Cellini’s Apollo and Hyacinthus can impart knowledge and help decode these early- modern sexual and social mores because the group is a remarkable all’ antica example of how revolutionary Renaissance artistic interpretations of classical dialogue featuring the adult male and a much younger adolescent subject conflated erotic desire and
philosophical allegory. It also demonstrates the manner in which these interpersonal dynamics of male desire and social relationships extended into the field of artistic representation. Renaissance understandings of sex and gender were not binary, but the binary opposition between men and women was strongly dependent on gender
performance.75 If erotic relations between men were not subject to constant scrutiny, masculinity certainly was, and Apollo and Hyacinth exemplifies how the manner in which the ideology of masculinity established certain fundamental principles across the social terrain. An adult male departing from the dominant definitions of masculinity by behaving effeminately or passively would upset gender orders and differences by his failure to adhere to these prescribed codes of exemplary masculinities and femininities. For a virile society such as sixteenth-century Florence, subjugation, domination and the imposition of one’s will were considered defining characteristics. Sexual ethics and behaviour were governed not by the hetero-homosexual context but by the question of active-passive roles that were enmeshed with important behavioural codes associated with these hierarchal stratifications. Apollo and Hyacinth reflects these sexual and cultural specificities and it is in the light of this historically and culturally framed juridical visibility of male same-sex relations that the statue surely ought to be read.
However, any study of the statue’s conception and execution should not be detached from our understanding of the circumstances under which male homoerotic relations were expressed in Renaissance Florence. A civic interpretation of Apollo and
Hyacinth can be sustained by the way Cellini seemingly encapsulates and assumes the
very identity of political hegemony when he imbues his Apollo with a sense of internal strength and character, along with virile physicality. Apollo’s beautiful body is a
somatic expression of internal qualities which underscore the notion that to be perceived
as the older, active penetrator in sexual intercourse with an adolescent boy did not tarnish masculine identities: on the contrary manliness and honour were affirmed. Similarly, a juvenile male such as Hyacinth could be dominated in a patriarchal society without incurring stigma because the subordination of the young is both natural and temporary in the social structure of a society where gender distinctions were important as social categories.
These contemporary social and cultural conventions played a principal role in what it meant to be male during Cellini’s time.76 In the Renaissance, the importance of adherence to prescribed gender roles was paramount, therefore how men behaved sexually contributed fundamentally to the shape of public life in a broader sense.77 An
understanding of the social history of sodomy in Florence is essential to grasp the ways in which realisation of political power is visually activated and characterised by
Cellini’s Apollo and Hyacinth.78 Therefore, the importance of Rocke’s findings cannot be overstated, because he demonstrates that the sodomy which most Florentines practised was strictly organised by age difference.79 Even though it is recorded
primarily through its prosecution, sodomy’s prevalence in the city emerges clearly and the scope and scale of its proscription made it a public affair.80 Elsewhere in Italy there were fewer prosecutions than in Florence because the penalties were more severe.81 In
76 In addition to Rocke’s research, an account of sodomy in the Italian Renaissance can be located in V. Finucci,
The Manly Masquerade: Masculinity, Paternity and Castration in the Italian Renaissance, Durham and London, 2003, pp. 249-50; C. Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern, Durham and London, 1999, pp. 55-79; K. O’Donnell and M. O’Rourke; Love, Sex, Intimacy and Friendship between Men, 1550-1800, London, 2002, pp. 99-103.
77 R. Mazo-Karras, From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe, Philadelphia, 2003,
pp. 3-8.
78 The alleged homoerotic inclinations and sexual conduct of many of Cellini’s contemporaries have been
extensively documented in both scholarly and popular texts. Many artists’ homoerotic desires were fuelled by the apprenticeship / bottega system where adolescent boys were taken in by craftsmen willing to endow them with their artistic, worldly and, sometimes, sexual knowledge. See Gary Cestaro, ed., Queer Italia: Same Sex Desire in Italian Literature and Film, New York, 2004, pp. 76-77.
79 Rocke, 1996, p. 4. 80 Rocke, 1996, pp. 13-15.
Rocke’s findings, sodomy in general, and particularly its prosecution, was well documented in Florence but of particular note is the extent to which pederastic relationships emerge with vigour in the legislative records. From this Rocke has estimated that at least two-thirds of all Florentine males were implicated by the time they reached the age of forty, and these figures do not include the magistracies themselves. Rocke gleans from his survey of the judicial records evidence to suggest that out of the adult males implicated for homoerotic behaviour only 3 per cent had allowed themselves to be penetrated and only 12 per cent never married.82 As a comment made by Domenico of Prato (1389-1432) pointing to the long standing prevalence of pederasty in court circles suggests, the love of adult men for youths was widespread; ‘those marvellous competitions of fencing, tournaments and high jousts are no longer furiously performed for women; he who best can, now does his shows for young lads’.83 These statistics confirm that the pederastic scenes studied in this chapter have a particular contemporary social and sexual context which invites further
investigation.
