The Two Sons of Noah, Raimondi – Participant Interpretation

The Two Sons of Noah is a print of an engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi, after the ‘l’Ivresse de Noé’ (The Drunkenness of Noah) fresco found in the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo.

The full fresco is based on Genesis 9, 20-27. The biblical account tells how Ham sees his father Noah, drunk on wine, laid nude, so warns his brothers. They come to cover him with a cloak, walking backwards so they don’t observe their father’s naked body. There is a distinct irony in the depiction of this story given the undeniable intimacy between the two male figures, brothers Shem and Japeth, and their own nakedness.

Given Michelangelo’s own oft-debated queerness and homosexuality, there feels a suggestion of rebellion to subvert a Biblical narrative around the shame of male to male nudity so visibly in a place so sacred, at the heart of Catholicism.

It is purported Michelangelo fell in love with young nobleman Tommaso dei Cavalieri, their love even evidenced in a series of poems. In one, Michelangelo describes how he wants to be Cavalieri’s clothing so he can wrap himself around his body, or be his shoes and kiss his feet. More curiously, Raimondi worked in Raphael’s circle of sexual libertarians. Was Raimondi intentionally highlighting this rebellious act of queerness with his engraving’s chosen rather specific subject from such a large piece?

Furthermore, to present any part of the story of Noah with an implication of queerness is also interesting on other fronts. The Sumerian flood myth, the Epic of Gilgamesh, is now widely accepted as the origin of the Biblical retelling of the Great Flood. It was discovered on clay tablets (currently in possession of the British Museum) of which often overlooked are the queer, bisexual, romantic and erotic undertones of this myth.

There is a distinct ambiguity of Eros in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which one may consider not always quite so ambiguous prior to modern colonisation and proliferation of modern religion in academic institutions. It is now more widely accepted that the Mesopotamian into Babylonian story tells of the journey of Gilgamesh ( ), King of Uruk, and his companion Enkidu ( ) with some distinct notion of queerness. It also rings of pre-colonial queerness in which imperialism such as the British Empire buried such identities profusely.

The story tells how Gilgamesh and Enkidu set off with several objectives, the culmination of which was to find the secret to eternal life. It certainly seems this has symbolic echoes in modern journeys of self-discovery and sexual identity. Despite having wives, their intimacy is clear throughout the narrative. Were either Michelangelo or Raimondi aware of this? 

Elsewhere in contemporary culture, we see the figure of Gilgamesh inspire other mythological characters from antiquity such as Heracles (Hercules) – now frequently used in queer and homosexual imagery. Examples in similar style include Derek Jarman’s work of ‘Sebastiane’ of similar aesthetic and even current popular culture films such as the hypermasculine ‘300’ directed by Zack Snyder. Rife with homoeroticism, fraternity, these works embrace visualising many of Ancient Greece’s far more eloquent set of words that we now attempt to summarise in English simply and perhaps ineffectively as ‘love’.

Whether Michalengelo or Raimondi were aware or not will never be truly known, although their queerness seems more than likely. It does however remain striking how such queerness from one of our first civilisation’s myths can, even millenia later, find reach across time into some of the most holy, anti-queer places in our modern society.

Written by Will Belshah, 2022.

Listen to an audio description of Marcantonia Raimondi’s The Two Sons of Noah, written and recorded by (Un)Defining Queer participant Belshah: