Abstract
This chapter will explore two previously unrecognized images of same-sex desire, Petrus Christus’s Couple in a Goldsmith’s Shop and the Housebook Master’s Falconer, which both employ the falcon as a sign of love (figures 1.1 and 1.8).1 These works have never been satisfactorily explained. Much has been written about the Goldsmith’s Shop, a canonical work within the field of northern renaissance art, but the literature is characterized by uncertainty, debate, and contradiction, precisely because no one has been able to make sense of the mysterious male couple depicted in the mirror in the right foreground (figure 1.2). The Falconer is less well known, but the few studies that discuss the print dismiss it too easily, thereby misinterpreting it. Both works are part of a complex cultural history of sexuality that is just now being written, which explores the conceptualization of heterosexual and homosexual desire, and shows how they became constructed as opposites in the West, with one defined as the norm and the other as deviance.2 Furthermore, these images demonstrate that love between men is implicated in the history of marriage, an institution that became the privileged site of heterosexuality. Yet these works also reveal that although some images reinforce the idea of sodomy as sin, others, to quote Jacqueline Murray, “extend beyond a litany of prohibitions and condemnations.”3
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Notes
For a summary of the arguments against adopting the word “homosexual” to refer to the time before the nineteenth century, see Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), pp. 26–32.
Jacqueline Murray, “Twice Marginal and Twice Invisible: Lesbians in the Middle Ages,” in Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Vern L. Bullough and James Brundage (New York: Garland, 1996), p. 208 [191–222].
Warren Johansson and William A. Percy, “Homosexuality,” in Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage (New York: Garland, 1996), pp. 176–78 [155–89].
For recent relevant studies on medieval and early modern images of homosexuals, see Michael Camille, “‘For Our Devotion and Pleasure’: The Sexual Objects of Jean, Duc de Berry,” Art History 24 (2001): 169–91
Michael Camille, The Medieval Art of Love: Objects and Subjects of Desire (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998), pp. 138–40
Craig Harbison, “The Sexuality of Christ in the Early Sixteenth Century in Germany,” in A Tribute to Robert A. Koch: Studies in the Northern Renaissance, ed. John Oliver Hand (Princeton: Department of Art and Archaeology, 1994), pp. 69–81
Robert Mills, “Ecce Homo,” in Gender and Holiness: Men, Women and Saints in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Samantha J.E. Riches and Sarah Salih (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 152–73
Robert Mills, “‘Whatever You Do Is a Delight to Me!’: Masculinity, Masochism, and Queer Play in Representations of Male Martyrdom,” Exemplaria 13.1 (2001): 1–37
James Saslow, Pictures and Passions: A History of Homosexuality in the Visual Arts (New York: Viking, 1999), esp. pp. 76–78, 92–95
J. Schenk, “Homoseksualiteit in de Nederlandse beeldende kunst voor 1800,” Spiegel Historiael 17 (1982): 576–83. For other works, see n65.
“m petr[us] xpi me fecit a 1449.” See Della C. Sperling, “Petrus Christus,” in From Van Eyck to Bruegel: Early Netherlandish Painting in the Metropolitan Museum, ed. Maryan W. Ainsworth and Keith Christiansen (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), p. 150 [150–53].
Peter Schabacker, “Petrus Christus’ ‘Saint Eloy’: Problems of Provenance, Sources and Meaning,” Art Quarterly 35 (1972): 107–108 [103–18].
Maryan W. Ainsworth, “St. Eligius,” in Petrus Christus: Renaissance Master of Bruges, ed. Maryan W. Ainsworth and Max P.J. Martens (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994), p. 96 [96–101].
F. Werner, “Eligius (Alo’, Loy) von Noyon,” in Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie, ed. Englebert Kirshbaum et al., 8 vols. (Rome: Herder, 1968–76), 6: cols. 122–27
Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origin and Character (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), p. 490, n2.
Guy Bauman, “Early Flemish Portraits 1425–1525,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 43.4 (1986): 11 [44–64]
Lorne Campbell, review of Petrus Christus exhibition at Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in Burlington Magazine 136 (1994): 641 [639–41]
Martha Wolff, “The South Netherlands, Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,” in The Robert Lehman Collection, vol. 2: Fifteenth to Eighteenth Century European Paintings: France, Central Europe, The Netherlands, and Great Britain, ed. Charles Sterling et al. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), pp. 65, 67, 69, 71 [61–124]
Hugo van der Velden, who terms it the “epitome of secular painting,” in “Defrocking St. Eloy: Petrus Christus’s ‘Vocational Portrait of a Goldsmith,’” Simiolus 26 (1998): 242–76.
