"In this late-thirteenth-century painting, while the scroll in Christ's hand falls open, the clasped text of his garment opens nearly to his phallus in the process of revealing a fleshly pryvetee that symbolizes God's hitherto hidden intentions, that "is" the Word made flesh. This iconography is highly serious . Here we see being formulated, in the late Middle Ages, a very powerful myth of a central presence that fills, orients, and stabilizes language. ..
"...Here is, as Leo Steinberg remarks, a veritable ostentatio genitalium .[16] The fatherly, priestly hand frames and draws the audience's attention to the Child's private parts, which are entirely exposed with the falling away of the long swaddling cloth that trails across the altar, linking the scene of bodily exposure on one end of the altar to the unclasped, open text of the Old Testament on the other. One pryvetee here is clearly linked to the other. God's hidden meaning is metaphorically revealed in Christ's revelation of his most private flesh...
"...In such paintings, the Christ Child no longer needs to hold a scroll symbolizing the Old Testament in his hand to remind us that he is the incarnate Word, that the text of his flesh is the key to understanding God's intentions.
"...A more effective way of directing the viewer's attention to Christ's groin was to use the direction of the gaze of other viewers within the picture to direct ours, as in some late-fourteenth-century images of the Adoration of the Magi. A Lombard illumination from about 1390, for example, presents a kneeling old king kissing the Child's foot while gazing intently at the nude infant's private parts (Fig. 11). Bohemian paintings and manuscript illuminations of the 1360s and 1370s, while depicting a nude Christ Child, still use his foot (symbolic of the phallus , a kind of displaced penis, even in earlier Byzantine models) as the focal point of the picture: ...
"... Renaissance painters go even further than late medieval ones in inventing ways to attract attention to Christ's genitals for doctrinal reasons.
"..The most fascinating question Steinberg's study raises is why we have not taken notice of such deliberate exposure of Christ's phallus when even the Madonna's index finger, like an embodied nota sign, points its sentence out to us (Fig. 17). We seem to have censored the exposure in our own minds, refused to see it. Nevertheless, the late medieval painters (and patrons) who started the vogue of Christ's nudity must have known what they were doing; an artist does not make Christ's penis—or his foot—the focal point of a picture by accident...
".. What would someone with bad intentions—a churl, a "janglere and a goliardeys" like Chaucer's Miller—see in our exemplary East Anglian Nativity scene? ...Were he to open his eyes, this Joseph would see "Goddes pryvetee" and his wife's too—that is, their intimate love-play and their private parts, Mary's exposed breast, Christ's gossamer-veiled, open thighs. He would see Mary behaving as the Christ-God's wife instead of his own: "An housbonde shal nat been inquisityf / Of Goddes pryvetee, nor of his wyf...
"Goliardic play involves just this kind of debasing interpretation of sacred images and signs—even to the extent of taking the Holy Family and "Goddes pryvetee" in vain. .. The infant God takes possession of his mother (Mary as Church);
he is the apple of her eye, excluding and replacing the old father (Joseph as Synagogue). In other images, the infant God is recognized king of all kings and worshipped by the aged Magi, who peer at his phallus as a thing of wonder...
"...Images of the "family romance" are the medium for Christian doctrine, which, by acts of sublimating exegesis, denies the primitive meaning and attraction of such images. Most of us have not consciously perceived the deliberate exposure of the Christ Child's penis in late medieval and Renaissance art; neither have we consciously perceived the primitive level of meaning ...Other texts, learned in the process of our schooling, have covered up the fundamental one. However, in the late Middle Ages, on festive occasions associated with seasonal change, and especially in the days leading up to and following the New Year, "youth" rebelled against the restrictions and censorship of age and authority and committed deliberately churlish, infantile, goliardic acts of interpretive parody or burlesque performance that, in effect, desublimated the sacred texts and rites, unmasked the euphemisms, removed the verbal loincloths of exegesis, and exposed the revitalizing energy of infantile, egocentric desire.
"...Medieval preachers also played for their listeners' attention by using the sensuality of the literal level of meaning of the Song of Songs to talk about divine love or by incorporating into their vernacular sermons "serious" puns such as the one on vierge (Virgin) and verge ("wand" or "penis" or, figuratively, typologically, "tree of Jesse")...