Sodomy was one of the most passionately debated moral issues of Renaissance society.84 However, in order to contextualise the historical contingency of Foucault’s claim that ‘the sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species’85, it is necessary to define and explore the extent to which certain sexual acts were individually evaluated and categorised in the early modern period. Foucault uses the axis of sodomy to give definitional clarity but during the Renaissance the mimetic
82 Rocke, 1996, pp. 154, 186, 156, 95.
83 A. Segre, ‘I dispacci di Cristofo da Piacenza, procuratore mantovano alla corte pontificale’, Archivia storico
italiano, Ser. 5: t.10 (1892), pp. 4-85.
84 For an account of the persecution and punishment of sodomy see B.U. Hergemöller, Sodom and Gomorrah:
On the Everyday Reality and Persecution of Homosexuals in the Middle Ages, trans. J. Phillips, London, 2001.
and exchangeable function of the label ‘sodomy’ was more accurately aligned to many acts perceived as sinning against the legally established and enforced social
organisations of procreation. During the early modern period ‘sodomy’ found special favour as a term of accusation for ‘that sin against nature’ and was often used
synonymously with male homoerotic activity at this time, but these too are problematic idioms because they did not refer exclusively to sex between males. This biblical term, consecrated by moral invectives and theological teaching, covers actions not limited to homoerotic practices, therefore those with certain sexual preferences at a particular stage in their development should not be forced to retrospectively occupy modernity’s familiar sexual categories. The early modern sodomite had been someone who was perceived as sinning by performing a certain sexual act without reproduction, contrary to the view of the church that the two should be inextricably enmeshed.86 In April 1424,
Bernardino of Siena, who was a Franciscan friar and one of the period’s most celebrated preachers, delivered a series of consecutive sermons in the city of Florence attacking the vice of sodomy. Every human calamity, he said, could be ascribed to this terrible sin, from flooding and warfare to disease and death - and God would take his revenge by raining down fire on the city as on Sodom and Gomorrah.87 In one of his sermons,
Bernardino instructed the congregation to deride sodomites by spitting when sodomy was spoken of:
Whenever you hear sodomy mentioned each and every one of you spit on the ground and clean your mouth out well. If they won’t change their ways otherwise, maybe they’ll change when they’re
86 For explanation of the early modern context of sodomy see J. Goldberg, (ed.), Reclaiming Sodom, New York
and London, 1994, pp. 3-6; J. Goldberg, Queering the Renaissance, Durham and London, 1994 pp. 12-15.
87 F. Mormando, The Preacher’s Demons: Bernardino of Siena and the Social Underworld of Early
ridiculed. Spit hard! Maybe the water they spit will extinguish their fire. Like this, everyone spit hard.88
It should be remembered, however, that the term was not privileged as the sole locus of homoerotic practice. Sodomy was a universalising and multivalent category referring to many different acts, such as masturbation, penile-oral congress, coitus interruptus and anal intercourse between heterosexual partners, all of which were
grouped together with bestiality. Even heterosexual intercourse in any variant other than the male-superior position was an act of sodomy because of perceived lessening of the chances of conception.89 The sexual landscape of Renaissance Italy was entrenched by concupiscence, in its narrow sense of sinfully libidinous desire or lust. Erotic desire, in whatever form, constituted a significant problem for Christian thinkers who advocated that sexual desire was closely linked to sin with desire, arousal and sexual acts seen as causing the soul to be diverted on its path to the divine.90 The sexual standards
enunciated by those theologians who were most explicitly condemnatory of libidinous activity between males meant that heterosexual intercourse between a Christian and a Jew, or a Christian and a Muslim, although potentially procreative, were also sometimes labelled as sodomy because such ‘infidels’ were perceived as being unnatural and the equivalent to dogs and other animals. Foucault theorises that: ‘confession, the
examination of conscience, all of the insistence on the secrets and the importance of the flesh, was not simply a means of forbidding sex or of pushing it as far as possible from consciousness, it was a way of placing sexuality at the heart of existence and of
connecting salvation to the mastery of sexuality’s obscure movements. Sex was, in
88 G. Kent and G. Hekma, (eds.), The Pursuit of Sodomy: Male Homosexuality in Renaissance and
Enlightenment Europe, London, 1989, p. 7.
89 See J. Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities, Stanford, 1992; S. Licata and R.P.
Patterson, The Gay Past, New York, 2013, pp. 60-5.
Christian societies that which had to be examined, watched over, confessed and transformed into discourse.’91
In fact, any sexual activity that would not result in conception was considered ‘unnatural’, and as such these disapproved acts were collectively grouped together and named ‘sodomy’, which is derived from one of the two cities, Sodom and Gomorrah, destroyed by God in the Old Testament.92 Nevertheless, the efforts of church and state failed to eradicate forbidden male same-sex erotic tendencies and this outlawed
behaviour and its representation in the visual domain evolved and survived in a hostile milieu entrenched in the Church’s position of intransient absolutism. The activities portrayed were often at odds with ecclesiastic morality and social propriety and can be viewed as signifiers of the difference between officially professed ideology and actual praxis that existed at this time.