October 11, 2004

• Dirty Pictures
  Giorgione, Giorgio de Castelfranco, painted his Venus Asleep
  around 1510.  She is widely thought to represent the goddess of
  love.  Giorgione died with this painting unfinished, and it was
  finished by Tiziano de Vicellio, AKA Titian.

  

  ---

  A quarter of a century later, around 1538,Titian woke her up and humanized her.  The subject of Titian’s Venus of Urbino is believed by many critics to be a courtesan.

  

  Mark Twain said, in Tramp Abroad:

  You enter [the Uffizi] and proceed to
  that most-visited little gallery that exists in the world –the
  Tribune– and there, against the wall, without obstructing wrap or
  leaf, you may look your fill upon the foulest, the vilest, the
  obscenest picture the world possesses — Titian’s Venus. It isn’t that
  she is naked and stretched out on a bed –no, it is the attitude of one
  of her arms and hand. If I ventured to describe that attitude there
  would be a fine howl –but there the Venus lies for anybody to gloat
  over that wants to –and there she has a right to lie, for she is a
  work of art, and art has its privileges. I saw a young girl stealing
  furtive glances at her; I saw young men gazing long and absorbedly at
  her, I saw aged infirm men hang upon her charms with a pathetic
  interest. How I should like to describe her –just to see what a holy
  indignation I could stir up in the world…yet the world is willing to
  let its sons and its daughters and itself look at Titian’s beast, but
  won’t stand a description of it in words….There are pictures of nude
  women which suggest no impure thought — I am well aware of that. I am
  not railing at such. What I am trying to emphasize is the fact that
  Titian’s Venus is very far from being one of that sort. Without any
  question it was painted for a bagnio and it was probably refused
  because it was a trifle too strong. In truth, it is a trifle too strong
  for any place but a public art gallery.

  ---

  Roughly a century after Titian painted his Venus, around 1651, Diego de
  Velázquez painted his only known female nude,The Toilet of Venus, Venus and Cupid, or Venus at her Mirror, also  known as the Rokeby Venus for the hall where
  it hung before being acquired by London’s National Gallery. 
  Velázquez isn’t known for painting nudes because he lived in Spain at the
  time when the Spanish Inquisition was in action.  The painting was
  kept hidden during the artist’s lifetime.

  

  In 1914, Mary Richardson, a suffragette seeking to draw attention to
  the imprisonment of Emmeline Pankhurst, entered the National Gallery
  with a meat axe and slashed the painting seven times before being
  apprehended.  She claimed it wasn’t art criticism, but political
  activism.  She won a medal for this and her other work toward
  women’s suffrage.

  ---

  Francisco de Goya’s most famous nude is the Maja, probably painted for
  Godoy, Prime Minister of King Charles IV, towards the end of the 18th.
  century or beginning of the 19th.

  

  There is another Maja, too.

  

  The clothed maja is for the first time mentioned in the diary of an
  engraver and academician who paid a visit to Godoy’s palace in 1800; as
  no mention to the nude is made, it is supposed that Goya painted it
  later on.

  ---

  Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
  (1780-1867) painted in the French neo-classic style.  He painted
  quite a few naked women.  His most famous is the Grande Odalisque.  An odalisque is a harem slave, concubine, or some such chattel.

  

  In 1842, Ingres painted Odalisque with Slave.

  

  ---

  And then, around 1863, Edouard Manet painted his Olympia.
  

  Manet’s protagonist is a prostitute
  –not a courtesan, as some critics have assumed Titian’s Venus to be,
  but more the nineteenth-century equivalent of the Renaissance
  meretrice. The distinction among these categories were not mere
  niceties in Renaissance Venice. In general, a courtesan was
  distinguished from a meretrice (prostitute) or puttana (whore) by her
  class (or class pretensions), by her superior economic status, and by
  the social status and (limited) number of her lovers. As a concomitant
  of these social and “romantic” aspects of her position, a courtesan
  might also claim exemption from sumptuary laws concerning dress and
  legislation regarding where she might live.
  (source)

  ---

  And, along comes the twenty-first century and a whole new class of whores, depicted here by Kayti Didriksen.

  

  ---

  That’s it for the art lesson for today, kiddies.
  

  • 1:03 pm
  • 9 Comments