Transuming Passion: Ganymede and the Erotics of Humanism
Transuming Passion places Ganymede, the beautiful boy whom Jupiter loved and abducted to Olympus, at the center of a sumptuously illustrated major essay in the interpretation of myth and history, demonstrating through close readings of works of art and literature how the Middle Ages and the Renaissance defined humanism in erotic and homoerotic-terms.
From Plato onward, the author moves through a long and fascinating history of interpretive strategies. Dante's canto of the sodomites in the Inferno is read in conjunction with the poet's self-identification as Ganymede in the Purgatorio, and Michelangelo's great drawing of Ganymede floating to heaven is set in the context of its pendant, Tityus punished on the floor of hell, as well as the tracing on the reverse side of the Tityus, an image of Christ risen from the tomb. Finally, Cellini's Ganymede is placed within a homoerotic and autoerotic sculptural triad, which Cellini describes in his autobiography as inspired by a personal confrontation with his own sexuality.
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