by Erik the Cool Cricket

I am not Catholic, and so it is difficult, from the outside looking in, to understand why so many seem shocked by the allegations of sexual abuse by their trusted clergy. Do people who attend mass have their eyes so focused on the back of the pew in front of them that they don't look up at the walls? Admittedly, most American Catholic churches do not have the ornate fixtures of old European cathedrals, but Catholic art--especially from the Italian Renaissance--is full of naked men and boys. It's venerated and adored as some of the greatest art in the world.

From that standpoint, pedophilia is nothing new in the Church, and it comes as no surprise to me that some priests sworn to chastity prey on little boys. It's an unforgivable and self-indulgent thing, but it has been going on for centuries.

The Church also continues to come out strongly against homosexuality--which clearly has nothing to do with acting on the impulse to molest a child. Again, however, Catholic imagery since the Byzantine period reveals, I think, a different truth, and the media's attention on homosexuality in the priesthood as if it's something new is an additional source of my confusion.

Perhaps the most obvious example is Michelangelo's ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It has no less than 20 ignudi--youthful, flawless and completely naked males. One can argue that this idealism is an extension of purity and an artistic fulfillment of spiritual grace, yet art historians and theologians can't agree on what the ignudi represent in Biblical terms. The main subject of the work is nine of the chapters of the Old Testament, but Carlo Petrangeli wrote in his contemporary book about the ceiling that the existence of the ignudi remains a mystery.

Clearly, Michelangelo liked men. As historians put it, he lived and was happiest among artists and mentors who were known to be homosexual. The guy who commissioned the work (Pope Julius II, a military strategist who was apparently quite a womanizer) knew all about these goings-on and didn't mind the naked guys up there once the scaffolding came down.

In the Sistine Chapel's case, the models were probably around 16 or 17 years old--nearly middle aged at that time and a few years older than the average child molested by a priest. One has only to look a few decades further to another Michelangelo to find younger subject matter.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was a Baroque malcontent who spent his rebellious life in and out of jail and once killed a man ostensibly over a tennis match. He was also a great artist whose Mannerist paintings use a breathtaking chiaroscuro that gives his works a remarkably lifelike, three-dimensional heft.

Caravaggio's early, lively "Bacchus" reveals an artist enticed by the sensual pleasures of life. The heavily rouged, seductive teenager who stares out from the painting not only offers his viewer a large glass filled with wine, but subtly grasps the tie of his garment, as if in preparation for removal. The boy's half-smiling pout, exposed muscular shoulder and theatrically adorned hair suggest an attitude of fruitful abandon by an artist who had readily accepted the good life.

Granted, "Bacchus" is part of the Greek mythos, but Caravaggio's sexuality is well-documented, and so are his increasing anger and melancholy. Maybe the latter is what compelled him as he grew older to turn to the Catholic Church at a time when the Protestant Reformation and the abolition of religious symbolism was in full swing, and artists all over Europe were painting secular subjects. Caravaggio chose Catholicism, but he did not abandon homoeroticism--or the startlingly young age of his models.

Aside from his sumptuous color, Caravaggio's most noted stylistic strategy was his utilization of a single light source, what his biographer Dale Harris calls "a spotlight from an enveloping gloom." In one of his works, Caravaggio pointed that light square at the toddler Jesus' private parts.

The painting "Madonna and Child With St. Anne" features the Mother (whose bosom nearly bursts out of her frock) holding a teetering, unclothed, completely exposed three-year-old by his chest as he helps her stomp on a serpent. This is no mere innocent interpretation of the story of good triumphing over evil. It's a masterpiece commissioned by a lecherous man who was a higher up in the Church.

Perhaps even more stunning is the same artist's "St. John With A Ram," which presents a muscular boy who hugs his arm around the neck of a beast whose horns are inarguably phallic. The child is completely nude, and there is no denying the prepubescent undeveloped stage of his genitalia--or the come-hither expression of amusement on his face.