Jos Kolderweij, in his review of Ainsworth and Martens, Petrus Christus: Renaissance Master, in Simiolus 23 (1995): 271 [268–73], convincingly argues that the object with the pelican on the lid is a reliquary.
Rings functioned in both the betrothal and wedding rituals: see Edwin Hall, The Arnolfini Betrothal: Medieval Marriage and the Enigma of Van Eyck’s Double Portrait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 15, 34, 62–64.
Joel Upton, Petrus Christus: His Place in Fifteenth-Century Flemish Painting (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), p. 34; Ainsworth, “St Eligius,” p. 96; and Wolff, “The South Netherlands,” p. 70.
See Wolff,“The South Netherlands,” p. 70; Ronald W. Lightbown, Mediaeval European Jewelry (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1992), pp. 306, 382.
Gustav Glück, “Bildnisse aus dem Hause Habsburg: I. Kaiserin Isabella,” Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, n.s. 7 (1933): 189, fig. 150, 191 [183–200]
Keith Moxey, “Chivalry and the Housebook Master (Master of the Amsterdam Cabinet),” in Livelier than Life: The Master of the Amsterdam Cabinet or the Housebook Master, ca. 1470–1500, exh. cat., ed. Jan Piet Filedt Kok (Amsterdam: Rijksprentenkabinet/Rijksmuseum, 1985), pp. 65–78. For this gesture, see also Marcantonio Raimondi’s Apollo, Hyacinth, and Amor, 1506, in Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 2, and two versions of Paris Bordon, Pair of Lovers, ca. 1540–50
Jill Dunkerton, Susan Foister, and Nicholas Penny, Dürer to Veronese: Sixteenth-Century Painting in the National Gallery (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 102–103, figs. 115–116.
For the sword as phallus see Diane Wolfthal, Images of Rape: The “Heroic” Tradition and Its Alternatives (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 61, 81, 83; for the gesture of grasping the hilt of the sword in a marital context
Margaret Scott, The History of Dress Series: Late Gothic Europe 1400–1500 (London: Mills and Boon, 1980), p. 33, fig. 13
Raimond van Marle, Iconographie de l’art profane au Moyen Âge et à la Renaissance, 2 vols. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1931), 1:457, fig. 452; Hall, Arnolfini Betrothal, pl. 9. For earnest money, see Wolff, “The South Netherlands,” p. 70, and Hall, Arnolfini Betrothal, pp. 15, 61.
Heinrich Schwartz, “The Mirror in Art,” Art Quarterly 15 (1952): 103 [97–118].
M.J.H. Madou, “Het gebruik van de spiegel in de Middeleeuwen,” in Oog in oog met de Spiegel, ed. Nico J. Brederoo (Amsterdam: Aramith, 1988), pp. 57–61 [38–65]; Schwartz, “The Mirror in Art,” p. 103
Julien Chapuis, “Early Netherlandish Painting: Shifting Perspectives,” in From Van Eyck to Bruegel: Early Netherlandish Painting in the Metropolitan Museum, ed. Maryan W. Ainsworth and Keith Christiansen (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), p. 17 [3–21]; Schabacker, “Petrus Christus’ ‘Saint Eloy,’” pp. 103–118.
Mira Friedman, “The Falcon and the Hunt: Symbolic Love Imagery in Medieval and Renaissance Art,” in Poetics of Love in the Middle Ages, ed. Moshe Lazar and Norris J. Lacy (Fairfax: George Mason University Press, 1989), p. 162 [157–75].
Peter Schabacker, Petrus Christus (Utrecht: Haentjens, Dekker and Gumbert, 1974), p. 90. Again van der Velden disagrees: see “Defrocking St. Eloy,” p. 243.
Meyer Schapiro, Words and Pictures: On the Literal and the Symbolic in the Illustration of a Text (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), p. 40.
See Ruth Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), esp. 1:209–27.
Filedt Kok, “Catalogue,” p. 155, fig. 58c; Stephen K. Scher (ed.), Europe in Torment: 1450–1550 (Providence: Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design, 1974), pp. 107–109.
