The Brooklyn Rail

The Irving Sandler Essay Series
Edited by Alexander Nagel

This essay series, generously supported by Scott Lynn, is named in honor of the art historian and critic Irving Sandler, whose broad spirit was epitomized in the question he would ask, with searching eyes, whenever he met someone or saw someone again: what are you thinking about? A space apart from the press of current events, the Sandler Essay invites artists and writers to reflect on what matters to them now, whether it is current or not, giving a chance for an “oblique contemporary” to come in view.

I’ve just returned to New York from my annual pilgrimage to the Zoo, where every May Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo hosts a cadre of monks, neopagans, cosplayers, and Tolkien lovers, in addition to a few medievalists. Three days of academic panels, working groups, and business meetings culminate with “The Dance,” where, if you’re anything like me, you’ll take the opportunity to kiss a beautiful Hispanist, whom you won’t see again till next year. It’s rather like summer camp that way. A little community beyond the normal strictures of place, time, and stuffy academic convention—despite in fact being a literal academic convention. We laugh, we drink, we dance, we promise to imagine the Middle Ages together again next year, between belting out Britney and the obligatory stay at the YMCA.

I can’t justify the cost of flying far away from New York City just to dance, and so I presented an academic paper at the conference, one small part of two panels on the topic of Queer(ing) Medieval Art organized by Gerry Guest. As two of my fellow panelists, Melanie Holcomb and Nancy Thebaut, presented on their forthcoming exhibition at the MET Cloisters, which will explore gender, sexuality, and desire, I nearly wept thinking about how much has changed even in the course of my short academic career. (For context, I defended my dissertation about a year ago.) A queer medieval show at THE MET? “My friends,” I declared at Bell’s Eccentric Cafe afterwards, “we have arrived.”

When I was beginning my Ph.D., circa 2015, my professor Thelma Thomas and I were convinced that a marble head of a woman in the Met’s early medieval collection had been re-carved from the head of a man. The curator in charge allowed me to examine it in the conservation lab, despite calling this theory “impossible” and “a fantasy,” in an email forwarded to me by mistake. For what it’s worth, timid first-year-grad-student me did not dare argue for a queer interpretation of the statue, simply for its adaptive reuse. But a potentially trans* reading coming from a young queer thinker evidently disturbed the senior scholar. Since then, my emerging research on the relationship between art-making and queerness has been called “disgusting” by a colleague. Once an attendee of a talk I presented literally clutched her pearls! “You sure know how to make an old lady jump,” she wrote to me afterwards. So, when I first read about Holcomb and Thebaut’s project earlier this year, I actually wondered aloud, “Am I dreaming?” It’s the original accusation of fantasy that has stuck with me over the years.

Queer medieval art history matters right now, and matters to me right now. Indeed, in the consistent impulse to undermine queer historical work as “fantasy,” I hear a faint echo of darker discourses of contemporary right-wing politics. As actress and trans activist Laverne Cox has put it, queer people are “often told we don’t exist.”¹ Whether undermined as a “phase,” a “choice,” or a very recent phenomenon (usually framed as an effect of contemporary decadence), non-normative sexualities and gender expressions are deemed “imaginary.” And more than this, legislation being written across the country at this very moment is actively seeking to make queer life—and especially trans* life—impossible, unreal. Rather than back away from the charge of queer fantasy, I want to take the opportunity of this essay to affirm that the fantasy of queerness itself has a history. For starters, in the Middle Ages cross-dressers were sometimes referred to as imaginationes, imaginary images. In the twentieth century, Jacques Lacan theorized the imaginaire by reworking Freudian theories of homosexuality.² Not only do queer people have a history, the trope of imaginary queerness has one too. Demonstrating the long entanglement of the imagination and queerness presents an opportunity to deconstruct the contemporary weaponization of this trope.

