hungry, hungry heart

Edwardian 15ct Gold Harlequin Fringe Necklace with Heart Shaped Centre Gemstone

Christ Depicted with Breasts in “The Lamentation of Christ by the Holy Women,” 16th century Belgian painting

ID: a Renaissance style painting of the dead body of Jesus laid out on a slab with white fabric draping it, surrounded by angels and women in robes of red, green, and white along with Mother Mary in blue. The women and angels all look sad and prayerful. Jesus (along with everyone else in the painting) is depicted as European, with pale skin and light brown hair and beard; his body is naked except for a white fabric draped over his hips. His arms are crossed along his stomach, just below his round breasts / end id.

In 16th-century Lessines, Belgium, a convent of nuns who provided hospice care for women was adorned with the above painting. Why did its artist decide to depict Jesus with breasts?

Jonas Atlas offers context in a Medium article, “Christ with Boobs,” which quotes a description of the painting by the Belgian museum that now houses it:

This intriguing painting, dating from the end of the 16th century, portrays a lying Christ, surrounded by the saintly women of Saint-John. Look very carefully at the representation of Christ in this image: he was painted with female breasts. Such images of Christ as a spiritual father and mother, refer to several religious and mystical writings that lend Christ feminine and motherly features. Christ has placed his hand on his breast and thus offers ‘spiritual nourishment’ to the sisters.

According to Atlas’s article, this depiction of Christ with breasts was “deemed inappropriate and painted over” in the 19th century, but rediscovered and restored in the 1990s.

For Atlas, this painting serves as a reminder that there have been expressions of Christianity throughout time that revered an androgynous Christ, and uplifted the feminine alongside the masculine: “It shows how the view on the essence of religion drastically changed during the periods which are called ‘the Enlightenment’ and ‘Modernity’. It shows how mystical and mythological thinking were gradually denied, ‘painted over’ and forgotten — not because of ‘malestream religion’ but because of changes in our modern — and quite binary — way of thinking.”

In the Epilogue that closes the 2021 text Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography, Mathilde van Dijk suggests that one reason this painting depicted Jesus with breasts is to reassure the nuns and female patients who viewed it that Christ shares in their particular suffering. He is not solely masculine, set apart from them, but feminine too, as this painting that “depicts his multiple genders, his motherliness and his agonies all at once” emphasizes.

Van Dijk summarizes many of the ways that scholars believe Christ was revered as androgynous and/or feminine in Medieval Europe, and how his androgyny served as a model for the Saints who followed him to join him in gender nonconformity (paragraph breaks added for accessibility):

“Saints are special, not the least because they are capable of transgressing seemingly fixed gender categories, as is their model, Christ, who was God and human at the same time.

As God, He would be beyond gender, but as Caroline Walker Bynum and other researchers have argued, the same is true as far as His body is concerned. Flexible, suffering and emitting liquids such as blood, it was similar to a woman’s body, despite Christ’s traditional assignment as a man. In her seminal monograph Holy Feast and Holy Fast, Bynum stressed the motherly capacity of His body to provide food [e.g. in the Eucharist], thus enhancing the connection to women, who can also provide food through their bodies. …

Sophie Sexon’s analyses in the present collection strengthen Bynum’s arguments considerably. Not only do Christ’s wounds, specifically the side wound, appear similar to female genitals, but these and other images were also used to help in women’s ordeals such as childbirth or menstruation. The birthing girdles that were laid across the bodies of women in labour are Sexon’s most striking example: the suffering of Christ and the suffering of women were connected.

They also examine the haptic practices around manuscripts, in which readers would touch and kiss texts and miniatures. Direct contact with the wound would draw the readers closer to Christ, even into him, thus dissolving the boundaries between him and the believer, who would come to share his gender fluidity, as did the saints.  (van Dijk, p. 275)

FURTHER READING:

Quotes in my #trans Jesus tag and my #God beyond gender tag, such as this post featuring a prayer of Saint Anselm that asks “And you, Jesus, are you not also a mother?…” and this post with a early Christian Syrian text imagining God with breasts

The section of this webpage titled “Assigned Male at Incarnation: An Intersex and Transgender Jesus”