"This Is My Body": Breasts, Wounds, and Other Body Parts in Medieval and Renaissance Images of Christ

In honor of Barbara Butch

“I’m a fat, Jewish, queer lesbian, and I’m really proud of all my identities, because they make me what I am now as a human.” For years this has been the message of the French DJ and ICON Award recipient Barbara Butch, who recently shone in a tableau staged on a bridge over the Seine River at the opening ceremony of the Olympics in Paris. Clad in a low-cut, deep blue gown with sparkly straps and balancing a metal crown with radiating stars on her head, she formed the center of a group of dancers, many in extravagant drag, who posed and vamped alongside her behind a long table. Her hands moved deftly over a mixing board, adjusting the sounds of music that pulsed out toward the audience; at one point she paused her technical machinations to lift her hands in front of her chest, arranging her fingers in the shape of a heart.

(Photo: Instagram/barbarabutch)

As is well known by now, the tableau she was centering looked a heck of a lot like images of the Last Supper that are a staple of Christian (especially Catholic) art.

In particular, it summoned to mind the most famous example of this iconography: the fresco painted by Leonardo da Vinci in the 1490s for the communal dining room of the monastery of St. Maria della Grazie in Milan.

Few other images in the Western canon are more familiar to a worldwide audience than this Last Supper, regardless of one’s religious affiliation. Already in the sixteenth century it was being reproduced and disseminated through printed engravings; in the seventeenth its composition was being gently reworked, and its subject matter gently lampooned, in paintings such as Jan van Bijlert’s The Feast of the Gods (1630/40); and in the twentieth and twenty-first it has been restaged and reconfigured, in varying degrees of (ir)reverence, way too many times to rehearse here.

Along with the few examples I included in my last post, you’ll find many more on artgirl67’s pinterest page. And here come twelve examples from movies, pictured with no hand-wringing or apology, in this article from Empire Magazine in 2012. I’m sure the list has grown since then. Yet somehow the fact that, in 2024, Ms. Butch occupied the central place at the table — where, in most Last Supper images, Christ would sit — she has been singled out for such vitriol, threats, and abuse online that she has had to take legal action to protect herself.

I can’t see anything in her self-display (by which I also mean the display of her by the show’s artistic design team) that should cause such offense among self-described Christians — especially not when those pious souls seem unbothered when killers, drunkards, and other derelicts are placed in that same role in countless other Last Supper shout-outs. Since neither Ms. Butch’s Jewish heritage nor her lesbian identity was showcased in any way in her appearance at the table, I have to assume that people were put off first and foremost by her female body, particularly evident in her ample breasts — and then by the openly sexy, joyfully gender-fluid or gender-bending bodies of her companions.

In another post I’m going to show you some examples of Christian art’s long history of, and comfort with, playing with gender. But in this one I want to focus in specifically on the body of Christ, in particular the awareness that artists in Leonardo’s time (ca. 1500) and in the centuries before then (the high-to-late Middle Ages, 13th-15th centuries) had that his body, while human, was emphatically not like ordinary bodies: that, as a human form imbued with divinity, it was open, capacious, flowing with redemptive grace in ways that could only be envisioned as female.

Now. As I noted in my last post, Leonardo’s Last Supper is not without queerness.

(A short aside: when I and other art historians refer to this artist as Leonardo, it’s not because we’re trying to be cute or pretending that we’re best pals with him. It’s because that’s his name. His full name, recorded in documents, was actually Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci — Leonardo, son of Mr. Piero from Vinci. His parents weren’t married and he was mostly raised by his mother; it’s not clear where exactly he was born, but his father came from a town called Vinci. When these guys moved to bigger cities they were, like many others, just identified by where they came from.)

Leonardo himself never married and there is evidence that he had male lovers, as did his rival Michelangelo. It’s worth noting that the four most iconic (by which I mean instantly recognizable to a mass public) images in the Western artistic canon — Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and Last Supper, and Michelangelo’s David sculpture and Creation of Adam fresco on the Sistine Chapel ceiling — come from these two queer artists. I don’t think either one of these guys (or their patrons) would have been scandalized by the staging of the tableau in Paris.

