Sex in the Sistine Chapel: The Nakedness of Noah in Judaism and Christianity

Mar 24 2008 - 4:00pm Earth and Planetary Sciences Building, Room 203

Sarah Massey 314-935-8677 or smassey@wustl.edu

The talk explores the iconographic and exegetic foundations within Judaism and Christianity that influenced Michelangelo’s depiction of a drunk naked Noah unprecedentedly surrounded by three naked sons. It places this first fresco set over the lay entrance to the Chapel within Michelangelo’s Sistine project as a whole, as well as within the related problems of theologenitalia in Christianity, Judaism, and paganism. A confluence of seemingly unrelated events and trends—including religious polemic within and between Judaism and Christianity, the cults of Osirus and Dinoysius, the incarnation, the blood libel and other forms of religious persecution, the sex lives of Florentine males, Michelangelo’s own tortured psychology, and Renaissance antiquarianism—effected this image. Now placed in the very heart of the Church, in the Pope’s own chapel, this version of the Noah story which hinted at sodomy and castration intimately signaled the struggles over sex and the nature of Jesus Christ that have plagued Christianity since its early centuries.

Benjamin Braude, Boston College, is currently completing Sex, Slavery, and Racism: The Secret History of the Sons of Noah, which examines the construction of attitudes toward color and identity from the ancient Near East and the classical world to the present.

This lecture is free and open to the public. It is sponsored by the Departments in History and Art History, and the Programs in Jewish, Islamic and Near Eastern Studies, Religious Studies, and Women and Gender Studies.