Caravaggio's Secrets.

Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit. Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 1998. xi + 8 color pls. + 18 b/w pls. + 118 pp. $25. ISBN: 0-262-02449-7.

These two books examine eroticism in seventeenth-century literature and art in quite different ways. While Rambuss, for whom queerness is a central theme, asserts that blasphemy in Christian devotional literature can be a form of faithfulness, Bersani and Dutoit see eroticism in Caravaggio's paintings as part of a strategy of displacement, secrecy, and enigma.

In Closet Devotions, Rambuss traces connections between religious feeling and erotic desire in English poetry, sermons, diaries, and devotional handbooks. He finds devout expressions having to do with the body, gender, eroticism, and homoeroticism that violate cultural orthodoxies. An example of such sacred eroticisms is found in the devotional manual of Francis Rous, who exhorts the reader, "If [Christ] come not yet into thee, stirre up thy spirituall concupiscence. Therewith let thy soul lust mightily for him." In "Batter my heart," Rambuss sees John Donne as employing a same-sex rape fantasy and a seduction to woo a trio of divine lovers. And Edward Taylor asserts in a striking simile, "The Soule's the Wombe. Christ is the Spermodote / And Saving Grace the seed cast there-into." What are we to make of the sexual terms used by the pious to speak of religious emotion?

Rambuss's main claim is that such expressions of devotion as a form of sexual desire serve not merely as metaphors, but lead to a heightened affect in the subjective experience of the worshipper. The body and the passions amplify religious feeling, even if by transgressive means. For Rambuss, the religious poetry of the metaphysicals (Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, Vaughan, Traherne), with its colliding themes of spirituality and carnality, explores devotion's intensities and perversities. Provocations to concupiscence, albeit in spiritual terms (being ravished by God; lusting after Christ), stimulate religious affect even as they retain a transgressive charge. In the case of Anne Wentworth, who left her husband to "marry Christ," Rambuss sees a woman who perceives no impenetrable divide between the soul and the body, the otherworldly and the this-worldly. Instead, these fields of experience impinge upon and enrich one another. Rambuss considers at some length the significance of the prayer closet, a special private room in which the body - its gestures, motions, voice - is brought to bear upon the performance of devotion. Closet devotions encouraged religious desire, mixed sometimes with erotic feelings, to operate within the subjectivity of the self.

Rambuss relates this historical material to how we experience sexualized devotion today, through film (Priest) and art (Serrano's Piss Christ). In stressing the thorough embodiment of Christ, Rambuss compares the "golden streams" issuing from his body in a poem by John Hayward (1604) to Serrano's work. In a provocative example, Rambuss discusses the gay porn video, More of a Man, where Christ's nearly naked body is offered ("ecce homo") for worship, desire, and various kinds of identification. Christ's body becomes a fetish, to be gazed upon and adored. Vito, the video's chief character, moves from the "prayer closet" of a chapel into a water closet, a public restroom where he has male/male sex. In a redemptive move he comes "out of the closet" into pleasure and devotion.

Rambuss uses such contemporary examples to criticize the protocols governing current notions of history ("in those days they couldn't have meant that"). He argues that too many examples of excessive, emotional sexuality occur in historical devotional texts to support the current view that such erotic references are merely metaphorical. For Rambuss, it would be too historicizing to impute to early modern authors an innocence concerning the sexual suggestiveness of their devotional aids. The fact that these authors were aware that their sexually charged works could be taken the wrong way is proof enough for Rambuss of their consciousness of the power of their sexual imagery. Rambuss reinterprets in frankly homoerotic terms poems that had been seen previously as embracing exclusively heterosexual imagery. In doing so, he criticizes earlier writers who had feminized Christ's male body in their interpretations. He discusses as well women's sexual/devotional imaginings. Thus St. Catherine of Siena has a stunning vision of marrying Christ not with a gold ring, but with the fleshy band of his circumcised foreskin. Rambuss thus finds in the poems of the metaphysicals figurations of devotion and desire hardly less unblushingly erotic than the porn video. Poems and video both reveal a similar desire for Christ and his body. But Rambuss seems to conjoin current and historical sentiments in too seamless a fashion. Christ, Pope Leo the Great asserted, is like us in all respects, including his body, apart from sin. Rambuss does not sufficiently explain how seventeenth-century devotees could have employed erotic metaphors in a religious context where sin was to be avoided as far as humanly possible. Nor does he explain how, if these historical votaries of Christ were conscious of the erotic implications of their words, they could have justified such imagery in their own minds as legitimate religious expressions. Is it possible that the imagery of bodily fluids was part of a tradition emphasizing the complete pain and suffering of Christ on the cross, along with his body's redemptive value, and that this imagery wasn't intended to be erotic? Is it only our generation for whom such imagery takes on an erotic valence because of our more open attitudes towards gayness and religion? Were gay men or straight women in the seventeenth century liberated enough in their thinking to mix authentically erotic and deeply devotional thoughts? And what would have been the product of such a mixture? Could they truly have reached the sacred through the violence of a broken taboo?

