Spectrum of Desire: Love, Sex, and Gender in the Middle Ages, installation view. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Bruce Schwarz.

Can receiving the stigmata be a sex act? It is surely intimate and sensual, not to mention penetrative. This is a question that I’ve been musing on ever since fixating on Giovanni di Paolo’s shimmering, submissive 15th-century panel painting, Saint Catherine of Siena Receiving the Stigmata, on view in the Met Cloister’s heroically horny and holy exhibition, Spectrum of Desire: Love, Sex, and Gender in the Middle Ages. In di Paolo’s painting, Saint Cathy bottoms for Christ, her arms raised in supplication, while Christ hovers above her, still stuck to the cross above a lavish red and gold altar. While it’s hard to get past Saint Cath and Christ’s matching zombie-green skin tone, the most remarkable part of this panel painting is their intense, erotic eye contact, like two lovers. Instead of coitus, these ESP love birds get off through their identical wounds, with blood barely visible on Catherine’s right hand and a teeny-weeny nail pierced through her left palm. Don’t clutch your pearls! This isn’t stigmata sex outside of marriage. Saint Catherine of Siena was mystically married to Christ, like many other berserk saints. I guess Christ is poly! Saint Catherine stands out, though, among his saintly spouses because she claimed her wedding ring wasn’t made out of boring jewels or gold, but Jesus’s foreskin! Unique!

Saint Catherine of Siena Receiving the Stigmata instantly attracted me in Spectrum of Desire because, following the lead of Saint John Waters of Charm City, Saint Cathy is one of my favorite bugged-out saints. She’s rivaled only by the perfectly named Christina the Astonishing, who levitated above a congregation after returning from the dead, repulsed to the rafters by their sinful stench, and after her return, flung herself into fires for kicks. Saint Catherine could be just as astonishing. She eschewed all food except for the Eucharist, but made exceptions for liquids like pus, which she ladled from a woman’s cancerous sores. Why? “For God, I guess,” postulates Saint Waters in his book Role Models. 

Spectrum of Desire: Love, Sex, and Gender in the Middle Ages, installation view. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Bruce Schwarz.

Saint Catherine of Siena isn’t the only one in Spectrum of Desire who is into blood sports and ogling Christ’s cut abs. Her fellow saint, Francis, is a size queen, peering up at a ginormous frame-mogging Christ (Jesus clearly looksmaxxed before going in front of Pontius Pilate) in Michele Giambono’s Man of Sorrows. Like Saint Cath, Fran has been penetrated too, given the faint line of blood that connects his punctured hands with Christ. But the stigmata isn’t the sexy centerfold here. Though Saint Franky’s eyes stay chastely upturned, it’s hard not to follow the trail of blood from Jesus’s side wound that trickles down his flat stomach, curves over his shapely hips, and drips around his pelvis into his loincloth. Just try not to get turned on. People in the Middle Ages understood the risk of gawping at Christ’s figure. As Bryan C. Keene notes in the Spectrum of Desire exhibition catalogue, anti-fun grump, Saint Bernardino of Siena, who, when not being a cock-blocker, encouraged the burning of books and vanities, like high heels and locks of false hair, finger-wagged about jacking it to Jesus paintings. Saint Bern had a reason to fear faithful fapping, given Jean de Beaumetz’s nearby Crucifixion with a Carthusian Monk, another painting of pregnant gazes at Christ’s body. The central lookie-loo in this work is a Carthusian monk who genuflects so close to the base of the cross that it looks like he’s giving Christ’s feet a good whiff. And why shouldn’t he? Who could resist taking a closer look at Christ’s sheer underwear! The wall label explains that these types of works became a source of concern for later monks, who “warned fellow monks against looking at such images of the naked Christ for the impure thoughts they could arouse.” What neuters! Let those pent-up monks have a little joy!

Joy is the exact feeling that coursed through my body in Spectrum of Desire, which is my favorite museum exhibition in recent memory. The show is a relief, as so many institutional exhibitions lately feel so staid. I wandered through the Whitney Biennial and, barring a few standouts, like Pat Oleszko’s deliriously silly video Footsi (more silly art, please!), Zach Blas’s overkill but still relevant demonic AI-worshipping installation, CULTUS, and Agosto Machado’s devotional archival/hoarder altar to Ethyl Eichelberger, which made me gasp as it, unbenownst to me, contained the exhibition card from my own co-curated Visual AIDS exhibition Party Out Of Bounds, I wondered if I even liked contemporary art anymore (I’ll admit the problem might be me). In contrast, the still-transgressive centuries-old mix of sacred and profane in Spectrum of Desire felt like a divine revelation.

Spectrum of Desire: Love, Sex, and Gender in the Middle Ages, installation view. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Bruce Schwarz.

Curated by Melanie Holcomb and Nancy Thebaut, the packed show, crammed into the sanctum of the Fuentiduena Chapel at the Cloisters, is everything I want in an exhibition: off-putting demonstrations of religious excess, like nuns recalling their “handsome and comely” statues of baby Jesus, such as the one on display with his ruddy cheeks and genitalia, coming alive and demanding to be breastfed; the Virgin Mary opening her thighs; sweetly homoerotic sculptures of Jesus wrapping his arms around John the Beloved and Mary and her cousin Elizabeth touching palms; a serpent-like Eve and Lilith sucking on the juices of their sumptuous paradise lost apples; and, of course, the always gorgeous, perpetually suffering queer icon Saint Sebastian, here represented by a wooden sculpture painted with a very faint happy trail leading to his crotch.