Today's audience would be hip to what was going on in that studio, and it's both fortunate and ironic that Caravaggio lived in a time when Rome had a better grasp of its p.r. so that we can still witness these amazing works. Back in 1600 not too many people saw paintings that hid in the candlelit rooms of bishops and cardinals. They're in museums now, but you have to travel to Italy to look at them. Men in the U.S. are being arrested and thrown in jail for having similar images on their hard drives.

Though many of his paintings like "St. John" were among the commissions of Cardinal Del Monte, who historians claim had an "interest" in nude youths, Caravaggio was one of those rare artists popular and sought after in his day, and he had his choice of who he worked with and what he painted. He continued with Biblical subject matter and included nudes in almost all of his work.

Thematically, however, the artist had things other than religion on his mind. As his art became more spiritual and more sophisticated, so increased his obsession with decay and the loss of youth. His "David with the Head of Goliath" is a gruesome portrayal, and it tellingly features the artist's own likeness on the decapitated head. The young David looks upon the victim of his sword with an expression of forlorn sadness. It is as if Caravaggio is blaming the older version of himself for the corruption of beautiful youth.

All art is, of course, interpreted by the eye of its beholder. Priests must recognize it as the historical iconography of their church, and some of them will be more cognizant of the subtext than others. I just don't understand why so many who subscribe to Catholicism haven't noticed the common artistic thread of older men's fascination with young men's bodies.

There is really nothing sinful or insidious about the beauty of youth or its appreciation. It is when an adult male takes advantage of an impressionable and curious child that something has gone terribly wrong. Caravaggio himself may have painted an allegory of this subjugation in his "The Sacrifice of Isaac." The horrified boy is, once again, shown completely nude. He is contorted under his stern and bearded father, who grasps his son from behind and is about to cut his throat when the smooth and youthful angel arrests Abraham's strong wrist and puts a stop to the act.

The Biblical story of Abraham's near-slaying of Isaac has never been more elegantly rendered, but the subtext of an older man's obsessive control over a helpless child is undeniable. Imagine the power a wayward priest has in telling that tale--with the ultimate psychological bombshell that God wanted it to happen.

There are many more artists, and countless more paintings. Giulio Romano, primarily an architect and a favorite pupil of Raphael, painted "The Construction of Noah's Ark" featuring a naked, muscular man working with an enormous saw (they didn't have OSHA back then). Scenes of young saints receiving their martyrdom in their altogether abound on the walls of cathedrals, right beside fully robed elderly saints with halos and lots of sheep.

The High Renaissance favored exploration of classical forms, and practically everything from Greece had naked men, but there was more to it than that. Romano and his contemporaries delivered commissions on a number of frescoes with a very happy naked infant Jesus on his mother's lap. I don't know; "swaddling clothes" is a kind of nondescript expression, but why the recurring baby penis? Raphael's nude cherubs that appear on today's greeting cards were a playful expression of his faith. But they may have inadvertently created a context that offered not-so-innocent Church leaders an outlet for their predilections.

Romano and his mentor were not as troubled--or as subversive--as Caravaggio, and maybe his images are inherently iconoclastic and should be treated as an aberration the same way the Vatican wants people to view its latest sex scandal. Nonetheless, there is no denying that the appreciation of his works has only increased over the centuries.

The more famous Michelangelo returned to the Sistine Chapel about 20 years after he finished the ceiling to paint "The Last Judgment" on the far wall. This work likewise had mind-boggling amounts of full frontal male nudity commissioned by the same Church that publicly would seem to condemn such things today.

The aging Michelangelo--also famous for his sculpture of the nude David, a shepherd boy--was not pulling the wool over people's eyes, however. The enormous fresco caused a lot of controversy in its day, and some called for its destruction and for the arrest of its creator. But the Church leaders of the time--Pope Paul III and his successor, Julius III--defended the nakedness. It wasn't until 1564 that the Council of Trent commissioned another artist to come in and "amend" "The Last Judgment" by painting draperies over the exposed genitalia.

Almost five centuries later, the Vatican still appears to be looking for some way to cover things up. It bears repeating that I am not Catholic--but it seems like they're going to need a lot of paint.

c. March, 2002 The Cool Cricket Company (tm)