Thirty years ago, the art scholar Leo Steinberg published “The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion,” a book that does much to explain the connection between Pope Francis’s passionate devotion to the poor and afflicted and his seeming openness to gay Catholics. In “The Sexuality of Christ,” Steinberg argues that as a result of the rise of the Franciscan order, around 1260, an emphasis on Christ’s nakedness, and, thus, on his humanity, joined compassion to an acceptance of the role of sexuality in human life.

A credo of the Franciscan order was nudus nudum Christum sequi (“follow naked the naked Christ”). It was a radical call to cast aside worldly wealth and belongings and acknowledge the fragile, fallen nature of all men and women. But in casting aside Christ’s garments, the Franciscans made Christ’s nude body a focal point. As a result, according to Steinberg, from about the middle of the thirteenth century until the sixteenth century artists lavished particular care on Christ’s penis, the part of Christ’s body that made him most mortal, and which proved his union with humankind. “One must recognize,” wrote Steinberg, “an ostentatio genitalium comparable to the canonic ostentatio vulnerum, the showing forth of the wounds.”

“The Sexuality of Christ” has changed the way we look at certain works of art. The “modern oblivion” of Steinberg’s subtitle was just that: centuries during which the central fact of Christ’s phallus in hundreds of Renaissance paintings was overlooked, denied, and, sometimes, bowdlerized. Steinberg adduces several examples of Christ’s genitalia being painted over or touched up to make them look like a mere blur. In one case, probably in the mid- to late nineteenth century, the Alinari brothers, famous for their photographic reproductions of paintings, blackened out the Christ child’s penis in their photograph of a fifteenth-century “Madonna and Child” by Giovanni Bellini. Such censorship, Steinberg believes, was meant as distraction from an uncomfortable theological premise: “A disturbing connection of godhead with sexuality.”

To bring to the surface this suppressed artistic trend, Steinberg reproduced dozens of paintings and drawings in which Christ’s genitalia are indisputably a central thematic concern. There are paintings of the Christ child touching his penis, and of the Virgin handling the infant Christ’s penis. In some pictures, the Christ child exhibits his genitals in a style similar to Venus displaying her sex. “Again and again,” Steinberg writes, “we see the young God-man parading his nakedness, or even flaunting his sex in ways normally reserved for female enticements.”

Many representations of the Three Magi show one of the foreign kings closely inspecting the infant Christ’s genitalia. Depictions of Christ on the cross and of the dead Christ lying in the Virgin’s arms clearly portray Christ with an erection. In some images, which Steinberg calls “psychologically troubling,” the divine Father touches his Son’s penis, “a conciliation,” Steinberg writes, “which stands for the atonement, the being-at-one, of man and God. For this atonement, on which hinges the Christian hope of salvation, Northern Renaissance art found the painfully intimate metaphor of the Father’s hand on the groin of the Son, breaching a universal taboo as the fittest symbol of reconcilement.”

Steinberg argued his thesis with tact, complexity and respect, likely conscious that he was far from the religious tradition he was writing about. He was a Jew, born in Moscow, in 1920—he died in 2011—the son of a man who had been the Soviet Commissar of Justice under Lenin. Disenchanted with the Bolsheviks, Steinberg’s father fled Russia with his family, settling in Berlin and then London. Leo came to the United States in his twenties, where he established himself as an art critic and then as a scholar of Renaissance art, eventually teaching at Hunter College and, later, at the University of Pennsylvania. As an academic, he wrote about art with the speculative and allusive sweep of the reigning art critics of the time, Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg. (The three of them, quipped Tom Wolfe, comprised a potent kingdom of taste called “Cultureburg.”)

Yet Steinberg also had the scholarly heft of another contemporary, Meyer Schapiro, who held court at Columbia. Like Schapiro, Steinberg imbued his reflections on older art with a modernist sensibility. Steinberg was one of those mid-twentieth-century Jewish intellectuals who were drawn to Catholicism. (Schapiro, for example, became an expert in Romanesque art, and Bernard Malamud filled his work with images of Catholic mercy and redemption.) Working as a translator of Yiddish when he first arrived in New York, Steinberg rendered into English the final volume of the Yiddish writer Sholem Asch’s Christian trilogy. In the novel, called “Mary,” Asch explores the relationship between the Virgin and her holy child. For a certain type of Jewish thinker, Catholicism’s beautiful sublimations and dark repressions offered infinite possibilities for dissection and analysis.