Medieval art historians have barely touched this topic,³ but contemporary artists are asking questions themselves and reimagining art history in the process. This past year, for instance, I wrote about Tirtzah Bassel’s wonderful exhibition Canon in Drag, which included several riffs on medieval images.⁴ In one of the Canon paintings (The Wound (A Cesarean) [2021]), based on thirteenth-century illuminated Bibles from Paris, Bassel presents Jesus birthing a child and sporting large, maternal breasts. A viewer unfamiliar with medieval art might describe this image as a “queering” of art history, as if medieval art in itself were somehow straight, but I take her image as an invitation to appreciate the queerness of medieval art itself. The relatively unknown medieval miniatures at the basis of Bassel’s image show an apparently male Jesus giving birth from the wound in his side to a personification of the Church. Such miniatures offer visions of trans* pregnancy and participate in a much broader constellation of medieval images that imagine the holy wound as a vagina, as well as mystic texts that refer to Christ as “Mother Jesus.”⁵ So, it is not medieval art that needs queering; it’s been pretty damn queer all along! It’s the traditional academic canon and its narratives, in which medieval art remains relatively marginal (as an unfortunate interruption between the Classical and the Renaissance), that needs the queering, and it’s scholars who need to find the courage, summoned by Bassel, to name what they see, queer medieval art, which could have a central role to play in new narratives.

Bassel’s project recognizes the power of the “imaginary,” and here I mean the term in its psychoanalytic sense, briefly alluded to above. In the thinking of Jacques Lacan, the imaginaire refers to the tendency of the psyche to misrecognize what we see as reflections of the self, creating our very sense of self in the process. If one takes the imaginary seriously, one must take art history seriously also. Your self-image and thus worldview depends on the authoritative images you grow up with and encounter in your daily life. If works like Bassel’s or exhibitions like the one soon to arrive at the Met were more commonly seen, your relationships with the body, with gender and sexuality, and with history would be different than what they are now. Imagined otherwise, the world would be otherwise.

Bassel is hardly alone. In the past several years, many contemporary artists have engaged Western art history in tandem with queering projects. The Miami-based artist Rene Farias, for instance, reimagines canonical iconographies by exchanging historical figures for visibly gay, erotic ones, their bodies metamorphosing into the mythic forms of fairies, minotaurs, and other unruly creatures. In a different vein, Kent Monkman reimagines the canonical, settler telling of American history (and canonical American history painting) from an Indigenous perspective, frequently including a fierce queer character with flowing locks and high heels within the scene. In Philadelphia, Jesse Mockrin is painting reimaginings of recognizable old master works that critique hetrosexual patterns of desire from a stridently critical, feminist perspective. These projects, each in their own way, recognize the tremendous power of canonical images to shape the world in which we live, to shape the imaginary. They also suggest that queering is the premier strategy of constructing a new imaginary available to the contemporary artist. Art historians, I hold, should work like these brave contemporary artists, perhaps taking an approach most similar to Bassel’s by shining a light on historical examples of queerness. In medieval art at least, these are numerous. But art historians can also address another question invited by all of these artists—and on the flip side, by the resurgent right wing and our field’s own conservatism: what’s so queer about the imagination in the first place? Here too medieval art and history offer some answers.

Let’s look at a picture: a miniature from a manuscript of the Romance of the Rose, made in Paris around 1340 and today housed in the British Library. The illumination depicts Ovid’s famous tale of doomed desire, the myth of Narcissus, a youth who was so captivated by the beauty of his own reflection or ymage, per the Rose’s version of the tale, that he fell hopelessly in love and, ultimately, drowned. The miniature shows a blonde youth, frocked in a belted pink cloak and red stockings. Fashionably dressed with long trumpet sleeves and rows of white buttons, the boy reclines on a lightly wooded hillock, raising one hand in a gesture of address to the eerie image that seems to float up and out from swirls of blue flowing water. Perhaps the boy is also on the verge of attempting to reach out with both hands and embrace the blonde and blushing image, which is already enclosed by the contour line of his chest and sleeve. Regarding each other in a shared gaze, the image seems to smile coyly up at the boy, whose rather crinkled and splayed pose at a diagonal suggests a swoon.⁶

