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The Queering of Saint Sebastian with Commentary on Images of the Biblical Figure Judith Elizabeth Weber In 288 AD, a Roman man was martyred twice. In Who’s Who in Gay and Lesbian History: from Antiquity to WWII, Robert Aldrich and Gary Wotherspoon state that after serving in the Roman Praetorian Guard long enough to advance to an important position, he was caught converting Romans to Christianity (400). For this offense, the man was shot with arrows and left for dead upon the tree to which he was tied. A Christian woman found him and tended his wounds, bringing him back from the brink of death. Instead of fleeing Rome with his life, however, the man “declared his faith in Christ during a pagan ceremony held by the two emperors” (Aldrich and Wotherspoon 400). Of course, he was arrested once again, and this time, he was beaten to death and thrown in the sewer. Little is known of the things that would have constituted his life as a man—his hobbies, who he loved, his temperament. Instead, history leaves us with hagiography, the life of a saint: Saint Sebastian. In art and culture, this particular saint is associated with archery. He is also the patron saint of athletes and soldiers, as well as the saint to invoke against plagues and disease (Catholic.org). Most interesting of all, perhaps, is Saint Sebastian’s emergence as a homosexual icon. How can a figure from the tradition of the Catholic Church, which GLBTQ.com’s Jason Goldman calls “a key historical antagonist of same-sex desire,” become the primary artistic image of gayness (“Subjects of the Visual Arts: St. Sebastian”)? When artists first depicted Saint Sebastian, he was neither particularly sexualized nor particularly striking. In a mosaic from Rome’s Church of San Pietro dating from 682 AD, the
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early practice of marking a saint not by distinguishing physical characteristics or employing particular settings but with specific iconography appears. This Saint Sebastian wears gray hair, a beard, and a halo like that of any other saint. His garb is plain and covers his body. The archer’s bow he carries, however, would inform believers of his identity. This symbol, linked to the narrative of his martyrdom, defines the saint in this artwork. Sebastian, however, is not only the patron saint of archers. Saints fulfill a role for believers beyond offering an inspirational story. Praying for Saint Sebastian’s intercession or building a chapel to him could “immediately bring about cessation of the plague” (Aldrich and Wotherspoon 400). By the time of the early Renaissance, it was this vital role that mattered most to believers. Art reflected the changing needs of the people. This saint, who survived something that could have killed him and who must impart this power to the faithful, should appear vital and strong. Along with this, the cause of his first martyrdom began characterizing some depictions of Saint Sebastian. Sandro Botticelli’s 1474 painting, for example, contains a youthful, muscular young man wearing only a loincloth, pierced by arrows rather than holding a bow. Around the same time, though, a 1475 panel from Spain shows Saint Sebastian standing with Saint Fabian, fully clothed and holding the symbolic bow and arrow. The gray hair and old man’s beard are gone, but he is not particularly sexual. In other parts of Europe, the Renaissance unfolded mainly in the ways set forth in Italy. More and more images of Saint Sebastian looked like Botticelli’s painting rather than the Spanish panel. In 1516, Hans Holbein the Elder painted an altarpiece featuring a buff, scantily clad figure surrounded by many other figures, rather than standing alone in the foreground as in Botticelli. The focus here is on what happened, as much as to whom it happened. Saint Sebastian may reside in the center of the image, but his story is the real star. Such group compositions still
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competed with stand-alone Sebastians. Peter Paul Ruben’s 1608 “Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian” strikes a balance between the two, with four shining angels surrounding the saint rather than a pack of archers taking aim. This Sebastian is decidedly sexual, however, with his muscular body gleaming as the cloth covering his genital area slides from his flesh. By the seventeenth century, depicting Saint Sebastian during his first martyrdom was the standard. It had more or less replaced the plain man standing in heavy robes, clutching a bow. The second martyrdom went virtually unmentioned. In fact, only one known image from this time shows the second martyrdom—Carracci’s 1612 painting of Roman soldiers dumping Sebastian’s clunky corpse into the sewer. Less compelling as a story and further removed from the miraculous recovery that had come to define this saint, it was atypical and unpopular subject matter. In 1617, the sculptor Bernini applied his typical sensual style to the first martyrdom theme, creating a passive, reclining figure wearing next to nothing besides the arrows which penetrate him and the curls that hang from his semi-conscious head. Saint Sebastian retains his rippling muscles and his youth, but not his vitality and action. While Dominicus Stainhart’s 1700 sculpture seems to illustrate a struggle, with the soft-curled head thrust back and away from the body, another interpretation considers it a position of surrender to suffering. The great emphasis on Saint Sebastian’s bondage, not present in the Bernini, combines the eroticism of the Italian sculpture with an increased consideration not of Sebastian’s recovery from his wounds, but of his acceptance of pain while bearing them. This Baroque combination of sex and masochism characterizes the next wave of Sebastian iconography. Menageot’s undated painting from the mid to late eighteenth century is a typical representation, with penetration, bondage, passivity, and physical beauty comprising the major iconographic components.
