Jean Delville's The School of Plato (1898) is remarkable not only as a statement piece of fin-de-siecle occulture, but also for its bold portrayal of Plato's pupils as a group of ephebes in intimate association. The canvas and its reception history lend themselves uniquely to a consideration of the complexities of an art-historiographical engagement with representations of male love, yet the majority of scholars have tended to subsume the work's 'homoeroticism' under Delville's occult preoccupations. In this essay, I attempt to unpack the male intimacy pictured by aligning art-historical analysis with queer theory and gay and lesbian history, seeking to suggest ways in which the painting may have straddled the line between normativity and deviance. I argue that its affinity with newly compact categories of subversive sexuality - then to an unprecedented extent in the public eye in Belgium - may help account for the government's stubborn refusal to purchase the work.

中文翻译：

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世纪末对男性亲密的感知：通过德尔维尔的柏拉图学派进行思考

让·德尔维尔（Jean Delville）的《柏拉图学派》（1898 年）引人注目，不仅是作为世纪末世界文化的陈述作品，而且还因为它大胆地将柏拉图的学生描绘成一群亲密联系的 ephebes。这幅画布及其接受历史独特地考虑了艺术史学与男性爱情表现的复杂性，但大多数学者倾向于将作品的“同性恋”归入德尔维尔的神秘主义关注之下。在这篇文章中，我试图通过将艺术史分析与酷儿理论和男女同性恋历史相结合来解开男性亲密关系，试图提出这幅画跨越规范性和偏差之间界限的方式。