Queering the picture : reading Quirizio da Murano's altarpiece of the Saviour
Date
2010-03-03T22:39:35Z
Authors
Stevenson, Marla
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Abstract
The wound that Jesus received from a spear during the Crucifixion appears in a new way in Northern Italian art of the late trecento. My research tracks some key changes to this symbol's meaning during its migration through different religious and gender contexts, in communities of Franciscan and Dominican friars and nuns between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. I focus especially on a Venetian altarpiece showing Jesus offering his wound to a Poor Clare. My analysis of this altarpiece examines ideas of religious, social and gendered identity in relation to the iconography of Jesus' wound.
Scholars in early-modern gender studies point to existing tensions between visibility and invisibility, possibility and impossibility, which arise in relation to the signifying power of the female body in a male-oriented heterosexist system. As such, the scholarly literature often avoids addressing female homoerotic desire and the possibility of same-sex sexual expression in these kinds of religious images. My work indicates that the emotional and bodily expression of religious women was visible, as are representations of female homoerotic desire, if we can look beyond a binary system of gender and heterosexism.
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transgenderism in art, history