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As the nineteenth century quickly brought changing attitudes to art, attitudes toward Saint Sebastian changed more slowly. The Romanticists, such as Eugene Delacroix, considered Sebastian as grand a subject as the historical epic or exotic adventure. His 1836 painting includes all of the elements of the new, sexy Sebastian defined by suffering and masochism, but Delacroix used line and color to emphasize the saint’s genital area in an unconventional way. While the Impressionists typically preferred landscapes, quiet outdoor scenes, and elevating the common to mythical status, Corot, who pioneered the movement, painted Saint Sebastian. His 1855 rendering of the first martyrdom uses the mood of the fading light to impart to impart a certain wistfulness as the near-naked young man stretches his bound body before the viewer, a single arrow lingering in his tender flesh. While abstract expressionist and artists following other twentieth century movements moved away from representational art and therefore excluded Saint Sebastian from their canvasses, photography had become a well-established art form, and here the tradition of maintaining and building upon the Renaissance ideal of the saint continued. Prominent among these images stands Kishin Shinoyama’s 1966 photograph of Yukio Mishima posing as the Sebastian. Mishima’s garment hangs perilously low upon his hips, threatening to reveal a glimpse of his penis. With bound hands, he gazes upward as one arrow thrusts deep into his hairy armpit and two others jut from his gleaming, muscled body. The French art duo Pierre et Gilles created a photograph equally derivative of Renaissance and Baroque images of Saint Sebastian, with the typical white loincloth and bound hands of his first martyrdom. By 2007, Saint Sebastian had evolved into an image whose meaning was so obvious that he could be appropriated for commercial use. That year, reFresh magazine, which gears itself towards homosexual men, featured a cover depicting him. Not content to display bound hands
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and bare torso, the model seems to gaze lustfully at the viewer. While the saint was no stranger to the world of commerce before, appearing in REM’s music video for “Losing My Religion,” the medium can be considered an art form in addition to functioning as a tool for promoting albums. Magazine covers, however, seldom aspire to art and fall squarely within the realm of marketing. The twenty-first century is the one in which Saint Sebastian survives as symbol more than story, and as mascot more than myth. What, then, does this saint mean to actual gay men? What is his significance to men inside and outside the Catholic faith, if he has always been gradually changing? In his essay for the book Gay Religion, Peter Savastano discusses the importance of saints to practicing Catholics. In particular, he explains that identifying with a saint offers an opportunity for people to “make a place for themselves” within the church (181). Because they are “marginalized and disenfranchised” by their church if they live openly, this opportunity is especially meaningful for gay men (Savastano 181). For them, certain saints (such as Saint Gerard and Saint Sebastian) can function as “a symbol with which to navigate the rough waters of being both gay and Catholic” (Savastanto 186). Also, Savastano says, having access to images of such saints makes a difference, because “for many of them an encounter with a picture or a statue of the saint is a primary means by which they forge an emotional bond with him” (186). Because depictions of Saint Sebastian’s healthy body transformed into a kind of eroticism typically reserved for figures intended for the sensual gaze of men, and because he was such a popular subject for so many centuries, opportunities for these encounters are numerous. For a practicing Catholic homosexual man, communing with this saint is one of a very few ways to feel accepted by an otherwise hostile church, as well as a means to accessing Catholicism as a personal religion.
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Also, because Saint Sebastian is what scholar Richard A. Kaye calls a “plague saint,” his “symbolic importance has intensified” since the beginning of the AIDS crisis (86). Earlier still, in the Victorian era homosexuality was viewed as a disease or mental illness. The conception of “homosexuality as a feminizing illness” made Saint Sebastian a logical saint to pray to for deliverance from what was perceived as a malady (Kaye 87). At the same time, those who did not necessarily feel sick, but who did conceive of male homosexuality as effeminate, could see themselves in this passive, penetrated saint. Even men who rejected the notion of effeminate homosexuality could identity with Saint Sebastian, although through his other facets. His role as the patron saint of athletes and soldiers makes him also, in a way, the patron saint of a certain type of male camaraderie. Finally, because of such frequent depiction of him in bondage and the centrality of pain and suffering to his narrative, images of Saint Sebastian resonate with the gay leather community. As Kaye puts it, “he has come to stand for the supposedly sado-masochistic nature of male same-sex eroticism” (87). For these reasons, even men who are not Catholic can recognize his image from art or other cultural sources and understand possible meanings. Unfortunately, for most of the history of Western culture, women have not been viewed as consumers of fine art, nor were they positioned to create what society considered fine art. In fact, within the art world there were proscribed functions for different female figures—for instance, the Virgin Mary as a virtuous example for women, or the odalisque as an object of desire. For these reasons, there is no exact equivalent of Saint Sebastian for lesbian women. Lately, however, one figure from the same artistic tradition that made Saint Sebastian a gay icon is being reclaimed by feminists in general and lesbians in particular. That figure is the Biblical woman Judith.