And just in case you’re sick of my Christian iconography preferences, there are other fables and myths to choose from, like that self-pleasuring Narcissus gaping at his own reflection. Even more alarming is the fable of Febilla and poet Virgil, who, miffed at Febilla for rebuffing his advances, snuffs out all the lights in Rome and stuffs a hot coal up her hoohah, rendering Feb the only light source in the city. On one disturbing, sexually abusive painted goblet, the townspeople stick their torches into her puss for a light. If viewers squint hard enough, an intricate ivory writing tablet gives Febilla a tad more agency, squatting on all fours, offering light to her fellow citizens, after dangling Virgil in a basket in the adjacent frame.

Aquamanile (Water Pitcher) in the form of Aristotle and Phyllis, South Netherlandish, Late 14th or early 15th century, Copper alloy, 12 13/16 × 7 1/16 × 15 1/2 in. (32.5 × 17.9 × 39.3 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Robert Lehman Collection, 1975 (1975.1.1416)

Spectrum of Desire also explores themes that are a little more earthly, depicting the lives and loves of people in the Middle Ages—or at least the baubles, belts, and gewgaws they wore or carried, particularly related to marriage. Some of these works are chastely romantic, like the German oil on panel, A Bridal Couple, which features an ornate two-toned tights and fairy slippers-wearing man as he hands his rosy-cheeked wife a forget-me-not. Others are a tad more provocative, such as the erotically curved saddle, likely used in a wedding procession, emblazoned with couples trying out all sorts of seduction, from alluring serenades to desperate grabbing. While the saddle is a cavalcade of conquest, other wedding accoutrements contained thinly veiled threats. A faded purse used by a bride to dole out coins is embroidered with a scene featuring Patient Griselda, as the wall label describes, “a European folktale figure subjected by her husband to a series of terrible lessons to test her submissiveness.” Yikes!

Don’t worry, though. Women get theirs. Holcomb and Thebaut not only expose the marital traditions of the Middle Ages, but they also reveal how, despite the stringent understanding of sexuality and wedlock of the time, there was more fluidity and flexibility to be found than most of us judgmental contemporary viewers, convinced of our own progressivism, would assume. Take the filthy and festive gag gifts. A plate features a wife spanking her husband, who appears stunned by this gendered role reversal, his ass turned toward the viewer in a way that makes my back ache. A nearby amusing and absurdist aquamanile presents a similar power switcheroo, with Phyllis riding Aristotle side-saddle.

Not everyone in the Middle Ages was so saddled to the binary or their assigned gender. As usual, those crazy saints were the ones to shuffle off those gendered restrictions. A wall label offers that there were several examples of trans masculine saints, often transitioning so they could become monks (maybe they liked that hair halo). My most revered gender-fucking saint that appears in the exhibition is hirsute Saint Wilgefortis. Horrified at the prospect of marrying a pagan man, Wilgefortis tapped God and prayed for a beard. The Holy Father granted her hairy wish, but her bio dad was less enthused, overreacting by crucifying her. Nice one, Daddy! Saint Wilgefortis doesn’t look all that impressed by her father’s brutal and final punishment, though, as she dangles, bored, from a cross in a tiny illustration from a Book of Hours.

Spectrum of Desire: Love, Sex, and Gender in the Middle Ages, installation view. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Bruce Schwarz.

Perhaps even more than the aesthetic qualities of the artwork on display, their corresponding bonko stories tickle my fancy. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t a few formal eye-poppers in Spectrum of Desire. In fact, the show features perhaps the biggest gasp-inducing shocker in all of art history: “The Wound of Christ” from The Prayer Book of Bonne of Luxembourg, Duchess of Normandy. A giant, swollen, reddened disembodied vulva hovers like a hallucination, wedged between a cross and a whipping post (very BDSM!). At the center of this yoni is a deep slit of black, a vaginal void. Above the vulva, a man with a ladder looks as if he’s ready to climb right in. What the hell?! While to anyone with eyes, this illustration appears pornographic, it’s intended to represent Jesus’s side wound. This vulvic imagery was not accidental. The wall label explains, “Medieval Christians were instructed to find refuge in Christ’s side as if it were a womb; some writings even compared his suffering on the cross to pangs of birth.” Jesus not only died for our sins but left us a warm womb to float in too! There’s also something delightfully radical here in terms of gender–lithe, loinclothed hunk Jesus also had a vulva. And those Christian conservatives dare hate anyone who isn’t cisgender!

It’s taken me far too long to not only appreciate art from the Middle Ages, but just maybe love it more than any other kind of art nowadays. I know why. I read way too much Christopher Hitchens and listened to way too much Bill Hicks at a formative young age. For a long time, I, stupidly, associated Christian iconography, even in old-ass art, with conservative loonies. But within the past few years, my perspective has shifted significantly. Maybe it’s because in 2026 Christian conservatives are mostly focused on their own heretical acts, like attempting to bring about the end times through red heifers and nuclear war, dancing with pyrotechnics in the wake of a grisly public assassination, and laying hands on Donald Trump above his Diet Coke button on the Resolute Desk. Perhaps I’ve simply softened and become less of an edgelord. Or realized that work reaching for transcendence made in the throes of religious mania is probably the best there is. Or maybe, through exhibitions like Spectrum of Desire, I finally recognize that some of the most subversive art still lies hidden in the past.