| Sumario: | This essay synthesizes the historiography of art history and sexuality/gender studies, while carefully navigating the difficulties inherent in historical sexual signification, in order to reveal the complexity of Albrecht Dürer's The Men's Bathhouse (Das Männerbad) (1496-97). Over time, the woodcut has accrued a wide variety of critical responses. Within this fortuna critica, some scholars have attempted to reduce the print to evidence of Dürer's cognizance of classical aesthetics prior to his first trip to Venice in 1494-95, in that it seems to provide a stylistic precursor to his later, more overtly classicizing The Fall of Man (1506, engraving). Other scholars have implicitly or explicitly sought to employ the woodcut as supportive of arguments for the existence of a universal homosexual identity, in that the artwork proves Dürer's homosexuality ergo an early modern homosexuality consonant with the way the modern terms "homosexual"/"heterosexual" conflate sexuality with identity. This essay claims that classicism and eroticism simultaneously inform the full iconographic potentiality of Dürer's print; this analysis of it shows how he inverted the traditional imagery of bathers by imagining men as the sole object of display within an all-male space, and then veiled that socially proscribed, same-sex desire behind the plausible deniability of the classically-derived, nude male figure.
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