Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/408

 the producer is very good. We discover, in studying the æsthetic uranian, that repulsive, effeminate, grossly sensual, despicable men have demostrated superbly their superbly artistic natures. In this, the uranian presents a contrast to similisexuals in the military, intellectual, and otherwise robust life. Still, the dionysian chronicle'of art is far longer in the same unsatisfactory tenor. The biography of art is convincing proof that art does not per se ennoble, does not refine, does not strengthen, does not ethically uplift the moral or intellectual man; a vast amount of sentimental theorizing to the contrary.

It is easy to see why many painters and sculptors have been similisexuals. They turn to it instinctively, in admiration of male forms. Such are nude in the studio by prescription. The delight in reproducing them is perennial to artists. Joy in their study is part of the homosexual's sense of the superiority of masculine beauty to feminine. Often the comely model becomes the Beloved.

We need not wonder at tales of the uranistic passions of classic Greek and Roman sculptors, during the far-away epochs of Hellas. As sculpture advanced in idealism, and as a preferential sense of the beauty of a youth intensified, as Greek social culture, Greek athletics, the Greek religion (with the very gods as homosexualists and pederasts) progressed, also developed philarrhenism. So was it in Rome. The Renaissance brought into the studio of marble-carver or painter, at the potency of the uranian impulses, all the plastic beauty of the naked male. In Italy especially, the Renaissance art took pederastic tinges; and a beautiful, budding youth became even more sensitively admired and desired than a virile young man. In vain did Savonarola cry out against pederasty, sodomy in Florence; a city notably homosexual in its proletariat to-day.