But my purpose is not to speculate on the proclivities of those Renaissance painters, but to shed some light on the power and significance of that female body at the center of the picture. It does no one a service to claim that Christians are getting it wrong when they see Leonardo’s Last Supper in this tableau; the composition is clearly there, even if the iconography also resonates with pagan feasting imagery. (As I noted before, the Dutch painting in Dijon that some are touting as the “real” source image was itself almost certainly inspired by Leonardo’s picture, so that whole argument is just hot air.) What might be more productive is to think about why (some, certainly not all) Christians would object that a woman’s body — in this case, a body offering itself in the form of festive music and in a hand gesture of a heart — should not carry the message of Christ’s loving inclusiveness that is at the core of (most modern Christians’ understanding of) Last Supper imagery.

(Another quick excursus: I qualify that last statement because in much medieval and Renaissance Last Supper imagery, the scene did not have the same affective value it enjoys today. Typically the main subject was the identification of Judas as a traitor — that’s what all the apostles in Leonardo’s version are all agitated about — and in cases where the Institution of the Eucharist was shown, there was usually a very clear anti-Jewish message involved — hardly a vision of warm inclusivity. This is a topic for yet another post.)

Now there is no question that, according to medieval Christian (Catholic) theology, Jesus of Nazareth, known to Christians as the Christ (a Greek term meaning “anointed one,” which early converts applied to him to signal their belief that he was the promised Messiah), was 100%, unequivocally human, and specifically, a biological man. In one of the many difficult paradoxes of Christianity, he was also 100%, unequivocally the ineffable, eternal, omnipotent, omniscient God. How to represent him as both? In Leonardo’s time, the age we (following their lead) call the Renaissance, a renewed interest in the aesthetics of Classical antiquity — all those buff, gorgeous bodies of the ancient Greek and Roman gods and goddesses — and the push toward philosophical Humanism led to artists focusing in on the beautiful, very human male body as the best way to show Christ’s combination of divinity and humanness. As the art historian Leo Steinberg showed in The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (1981; new ed. 1996), painters in Leonardo’s (and, later, Jan van Bijlert’s day) had no qualms picturing Jesus with a post-mortem erection under his loincloth, as in Willem Key’s Pieta from around 1530 (now in Munich, Alte Pinakothek):

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

But apart from Michelangelo, who rendered Christ naked both in a sculpted crucifix and in the Last Judgment scene on the western wall of the Sistine Chapel — which caused a scandal even in its own time and had to be painted over — artists tended not to lay bare his full, adult “humanity.” They did go all-out in their depictions of him as a baby and child, though. Here’s one among maaaannnnnyyyyyy examples where Baby Jesus’s package is not just visible but being shown to us by his mother, who gently holds his squirmy legs apart. (Google the painter, Giovanni Cariani, and you’ll find lots more configurations. This one shows the Madonna and Child with Saint Sebastian from 1519; it’s in Paris at The Louvre.)

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

There are lots of Baby Jesus sculptures, carved in the round, that leave nothing to the imagination. This zesty little guy — a German polychromed sculpture from around 1500 — is at the Met-Cloisters in New York.

One reason for showing the Baby so proudly au naturel — apart from the fact that medieval people were much more accustomed to nudity than we are now — was to emphasize that he had indeed been circumcised, in keeping with Jewish custom. More broadly, it was to assert that, even though he was God’s son, he was human in all his parts, as theologians insisted he must be — real flesh and blood from birth until painful death.

A baby has to eat, though, and this is where breasts come in. Baby Jesus was often shown both naked and nursing (or taking a break after nursing), as in this gorgeous picture by the Netherlandish painter known as the Master of Flemalle (possibly Robert Campin), from around 1425/30, now in the National Gallery, London:

Showing Mary’s bare breast and nipple right next to Jesus’s face was not scandalous at all; it showed them both to be human. (Note, too, that the painter did not omit to include a glimpse of the infant’s genitals in that little gap just over the Virgin’s left thumb.) A lot of times, to be sure, Mary’s body wasn’t rendered in an explicit or anatomically convincing way, as in this painting by a follower of Rogier van der Weyden, again at the Metropolitan Museum in New York:

And never were both shown at once. Mary’s assets, though, could be pretty impressive — as in this stunning picture by the French artist Jean Fouquet, from around 1452, now in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp:

