Literary Review: Come Hell & High Water

As Stephen Taylor argues in this enthralling new book, it was men like these who, in the great age of sail, made the British Empire possible. He tells the story of Britain’s rise to maritime supremacy in roughly the century from 1750 to 1850, using first-hand accounts of life on the lower decks, official records – ships’ logs, muster rolls, court martials and so on – and other contemporary sources. [...]

When their personal discontent became intolerable, they deserted in their tens of thousands. Nelson himself reckoned that 42,000 deserted between 1793 and 1802 alone, a figure Taylor believes may be on the low side. Their skills made them highly prized commodities and they were happy to sail under any flag, towards any compass point. The institution that valued that commodity least was the Royal Navy.

Perhaps the most resented British naval practice in this period was impressment, the seizure of experienced seamen (and, after 1798, almost any suitable man) for service on the waves. Those pressed on land often left behind wives and children, who were condemned to destitution. Taylor highlights the case of Mary Jones, a mother of two, one newborn, who was evicted from her home after her merchant seaman husband was taken. She was hanged in October 1771 – suckling her baby on the gallows, it was said – for stealing a length of cloth. Those pressed at sea might have spent two years sailing to India and back, only to be seized within sight of English shores – and two years’ backpay – for another year or more of service.

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Literary Review: Gazing at the Moon

In Seen from Behind, Patricia Lee Rubin pays much attention to Signorelli and is no doubt properly circumspect about outing him: sexual mentalities in 1500 are not to be crudely submitted to 21st-century models. But then, if Signorelli wasn’t in some sense gay, what did his focus on the male backside mean, to him and to his contemporaries? Of course, Renaissance art revived the idealised bodies, male and female, of the classical world. The naked male figure soaked up meanings, conveying ideas of both physical power and divinely inspired grace. At the same time, art granted a licence to look at, and appreciate, things concealed by social convention. The heroic male nude could not, I think, be used today to signify civic pride and glory, as it was when Michelangelo’s David was placed at the entrance to the Palazzo della Signoria in Florence, or when the Foro Italico was laid out in Rome four centuries later. Fascism has polluted it, feminism questions it, irony and pornography undermine it. Recapturing its earlier meanings is a complex task. [...]

Rubin doesn’t mention Cornelis – she focuses mainly on painters and sculptors of the Italian Renaissance and their work, from a stooping labourer in a Giotto fresco turning his backside towards Christ to Michelangelo’s insistence on seeing the male nude, in two or in three dimensions, from every conceivable angle. One of her themes is that though the male bottom may be sexy, its baring had long been a sign of derision (as in mooning), with certain vernacular meanings – in one Signorelli mural, the Devil, whom the artist shows tempting a pilgrim, has his leggings down to show his tight white underpants, ‘embodying the expression andare a fare in culo – go to Hell’. Rubin notes too that in the 15th century military costumes became far more tightly fitting, inviting eroticised display; St Bernardino of Siena explicitly attacked such dress as ‘invitations to sodomy’. [...]

Rubin examines the eroticisation of Donatello’s David, created, she insists, with no intention of arousing illicit desire, but ‘queered’ by Horst Janson in the 1950s – the formidable John Pope-Hennessy thought Janson’s teasing-out of homoerotic meanings had left a ‘trail of slime on a great work of art’. But homoerotic exploration clearly had its part in the sophisticated court culture of 15th-century Florence. The latent queerness of Donatello’s work was surpassed in the final years of the century by the unignorable sensuality of Michelangelo’s marble Bacchus, one of the first monumental nudes of the Renaissance, showing a youth on the brink of manhood, upright but teetering with drink, and designed to be seen in the round, the back view (with a hidden satyr’s head aligned with Bacchus’s left buttock) as important as the front.

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