HARVEY SACHS
Leaving Italy
S
EVERAL YEARS AGO,
I visited a small exhibition of sixteenth-century
Sienese paintings at Siena's Palazzo Chigi Saracini. There were sev–
eral fine works on display, but II Sodoma's "Allegory of Heavenly
Love" was in a class by itself.
It
struck me as such a magnificent lie that
I bought a small poster of it to tack to the wall near my desk.
In
it, a
young woman is holding a pitcher in her right hand, dousing the flames
that burn atop an altar dedicated to earthly love
("Stil1si terrenas"
says
the motto-"I extinguished the earthly"), while, with a kindling-stick in
her left hand, she lights the fire of heavenly love on a higher altar
("Celestes").
But the only details that lend even a touch of determina–
tion
to
the woman's general aspect are her straight, Roman legionary's
nose and her Minerva-style helmer. Everything else seems calculated
to
a wa ken thoughts of decidedl y non-reI igious love: the honey-colm-ed
hair falling over the lovely, bare shoulder; the soft, exposed little breast;
the beautifully molded left thigh, discernible through a veil-like wrap
and ready to curl itself around someone else's thigh; the small, sensual
mouth; the long, gentle fingers, created for caressing.... Surely all of
these features were meant
to
make viewers long to do what the painting
was officia II
y
intended to persuade them to renounce. The allegorica I
lady may believe that she wants to give up the life of the senses-she
may declare that she
will
give it up-but she can't, won't, mustn't.
The painting's message is flagrantly ambiguous (even the broken altar
in the middle distance might refer to the fate of a previous resolution of
the same sort), and the ambiguity doesn't end with the painting. 11
Sodoma, whose real name was Giovannantonio Bazzi, was homosexual
and possibly also an animal lover, in the more unconventional sense of
the term. "Having always around him boys and beardless youths,
whom he loved boundlessly, he acquired the nickname of the
Sodomite," according
to
Vasari, who knew him. "He delighted, fur–
thermore, in having the strangest sorts of animals in his house." Far
from resenting his nickname, however, Giovannantonio "gloried in it,
making verses and poems on it." Thus, the "Allegory of Heavenly
Love" was either a remarkable piece of wishful thinking or a commis-