I love this picture for its embrace of highly chromatic color and dazzling geometric pattern, its sense of graphic line that articulates a tessellated design within which we find a body so precariously oriented, kinked, looking, loving. This body never fully escapes the painterly and fluid world in which the artist has set it—and only just barely set it! From bent wrist to pointed toe, the elegant boy spans the picture plane, breaching the frame (as does the tree behind him). Narcissus is not about to drown in the spring. He is now and forever falling into the miniature on the page. The painting is a spring, its laid gold a real mirror. The boundaries of the picture are unstable, suggesting that Narcissus fell in love with this miniature and fell into it even before he glimpsed the image in the spring depicted therein. We are invited, therefore, to fall in love with the picture too, on the boy’s model. Second, these pictorial qualities demand that the figure of Narcissus be seen foremost as painting, as liquid medium artfully applied to a substrate. The body of Narcissus appears as a visibly crafted, artistic image. In other words, we cannot fail to see his creator’s hand. Beyond visualizing the story of a boy’s love of an image, this image visualizes a boy for us to love, putting us in the position of Narcissus, who cast and created that image in the first place. We see Narcissus with the eyes of the picture’s first viewer, the artist himself who rendered a painting that shifts and shimmers like a pool of rippling water. I hold that this picture offers a kind of self-portrait of a medieval artist, asking to be recognized and desired for his ability to craft images. What’s perhaps surprising about this idea is that it implies a medieval artist’s embrace of a secular story about a body awakened to new desire and to same-sex desire, in addition to a desire for pictures and image-making. What could queerness offer a medieval artist?

The notion of a queer medieval artist is not so fanciful as it might seem, though investigating the topic challenges us to ask what we mean by the word “queer.” In the late Middle Ages, churchmen tended to frame queer sexualities, embodiments, and tendencies as forms of misprision and thus forms of artistry. In fact, Alain de Lille, an influential theologian and Neoplatonist of the twelfth century, even condemned Narcissus as sodomitical—and not only for his love of boys. Far more dangerous was his love of ombres, the false images cast upon the pool, at the root of his deathly sexuality.⁷ Alain’s near contemporary, the Parisian theologian Guillaume d’Auvergne, addressed the relationship of false images and queerness from another angle. In his treatise on confession, Guillaume condemned cross-dressing as an imaginary image or imaginatio at odds with the crossdresser’s “nature” or naturam. “Nature” is a pun here, meaning both “essence” and “genital” in medieval Latin. Mismatched with the cross-dresser’s male genitals, feminine clothes function as a crafted and crafty image, obscuring the man’s true male essence, or perhaps even suggesting that maleness is itself a masquerade of conventions that can be stripped off. For the phobic churchman, the cross-dresser is a master (or mistress) of false appearance. He goes on to write that the imagination is dangerous because it stirs up desire and might lead an unsuspecting man to engage in “unnatural” sex, contra naturam, really bringing the pun home.⁸ Here, sodomy hinges on misrecognition and artificiality—art-making even. As any contemporary drag queen would, I’m sure, agree, queerness is a form of imagining the body and the world otherwise. If queerness is a species of misprision, an imaginative kind of world-making and re-making, it had to be repressed and, ironically, declared imaginary—artificial, unreal, unnatural.

In the miniature of Narcissus, we find a limp-wristed boy in love with an imaginatio, an imaginary image, a painting that is visibly artificial and unreal that simultaneously articulates a scene from a well-known fictional story, a fairy story.⁹ It’s the workings of the imagination itself that are on display here, that of a clever artist, winkingly reminding us that a painting, in essence, is nothing more than a positive and pleasurable form of misprision, an imaginary view of worlds that do not or do not yet exist. There lies the true affinity of queerness and the imaginative arts, as well as their shared power. To live a queer life is to live fabulously—to live a fable, like the tale of Narcissus and other canonical myths, in which unlikely heroes face demons, battle monsters, and ultimately come to terms with the self. It is to live artfully and imaginatively, too, because you must reject the structures and conventions regulating your body and choose to make something new, in order to survive. Committed to reigning social hierarchies and realities, contemporary conservatives despise queers for the same reason powerful medieval churchmen did; we offer images of alternative worlds beyond the rulebook they’ve written, and we affirm the irrepressibility of those acts of imagination. To live queerly is akin to painting a new world and loving it. The medieval artist knew this.

