tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-984317470266050424.post6914407177871577117..comments2024-03-03T17:50:27.025-05:00Comments on Gay Influence: Pope Julius IIITerryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18219632588063153768noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-984317470266050424.post-47311095081671073202017-01-17T10:59:30.985-05:002017-01-17T10:59:30.985-05:00"This would make a great novel. Has anyone wr..."This would make a great novel. Has anyone written one?"<br /><br />Novels in English about Italian Renaissance figures are few and far between and, so far as I know, there aren't many in Italian. (The most famous, of course, as well as the all-time worst, is "The Agony and the Ecstacy," whose command of historical fact is so take-it-or-leave-it that you could easily think Stone was writing about someone who never existed.) But Anonymous is correct that there is plenty of material out there. Most famous, of course, is Benvenuto Cellini, whose non-stop autobiography has been the energy behind many adaptations, including Berlioz's eponymous opera. There are other more interesting but less famous characters for whom a lot of creative elaborations on the scarce evidence aren't necessary, as has befallen both Michelangelos -- Buonarotti and the guy from Caravaggio.<br /><br />As it happens, at the moment I'm embarking on a novel project set in seventeenth-century Rome, which was a much more open society than the Rome in which Julius III lived and reigned. Between the death of Pope Paul III in 1549 and the election of Pope Sixtus V in 1585, the papacy -- and, consequently, the city itself -- suffered a long drought of highly puritanical, heavy-handed pontiffs. Julius III was not among them -- obviously! -- but he was also a virtual stranger in Rome at the time of his election and, apart from his predilection for Italian chicken, he was a good and sensible ruler of the Church. As far as cheesy gay gossip is concerned, the 17th century was far more interesting, beginning with the election of Paul V Borghese in 1605 and continuing for the rest of the century.<br /><br />But I think it's important to distinguish between the cheesy, gasp-getting, and cackle-baiting tidbits of tacky detritus that get onto websites that claim to "expose" things that nobody would know otherwise. I also think that far more interesting are issues of gender stability, sexual identity, and the roll of romantic love in erotic attraction in Early Modern Italy. There's been a lot of serious literature -- in English -- about those topics; but, again with Anonymous, I think more people would know about them if somebody put those issues into the lives of real people through carefully researched historical fiction. That's what my goal is.<br /><br />On the whole, the Renaissance in Italy was far, *far* more tolerant of the private behavior of high authorities than the U.S. public is today. In that regard Italy in the 16th and 17th centuries was more like 21st-century France than the United States, which seems to thrive on a sort of backwards-Protestant/agnostic delight in the shenanigans of Catholic clergy. (Note: I am *not* talking about the abuse of children, nor am I saying what my own moral position is. I'm writing purely as a professional historian of the period.)Hoodlumhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10037973946828604796noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-984317470266050424.post-4973386829253841952017-01-12T05:26:00.634-05:002017-01-12T05:26:00.634-05:00This would make a great novel. Has anyone written ...This would make a great novel. Has anyone written one?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com