Blasphemous or Beautiful? Leonardo da Vinci’s Saint John the Baptist: Holy Masculinity and Its Ambiguities ca. 1500

Abstract

<p>Leonardo da Vinci’s sensuous <i>Saint John the Baptist </i>(ca. 1513–16) has troubled its modern viewers for centuries, producing a trail of scholarship that attempts to explain its alleged blasphemy, androgyny, or ambiguity by probing Leonardo’s sexual life or by claiming that the saint’s appearance is irrelevant to its interpretation. In other words, it is assumed that for his period viewer, Leonardo’s <i>Saint John</i> was understood to be “deviant” with respect to both gender and religious norms. However, period accounts of the painting remark not on blasphemy, but beauty, while depictions of beautiful male saints like John the Evangelist and Sebastian contextualize the painting within a long tradition binding holy masculine beauty and virtue. This article proposes an interpretation of the <i>Saint John</i> rooted in Leonardo’s engagement with Aristotelian natural philosophy, period conceptions of holy masculinity, and theological discourse, in order to reconstruct the painting’s devotional implications for the period viewer.</p>