I mean, wow. This painting of the regal Mary, the naked (and quite sated) Baby, and a cluster of red and blue cherubs was commissioned from Fouquet by a high-ranking administrator to the French kings named Étienne Chevalier; he was pictured, along with his holy patron St. Stephen, in another panel that was once joined to this, so that he’d be praying toward this heavenly company for eternity (or at least until the diptych was separated). (You can read more about this here.) It’s likely that Fouquet based his striking depiction of the Virgin on the king’s mistress, a famed beauty named Agnes Sorel, who had died two years prior. So the work may be a tribute to a real person even as it envisions Mary and Jesus in a heavenly scene — pointing us to a kind of serious playfulness that is a hallmark of medieval and Renaissance Christian art, its ability to fuse the sacred and profane, bodily and spiritual, into a single fecund image.

But in Christian theology, it wasn’t only Mary’s body that was nurturing; Christ, as human and God, had not only to take in food but also to provide nourishment to all humanity. That is what the Eucharist provided in the liturgy, as images of the Last Supper (and, much more explicitly, the Mass of St. Gregory, as we’ll see in another post) suggested. But there were other ways to show Christ nurturing people with his body, ways detached from the highly controlled and mediated sacramental rites. The female body — with, yes, its breasts — provided a matrix for how Christ was imagined to tend to his faithful.

Here’s a pretty clear depiction of how this worked conceptually — a large painted altarpiece made by Lorenzo Monaco for the altar of the Trinity in Florence Cathedral (where presumably Leonardo would have seen it), and completed by 1402. It’s now at the Met in New York.

In the lower right-hand corner, Mary, sheltering a community of hopeful devotees, pulls her breast from her robe and says to Christ: “Dearest son, because of the milk that I gave you, have mercy on them.” Moved by this memory of his mother’s love, Christ in turn points to the wound in his side — an unhealed remnant of the painful death he suffered — and asks God the Father to “let those be saved for whom you wished me to suffer the Passion.” (We call this iconography the “Double-Intercession” because both figures are acting on behalf of the community, but we can also think of it as the original double-guilt-trip.) What’s crucial to note, as the historian Caroline Bynum pointed out, is that Mary’s breast and Christ’s side wound are being equated: both provide means of salvation. (Notice, too, that it is Mary who works most directly on behalf of humanity. It is at her side that they gather, and it’s her hand that acknowledges them.)

In any case: in medieval Europe, it wasn’t unusual for Christ to be imagined in female terms; theological writers as diverse in perspective as Anselm of Canterbury, Bernard of Clairvaux, Francis of Assisi, and Julian of Norwich, refer explicitly to Jesus as a mother — and, in turn, Bernard and Francis would be described as mothers by their own male followers. There was nothing scandalous about this at all, as Bynum has shown. In visual images, the wound functioned as a sort of breast — the source of nourishment through the blood it shed. Holy men and women sometimes imagined themselves suckling it, as we see depicted in this image of St. Catherine of Siena in a 15th-century German manuscript now in Paris:

(Paris, Bibl. Nat., MS. All. 34, fol. 43v (after Jeffrey F. Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany, New York: Zone, 1998, p. 461)

More often, the wound spewed its food from a distance. In this small devotional painting, Jesus pours a mixture of blood and Eucharistic hosts from his wound into a fountain where souls in purgatory soak them up as part of their process of cleansing and redemption.

(15th century panel painting, now in Cologne, Columba Museum. Photo: Mitchell Merback)

See what I mean about the Paris Last Supper tableau looking pretty tame? Medieval art is wild. I’ll save the discussion of Eucharistic imagery, and particularly the spurting blood, for another post. Let’s stick with the side wound, which had the double-advantage of spewing life-giving blood out and also inviting people in. In the tiny devotional book known as the Rothschild Canticles (made in Flanders around 1300, now at Yale’s Beinecke Library, and thoroughly studied by Jeffrey Hamburger), a naked, gleaming white Jesus — still partially adhering to both the cross of the Crucifixion and the column of the Flagellation — points his finger meaningfully to a female figure on the opposite page, as if inviting her to plunge her spear into his side.

Much evidence suggests that this manuscript was made for a women’s monastic community, but it’s important to note that the Latin word for soul, anima, was gendered female — so it wasn’t uncommon at all for male writers and artists to envision the generic human soul (which this figure presumably represents) as female.