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To begin with, Judith’s story is one of power. According to Crawford Howell Toy and Charles C. Torrey of JewishEncyclopedia.com, Judith “works deliverance for her city—and thus for all Judea and Jerusalem—by bewitching the Assyrian captain, Holofernes, and cutting off his head.” Judith was a woman of noble birth who had been widowed and never remarried, living instead with her maid, Abra. The particular way in which she gained this “deliverance” involved charming her way into the Assyrian captain’s tent the night before he was to attack and decapitating him while he drunkenly lounged in bed and displaying the head to his terrified army. Her loyal maid was, of course, on hand to help. Depictions of Judith by male artists often seem fraught with a struggle to portray a powerful woman without threatening traditional conceptions of masculinity and prevailing gender roles. For example, Lucas Cranach the Elder’s 1530 painting “Judith with Head of Holofernes” shows Judith alone, gazing sensually at the viewer while wearing a low-cut gown of red. It suggests that her power is sexual only and in fact may be something sinful, as scarlet is the color of prostitution and general malfeasance. Also importantly, Cranach does not show Judith in the act. His Judith has already completed her task and appears passive rather than active. In Cristofano Allori’s 1613 painting of Judith, she is also rendered post-slaughter, but at the edge of the image we see the bed of the slain Assyrian captain. Also, the head of Holofernes appears much fresher than in Cranach’s painting. We are closer to the scene of the action, just barely outside of it. Allori also included the maid Abra in his painting, although she appears as a marginal, asexual figure lingering behind Judith and Judith’s strength, with no power of her own. She is not an equal or a companion, and her white head covering separates her from Judith’s flame-colored garments.
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When a woman finally painted Judith, everything changed. While Artemisia Gentileschi was not the first person to show Judith in the act of beheading Holofernes, her renderings tended to be more violent than depictions by other artists. Judith was one of her favorite subjects, as well as a subject very popular in the Baroque era, but one in particular stands out as innovative. Gentileschi’s 1621 painting contains a still-living Holofernes, although the sword is halfway through his throat and the blood, which spurts dramatically, suggest he is not long for this world. Abra stands beside Judith and helps hold down their victim, even as he strikes at her with his fist. The two women appear as serious and determined companions in the act. Neither looks away from the task at hand. It is their solidarity, not seduction, which makes them strong. Today, it is Gentileschi’s work that influences women who look for themselves in art. For example, in 2008 Becki Jayne painted a tribute to Gentileschi’s Judith, adding overt lesbian overtones, such as a pink triangle necklace around the heroine’s throat. She also painted Abra as a black woman as a correction of historical omission. It retains all of the violence but bears additional symbolism. The same year, Judith Klausner’s artwork “Judith and Holofernes” substituted praying mantis figures for human ones. Although there is no blood and Abra does not appear, the praying mantis is highly symbolic in that the female often removes and/or eats the head of the male after sexual intercourse. Here, Klausner suggests that Judith literally consumes the power of Holofernes, so while the sexual emphasis of earlier images appears, it is he, not she, who the sex object. While Judith is not to lesbians what Saint Sebastian is to male homosexuals, her story and iconography are fertile ground for current and future artists who may wish to forge a lesbian icon or simply further the powerful image of woman. In both cases, a figure that began as purely religious expanded to include meanings never intended or considered by the people who created the first images of them. Saint Sebastian began
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as nearly indistinguishable from any other saint, but was transformed by the crisis of the plague and changing mores during the Renaissance and Baroque eras. The Biblical figure Judith went from little better than a whore to a fierce protectress and possible lesbian as women gained access to the arts. The continuing relevance and symbolism of the two remain in the hands of artists, patrons, and believers.
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Works Cited Aldrich, Robert and Gary Wotherspoon. Who’s Who in Gay and Lesbian History: from Antiquity to World War II. London: Routledge, 2001. Print. Catholic Online. “St. Sebastian.” Saints. Catholic.org, 2010. Web, May 2010 Goldman, Jason. “Subjects of the Visual Arts: Saint Sebastian.” GLBTQ.com, July 2005. Web, May 2010. Toy, Crawford Howell and Charles C. Torrey. “Judith, Book of.” JewishEncyclopedia.com, undated. Web, May 2010 Kaye, Richard A. “Losing His Religion.”Outlooks: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities and Visual Cultures. Ed. Peter Horne and Reina Lewis. London: Routledge, 1996. 86-112. Print. Savastano, Peter. “St. Gerard Teaches Him That Love Cancels That Out.” Gay Religion. Ed.Scott Thumma and Edward R. Gray. Oxford: AltaMira Press, 2005. 181-220. Print.