* * *

“The Sexuality of Christ” takes up, to put it mildly, an ultra-sensitive subject. For that reason, Steinberg stresses that Renaissance artists’ emphasis on Christ’s penis is an esthetic choice guided by deep religious belief, though he occasionally hints that Renaissance artists could at the same time have been having sly fun with the subject. And it is hard to believe that in, say, quattrocento Florence, an epoch so liberated in its sexual mores—Fra Filippo Lippi, for example, lived openly with a defrocked nun, whom he used as a model for his Madonnas—artists could resist being simultaneously worldly and pious.

For Steinberg, however, theological motives were preëminent. He held that artists used the evidence of Christ’s genitals to prove that Christ submitted to becoming human before returning to the godhead. The revelation of his penis demonstrates, as Steinberg puts it, Christ’s “humanation,” that moment of incarnation which proved Christ’s love for humankind. And the many representations of the Christ child’s circumcision are important as foretellings of his crucifixion—the blood of Christ’s penis is fulfilled in the blood from Christ’s wounds.

Entering with obvious relish the realm of Christian sexual hermeneutics, Steinberg relies on St. Augustine, who emphasized his surrender to and then escape from the “fleshpots of Carthage,” to argue that Christ’s erection was a singular way to demonstrate Christ’s chastity. Without the capacity to yield to lust, Christ’s triumph over carnal desire would have no human meaning. Unlike men after the fall of Adam, who fell victim to lust, Christ willed his erection; it was not an involuntary physiological event. By both willing and resisting it, he declared his victory over the stain of sin bequeathed to humanity by Adam and Eve, and over the death that their carnal weakness brought into the world. That, after all, is the significance of the resurrection.

To drive this point home, Steinberg had to prove that during the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance the word “resurrection” could be used as a double entendre, connoting both the divine event and the humble mortal fact of an erection. Steinberg quotes from one of Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century tales in the Decameron, in which a pious young girl inflames the desire of a monk named Rustico, causing in the latter a “resurrection of the flesh.” Steinberg notes that it was not until modern times that the original phrase was accurately translated from Italian, a censoring that he sees as analogous to the later bowdlerization of Christ’s penis in Renaissance paintings. (You can find a faithful rendition of Boccaccio’s phrase in the superb translation of the Decameron from Norton; it occurs in the tenth story of the third day.) Here, as throughout his argument, Steinberg hints at the painters’ playfulness about the sacred subject, but he leaves it at that.

* * *

Steinberg’s thesis was met with excitement in many scholarly quarters. Not surprisingly, there was also strong academic resistance to his interpretation, though his book seems not to have caused the slightest ripple in pastoral circles.

The vulnerable component of Steinberg’s perspective was that it was almost entirely speculative. Steinberg does quote from some sermons of the time in support of his argument concerning the centrality of the circumcision, but he builds his case mostly on logic and on physical evidence. Christ’s penis is a prominent element of countless paintings in the Renaissance. That is undeniable, and a theological explanation is the only one that made sense to him.

The skeptical response to Steinberg’s thesis was that the attention paid to Christ’s penis was merely the consequence of Renaissance naturalism. Steinberg had a convincing set of rejoinders: No children in actual life have been known to receive powerful kings shortly after their birth while smiling benignly and proudly displaying their genitals. It is not a medical fact that dying men experience an erection in the moment of their decease. And even if the emphasis on Christ’s penis in Renaissance painting were the product of fidelity to real life, Christ was no ordinary man.