Caravaggio's Secrets is an investigation in aesthetics tracing how the artist rejects historical representation and instead sees his subjects as "modes of being," as images lying directly before him, and us, in the immediate present. Bersani and Dutoit begin by analyzing Caravaggio's early erotic paintings of boys. The authors see in these works a complex play of erotic invitation and self-concealing retreat that, in the end, projects an enigmatic address to the viewer suggesting intimacy and secrecy. For example, in Caravaggio's come-ons such as the Bacchino Malato or the Boy with a Basket of Fruit, the erotic invitation is qualified by a retreat, signaled by the boys' closing their arms in on themselves in moves that protect them from the advances they invite. Thus Caravaggio is interested in the enigmatic body, one that presents itself but also withdraws.

In his religious works, the authors argue, Caravaggio thinks of his models not as historical subjects from the bible, but as people living in the moment that he is painting them. His models play their roles unconvincingly, so that the master gives them the freedom to resist their assigned narrative and religious functions. The authors cite many examples of the artist's works in which the various figures depicted don't look where they should, so that Caravaggio seems unwilling or unable to center their, or our, gaze. The artist exhibits a profound uncertainty about relational priorities, and is thus an outlaw operating outside the pictorial tradition given to him. For example, in his Betrayal of Christ (Dublin), Caravaggio depicts himself as the man holding the lantern at the right, witnessing the scene. He is thus in a relational connection to the subject, unconcealing it for his contemporary audience. In doing so, the artist removes us from history through relationality, through his active participation in the scene.

Other examples of Caravaggio's paintings are used to show how he circumvented in various ways expected valences between works of art, truth, and history. The authors conclude that Caravaggio's art marks a turning point in the history of consciousness in which it is recognized that truth cannot be an object of knowledge, an awareness that reformulates both intersubjectivity and metaphysics. The artist thus moves from painting historical narratives to depicting modes of being that feature subjects as if they exist in the immediate present. In doing so, Caravaggio allows his models to exist in a disturbing presentness that defeats his own attempt to impose another identity on them. For example, in the Borghese St. John, Caravaggio gives the model his role to play unpersuasively, so that the boy seems not devoured by ascetic passion, but gone to seed, like a boy of the streets, sitting in an uncomfortable pose.

The authors have a point, but at the same time it can be argued against them that the boy assumes one of the most classical contrapposto poses Caravaggio ever painted, and that St. John's wistful expression may be taken as a sign of his awareness of his own future death by beheading or of Christ's death on the cross. And in other paintings, such as the Death of the Virgin or the Entombment of Christ, the models' immediacy doesn't displace the narrative content, as Bersani and Dutoit would have it, but, it seems to me, augments it. Thus the paintings are allowed a richness that we may infer from the comment of Cardinal Ottavio Paravicino, who called Caravaggio's pictures "tra il devoto, et profano," between the sacred and the profane. I prefer to see Caravaggio's immediacy of expression as resonating with the historical dimension rather than destroying it. The result is paintings that have both the depth of narrative tradition and the direct presence of the moment.

The Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg