Art History – Gay Catholic Priests

— For contemporary artists like Río Edén, Mx. Zeloszelos Marchandt, and Elliot Barnhill, making religious art is a revolutionary act

Río Edén, “Created in Divine image” (2020)

Surrounded by tulips and lilacs, a Black person with top surgery scars and a chest tattoo reading “Resurrected 01-26-2012” raises their face up to the sky. Titled “Created in Divine image” (2020), a phrase repeated in pink text against a background of gray clouds, that person’s hollow face is pierced by rays of pink, white, and blue light — the colors of the trans pride flag. In the Instagram caption accompanying his work, trans artist Río Edén wrote, “Blessed be those who live outside the binary, bless be those who challenge the binary, bless be those who are trans.”

Edén, also known as The Brooklyn Bruja, is part of a growing artistic movement visualizing the divinity of queer bodies and the queerness of religious figures. This movement gained steam in the last three years, right as scholars are rediscovering how Jesus and the saints may have been queer according to personal writings and hagiographies and have been depicted as queer for centuries by LGBTQ+ artists and others grappling with how divinity supersedes gender binaries. I myself have written about genderqueer-ness in Medieval theologians’ interpretations of Christ. At the same time, artists like Edén are depicting saints and religious figures as visually queer through the inclusion of top surgery scars, breast augmentation, body hair, and other attributes, while also celebrating the divinity and queer sainthood of LGBTQ+ folx today.

Edén is a trans autistic person of color, with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), Complex Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD), Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and anxiety. He grew up in a Baptist family that later converted to Pentecostalism — an extremely homophobic religious sect. He was outed by his mom at 15 and entered conversion therapy at 17. He was thus forced back into the closet, only officially coming out at 21. He began to medically transition almost three years ago, first starting hormone replacement therapy in June 2021.

Río Edén, collage featuring Daniel Davis Aston with freshly healed top surgery scars, surrounded by a pink and gold halo, candles, and flowers. This collage was created and shared on social media just two days after Aston’s murder in the Club Q shooting

“Created in Divine image” is made in Edén’s typical style of ethereal collages overlapping faceless figures, natural backgrounds, halos, and shimmering color gradients. Its religious imagery is strikingly similar to another collage featuring Daniel Davis Aston. In that work, Edén memorializes Aston, who was killed in the Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs in November of 2022, as a queer saint martyred in the fight for trans existence.

For those who know Edén’s backstory, it may seem anathema for him to reclaim the religious words and symbols that made him feel shame. But Edén disagrees. He views his art as a form of divine protest. “I was taught that man and woman were created in the image of God,” he explained to Hyperallergic, “but then when they talk about trans and queer people, that message starts to fade off, and I don’t like to have queer people feel the way that I did where they feel excluded from having that divineness too.” For Edén, creating religious art is in of itself a revolutionary act: The White, straight, Christians who surrounded him growing up have controlled what Jesus and God look like for too long.

If they can depict Jesus as a cishet, monogamous White man, Edén argued, then he too can show that Jesus was made in his own image, as a trans person of color.

Mx. Zeloszelos Marchandt, “Ecce Homo” (2023)

Edén’s practice is not just about dismantling heteronormativity in religious art, but also about depicting LGBTQ+ individuals of color as divine, in a similar vein to trans performance and visual artist Mx. Zeloszelos Marchandt. In “Ecce Homo” (2023), for instance, Marchandt depicts himself as a Black, Indigenous, and trans Jesus. Both Edén and Marchandt encounter Him through their own bodies, and thus visualize Jesus — mouthpiece for God on Earth — as a spokesperson for communities facing oppression today.

As Edén argues, no one really knows how Jesus presented or identified. The same is true of many saints, but in Alicia Spencer-Hall and Blake Gutt’s 2021 book Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography, Medieval scholars argue that illuminators visualized Jesus and God as transcending the human concept of gender. Many saints were queer and because of their proximity to God were depicted as visually queer by Medieval artists.

