The 2017 Vatican Nativity, located at the center of Saint Peter’s Square in Rome, recently incited controversy primarily because of a figure depicting a nude man. The theme for the Nativity is the “Seven Corporal Works of Mercy,” which includes: clothe the naked. The nude man, with his genitals covered only by a cloth, reclines on his back while another man hands him some sort of white fabric. The work references several traditions, including Michelangelo, the Neapolitan creche, and contemporary homoerotic art.

Throughout the history of Art, even sometimes in images portraying Christian religious themes and subjects, there is a struggle between what is art and what is pornography. For instance, certain scenes from Scripture and Church history, particularly the more grisly procedures of martyrdom endured by the Early Christian martyrs, allowed an opportunity for calculating artists to create almost lurid depictions of torture and death that borders on sadomasochism; see the numerous paintings of Saint Agatha. In addition, at times, the portraits of Saint Mary Magdalene become repetitive and appear as an excuse to paint a beautiful topless woman with flowing hair. In terms of the homoerotic, no Saint has the number of images supposedly crafted in his honor that precipitously teeter between art and the pornographic than Saint Sebastian; see above “Saint Sebastian Tended by Saint Irene” by Vicente López y Portañahence; hence his continual cult of adulation among modern gay male artists. The mixed-media photographs of the talented but misguided gay artists Pierre Commoy and Gilles Blanchard, known as Pierre et Gilles, exploit and fetishizes some of the latent homoeroticism in these religious works; the nude male in the Vatican nativity doesn’t quite go that far, but it is nevertheless still (on purpose or accidentally) part of the same tradition.

No competent artist works within a vacuum and they are normally aware that all Art includes a long history of precedence. As for the 2017 Vatican Nativity, by including a reclining nude man, it is forever linked with other such depictions from the past. Since before the Barberini Faun, carved during the Greek Hellenistic period, to the soft-core drawings and paintings by early-gay artist George Quaintance, (example above,) the nude male figure has the power to illicit admiration as well as lust. The quintessential example of the artist who could utilize the nude male body in his artwork and not slip into the pornographic – was Michelangelo. On the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican are numerous nude men, the famous and repeatedly copied ignuidi, that serve to frame the various scenes representing the Creation of the World, are both ravishingly beautiful and inspiring. They uplift the mind rather than the blood pressure. Their expressions vary from ecstatic to languid. The more energetic examples are similar to the nude male in the Vatican Nativity, expect they are two-dimensional. Although painted in bright colors of pre-Mannerism, yet, there is a level of restraint; and the flat surface presents the possibility for the artist to conceive an entire world in which to place the figure; hence, the vast cosmology of the Sistine Ceiling forms one unified theme of the glorified human body (represented by the male) as created in the image and likeness of God. This is more difficult to achieve in the three-dimensional form of sculpture which pushes the artwork into the so-called real-world of the viewer space. In the oeuvre of Michelangelo, the potential erotic heat of some of his sculptures, notably the “Dying Slave,” (pictured above,) is curtailed because of the bleached-bone surface of the bare marble; in ancient examples, which this is derived from, the statues would have originally been painted in full polychrome. The nude male at the Vatican Nativity could be viewed as an attempt to bridge the Classical and Old Masters with that of the traditional Neapolitan creche – one of the few surviving traditions of European fully painted sculpture outside of the Middle Ages.

The Neapolitan creche has its roots in the florid Rocco of Southern Italy. Its style is highly realistic, minutely detailed, and sometimes garishly colored. This technique is decidedly effective when depicting the expressive faces and gestures of the countless floating angels, townspeople, and shepherds as placed in these incredibly elaborate scenes. When over-sized and shifted to the depiction of the nude body – it becomes artificial and almost ugly. For that reason, the nude male at the Vatican resembles the vulgar pornographic sculptures (detail pictured above) by American artist Jeff Koons – specifically those created when he was married to Italian porn-actress Ilona “Cicciolina” Staller. And although it’s made of terracotta, the Vatican’s nude male looks like the shiny surface of plastic and evokes the contemporary phenomena of lifelike sex-dolls – as a result it becomes a type of grotesque kitsch. Like much modern pornography, it revolts rather than titillates. This project would require an extremely talented artist, actually a great one, to succeed at doing what even Michelangelo did not attempt: a nude polychrome sculpture in the round placed at the middle of a religious scene.

In 2009, speaking to a group of artists at the Sistine Chapel, Pope Benedict XVI said:

Beauty, whether that of the natural universe or that expressed in art, precisely because it opens up and broadens the horizons of human awareness, pointing us beyond ourselves, bringing us face to face with the abyss of Infinity, can become a path towards the transcendent, towards the ultimate Mystery, towards God. Art, in all its forms, at the point where it encounters the great questions of our existence, the fundamental themes that give life its meaning, can take on a religious quality, thereby turning into a path of profound inner reflection and spirituality.

In the 2017 Vatican Nativity, like the blatantly gay-inspired fresco commissioned by Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, the body becomes merely a body. There is no locus to “transcend” the earthy towards the divine. In fact, it keeps us resoundingly attached to the ground. Michelangelo envisioned the nude male body as the summation of God’s creation – and the most profound artists of every generation transcend even themselves and create something that looks almost as if it were touched by the hand of God. Contemporary art in the Catholic Church, at least since the late-1960s, generally lacks this timeless quality and becomes either violently deconstructive or a sentimental pastiche. The genius of Michelangelo, and other truly great artists, is that they are able to reference the past, honor it, and then move on. Michelangelo certainly understood that the multitude of nude male bodies in the Sistine would immediately provoke in the mind of the contemporary viewer the fleshy paganism of the Classical Greeks; but he transformed what could have been disastrous – because there was an intense Christian mentality in everything he did; he once wrote: “The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.” And, in an age of pornographic supremacy, unequaled during any moment of human history, for the artist, the depiction of the nude form, especially within a religious context, is fraught with difficulty as well as responsibility. It shouldn’t appear overly stuck in the present or as an afterthought – the nude in the Vatican Nativity seems to be both.