Scott, Late Gothic Painting, pp. 146, 148. Bauman also terms them aristocratic: see “Early Flemish Portraits,” pp. 11–12. For images of Isabella, see Micheline Sonkes, Dessins du XVe siècle: Groupe Van der Weyden (Brussels: Centre National de Recherches “Primitifs Flamands,” 1969), p. 110 and pl. XXIIIb.
H. Clifford Smith, “‘The Legend of S. Eloy and S. Goddeberta’ by Petrus Christus,” Burlington Magazine 35 (1914): 331 [326–35].
John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 253
Juliann Vitullo, The Chivalric Epic in Medieval Italy (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2000), pp. 79–80.
Beate Schmolke-Hasselmann, “Accipiter et chirotheca: Die Artus des Andreas Capellanus—eine Liebesallegorie?,” Germanisch-romanische Monatschrift 63 (1982): 387–417 (esp. 392–96).
Camille, Medieval Art of Love, p. 97, fig. 82. See also, for example, Mira Friedman,“Sünde, Sünder und die Darstellungen der Laster in dem Bildern zur ‘Bible Moralisée,’” Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 37 (1984): 162, 165–66; 253, fig. 6; 254, figs. 11–12; 260, fig. 33 [157–71].
Marc Boone, “State Power and Illicit Sexuality: The Persecution of Sodomy in Late Medieval Bruges,” Journal of Medieval History 22 (1996): 143–44 [135–53].
Jacques Chiffoleau, “Dire l’indicible. Remarques sur la catégorie du ‘nefan-dum’ du XIIe au XVe siècle,” Annales: Économies, sociétés, civilisations 45.2 (1990): 289–324.
Joseph Manca, “Sacred vs. Profane: Images of Sexual Vice in Renaissance Art,” Studies in Iconography 13 (1990): 145–90
Joseph Manca, The Art of Ercole de’ Roberti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 96.
Charles de Tolnay, Michelangelo: Sculptor, Painter, Architect (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 19; Manca,“Sacred vs. Profane,” 155–57, 187–88, n29; Saslow, Pictures and Passions, p. 97
William E. Wallace, Michelangelo: The Complete Sculpture, Painting, Architecture (Hong Kong: Hugh Lauter Levin, 1998), p. 137.
Howard Hibbard, Michelangelo, 2nd edn. (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), cites this explanation along with another, p. 318.
Elizabeth B. Keiser, Courtly Desire and Medieval Homophobia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 2–5, 133.
See Joseph Cady, “The ‘Masculine Love’ of the ‘Princes of Sodom’ ‘Practicing the Art of Ganymede’ at Henri Ill’s Court: The Homosexuality of Henri III and His Mignons in Pierre de L’Estoile’s Mémoires-Journaux,” in Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West, ed. Jacqueline Murray and Konrad Eisenbichler (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), p. 126 [123–54].
See Cady, “The ‘Masculine Love’ of the ‘Princes of Sodom,’” p. 127. For this phenomenon elsewhere, see Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller, “Homosexuelles Alltagsleben im Mittelalter,” Zeitschrift für Sexualforschung 5 (1992): 117–118.
Lilian Armstrong first proposed this in The Paintings and Drawings of Marco Zoppo (New York: Garland Publishing, 1976), pp. 252, 313–314, 420.
Later scholars have supported her proposal: see Betty Rosasco, “Albrecht Dürer’s ‘Death of Orpheus’: Its Critical Fortunes and a New Interpretation of Its Meaning,” Idea: Jahrbuch der Hamburger Kunsthalle 3 (1984): 33 [19–41]
Hugo Chapman, Padua in the 1450s: Marc Zoppo and His Contemporaries (London: British Museum, 1998), p. 38.
Jeffrey Richards, Sex, Dissidence and Damnation: Minority Groups in the Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 138.
Michael J. Rocke, “Sodomites in Fifteenth-century Tuscany: The Views of Bernardino of Siena,” in The Pursuit of Sodomy: Male Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe, ed. Kent Gerad and Gert Hekma (New York: Haworth Press, 1989), p. 18 [7–31]. Also see his Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1978).
