Art History: Do better.
Oct. 31st, 2017 09:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickSo I’m trolling the internet this morning (reading about Patreon’s recently-revised porn-unfriendly policy) whereupon I stumble onto an image decorating the sidebar of one of the articles:
It is a lovely image, a bit upscale for a porn-related blog, but I’ll take my art where I can get it. I like this image a lot and due to the power of the internets (Not Just For Porn) I was able to find out what it was and who painted it and so forth.
Now, I took art history in college (covering stuff renaissance and onward) and yet we never saw this picture. Lots and lots of Madonna and Child, no Nymphs and Satyr. (This picture is William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s Nymphes et Satyre (Nymphs and Satyr) painted in 1873 and it’s located at the Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts and thank you google image search for your helpfulness.) If we’d seen it, I would have remembered this one. It’s lovely. Just is. I am particularly charmed by the expression on the face of the middle nymph.
I don’t know how there is art history with a zillion unremarkable Madonna and Child paintings (okay, yes, the fucking church paid for a lot of art and the church loved Madonna and Child paintings) even though other stuff was a lot more interesting, like, say, this delightful picture of Nymphs and Satyr. I am still kind of pissy about this even though college art history was in the first half of the 1990′s for me.
You can argue that we did so many fucking Madonna and Child things because when you have the same subject matter, it’s easier to explore different treatments. Okay, fine. So you can do that with stuff OTHER THAN Madonna and Child. Like, for example, Saint Sebastian, who is one of my favorite painting subjects. (Yes, because he’s the one depicted mostly naked and shot up with arrows and no, I don’t want to discuss what the fuck that says about me. He’s probably my very own Wound Man or something.)
In case you’re not Catholic or whatever, Sebastian was shot full of arrows for being a Christian but DID NOT DIE of it. Irene of Rome went to get his body and discovered he was still alive. She took him home and nursed him back to health.
Lots of reasonably-famous painter dudes (In the era we’re doing, it’s mostly dudes painting. Sorry.) have painted Saint Sebastian all shot up with arrows or just hanging out with not a lotta clothes on.
Titian did one, when he was quite old:
Peter Paul Reubens did one in 1604, and as you might expect, it’s somewhat fleshy:
A lot of Reubens’ stuff is fleshy. Like, if it’s relatively heavy women with kind of bolt-on tits (but not as bolt-on as Michelangelo’s bolt-on tits were, because fuck all, his bolt-on tit problem was fucking EPIC:
I know, right? That right there is a man with tits bolted on. You are not fooling ANYONE, Michelangelo. Also, this is marble. MARBLE. You committed to bad tits IN MARBLE. I cannot argue that the dude couldn’t sculpt. He was a fantastic fucking sculptor who did a lot of goddam-that’s-incredible sculpting. If Notte’s tits look like that, it’s on purpose. This is not a mistake because he was a bad sculptor who got into trouble halfway through and had to, y’know, get the damn thing finished somehow.) cavorting in gauzy fabric, that’s Reubens.
See? They’re, well, reasonably well-fed. Note fupa (google it) visible on right side model. Rubens did not paint very skinny women. Here’s another one of his (he did a couple of Judgment of Paris efforts):
(Both this Judgment of Paris and The Three Graces above it are in the Prado in Madrid, Spain, which also houses Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights and Velazquez’s Las Meninas)
He did Saint Sebastian again in 1614, still fleshy:
Botticelli did one, and it looks more paper doll and less real, kind of an eastern-influence (think of those horrible endless Madonna and Child pix with the elongated faces). But also I see Keanu Reeves, there, don’t you? :) Also what the fuck is going on with the feet there? Did Botticelli just give up when he got to the feet? That right foot (on the left in this image, I mean Sebastian’s right foot) is…. ugh. Also them is some short arrows or the one in Sebastian’s right armpit should be coming out above his left collarbone. I guess they had him pretty high up because judging from the angles, all the arrows were shot in from below.
And one by Andrea Mantenga, 1456(ish) which is like, the famous one.
But that’s not the only Saint Sebastian he painted. He did three of them. (Possibly Sebastian was also his Wound Man?) Here’s the 1480 one, which is a somewhat buffer Sebastian of like 6% bodyfat. He’s fucking ripped through the midsection but definitely should incorporate some curls and shit into his lifting. Arms need work.
And this is his Sebastian in 1490, which is kinda… yeah, looks like shibari to me, but what do I know?
Some people didn’t bother with the arrows, like François Guillaume Ménageot who just wentstraight for the sexy. Nothin’ straight about his effort:
As we’ve just seen, you can look at various “same subject, different painters” efforts that are NOT Madonna and Child. There is other stuff that is similarly popular, Sebastian full of arrows is not the only thing that gets painted repeatedly by various and sundry painters.
I would have enjoyed art history a lot more if they’d exercised some fucking creativity in the subject matter instead of making us look at forty million damn Madonna and Child pictures.
Also The Toast did this way more entertainingly than I did with more snark. Their effort regarding assorted paintings of Saint Sebastian and his martyrdom is here. Enjoy.
