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“‘The Love that dare not speak its name’ in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man […] as you find in the sonnets of
Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are.” -(Wilde qtd. in Bristow 3) Considering the bitterly resentful account Wilde gives of Bosie in De Profundis (Kelly 17; Wallen 330), the words spoken at his last trial would seem, at best, performative, at worst, dishonest. Reading some of his letters to Besie right after his incarceration, however, one would find that they ring true. In what follows, my aim is to show how the early prison letters of Wilde parallel the drawings and sonnets of Michelangelo by applying Christian symbolism to an essentially Hellenic model of pederastic love to legitimise it in the eyes of the world. Introducing, first, Ganymede, and his role in Renaissance Neoplatonist iconography (Panofsky 250-256), the opening part of the presentation considers the ‘christening’ of the furor dixinus by Michelangelo. Turning, then, to the early letters of Wilde, the latter part will focus on how he adopts the same framework, invoking Christ to elevate his homosexual passions to a sphere of the divine. Introducing these lesser-known letters, the presentation offers a more holistic approach to Wilde’s notorious relationship than what De Profundis in itself suggests.
