The Season of Brideshead: Sex and Sainthood pt 1

Sex and sainthood, part 1

So who is this?

And would you care to guess their sex?

Here they are again in another representation where they comfort Mary.

A little context might help, here is a bit more detail.

So far, I've shown you art created in the mid 19th century. Here is 20th century representation of the same person.

Well, that makes it rather obvious doesn't it? Here is the first again at a wider angle.

Yes, it's Saint John the Evangelist whom some believe to also be Saint John the Apostle. As you can see, he is a bit of a girly boy.

All of these pictures are from my church but if you travel around you will see that he is often represented in this fashion. Why? Well, that is anybody's guess but here is an educated guess: early Christians believed that the fourth gospel was written by John and the fourth gospel was the last gospel to be written. Therefore, they concluded, John must have been a very young apostle. So he was typically represented as young.

But how did he get to be girly?

Okay, let's add another piece to the puzzle. In John's gospel, John is said to be the Apostle who reclined next to Jesus at the last supper. Now, if you know your cultural history, you will know that is because all the Apostles would have been reclining on couches around the table because that was the way they ate back then. But the middle ages and Renaissance didn't know that. They ate at tables with chairs and assumed that everyone had always done that. So how to explain this? Well, they started painting John leaning up against Jesus at the last supper.

Final piece of the puzzle, all you need is a few artists who are erotically attracted to young men and boys and pretty soon John is on his way to being a gay saint. (Or, if you are a complete idiot like Dan Brown, really Mary Magdalene in disguise.)

This sort of thing happened to other saints who were believed to be young. In the homosexual aesthete culture of the late 19th century and early 20th century, the very favourite was Saint Sebastian. Aesthetes looked back on paintings of Sebastian and they saw an icon. It's not hard to see how they came to that view.

Here is a famous Sebastian by Mategna:

Here is another by Carlo Saraceni (1579-1620) that is consderably more overt. Check the placement of his "arrow"and the expression on his face.

You don't have to be an overly prurient type to conclude that Saraceni might just have had a pretty boy who has just concluded an act of self love in mind when he painted this and that he substituted an arrow for that other shaft in order to pass muster with the clergy. You can even imagine Saraceni and his buddies sitting in the back at the unveiling chuckling to themselves at the clever one they put over on the church authorities.

Evelyn Waugh, who was unusually well-informed and sympathetic to homosexual subculture of his time, knew this. He picked Saint Sebastian advisedly. he didn't necessarily mean for everyone to get the reference but it's there and it is part of understanding Brideshead Revisited fully.

Nowadays, of course, everyone knows about Saint Sebastian the gay icon but fewer tend to remember the saint. And here we might want to consider a particular portrayal of Saint Sebastian as done by Giovanni Bellini.

The central image is Sebastian. Wikipedia says the image on left is Saint John the Evangelist but I think they have that wrong and it's Saint John the Baptist. The one on the right is Saint Anthony of the Desert. If you think about it, you can see all three in Sebastian in this novel. The image over the top is the Annunciation.

The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post is here.