The most cogent criticism of Steinberg’s book came from Caroline Bynum, a feminist scholar. Bynum pointed out that in medieval texts Christ was often portrayed in feminine terms, and she gave as evidence paintings in which a feminized Christ appears. Steinberg conceded that Christ was sometimes portrayed as both male and female—“In one category of metaphors, the wound [in his side] is said to lactate and give birth”—but responded that this did not diminish the universal resonance of phallic imagery, nor did it lessen the impact of the other paintings he offered as evidence. Steinberg’s and Bynum’s arguments do not appear to be mutually exclusive. An androgynous Christ with a highly symbolic phallus does not seem out of the question.

Bynum also protested that Steinberg imposed a modern view of sexuality on the Renaissance, to which Steinberg pointed out that the female mystics whose texts she cites were exceptional people, and that the paintings themselves bear witness to an experience of human sexuality that is ordinary and timeless.

Steinberg also argued, as he had in response to other critics, that the artists he was using as examples were not illustrating preëxisting texts. They were confronted by the entirely new artistic problem, made possible by the Franciscan emphasis on Christ’s nakedness, of how to portray Christ’s naked body. In response, they created their own theology, embedded in their representations of Christ. “Renaissance art,” wrote Steinberg, “harnessed the theological impulse and developed the requisite stylistic means to attest the utter carnality of God’s humanation in Christ.” Byzantine art had to prove the divinity of Christ in the face of schisms and iconoclasms; Byzantine artists had no special use for Christ’s naked body. But the more confidently situated Catholic artists of the Renaissance celebrated Christ’s carnal humanity.

* * *

“The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion” was first published in 1983; an expanded version, from 1996, includes Steinberg’s response to his critics, which at times forsakes the austerity and poise of his earlier arguments for a tone that veers into a smug frolicsomeness bordering on lack of taste. (He writes, of the question of Christ’s voluntary erection, that St. Augustine’s “conviction had hardened.”) It is the vaguely mocking tone of someone who believes that he sees, with absolute clarity, what no one else will admit to seeing. Still, Steinberg’s erudition is breathtaking, and his arguments remain convincing.

Particularly striking now is the original book’s postscript, written by a Jesuit scholar named John W. O’Malley. In the course of defending Steinberg’s thesis, O’Malley writes that the “ ‘Renaissance theology’ ” of Christ’s penis that was put forward by the artists Steinberg discusses “was severely damaged, perhaps in large part destroyed, by the bitter controversies sparked by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.”

The Jesuit O’Malley is talking about a time when Catholicism was under such siege that the freedom of embodying Christ’s love for humanity in his naked body, a freedom fuelled by Franciscan piety, vanished, giving way to polemics and proselytizing. As James Carroll vividly demonstrates in his Profile of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, in this week’s magazine, it is this very lapse into militancy that the present Jesuit Pope, inspired by Franciscan piety, is determined to correct. Pope Francis could well agree with Steinberg, who lamented that the human Christ disappeared “as modern Christianity distanced itself from its mythic roots; as the person of Jesus was refined into all doctrine and message, the kerygma of a Christianity without Christ.” That, Steinberg says, was when “the exposure of Christ’s genitalia became merely impudent.” One might add that in our own epoch the Catholic Church’s denial of Christ’s sexuality runs parallel to its denial of human sexuality, taboos that resurface in once scandal after another.

In modern times, the Catholic Church has been under siege to an unprecedented degree, as much by internal rifts and abuses as by unbelief and competing Protestant sects. In response, its doctrine and its message have become all the more abstract and inflexible; all the more a Christianity without Christ. The current Pope, by heeding the call to “follow naked the naked Christ,” seems determined to make inseparable the alliance between the naked body that lives, works, suffers, and dies, and the naked body that was created with the capacity to experience physical love. If this is so, then Pope Francis has an ally in Leo Steinberg, the displaced Russian Jew whose modernist, heretical instincts led him to the grave, beautiful, profound, and, at times, playful depiction of Christ’s sexuality.

Lee Siegel is the author of, among other books, two collections of criticism, “Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the Imagination” and “Not Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television.” He is a frequent contributor to Page-Turner.

Above: “Madonna and Child with Two Cherubs,” by Pietro Perugino (1495).