James Saslow, “The Middle Ages and Negative Imagery,” The Advocate (January 21, 1986): 56–58
Edgar Wind, “‘Hercules’ and ‘Orpheus’: Two Mock-Heroic Designs by Dürer,” Journal of the Warburg Institute 2 (1938–39): 214–217 [206–18]. Colin Eisler, noting Dürer’s close relationship with Willibald Pirckheimer, has suggested that the two were lovers
see his review of Jane Campbell Hutchison, Albrecht Dürer: A Biography, in Renaissance Quarterly 45 (1992): 165 [163–66]
Sixteenth-century Netherlandish art also represented same-sex desire. Bosch is probably referring to sexual acts when he shows a man inserting a flower into another man’s rear end, a print by Theodor de Brij depicts dogs attacking homosexuals in the New World, and those by Frans Hoogenberg show the arrest and execution of monks condemned for sodomy in Bruges. See Saslow, Pictures and Passions, p. 78, and J. Schenk, “Homoseksualiteit in de Nederlandse beeldende kunst voor 1800,” Spiegel Historiael 17 (1982): 579–80 [576–83]. See also an illumination of Jupiter and Ganymede in The City of God, Philadelphia Museum of Art,’ 45–65–1, fol. 33r.
See, for example, Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts/Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992).
Max Lehrs, “Die deutsche und niederländische Kupferstich des fünfzehten Jahhunderts in der kleineren Sammlungen,” Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft 15 (1892): 122 [110–46], no. 64:“der Falkonier” and “sein Begleiter”; Max Lehrs, Geschichte und Kritischer Katalog des Deutschen, Niederländerischen und Französischen Kupferstichs im XV. Jahrhundert, 10 vols. (Vienna: Gesellschaft für Vervielfältigende Kunst, 1932), 8:140, no. 75: “der Begleiter” and “der Genosse”
Max Lehrs, The Master of the Amsterdam Cabinet (Paris: International Chalcographical Society, 1893–94), p. 70
Max Lehrs, “Der deutsche und niederländische Kupferstich des fünfzehnten Jahrhunderts in den kleineren Sammlungen,” Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft 15 (1892): 122 [110–46]
Jane Campbell Hutchison, The Master of the Housebook (New York: Collector’s Edition, 1972), p. 60
Filedt Kok, “Catalogue,” p. 167. Alfred Stange called the print “The Falconer with the Aristocratic Lord” (Die Falkner mit dem vornehmen Herren): see Stange, Das Hausbuchmeister (Baden-Baden: Heitz, 1958), pp. 15, 39. Fabrizio Augustoni returns to Lehr’s title in Catalogo completo delle incisioni del Maestro del Libro di Casa (Milan: Salamon and Agustoni, 1972), p. xxx (“Der Falkenier und sein Begleiter”).
For this print, see Jay A. Levenson, Konrad Oberhuber, and Jacqueline L. Sheehan, Early Italian Engravings from the National Gallery of Art (Washington: National Gallery, 1973), p. 94, cat. no. 17. For another print that shows the gentleman and his servant out falconing
Arthur M. Hind, Early Italian Engraving (New York: Knoedler, 1938), II, A.III. 22, a1. Here the gentleman rides on horseback while his servant walks, again a clear class distinction.
Jonathan J.G. Alexander, The Master of Mary of Burgundy: A Book of Hours for Engelbert of Nassau (New York: Georges Braziller, 1970), cat. nos. 41–58, fol. 55v. Alexander notes that Emperor Frederick II described the same sort of lure.
Heinz Peters, “Falke, Falkenjagd, Falkner, und Falkenbuch,” in Reallexikon zur Deutschen Kunstgeschichte, ed. Otto Schmitt et al. (Munich: Alfred Druckmüller, 1937), 6:1279, 1281–82, 1314 [1251–1366].
Guy de Tervarent, Attributs et symboles dans l’art profane, 1450–1600: dictionnaire d’un langage perdu, 3 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 1958–64), 2:309
F.W.H. Hollstein, German Engravings, Etchings, and Woodcuts ca. 1400–1700 (Amsterdam: Menno Hertzberger, 1954), 1:56, B.109.
David Landau and Peter Parshall, The Renaissance Print: 1470–1550 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 5 and 378, n109.
James Saslow, Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).
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Wolfthal, D. (2004). Picturing Same-Sex Desire: The Falconer and His Lover in Images by Petrus Christus and the Housebook Master. In: Campbell, E., Mills, R. (eds) Troubled Vision: Gender, Sexuality, and Sight in Medieval Text and Image. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-11451-8_2
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