Fordham was delighted and honored to host Melanie Holcomb, Curator in the Department of Medieval Art at the MET and MET Cloisters, to talk about her latest exhibition, “Spectrum of Desire: Love, Sex, and Gender in the Middle Ages” at the Lincoln Center campus on March 24th. The exhibit at the MET Cloisters closed on March 29th after being on display for five months.
The exhibit invites visitors, as Dr. Holcomb said in her closing statement, to “say what they see” and encourages the public to engage with notions of desire in a safe space such as the far away time of the Middle Ages. With the goal of using as much of the MET’s own collection as possible, Dr. Holcomb talked about the process of choosing objects that often are not put on display, and how these objects encourage ways of thinking against the grain of traditional approaches to medieval art.
During her talk, Dr. Holcomb took us on a thematic “walking tour” of some of the objects in the exhibit, in which the visitors are introduced to more familiar ideas of “Marriage, Sex, and Chastity” to less familiar ones like “Mystical Union.”
In this first thematic grouping of “Marriage, Sex, and Chastity” we were introduced to a variety of objects: a 15th-century wooden statuette base of Eve charged with flirtatious eroticism in her encounter with the serpent Lilith. Dr. Holcomb also considered a 16th-century print of Adam and Eve as an image of same-sex desire, along with Roundels and a marriage portrait as other points of discussion.
Image by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Base for a Statuette
Next, for the “Objects of Desire,” Dr. Holcomb introduced us to the Aquamanile in the Form of Aristotle and Phyllis, which depicts a reversal of gender roles as Phyllis rides on Aristotle’s back while one hand holds his hair and the other rests on his rear. The second object was the 14th-century ivory Writing Tablet with Scenes from the Lives of Virgil and Aristotle, that explores a fable of sadomasochism: one scene of Virgil dangling from a basket after his pursuits were rejected by Febilla. Another scene is of Febilla bent over and being penetrated by a candle.
Image by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Aquamanile in the Form of Aristotle and Phyllis
The genderfluid depictions of saints were considered for the theme of “Beautiful Bodies.” A 15th-century statue of St. Sebastian shows him with a bare chest, long hair, slender waist, and bright skin, along with a tantalizingly low loincloth.
Image by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Saint Sebastion
Bringing the exhibit to a close, the section of “Mystical Union” holds a final object which brings together the themes of the exhibit: the fourteenth-century sculpture of Christ and John and Evangelist. Seated in a standard pose of marriage, they are joined by their right hands, with Christ reaching his arm over, while John rests his head on Christ’s shoulder. It is an image of Christ’s authority and, as Dr. Holcomb suggests, encourages the contemplation of a queer reading of the relationship between Christ and John.
Image by the Metropolitan Museum of Art,Christ and Saint John the Evangelist
Lastly, Dr. Holcomb discussed the space of the exhibit and some of the backlash the MET received for having the exhibit in an artificial religious setting. For six months, they worked with members of the clergy, academics, and scholars, along with the queer community, in the process of developing the exhibit. Held in the Cloister’s Notre-Dame-du-Bourg chapel, the space promotes a bridge between the religious and the erotic, and enhances the way that we, as viewers, think about how medieval artists imagined and engaged with the erotic. The entrance, adorned with velvet curtains, gives a parlor appeal and sets the scene for an environment of contemplation on the intimacy between eroticism, religion, and medieval culture.
