A Depiction of Male Same-Sex Seduction in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Effects of Bad Government Fresco

In his book Pictures and Passions: A History of Homosexuality in the Visual Arts, James M. Saslow observes that as the repression of homoerotic behavior increased in Europe beginning in the thirteenth century, after a period of relative tolerance in the earlier and central Middle Ages, the number of images of sodomy (as homoerotic behavior was labeled at the time) actually increased, and these images grew more explicit in their depiction of “taboo behavior.”¹ Inspired at least in part by Dante’s Commedia (The Divine Comedy), where unrepentant sodomites are condemned to the seventh circle of Hell “to run ceaselessly among a rain of fire reminiscent of Sodom itself,” images of the Last Judgment, including several produced in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy, show sodomites suffering horrible tortures that mimic their crimes against nature.² For example, in the Collegiate Church of San Gimignano, not far from Siena, the painter Taddeo di Bartolo depicted a devil ramming a pole up the anus of a man who is labeled a “SOTOMITTO”; the pole reemerges through the mouth of the sodomite, whence it then penetrates the mouth of another damned figure (fig. 1). In this way, the artist managed to convey two of the sexual acts of which male sodomites stood accused: anal and oral sex. The sodomites were accompanied in this particular section of hell, identified as the area reserved for those who committed the sin of concupiscence (“LA LUSURIA”), by other sinners labeled as ruffians and adulterers. It was held at the time that sodomy was one of the many forms of concupiscence. Similarly lurid scenes of sodomites being turned on spits driven through their anuses were executed by Giotto in the Arena Chapel in Padua at the beginning of the fourteenth century and by Buonamico Buffalmacco in the Camposanto, or burial ground, of Pisa at midcentury. These likely served as models for Taddeo di Bartolo’s work.³

Figure 1.

Taddeo di Bartolo, Hell (detail), Collegiate Church of San Gimignano. Photo: Alinari/Art Resource.

Images such as these emphasized the view prevailing at the time that sodomy was a voluntary choice of the individual to have sex contra naturam (against nature). And although the category included various sexual acts not aimed at procreation, including masturbation, bestiality, and anal sex involving a man and woman, it was most commonly understood to mean anal or oral sex between men.⁴ Sodomy was also viewed as a turning away from God to a form of idolatry. As the fifteenth-century Franciscan preacher Bernardino of Siena observed, “Whenever you love anything more than you love God, that thing becomes your God. And [Scripture] says: ‘Those who adore the beast or its image.’ What is its image? The appearance of a cute little boy before the mental and corporal eyes of the sodomites.”⁵

During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, however, what might be termed the social threat of sodomy grew in prominence since during that time Europe in general and the region of Italy in particular faced a series of misfortunes, including famine, war, and plague, that created a demographic crisis.⁶ Various states and cities across Italy witnessed a dramatic loss of population, a process that had begun even before the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century.⁷ As witnesses to these changes, writers from Dante on lamented the extinction of families.⁸ Bernardino for one believed that sodomites were largely to blame for this situation since they were choosing to have nonprocreative sex. According to the preacher, sodomites were, as Franco Mormando observes, “filicidae, killers of their own children.”⁹ Addressing them in one of his sermons, Bernardino thundered: “O my lads, if you want to exterminate your city and motherland, I tell you, keep on being sodomites; I tell you, if you want her to be exterminated, then don’t give up your sodomizing.”¹⁰

This more abstract threat of sodomy as a cause of population decline was much more difficult for artists...