Sexuality and Religion Through Art

Tucked away on the third floor of the Harvard Art Museums, past Ancient Egyptian art and a gallery full of photographs, is an eclectic curation of works with no clear throughline. “Engravings,” you think as the intricate black-and-white works by Albrecht Dürer, Sebald Beham, and Hans Baldung Grien first ensnare your eyes. You glance at the wall behind you, though, and altarpieces, coins, and a tempera painting confront you. After taking a beat, you sense a theme: religious work. The altarpieces are, of course, altarpieces; the coins are from Constantine (the first Roman Emperor to embrace Christianity), the painting depicts the head of Christ, and the engravings you first saw show Adam and Eve. Quite proud of yourself, you breach the threshold of the second room of the exhibition, and try as you might, you cannot hold on to your thesis. The works here seem to be centered around horses… but also Incan portraits?

“Introduction to the History of Art” was curated by Professors Jeffrey Hamburger, Cécile Fromont, and Joseph Leo Koerner, who co-teach History of Art and Architecture 10. The common thread of this exhibition? Time, self and subjectivity, and the future of the past. You could pull on a thousand threads from the tapestry that makes up those topics, and still not scratch the surface. Still, pulling those threads is exactly what gives this curation its meaning. Therefore, like Sisyphus in the depths of Tartarus, we trudge on.

While the exhibition has around 40 works spread throughout, two particularly interesting pieces feature unique intersections of sexuality and religion.

The story we will tell begins where the Pishon, Gihon, Tigris, and Euphrates rivers first met—the Garden of Eden. In this very garden, the Bible says humanity was created. Adam was formed from the dust of the earth, and Eve from Adam’s rib. As the story goes, Adam and Eve were given everything they needed but were forbidden to eat fruit from one specific tree. Tempted by a serpent, Eve ate the fruit and gave some to Adam. Immediately their eyes were opened, and they realized they were naked, so they sewed fig leaves together to cover themselves. As punishment for their disobedience, God expelled them from the garden.

Albrecht Dürer perfectly captures the moment of this original sin—the Fall as it is called—in his engraving printed in black ink on white antique laid paper, titled “Adam and Eve.” In the work, Eve receives an apple from the serpent, which insinuates a freezing of the sin in time. More specifically, as the apple has yet to be eaten, the scene takes place before “The Fall.” However, our understanding of the temporality is complicated by the plants conveniently covering the genitals of both Adam and Eve. As mentioned earlier, Adam and Eve did not consider their nudity as shameful until after The Fall. This detail pulls us out of our immersion and forces us to consider why Dürer would include such an inaccuracy in his work.

This inaccuracy is perhaps Dürer’s intentional commentary on the human condition. Before “The Fall,” sexuality had no normative property. However, after the first bite of the apple, humanity was cast out of the garden, where we can never return. Therefore, even in the most naturalistic and accurate depiction of the time before the Fall, Dürer seems to remind us that we cannot go back. Our eyes have been permanently opened to our nakedness.

The tree from which Adam and Eve ate was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Upon receiving such knowledge, the first thing the pair did was to become ashamed of their exposed genitalia and fashion clothes to cover themselves. What does this say about the moral characteristics of our sexuality? It is clear that after the original sin, nakedness was wrong, but what about before? Was our sexuality always something to be hidden away, and the knowledge of good and evil showed us that, or was normativity only injected into our sexuality after the moment Eve’s teeth touched the flesh of the apple?

Another work from the exhibit that touches on similar themes is the “Madonna,” by Edvard Munch. In form, the lithographic print is a ‘Madonna and Child’—a depiction of the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ. However, it differs from most other Madonna and Child depictions, in which Mary is chaste and robed, displaying her purity. Further, the baby Jesus is typically the more central figure, as expected.

This work is nearly the opposite of what we are used to seeing. Jesus is small and emaciated, tucked in the darkness of the corner. He crosses his arms, hugging himself, evoking feelings of childlike fear. His mother, by contrast, is in the foreground. She lies back, with her hands behind her head, fully naked. There is a hint of ecstatic eroticism, as Mary pitches her head back, stares up at the ceiling, and parts her lips. Upon closer inspection, however, her eyes reveal themselves as hollow voids, as if she were dead. There are also sperm encircling her, which look like they originate from the baby and end towards her hips.

Once again, the morality of sexuality is called into question. In his work, Munch tears down the false, thin veil of a virgin birth and makes conception inextricable from life. It is as if he is forcing the viewer into deeper waters. From the comfortable, inexplicit idea of a child born from holiness and purity, one must wade into the animalistic, carnal, and deeply human reality. Together, the works are profoundly haunting, and yet somehow familiar.

This exploration offers no takeaway; no lesson to learn or answer to find. Instead, it leaves only more questions. Our interpretation of both works may not be what either artist intended, and other viewers may take away entirely different messages. However, as we started with, this is just one thread in a tapestry of millions that exist in this gallery. Professors Hamburger, Fromont, and Koerner have created a phenomenal curation, made even more special by its ephemerality. In four months, the installation will be replaced, and the threads burned with it, as this group of works will likely never be shown together again.

Elliot Hunter Chung ’29 (elliotchung@college.harvard.edu) and Wisdom Omolayo ’29 (wisdom_omolayo@college.harvard.edu) are comping the “Harvard Independent.”

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