The Brooklyn Rail

I stand taut by the acid bath, lifting the plate out of the darkness. In a moment, I will look through the jeweler’s loupe at the glint of the copper, seeing how deeply the lines have been etched, imagining wiping the viscous ink into the jagged crevasses.

My hands recreate a printmaking process that dates back to the Renaissance, when artists in Germany and Italy repurposed etching from the manufacture of elaborate armor to the translation of drawings onto metal plates that could be inked and printed. My design too is an old one: a recreation of a lost drawing by Michelangelo that now only survives in various copies, including one housed in the Fogg Museum at Harvard. The drawing is famous for its depiction of a young Ganymede being lifted up into the skies by an eagle. Holding a burin and adding lines to my partially-etched plate, I think about replication: the same grip on the same instrument biting through the ground, perhaps the same desire to recreate the fluidity of the hand within the rigidity of the plate, perhaps a familiar retracing of historical and aesthetic pathways, of both giddy inspiration and hubristic embarrassment in this act of artmaking as repetition.

And also: a delighted recognition. My remaking of Ganymede feels like a meme-like appropriation of the Italian Renaissance to highlight my own intersectional queerness and transcultural identity. For the myth of Ganymede is itself a subversive one. “The loveliest born of the race of mortals,” as Homer describes him, Ganymede was a beautiful Trojan boy snatched by Zeus/Jupiter, in the form of an eagle, to be his cupbearer. With its Asian-Anatolian location and its evocation of burning love so intense that it transformed even the king of gods into a predatory raptor (so Ovid tells us), the myth of Ganymede was already a moniker for a gay man in antiquity. But the story, particularly in Homer’s version, also identified homosexuality as a foreign, Asian practice imported to Rome, something racialized and abhorrent, if titillating and prevalent. By drawing Ganymede in the very moment he is seized by the god, Michelangelo proclaims his own unspeakable homosexual desire and steps into this genealogy. The picture replicates a story, a feeling, a fear.

What does it mean, then, for a South Asian woman to think about queerness and art through Michelangelo’s drawing of Ganymede and the very technology of etching as replication? The incisions on my copper plate raise questions about just who gets to draw on Early/Modern/Italy as a cultural resource—and what such cultural borrowings might signal. Is every evocation of the Italian Renaissance a conservative, Eurocentric gesture or a desire for white-passing cultural assimilation? Or, is my redrawing a reclamation of the porosity and openness that was always already present in the Renaissance’s remakings of its own multi-layered histories? If Ganymede is an Asian figure, later assimilated to those beautiful male cupbearers, the sāqi of Persianate ghazals, is he a culturally alien figure to me—or to Michelangelo?

At the very moment when Italian politics has embraced ultra-right-wing nationalism and its Fascist past, the evocation of Michelangelo—not in his guise as the icon of Western cultural genius but rather as a tormented, queer, counter-cultural emblem—is both transgressive and familiar, something new and something repeated. For the strange layering of multiple times and spaces is embedded in the very concept of “Italy.” Italy claims to be one with Rome, caput mundi, the cultural “head of the world,” but its deeper Etruscan past is a reminder of long legacies of settler colonialism and Indigenous struggle (as the Aeneid suggests). It has long been a political crossroads of migration and crossing within and beyond the Mediterranean. An idea, a desire, an aspiration, the imagining of Italy as a political category was itself transgressive and familiar. When the fourteenth-century Humanist Francesco Petrarch invokes “Italia mia” in a famous canzone, he dreams of a unification that will not occur for another five hundred years. And when Niccolo Machiavelli warns of the internecine tensions among the Italian city states in the early sixteenth century and the predation by foreign powers, he seems to anticipate contemporary nationalist anxiety and fears of otherness. In a sense, Italy’s past has always been its present and its future. The idea of “Italy” marks a kind of untimeliness that is best captured by the Renaissance itself, which looped back to antiquity while also claiming to make a definitive break with historical unfolding. Modernity in this view is repetition: a return to the past that is also, somehow, a radical rupture from the past; it is a replication that makes something anew.

Michelangelo has long occupied a central place in this dynamic. His David, an emblem for Italy and the Renaissance, fuses time and space, classical sculpture with Biblical mythmaking as the young hero is poised, watchful, in the wary pause before the decisive battle with Goliath. But David is not only a biblical statue. It soon became a metaphor for Florence and the pluckiness of small city-states against incursion by hostile external forces. David is also a beautiful, naked young man with gigantic hands—the kind of body that Michelangelo is now known to have desired. Since the sixteenth century, when rumors of Michelangelo’s homosexuality swirled amid Rome’s elite, every generation has rediscovered the artist as a model for queer life. There is ample evidence, of course, from the Ignudi of the Sistine Chapel to the series of drawings he made for Tommaso dei Cavalieri, the beautiful young nobleman with whom he was enamored—and of which Ganymede is a part. Michelangelo himself acknowledges as much in one of his sonnets to Tommaso. “A fierce burning for immense beauty is not always the cause of bitter, mortal guilt,” he writes tentatively, imagining a love that “stirs and wakes us … feathers our wings.” The images in the poem are not unlike the wings of the eagle that encircle his Ganymede. They too repeat old ways of speaking and imagining the relationship of the present with the past.