Sexuality in Perugino’s St Agnostino alterpiece

The image is immediately arresting as a deep invention. The figure alive and vital in gossamer shimmering colours against a blue Tuscan landscape. The first sense is one of sweetness and delicacy, with sinuous body downturned head and gaze; a kind of innocence. But the image gets more and more complex the longer one looks. There are curious lapses of proportion in context. So that below the folded arms over the breast/chest the body is undoubtedly feminine. It is more than nubile it is definitely feminine; with the weight gently relaxed onto the left thigh with the right leg unweighted. This right leg more than anything like Botticelli. The loin cloth covers genitals that could hardly be male and seem to imply either very young male or female. But above the folded arms there is on the one hand a slim chest but also bulky shoulders and deltoids and a bulky trapezius muscle defining the slanted neck. This upper torso is undeniably male although it carries on it a delicate (although male) head. So in muscle terms the deltoids and trapezius are developed but the pectorals are not. The chest indeed looks boy like. The breasts are covered with the folded arms that represent more ambiguity. What’s striking as one looks is how the elbow regions particularly of the left are swollen and the point of the elbow enlarged almost like a nipple. Seen in this way the two elbow regions like large mature dugs. Here it is almost as if one gets the feeling that the upper body is being cradled or held by the arms which are themselves the arms of an older woman. So in this one image there are elements of the female, element or so however in win this one English there are elements of the female, prepubescent or female genitalia, young boyness, maleness, and extreme delicacy. Such a collection of elements fused in an image of pre-sexual nascent life, emerging as it were from the holding of the maternal, springing with unformed sexual gender. There is a bit of every gender in an unformed sense; and perhaps the something here that accounts for the overall sense of extreme gentleness, grace and strength.

If every artist makes his or her own image of Christ as an image of the good, then what is this telling us? One can point to the deepening of Catholicism during this period and Marian devotion. Perugino taught Raphael, and this image is the antecedent of generations of sweet saccharine Madonnas. But psychologically it is characterised by sweetness and complete lack of threat. One can’t imagine this Christ throwing the money changers out of the temple. He is uninformed nascent innocent infantile, pre-sexual. The contrast,for instance, with Piero’s Resurrection Christ of around the same time could not be more complete. Yet the image is not sentimental (although it will easily become so in future iterations of the same idea): it is certainly communicating some real sense of the good in the gentle.

How then to account for the particular quality of the image? Perhaps it relates to a notion of the good which avoids any aspect of sexuality or power or aggression. Perhaps an aesthetism with something of St Francis of Assisi. It’s also a notion of the good in which all is possible - a very nascent quality. Or you could say a Christ removed from many of the complexities that lead to the fall. So this perhaps anticipates the childlike peaceful Christ of St Francis. But it is an idea of the good that avoids rather than transcends many of the complexities of real existence. In this sense it is a dream image, but one that speaks to the core of an early self before differentiation, completely nascent, held but emergent, fresh to any rough winds. The gentlest of saplings.

So to us today it speaks to a complex but potent prelapsarian purity, which is pre-Oedipal; a gentle early childhood, yet with enough promise of strength to resist infantilisation.

Perugia
April 2012