ABSTRACT
Leo Steinberg, in his classic study, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion,1 noticed that the sexuality of Christ was prominent at the very centre of Renaissance paintings, in which the Virgin Mary very often even pointed to the child Christ’s sex (Figure 1.1). Why? Why would religious paintings, traditionally associated with modesty and prudishness, wish to explicitly draw attention to the sex of the child Christ, both as its central topic and at the exact geometric centre of the painting? To understand this conundrum, Steinberg had to recover lost meanings. In particular, he had to recover the forgotten seventeenth-century concept of ‘humanation’. His research thus tackled the problem that ‘most modern viewers are content to stop at the demythicized image – a human image drawn to all appearances from the natural world, far afield from the mysteries of the Creed’.2
