Diane Wolfthal’s In and Out of the Marital Bed: Seeing Sex in Renaissance Europe is yet another beautiful book from Yale University Press. It features a delicious picture on the dust jacket cover of a man and a woman fully covered (well, almost—there have to be openings in their clothing somewhere), making love in a beautiful bed, as another couple peeks through a curtain in order to watch. Meanwhile, a cute little dog at the side of the bed turns its head to observe the voyeurs. In other words, we watch the dog watching the couple watching the lovers. Actually, we watch all the watching. Very amusing.

The title, with its nice alliteration (“seeing sex”) is also enticing, though in fact readers do not really see a whole lot of sex in this book. Rather, most of the copious and alluring illustrations here allude to sex, but do not explicitly show the act of sex. Moreover, the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century art of the “Renaissance” discussed here is predominately French, Flemish, and German. The Italians do not figure prominently. The word “Renaissance” is more apt as a description of the Italians. But, no matter.

Although sex can be associated with play and pleasure, Wolfthal focuses her attention instead on sexuality and politics. The tone of her writing shades toward gravitas. There is little here if anything of the mirth associated with the Renaissance marriage bed in both song and art. Wolfthal is nonetheless deeply knowledgeable about her subject and has done an impressive amount of research. The bibliography, for example, is extensive and invaluable.

The organization of the book is most inviting. There are five principal chapters, which address the following subjects: the bed, the dressing area of the home, the woman in the window, the bath, and the street—plus an introduction and a conclusion. Throughout these chapters there are engaging shorter sections identified by brief signposts: the chaste marital bed, anxiety in the marital bed, the bed of the Arnolfini portrait, etc.

Addressing a wide range of subjects, including dress and even furniture, In and Out of the Marital Bed intersects a vast literature on domesticity in the Renaissance, and is closely related to recent work on erotica and art pertaining to marriage. In its approach, the book is a sustained essay in visual culture or the social history of art, with a strong slant toward gender studies.

There is a delightful and highly informative section on combs. It includes a portrait of Elizabeth Vernon, countess of South Hampton, in which the subject is combing her hair—a sensuous image, which, as Wolfthal justly observes, is indeed erotic. She also presents a beautiful French sixteenth-century ivory, which illustrates David and Bathsheba. She shows us the back of a sixteenth-century Italian mirror, which illustrates a man offering a comb to a woman, and, perhaps best of all, she illustrates a Flemish badge in the shape of a comb in the middle of which we see a copulating couple. Although Wolfthal’s interests lie mostly in the direction of politics, mores, law, theology, and morality, readers might pause here to enjoy the wit of this object, for the impressive phallus that conjoins the lovers rhymes with the teeth of the comb.

It is not easy to do justice to this highly enjoyable, stimulating, and learned book. There is much to appreciate in terms of what has gone into an exceptional synthesis, as Wolfthal teases significance out of a wide variety of artistic media, including engravings, etchings, painting, sculpture, and stained glass, doing so in an admirably coherent way. Any number of observations throw light on little-known works of art or place such works in their context in a helpful way. Especially engaging is her informative discussion of art illustrating baths, for example, Girolamo Romanino’s amusing images of bathers in a castle in Trento and Albrecht Altdorfer’s no less entertaining murals for a bishop’s palace in Regensburg. I will leave it for future readers to turn to Wolfthal’s instructive commentary on the fascinating social context of the latter work, though I should like to pause to emphasize the droll sexiness of these images (especially figs. 97 and 98). In one scene, still in Regensburg, a nude male figure reaches down toward the nether regions of a nude woman who is holding what seems to be her dress or scant drapery. The woman seemingly resists, but not without a coy smile playing across her lips.

Works of art often elude the best efforts to understand their intentions. Various works of art interpreted in Wolfthal’s searching book indeed resist interpretation. Take, for instance, the exceedingly beautiful and allusive, if not elusive, painting by Petrus Christus, conventionally described as A Couple in a Goldsmith’s Shop (1449), which is in the Lehman collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Especially mysterious is the much-discussed reflection in a mirror of two men seemingly standing in the street. In a veritable iconographical treatise, which is richly documented, Wolfthal reviews various previous interpretations of these mysterious figures. Since one of the gentlemen has a falcon resisting on his arm, and since the falcon is often associated with the hunt, which is traditionally associated with sexual pursuits, Wolfthal concludes that the male couple has an erotic bond that is meant to be seen in contrast to the union of the bridal couple prominent in the picture. Yet she does not stop here with this hypothesis. She next links the two men reflected in the mirror to the nudes in the background of Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo (ca. 1504). She refers to the discussion of these figures in the scholarship of Charles de Tolnay (Michelangelo: Sculptor, Painter, Architect, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975) and William E. Wallace (Michelangelo: The Complete Sculpture, Painting, Architecture, Westport, CT: Hugh Lauter Levin Associates, Inc., 1998). The latter writes in fact of the background figures lounging in an erotic embrace, an image of carnal love that stands in contrast to the spiritual love of Mary and Joseph. Wolfthal translates what Wallace writes by saying that Michelangelo represents the sin of sodomy. I rather doubt that Michelangelo would have accepted this characterization of his figures, given their admittedly sensual overtones. Nor do I think that Wallace would quite accept her translation of his words into her explicit imputation of sin. In any event, on the basis of her free translation of Wallace’s words and an apparent analogy between the paintings of Christus and Michelangelo, Wolfthal concludes that the two men in the mirror of Christus’s image represent a previously unrecognized example of same-sex desire, which stands in contrast to the heterosexual love of the picture’s bridal couple.

Wolfthal’s conclusion to her discussion of the painting by Christus is perhaps too overstated, perhaps even reductive, but it is nevertheless stimulating, indeed provocative. Although I am not sure that Wolfthal’s interpretation is entirely persuasive, I nevertheless admire her liveliness of mind and engagement with the materials of her study. She compels us to think hard about the puzzles of art, and she does a very good job of placing art in context. I have no doubt that her book will encourage further discussion and debate. It certainly provides a useful framework for any discussion of Renaissance sexuality.