Contemporary artists are rediscovering the queer powers of the imagination. It’s cropping up everywhere nowadays, and not just in the realm of fine art. Three years ago, Lauren Groff turned to queerness as an allegory for fiction in her New York Times bestseller Matrix, a novel about a medieval lesbian nun who imagines theology in new mythological terms. Instagram and TikTok darling Greedy Peasant is watched by thousands every week, frocked in medieval garb that undermines conventional notions of masculinity. With every tassel he stitches, it seems to me, he gradually remakes the past in a new imaginary image. He uses his queer imagination to queer the cultural imaginary and to recoup a vision of a queer past that remains difficult to see because to affirm its reality remains a fringe—and in his case, fringed—viewpoint. As I say, medieval art historians still have a lot of work to do.

What I love most about contemporary practitioners engaging the imaginary and engaging queerness is that their work holds me accountable in my own work. When my inner censors declare my research projects unfounded and imaginary (or an anonymous reviewer does), I am reminded that, outside of the strictures of academic convention, other folks are seeing what I am seeing and daring to think differently, to look again, to imagine otherwise. In their desire for a queer past and their visions of queer new worlds, I see echoes of the imaginative practice of the medieval artist. And this month? I’ve got wind in my sails and a spring in my step. I danced with some talented, brave art historians at the Zoo, who are invested in excavating and exhibiting the queerness of medieval art—at THE MET?! Projects like theirs not only render fuller and more accurate visions of the past visible, they simultaneously render more equitable futures imaginable. After hearing their ambitious papers, I feel newly affirmed in my belief in the reality of queer medieval art. I really can’t imagine things otherwise.

1. Laverne Cox, as quoted in Katy Steinmetz, “Laverne Cox: Counting LGBT People is ‘a Matter of Life and Death,’” TIME (9 June 2016), https://time.com/4362997/laverne-cox-lgbt-census/.
2. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 52-53; Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkley: University of California Press, 1993), 341.
3. The work of medieval historian Leah DeVun comes closest. I first encountered Cox’s quotation cited above in her work: The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), 161. To be sure, there are strong voices in this subfield—Robert Mills, Roland Betancourt, and Maeve Doyle, among others—but the project to approach medieval art from the position of queer studies and queer theory remains relatively new, in contrast to medieval studies as a whole. Case in point, in 1993 an original editor of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies was a medievalist, Chaucer scholar Carolyn Dinshaw.
4. Christopher T. Richards, “Tirtzah Bassel: Canon in Drag,” Brooklyn Rail (November 2023): https://brooklynrail.org/2022/11/artseen/Tirtzah-Bassel-Canon-in-Drag.
5. For a larger study of related phenomena, see the foundational work of Caroline Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkley: University of California Press, 1982).
6. My description emerged from formal comparisons of the miniature to contemporary queer riffs on Narcissus by Brooklyn-based artist Ben Chmura, known by his mythic pseudonym Dis.Pater. See his Jared Gazing (2022).
7. Alain de Lille, Liber de Planctu Naturae, in Patrologia Latina, vol. 210, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne (Paris: Migne, 1855), 449c.
8. Guillaume d’Auvergne, Supplementum Tractatus Novi de Poenitentia, cap. XIX, in Opera omnia, vol. 2 (Paris, Andrea Pralard, 1674), 231-232.
9. In a twelfth-century adaptation of the story, the Lai de Narcisse, Narcissus confuses his reflection for a fee de mer, a female water fairy, a moment of misrecognition that undermines Narcissus’s assumed masculine gender. See Simon Gaunt, Love and Death in Medieval French and Occitan Courtly Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 175-176.