GLR July-August 2024

What a Queer Institution Was the Castrati ARTMEMO

non of the castrato is inextricably con nected to the Catholic Church. During the European Renaissance, women were for bidden from performing on stage or singing in church. Within the Papal States, women couldn’t even sing in public. This prohibition, combined with the need for singers with high-pitched, angelic voices, led to a practice that we may regard as bar baric: the making of castrati through the destruction of a prepubescent boy’s testi cles, usually by crushing, in an operation performed by specialists from Norcia, a town in central Italy. Interestingly, castrating boys without medical justification—or their consent— was against official Church doctrine and local laws. Generally, a medical pretext such as a hernia—for which castration was prescribed for male sufferers of all ages— was invented. As for consent, this is an even thornier issue. Most castrati were probably pressured by economic circumstances, teachers, or relatives—if they had any agency in the matter at all. Italian families sometimes sought the procedure for their musically gifted sons, because the potential rewards—fame, fortune, the chance to con sort with popes and princes—could be con siderable. The most famous castrato of all time, il Farinelli , held important political positions within the Spanish court and was made a knight of the Calatrava Order by the King of Spain. The practice reached its height in the 17th century, when the Italian peninsula

L EE L ANZILOTTA H E STARES dreamily at someone over your shoulder, his mouth open and poised to sing. In his hands he strums the lute that gives him his name. Flowers decorate the desk before him. The flowing white blouse he wears is open, displaying an unusually broad rib cage and rounded shoulders. His too-boy ish face and luscious curls give him a femi nine appearance, making his gender and age ambiguous. He’s beautiful and mes merizing yet somehow haunting or, per haps, haunted. He’s the musician in Caravaggio’s The Lute Player , suggested by some to be the Spanish castrato Pietro Montoya. No other known depictions survive of this man, who would have been in his early twenties at the time the painting was created. He probably lived in the household of the Cardinal del Monte, a patron of Caravaggio’s, while singing with the papal choir between 1592 and 1600. This period coincides with Car avaggio’s own residence within the house hold of del Monte. Caravaggio’s musical paintings, including The Musicians and multiple versions of The Lute Player , were all painted there. The idea of a castrated musician spon sored by a cardinal might seem strange or even perverse to a modern reader. Yet many high-ranking figures within the church financed the training of castrati and gave them housing. The cultural phenome

was plagued by wars, pestilence, and severe economic difficulties. Mutilating a son in the hope of producing the next great star was at times a desperate attempt to escape extreme poverty. For others, it was seen as an almost religious sacrifice—a son giving up his ability to procreate in order to pro duce beautiful music for the Church and to help his family. Of course, their voices were not the only thing altered by this drastic procedure. Some castrati grew to be unusually tall, with broader rib cages and sometimes even abnormal facial bones, because their growth plates closed later than those of intact males. They kept the hair on top but could not, of course, grow a beard. Body fat tended to settle on the hips and thighs, with breasts occasionally developing as well. Many suffered from specific medical condi tions, such as osteoporosis, as they aged. Before they sang a single note, their appear ance marked them as different from ordi nary people. Their feminine features made them easy marks for ridicule. Even the most famous and acclaimed were in many ways outcasts. Of special interest to us, their gender ambiguous appearance led them to be per ceived as a kind of third gender. In the Early Modern period, pre-adolescent boys and girls were not gendered as strictly or as early as we do today. Gender was some thing one grew into with age. The castrati never grew up to become either male or fe male, instead remaining somewhere in be tween in terms of both physiology and social role. A fable from the Renaissance discussed by cultural historian Martha Feldman in The Castrato (2016) tells of a castrato who struggles to explain his gen der when questioned, leading him to invent a fantastical story about being of a race of effeminate men born from eggs laid by roosters. As in antiquity, effeminacy in men was associated with lewdness, especially toward women, causing such men to be sexualized and desired by both men and women. They were believed to be capable of sexual activ ity despite being infertile and may have been sexually capable in some cases. There are tales of their affairs with women, as im probable as this might seem. A legal treatise from the early 1700s made it clear that cas trati could not marry, apparently in response to a woman’s desire to marry the castrato Nicolò Grimaldi. We also know that noble men occasionally took castrati as lovers. These relationships, as music historian Roger Freitas has written, were common

Caravaggio. The Lute Player , 1596.

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