solto no espaço @soltonoespaco - Tumblr Blog

clarkkantagain-deactivated20260

alon shalev and oren shtaierman by benny and matan

loveyourgerms

cumdumpguru

same tbh

newloverofbeauty

Painter Rupert Bunny and friends, Australia (1890s)

photoarchive

Jaime Permuth, selection from Yonkeros, 2010

Pierre et Gilles, St. Sebastian, 1987

dialogue-queered

How did iconography of Saint Sebastian become popular in the gay community? Oscar Wilde was taken with Guido Reni's painting the figure.

Comment:

Katie White’s article for Artnet News highlights interpretations of Susan Sontag and others of St Sebastian as the ‘exemplary sufferer’ who passively internalises the experience of being shot with arrows and seems to display both pleasure and pain.

These themes are also highlighted by the curators of the recent ‘Queer: Stories from the NGV’s Collection’ at Melbourne’s, National Gallery of Victoria.

White’s article provides an art history starting-point to the queer community’s embrace of St Sebastian.

Extract:

By the dawn of the Renaissance, artists were emulating prototypes of masculinity associated with the Greek world, and Saint Sebastian transformed into a figure of ephebic beauty—adolescent, lithe, idealized in form, and often covered only by a loin cloth. These images showed the saint, not in his actual moment of martyrdom, but in a more poetic moment of torture by arrows. Indeed, these Renaissance and Baroque depictions are rooted in the Catholic teachings about the permeability of saints’ bodies and the ecstasy experienced in their communion with the divine—these depictions were the ones to be later embraced by the gay community who saw their own experiences mirrored in Saint Sebastian’s beautiful suffering.