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In a recent and widely discussed article, “The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion” (1983), Leo Steinberg attempts to show that much of the religious painting of the Renaissance was focused on Christ's genitals—a phenomenon that he interprets as an extension of the “incarnational theology” (O'Malley, 1979) of the period, that is, the Church's obsessive concern with God's having become flesh, become a man. If Incarnation was the chief subject of Renaissance preaching, then what better support of this doctrine than an ostentatio genitalium on the part of the Christ child? Whatever is sexual is also mortal. Thus “the evidence of Christ's sexual member serves as a pledge of God's humanation” (Steinberg, p. 13).
Steinberg's argument is a persuasive one. Yet in the history of European art there is another group of paintings, predating the naked Christs, which even more clearly mirrors the church's insistent emphasis on Incarnation. I refer to the unicorn paintings of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. These pictures are veritable tracts of incarnational theology. At the same time, their palpable conflicts of tone and meaning reveal, no doubt unconsciously, the reason for the Church's obsession with Incarnation during the period in question. As Steinberg does not mention, Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was swamped with heresy, the