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If, as historians of sexuality now often take for granted, ‘sexual orientation’ is a peculiarly modern possibility – a concept that coincided historically with the construction of the homosexual as a recognizable type of person – how might the concept be reoriented as a framework for understanding pre-modern art? This essay revolves around the question of orientations: what it means for sexuality to be experienced as orientated; why visual images of sexual activity variously contribute to oriented or disoriented understandings of identity and embodiment; and how the spatial and temporal dimensions of orientation might be harnessed as a means of understanding sexual imagery in historical contexts. Focusing on a little-discussed scene from the Last Judgement fresco (c.1393–1413) in the Collegiata, San Gimignano, attributed to Taddeo di Bartolo, which depicts, among a group of infernal sinners who are guilty of the sin of lussuria, a male couple apparently being chastised for sodomy, I also draw on recent theorizations of orientation in queer and gender theory, notably Sara Ahmed’s much discussed Queer Phenomenology (2006).
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