"...We may be reminded of the techniques of modern advertising by Gregory the Great's explanation, in beginning the commentary on the Song of Songs usually attributed to him, of how carnal language attracts the listener's attention:
in this book love is expressed as if in carnal language, so that the mind, stimulated by words it is accustomed to, may be aroused from its torpor, and through words concerned with a love which is below, may be excited to a love which is above. In this book are mentioned kisses, breasts, cheeks, and thighs. Nor is the Sacred description to be ridiculed on that account, but the greater mercy of God is to be considered; for when He names the members of the body and thus calls to love, it should be noted how wonderfully and mercifully we are treated. For in order that our hearts may be inflamed with sacred love, He extends His words even to wicked love...
"...Michel Zink has remarked that some medieval preachers seem to have taken pleasure in the "intellectual game of turning around the [secular] text and in the unexpected allegorical interpretation," in "reducing vanitas ad veritatem ." Thus one preacher from Amiens used the refrain of a secular love song, with its conventional erotic undertones, "Bone est la dolor dont ge atent douchour / Et soulas et joie" ("Good is the suffering from which I expect sweetness / and pleasure and joy"), to point out the relationship between penance and paradise.[14] The more stubbornly carnal the text, the greater pleasure the preacher took in reversing its meaning with his gloss. Indeed, in reading vernacular sermons and imagining their oral performance, one can sometimes catch glimpses of a preacher playing games with his audience...
"...As an instance of syllogistic reasoning in vernacular sermons, Zink paraphrases the following sequence from a thirteenth-century sermon, which, as he notes, is periodically punctuated with the exhortations "don't be stupid" or "listen and understand":
The body of Christ gives la vie to him who receives it. God, is he not vie? Yes. Is there anything better than eternal vie in joy without end? No. God is vie: everything that is God is thus vie . The flesh of God, is it not God?
"Yes. And whoever receives it, does he not receive vie? Yes, it is even eternal vie that he has within him if he receives it in a worthy way.[15]
The preacher's warnings, "Or m'atendez e entendez," "Mais entendez, ne soiez mie bestes," may be necessary because of the novelty of syllogisms, as Zink suggests, but they also call attention to the possibility, for the listener, of misunderstanding vie (life) as vit (penis) in several contexts of this argument. In effect, the preacher is playing a sort of peekaboo, both suggesting the carnal interpretation and insisting that the listener subordinate it to a higher meaning. By alternately teasing and prodding his audience, the preacher makes the implicit point that the Christ Child's vit represents the eternal vie Christ made possible for men through his Incarnation, by assuming the flesh, the phallus...
"...Zink also remarks that etymological wordplay based on Latin virgo and virga or Old French vierge and verge is common in thirteenth-century sermons and that it is consecrated by the Church for the Office of the Virgin at Easter and justified by Hugh of Saint Victor in a chapter entitled "Quod multiplici ratione Maria dicatur virga, et Christus flos ejus."[16] To the medieval listener, explanations of why the Virgin should be called "wand" (or "penis") may have verged upon the ludicrous, even though the purpose of the pun is serious, to bring together Old and New Testaments through typological allusions. Thus we see young vines climbing up aged trees—or other references to the Tree of Jesse—in the background in pictorial representations of the Virgin and Child wherein the Child's penis is prominently exposed, peered at, or even pointed to by the Virgin or his grandmother.[17] Pure-minded people should have no great difficulty with such serious puns or devotional images of the Vierge / verge but should surmount their initial carnal attraction with a doctrinally serious, typological interpretation...
"But why should the Christian preacher or artist or writer run such risks of being misunderstood by appealing to the flesh, to carnal sensation, in these ways, only to block or cover it over in the end? Why should the artist whose message is spiritual resort to such manipulations? Gregory the Great's admission is more forth-right than most: carnal imagery stimulates, attracts the audience's attention, gets energy flowing that may then be diverted and redirected toward God."
Kendrick, Laura. Chaucerian Play: Comedy and Control in The Canterbury Tales. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1988 1988.
http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft1q2nb112/