There were plenty of instances of personifications of broad human characteristics such as the Virtues, as women. In another startling image from a thirteenth-century German manuscript, we see the cardinal virtues of Charity, Humility, and others doing the work of salvation by nailing Christ to the Cross and piercing his side.

That’s Ecclesia, Lady Church, in the long blue robe, catching the blood and water Christ spurts from his side into her chalice. In an image from another thirteenth-century manuscript — a Moralized Bible made in Paris during the early reign of King Louis IX (Vienna ÖNB Codex Vindobonensis 2554; I photographed this page from the facsimile) — we see Ecclesia in the process of being born. God Father acts as a midwife, pulling his Church from, yes, the wound in the dying Christ’s side:

So it seems that the opening in Christ’s side was a bleeding wound inflicted at the crucifixion — and also a nourishing breast that gives sustenance to the faithful — and also a womb that engenders and births the Christian establishment. As an access point to Christ’s heart, it could invite people to move inside. In this image made by a late medieval nun in the German convent of Eichstätt, the sister has climbed the ladder of the virtues into the wounded heart, which has replaced Christ’s torso and become a kind of house where she can hang out with Baby Jesus.

(Photo after Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

In medieval art, Christ’s capacious side wound could even become detached from the body to form a subject of contemplation in its own right:

Now you don’t have to be trained in Freudian psychology to see what is perfectly evident: the wound, surrounded by miniature Instruments of the Passion (the items held in the Sainte-Chapelle that the Revolutionists targeted!), is a wound — but it’s also a vulva. It’s just there. This kind of image was hardly a fringe, weird, outrageous thing, the way it looks today; it was totally mainstream. The page we see is in an exquisite, very high-end Book of Hours, a kind of prayerbook favored by lay men and women; this one, now at the Met-Cloisters in New York, was custom-made in the 1340s for a French noblewoman named Bonne of Luxembourg, the Duchess of Normandy. On another page we see Bonne and her husband kneeling before the crucifix, with Christ again pointing their attention (and ours) to that opening:

Bonne’s husband, Jean, would become king after her death in 1349; their son would be King Charles V, and he kept this manuscript in the royal library he established in Paris. (It occurs to me that it’s hard to distinguish the two kneeling people in this image. That’s Jean, the husband, in front, with the bobbed haircut and bangs (fringe, for readers in the UK. :-) Bonne wears her hair in tight braids that are coiled next to her face. Their clothing is nearly identical, and in both cases it masks the contours of their bodies. This is really interesting: Christ fuses male and female into his single body, while “real” male and female bodies are separate but barely differentiated.)

There are two big points I’m getting at here that are relevant to the Olympics discussion. First, there’s the idea that the same image or motif can be not just layered but packed with meanings, meanings that might be contradictory or clashing. In academic terms that I think are useful here we can describe them as labile — subject to shift and mutate in ways we might not always be able to control or make sense of easily — and multivalent — containing various shades of meaning stacked together. Making a memorable image that was labile and multivalent — a joyfully queer dance party that was also a Last Supper and also a pagan feast of the Greek and Roman deities — is precisely what I think what the Paris Olympics folks were doing; to reduce it to any one component would make it kind of boring. There’s no “mockery” of Christian imagery, unless you believe that the Christian message is exclusionary, and that only straight white cis men have a place at the table. (Though, again, if that’s the case you’d really have to loosen your grasp on Leonardo’s Last Supper).

Medieval and Renaissance artists, and their patrons and audiences, were not so restrictive — that’s my second point. Mary’s body may have been extraordinary in its capacity to give birth though being virginal, but it was absolutely human in its ability to hug, hold, and feed. The Baby Jesus who suckled her breasts grew into the adult who suffered on the cross and poured blood from his side to nourish humanity — and, at that table of the Last Supper, offered his body, in the form of bread, for his disciples to share. Bodies, as fleshly instruments and as gendered beings, are crucial to all of this. The female body absolutely has a place at that table.

So, too, it had a rightful place at that table on the Seine, whether you chose to interpret that body as slipping into the role of Apollo or Christ, or recognize in it the beautiful “fat, Jewish, queer lesbian” human that Ms. Butch is. I hope the haters (it’s hard to consider them Christians) will come to their senses and leave her in peace.