Elliott Barnhill “Heavenly Body 1” (2023)

Queer depictions of saints date back centuries, and queer creators today are reclaiming and reviving this artistic tradition. Elliott Barnhill, a disabled transmasc queer Catholic and seminary graduate, reimagines saints who have canonically been depicted as straight, hyperfeminine, or hypermasculine. His own coming out was predicated upon “becoming aware that the things we now call queerness can be found in the lives of saints,” he told me. His mission to spread that awareness extends beyond visual depictions: He founded the Instagram account Queer Catholic Icons and the podcast Blessed are the Binary Breakers.

With seraphs bearing top surgery scars, Barnhill creates distinctly modern queer Catholic icons in bold defiance of the Church’s queerphobic stance. Similarly, queer femme artist Dani explores butchfemme identity in her portraits of Catholic saints through her Instagram account AndHerSaints. With intimate portraits of St. Therese of Lisieux and St. Joan of Arc, their works center on dignity: acknowledging that queer lives and experiences are sacred and holy.

All of these artists, along with others like text-based artist Girl of Sword and whole zines dedicated to trans+ Christian art such as The Transient Theology Project, are part of a queer artistic Renaissance that affirms the dignity and divinity of queer people centuries ago and today. In doing so, they not only challenge the dichotomy of queerness and religion, but disrupt queerphobic religious teachings that seek to harm queer folx. As these artists and scholars argue, their queerness just brings them that much closer to God.

Dani, “St. Thérèse & St. Joan of Arc” (2023)

Río Edén, “Our transness is omnipresent” ( 2023)

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Painting depicting transfiguration of Jesus, a story in the New Testament when Jesus becomes radiant upon a mountain.

By Anna Swartwood House

The portrayal of Jesus as a white, European man has come under renewed scrutiny during this period of introspection over the legacy of racism in society.

As protesters called for the removal of Confederate statues in the U.S., activist Shaun King went further, suggesting that murals and artwork depicting “white Jesus” should “come down.”

His concerns about the depiction of Christ and how it is used to uphold notions of white supremacy are not isolated. Prominent scholars and the archbishop of Canterbury have called to reconsider Jesus’ portrayal as a white man.

As a European Renaissance art historian, I study the evolving image of Jesus Christ from A.D. 1350 to 1600. Some of the best-known depictions of Christ, from Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper” to Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment” in the Sistine Chapel, were produced during this period.

But the all-time most-reproduced image of Jesus comes from another period. It is Warner Sallman’s light-eyed, light-haired “Head of Christ” from 1940. Sallman, a former commercial artist who created art for advertising campaigns, successfully marketed this picture worldwide.

Through Sallman’s partnerships with two Christian publishing companies, one Protestant and one Catholic, the Head of Christ came to be included on everything from prayer cards to stained glass, faux oil paintings, calendars, hymnals and night lights.

Sallman’s painting culminates a long tradition of white Europeans creating and disseminating pictures of Christ made in their own image.

In search of the holy face

The historical Jesus likely had the brown eyes and skin of other first-century Jews from Galilee, a region in biblical Israel. But no one knows exactly what Jesus looked like. There are no known images of Jesus from his lifetime, and while the Old Testament Kings Saul and David are explicitly called tall and handsome in the Bible, there is little indication of Jesus’ appearance in the Old or New Testaments.

Even these texts are contradictory: The Old Testament prophet Isaiah reads that the coming savior “had no beauty or majesty,” while the Book of Psalms claims he was “fairer than the children of men,” the word “fair” referring to physical beauty.

The earliest images of Jesus Christ emerged in the first through third centuries A.D., amidst concerns about idolatry. They were less about capturing the actual appearance of Christ than about clarifying his role as a ruler or as a savior.

To clearly indicate these roles, early Christian artists often relied on syncretism, meaning they combined visual formats from other cultures.

Probably the most popular syncretic image is Christ as the Good Shepherd, a beardless, youthful figure based on pagan representations of Orpheus, Hermes and Apollo.

In other common depictions, Christ wears the toga or other attributes of the emperor. The theologian Richard Viladesau argues that the mature bearded Christ, with long hair in the “Syrian” style, combines characteristics of the Greek god Zeus and the Old Testament figure Samson, among others.

Christ as self-portraitist

The first portraits of Christ, in the sense of authoritative likenesses, were believed to be self-portraits: the miraculous “image not made by human hands,” or acheiropoietos.

