A Depiction of Male Same-Sex Seduction in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s <i>Effects of Bad Government</i> Fresco

Abstract

I n h I s b o o k P i c t u r e s a n d P a s s i o n s : A History of Homosexuality in the Visual Arts, James M. Saslow observes that as the repression of homoerotic behavior increased in europe beginning in the thirteenth century, after a period of relative tolerance in the earlier and central Middle Ages, the number of images of sodomy (as homoerotic behavior was labeled at the time) actually increased, and these images grew more explicit in their depiction of “taboo behavior.” inspired at least in part by Dante’s Commedia (The Divine Comedy), where unrepentant sodomites are condemned to the seventh circle of Hell “to run ceaselessly among a rain of fire reminiscent of Sodom itself,” images of the Last Judgment, including several produced in fourteenthand fifteenth-century italy, show sodomites suffering horrible tortures that mimic their crimes against nature. For example, in the Collegiate Church of San Gimignano, not far from Siena, the painter Taddeo di Bartolo depicted a devil ramming a pole up the anus of a man who is labeled a “SOTOMiTTO”; the pole reemerges through the mouth of the sodomite, whence it then penetrates the mouth of another damned figure (fig. 1). in this way, the artist managed to convey two of the sexual acts of which male sodomites stood accused: anal and oral sex. The sodomites were accompanied in this particular section of hell, identified as the area reserved for those who committed the sin of concupiscence (“LA LUSURiA”),