One of my friends just called me to let me know that Leo Steinberg, one of the most influential art historians of the last half-century, died this past Sunday. He was 90 years old. Like many painters, I tend to keep my distance from art historians. Coming after the fact of art as they do, too many of them, inadvertently or not, dull art down too much for my taste. They tame it. They treat it like it’s a butterfly needing to be captured, chloroformed, pinned down, and then neatly categorized. Steinberg wasn’t like that.
Bold, brilliant, and provocative, Steinberg, who was trained in Renaissance and Baroque art, covered an enormous range of artists and aesthetic topics, from Renaissance to contemporary art. He wasn’t interested in sitting around endlessly describing art, or in coming up with dry linguistic theories about it. Art was full of life and sexuality. In one of his most controversial books, in fact, he directly tackled the touchy subject of the sexuality of Christ.
Steinberg’s The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (1983) takes on a very simple question, never before brought up, out in the open: Why do so many Renaissance paintings so prominently depict the baby Jesus’ genitals? Images of the naked baby Jesus are so ubiquitous in Western art that it’s puzzling why it took 500 years for an art historian to finally wonder aloud about it.
The genitals are exposed on purpose, Steinberg argued, and are in fact critical in Christina iconography because they constitute an aesthetic asseveration of Christ’s humanity. The theology of Christianity is not that Christ was effeminate, or ethereally devoid of sexual desire, but that he was fully and completely a man. Yes, he was a virgin, but his virginity was deliberate, the result of a man who completely controlled his sexual desire. Those darling genitals in images of the baby Jesus are visual iterations reminding the faithful that Christ would grow into a man who suffered as fully as other men.
Steinberg’s work didn’t sit well with everyone. While no one could deny his brilliance, some accused him of over-reaching in his art-historical interpretations. Acutely proud of his intellectual boldness, however, and vastly preferring going out on an imaginative intellectual limb to confining his art history to timidly tracking the trajectories of art and artists, Steinberg defended himself in a 1967 essay, “Objectivity and the Shrinking Self.” Why were so many young scholars so unimaginative? Had they lost the brave strivings of humanism, trading them in for the insecure narrowness of social science?
I knew Leo Steinberg personally just a little bit. Occasionally, I dined with him at one of his favorite restaurants (one of the last places here in New York to still permit smoking—a necessity for this man, who was a chain smoker almost his entire life). I also visited him in his apartment in midtown for a few long afternoon discussions about art and whatnot, and attended some of his frequent lectures at the New York Studio School. There were many admirers and followers like me—painters, in particular, who took pleasure in spending time with this liveliest of art historians who loved peppering us with difficult questions about art, and who also respected us enough to try out hugely enormous ideas about art. Not everyone can get away with being as boldly imaginative in his field as Leo Steinberg was in his; it helped that he was a genius.