a millennium of decay and dilapidation.

Leonardo was not particularly interested in mythology – or literary culture for that matter, although he wrote extensive notes about art and other matters – which makes the myths that he does choose to deal with even more significant. Perhaps the most important is the story of Leda, who is impregnated by Zeus in the form of a swan and gives birth to two eggs, which contain Castor and Pollux (today the constellation Gemini) as well as Clytemnestra, who later marries Agamemnon, and Helen, the wife of Menelaus who runs away with Paris, provoking the Trojan War.

In one remarkable drawing, Leonardo represents Leda kneeling on the ground, holding onto the neck of the swan and gazing down at the two eggs that have cracked open, revealing the infants. He also made a drawing of her standing, of which a copy by Raphael survives, and may have completed a painting of the subject, for numerous copies exist by his various pupils, such as Francesco Melzi, his companion and posthumous editor of his manuscripts, or Cesare da Sesto.

Leonardo’s interest in this subject may possibly echo the famous bird dream discussed by Sigmund Freud in his essay on the artist (1916), but is certainly connected with his fascination for the forms and vitality of nature, which we see in his countless drawings of water, of plants, of hair and of course of the human body.

He does not appear to have been sexually interested in women, although the concept of homosexuality, as I have observed before, is anachronistic before the last century or century and a half. He was denounced for sodomy as a young man, but such charges were often brought to damage the reputation of a rival in politics or business in Renaissance Florence.

Leonardo seems to have been particularly drawn to the image of the androgyne, which has a long history in mythology, philosophy and alchemy as the symbol of the reconciliation or transcendence of dualism. Both his male and female figures, as well as inherently sexless entities like angels, tend towards this ideal state of harmony – which, as we discussed last week, arises from the synthesis of male and female.

Detail: Leonardo da Vinci, Study for the Kneeling Leda, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 1507

Interestingly, Michelangelo too painted a picture of Leda coupling with the swan – formally speaking a spin-off of his statue of Night at the Sagrestia Nuova – which was in the French royal collection until a puritanical bureaucrat failed to take proper care of it in the early 17th century; it is known today from a copy made from the original by Rubens, who incorporated the figure into his Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus (1618), especially significant since the two male figures in the painting are Castor and Pollux.

But Michelangelo was no more interested in women than Leonardo; his most exuberant, yet also complex, expressions of the beauty of the human form are the ignudi of the Sistine ceiling, all variations on the theme of the Belvedere Torso, a powerful but fragmentary Hellenistic Pergamese torso in the Vatican collection.

The big subject of the Sistine ceiling is the origin and persistence (even after the Flood) of sin, and thus a demonstration of the necessity of God’s incarnation as Christ. Within this scheme, the ignudi, who share the physical perfection of the newly-made Adam, play an ambivalent role, reminding us of the perfect beauty of the human body as originally formed, and yet expressing a profound spiritual disquiet in their twisting

restlessness.

A Neoplatonic understanding of love is evident in the drawing by Michelangelo for the young Tommaso dei Cavalieri, of Jupiter carrying off the shepherd Ganymede, and which is known today through a number of copies and engravings. The subject is treated by other artists in different ways, but in Michelangelo’s drawing it is a vision of the soul being carried off by the force of the divine – or of the affinity of love with divine possession.

Of the three giants of the High Renaissance, only Raphael was sexually interested in women, and while Michelangelo based even female figures on male models – Renaissance studios were always full of boys who could pose for the master – Raphael drew his mistresses, and not surprisingly, produced figures that feel far more naturally female. Raphael’s early death was even blamed on exhaustion brought on by excessive indulgence in sex.

There are not a lot of opportunities for amorous themes to appear in his grandest work, like the cycle of frescoes in the Vatican Stanze or his late masterpiece, the Cartoons, today at the Victoria and Albert Museum, produced as designs for tapestries to be hung in the Sistine Chapel, but they naturally dominate the Psyche frescoes at the Farnesina in Rome.

This story, a kind of philosophical fairy tale, is told by the second-century Roman author Apuleius as part of The Golden Ass, an ostensibly picaresque novel with a deeper spiritual meaning. In short, Cupid is sent by his jealous mother Venus to kill an extraordinarily beautiful young girl, but falls in love with her instead. He visits Psyche every night in the dark, warning her she must never look at him, but she lights a lamp one night to see her lover; a drop of hot oil wakes him and he disappears.

Persecuted by Venus, Psyche undergoes a series of seemingly impossible tasks, in which she is aided by various real or supernatural creatures. Finally she is reunited with Cupid, and – the final meaning of the tale – love makes the soul immortal. The story became enormously popular in the Renaissance; the episode in which she spies on her lover, wakes him and loses him was, not surprisingly, the most popular with artists.

Raphael and his workshop illustrate many of the episodes in the loggia of the Farnesina villa, and there are exquisite red chalk drawings by his own hand, such as the group of the three Graces. Most of the painting itself, as often in large commissions of this kind, was executed by the very able painters who worked under his

direction.

One of the two central scenes shows the wedding feast of Cupid and Psyche, painted as though on a tapestry suspended in the ceiling. The bride and groom sit on the right, in the place of honour. Many of the most important of the gods are present, including Jupiter; Ganymede kneels in the foreground offering him a cup of wine. The Graces, on the right, sprinkle perfume and the Hours, with butterfly wings, scatter flowers. Bacchus himself pours wine on the right, and Apollo plays music on the left.

All around are festoons of leaves, fruit and flowers painted by Raphael’s assistant, Giovanni da Udine. If we look carefully, however, these floral decorations are not as innocent as it seems.

Above the figure of Mercury, in particular, is a suggestively split melon fringed with dark grapes, while as Vasari wrote in Giovanni’s biography, “above the flying figure of Mercury, he fashioned a Priapus from a gourd and two eggplants for testicles”. This may well be the celebration of a theme dear to the Neoplatonists, but Raphael and his team subtly remind us of the realities of the earthly Venus.

Eros in Art: Part Three