EDITED: 1-24-2019 Tumblr flagged this as porn. Damn their (robotic, incompetent) eyes to hell.
It is a lovely image, a bit upscale for a porn-related blog, but I’ll take my art where I can get it. I like this image a lot and due to the power of the internets (Not Just For Porn) I was able to find out what it was and who painted it and so forth.
Now, I took art history in college (covering stuff renaissance and onward) and yet we never saw this picture. Lots and lots of Madonna and Child, no Nymphs and Satyr. (This picture is William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s Nymphes et Satyre (Nymphs and Satyr) painted in 1873 and it’s located at the Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts and thank you google image search for your helpfulness.) If we’d seen it, I would have remembered this one. It’s lovely. Just is. I am particularly charmed by the expression on the face of the middle nymph.
I don’t know how there is art history with a zillion unremarkable Madonna and Child paintings (okay, yes, the fucking church paid for a lot of art and the church loved Madonna and Child paintings) even though other stuff was a lot more interesting, like, say, this delightful picture of Nymphs and Satyr. I am still kind of pissy about this even though college art history was in the first half of the 1990′s for me.
You can argue that we did so many fucking Madonna and Child things because when you have the same subject matter, it’s easier to explore different treatments. Okay, fine. So you can do that with stuff OTHER THAN Madonna and Child. Like, for example, Saint Sebastian, who is one of my favorite painting subjects. (Yes, because he’s the one depicted mostly naked and shot up with arrows and no, I don’t want to discuss what the fuck that says about me. He’s probably my very own Wound Man or something.)
In case you’re not Catholic or whatever, Sebastian was shot full of arrows for being a Christian but DID NOT DIE of it. Irene of Rome went to get his body and discovered he was still alive. She took him home and nursed him back to health.
Lots of reasonably-famous painter dudes (In the era we’re doing, it’s mostly dudes painting. Sorry.) have painted Saint Sebastian all shot up with arrows or just hanging out with not a lotta clothes on.
Titian did one, when he was quite old:
Peter Paul Reubens did one in 1604, and as you might expect, it’s somewhat fleshy:
A lot of Reubens’ stuff is fleshy. Like, if it’s relatively heavy women with kind of bolt-on tits (but not as bolt-on as Michelangelo’s bolt-on tits were, because fuck all, his bolt-on tit problem was fucking EPIC:
I know, right? That right there is a man with tits bolted on. You are not fooling ANYONE, Michelangelo. Also, this is marble. MARBLE. You committed to bad tits IN MARBLE. I cannot argue that the dude couldn’t sculpt. He was a fantastic fucking sculptor who did a lot of goddam-that’s-incredible sculpting. If Notte’s tits look like that, it’s on purpose. This is not a mistake because he was a bad sculptor who got into trouble halfway through and had to, y’know, get the damn thing finished somehow.) cavorting in gauzy fabric, that’s Reubens.
See? They’re, well, reasonably well-fed. Note fupa (google it) visible on right side model. Rubens did not paint very skinny women. Here’s another one of his (he did a couple of Judgment of Paris efforts):
(Both this Judgment of Paris and The Three Graces above it are in the Prado in Madrid, Spain, which also houses Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights and Velazquez’s Las Meninas)
He did Saint Sebastian again in 1614, still fleshy:
Botticelli did one, and it looks more paper doll and less real, kind of an eastern-influence (think of those horrible endless Madonna and Child pix with the elongated faces). But also I see Keanu Reeves, there, don’t you? :) Also what the fuck is going on with the feet there? Did Botticelli just give up when he got to the feet? That right foot (on the left in this image, I mean Sebastian’s right foot) is…. ugh. Also them is some short arrows or the one in Sebastian’s right armpit should be coming out above his left collarbone. I guess they had him pretty high up because judging from the angles, all the arrows were shot in from below.
And one by Andrea Mantenga, 1456(ish) which is like, the famous one.
But that’s not the only Saint Sebastian he painted. He did three of them. (Possibly Sebastian was also his Wound Man?) Here’s the 1480 one, which is a somewhat buffer Sebastian of like 6% bodyfat. He’s fucking ripped through the midsection but definitely should incorporate some curls and shit into his lifting. Arms need work.
And this is his Sebastian in 1490, which is kinda… yeah, looks like shibari to me, but what do I know?
Some people didn’t bother with the arrows, like François Guillaume Ménageot who just went
As we’ve just seen, you can look at various “same subject, different painters” efforts that are NOT Madonna and Child. There is other stuff that is similarly popular, Sebastian full of arrows is not the only thing that gets painted repeatedly by various and sundry painters.
I would have enjoyed art history a lot more if they’d exercised some fucking creativity in the subject matter instead of making us look at forty million damn Madonna and Child pictures.
Also The Toast did this way more entertainingly than I did with more snark. Their effort regarding assorted paintings of Saint Sebastian and his martyrdom is here. Enjoy.
EDITED: 1-24-2019 Tumblr flagged this as porn. Damn their (robotic, incompetent) eyes to hell.