This belief originated in the seventh century A.D., based on a legend that Christ healed King Abgar of Edessa in modern-day Urfa, Turkey, through a miraculous image of his face, now known as the Mandylion.

A similar legend adopted by Western Christianity between the 11th and 14th centuries recounts how, before his death by crucifixion, Christ left an impression of his face on the veil of Saint Veronica, an image known as the volto santo, or “Holy Face.”

These two images, along with other similar relics, have formed the basis of iconic traditions about the “true image” of Christ.

From the perspective of art history, these artifacts reinforced an already standardized image of a bearded Christ with shoulder-length, dark hair.

In the Renaissance, European artists began to combine the icon and the portrait, making Christ in their own likeness. This happened for a variety of reasons, from identifying with the human suffering of Christ to commenting on one’s own creative power.

The 15th-century Sicilian painter Antonello da Messina, for example, painted small pictures of the suffering Christ formatted exactly like his portraits of regular people, with the subject positioned between a fictive parapet and a plain black background and signed “Antonello da Messina painted me.”

The 16th-century German artist Albrecht Dürer blurred the line between the holy face and his own image in a famous self-portrait of 1500. In this, he posed frontally like an icon, with his beard and luxuriant shoulder-length hair recalling Christ’s. The “AD” monogram could stand equally for “Albrecht Dürer” or “Anno Domini” – “in the year of our Lord.”

In whose image?

This phenomenon was not restricted to Europe: There are 16th- and 17th-century pictures of Jesus with, for example, Ethiopian and Indian features.

In Europe, however, the image of a light-skinned European Christ began to influence other parts of the world through European trade and colonization.

The Italian painter Andrea Mantegna’s “Adoration of the Magi” from A.D. 1505 features three distinct magi, who, according to one contemporary tradition, came from Africa, the Middle East and Asia. They present expensive objects of porcelain, agate and brass that would have been prized imports from China and the Persian and Ottoman empires.

But Jesus’ light skin and blues eyes suggest that he is not Middle Eastern but European-born. And the faux-Hebrew script embroidered on Mary’s cuffs and hemline belie a complicated relationship to the Judaism of the Holy Family.

In Mantegna’s Italy, anti-Semitic myths were already prevalent among the majority Christian population, with Jewish people often segregated to their own quarters of major cities.

Artists tried to distance Jesus and his parents from their Jewishness. Even seemingly small attributes like pierced ears – earrings were associated with Jewish women, their removal with a conversion to Christianity – could represent a transition toward the Christianity represented by Jesus.

Much later, anti-Semitic forces in Europe including the Nazis would attempt to divorce Jesus totally from his Judaism in favor of an Aryan stereotype.

White Jesus abroad

As Europeans colonized increasingly farther-flung lands, they brought a European Jesus with them. Jesuit missionaries established painting schools that taught new converts Christian art in a European mode.

A small altarpiece made in the school of Giovanni Niccolò, the Italian Jesuit who founded the “Seminary of Painters” in Kumamoto, Japan, around 1590, combines a traditional Japanese gilt and mother-of-pearl shrine with a painting of a distinctly white, European Madonna and Child.

In colonial Latin America – called “New Spain” by European colonists – images of a white Jesus reinforced a caste system where white, Christian Europeans occupied the top tier, while those with darker skin from perceived intermixing with native populations ranked considerably lower.

Artist Nicolas Correa’s 1695 painting of Saint Rose of Lima, the first Catholic saint born in “New Spain,” shows her metaphorical marriage to a blond, light-skinned Christ.

Legacies of likeness

Scholar Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey argue that in the centuries after European colonization of the Americas, the image of a white Christ associated him with the logic of empire and could be used to justify the oppression of Native and African Americans.

In a multiracial but unequal America, there was a disproportionate representation of a white Jesus in the media. It wasn’t only Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ that was depicted widely; a large proportion of actors who have played Jesus on television and film have been white with blue eyes.

Pictures of Jesus historically have served many purposes, from symbolically presenting his power to depicting his actual likeness. But representation matters, and viewers need to understand the complicated history of the images of Christ they consume.