Wordsmoker

If you think that we just invented the practice of sending our loved ones sexy pictures you can think again.  Anyone who has walked through a museum knows that they are filled with all sorts of naughty images. Think of it as sexting just with a different kind of technology.

To show that we are sophisticated and cosmopolitan we try not to point and giggle.  We talk instead about the dramatic chiaroscuro and subtle sfumato but really we are thinking: “Titties!”

By “we” I am especially referring to our beloved editor and connoisseur of all things mammary,  Virus with Shoes. Of course there are  plenty of other areas of erotica in Renaissance painting — straight and gay and bi and miscellaneous. However, in honor of Virus, this post is focusing on a few of the more interesting tittary trends of the  Renaissance.

Pinups (Mona Lisa: Show us your tits!)

The Italian High Renaissance produced some of art history’s  loveliest pinups.

This painting by Tintoretto might be portrait of a famous courtesan but it usually goes by  a title that has been translated awkwardly into English as “Woman Discovering Her Bosom.”   In this case “discovering” means “uncovering” or ‘revealing.”   However, I like how the odd word choice  suggests that she might be suddenly learning of these protruding sacs emerging from her upper torso.

Oh my!  What have we here?  Why I believe I’ve discovered a bosom!

(The Woman Who Discovers the Bosom c. 1570.  Tintoretto. Museo del Prado, Madrid)

We can generally assume that the naked woman being painted is also the lover of the artist.  I mean, that’s kind of a given isn’t it?  Unless she is the mistress of the king.    Sometimes this relationship is made more explicit.  Perhaps the painting is even something that the artist has created for their own pleasure. 

This Portrait of a Young Woman (1518-20) by the great Italian painter  Raphael, is of his lover, Margherita Luti.  The painting is better known by the title La fornarina (bakeress).  She wears a Turkish style scarf around her head.  Painters liked to display their skill at rendering Eastern textiles in their art.   This was also the fashion used for Odalisques, the popular nineteenth century Orientalist motif for reclining nudes, conjuring up the romance of the harem and sexual servitude. (Slavery is so romantic!)

This full frontal image of a half naked lover is rather bold.  It is not pretending to be much more than erotica for the painter.    More commonly at this point in time painters drew upon classical themes when they wanted to explore various erotic motifs.  Greek and Roman gods and goddesses were always cavorting about naked providing Renaissance painters with opportunities to depict rape and bestiality and orgies for their discerning patrons.

Nonetheless, the painters also found a few thematic outlets for erotica in religious themes.   The Old Testament was good for sex and violence.  And for Christian paintings  there was always an excuse to show some boobage with the Madonna and Child images.

Fetish

The Lactating Madonna is one of the more common themes in religious painting.  And within this genre my favorite subject matter – just for the sheer goofy playfulness of Mary’s tit as SuperSoaker gun – is the Lactation Miracle of St. Bermard of Clairvaux.

Feast your eyes for a moment.  And it is important that you think about the visionary aspect of this since the milk spraying into Bermard’s eyes represents the gift of vision.  (Milk on the head = wisdom).

(Left: Lactation of St. Bernard. Flemish school. 1480. Musée d´Art Religieux d´Art Mosan. Liège.)

(Right: The Vision of St Bernard. Cano, Alonso.c.1650. Museo del Prado. Madrid)

Saint Bernard was the abbot of Clairvaux and one of the most influential members of the Cistercian order.  Unsurprisingly, he was also a great promoter of the cult of the Virgin.  There are different versions of the Lactation Miracle story.  One of the versions has it that Bernard was praying in front of a statue of the Madonna nursing the Child. He begged her to “Show that you are a mother” (Monstra te esse matrem). The statue became alive and squirted milk on Bernard’s lips. The scene is called Lactatio after this event.

The spraying milk imagery gets even wackier in  Tintoretto’s ( Jacopo Comin, 1518 –1594)  delightfully surreal painting, The Origin of the Milky Way which depicts Hercules being held to Juno’s breast by Jupiter.

This work, painted for the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II,  shows the moment where the baby Hercules is placed on the sleeping Juno’s breast to feed and give him immortality. However she wakes up  (duh!) and the spilt milk forms the Milky Way.  Oops!

(Jacopo Tintoretto (Robusti) The Origin of the Milky Way, c.1575-80.  National Gallery.  London, UK)

Girl-on-Girl

I would be very remiss if I did not mention one of the most famous titty paintings in all of art history.  I am speaking of course,  of those risque French  paintings of  Gabrielle d’Estrees and her [sorority] sister in the bathtub.

Gabrielle d’Estrées, Duchess of Beaufort and Verneuil, Marchioness of Monceaux) (1571–1599) was a the companion and lover of Henry IV of France and her story is a fascinating one.    I am not going to go into it here since this post is just about her breasts, but I encourage you to look it up.

(Gabrielle d’Estes with a Sister.  Master of the Fontainebleau School.  Uffizi. Florence.  Italy.   1590-1594)

There is specific symbolic significance to everything in the paintings, which can be decoded to tell the love story of Gabrielle and the king.   They are also highly titillating (get it?!) images of two young women fondling each other in the bath.

Fontainbleau was a famous French royal residence, kind of like a big fraternity with tons of bling, where artists developed the genre known as the boudoir portrait.  At that time it was a genre rather unique to the French.

The most famous artist of Fontainbleau was François Clouet (c. 1510-72), who painted this complex and very staged image depicting different levels of the life of the court with the primary focus on the intimate lives of courtiers.

This  work has been traditionally identified as representing Diane de Poitiers, but is is more probably Marie Touchet, mistress of Charles IX.

Lady in Her Bath 1571   François Clouet.   The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

Amateur Couples

I include this painting because it is one of the weirder images of Renaissance erotica.  It is so full of sexual symbolism and yet so lacking in  sexuality.

(Monk with a Nun 1591 Cornelis van Haarlem, Frans Halsmuseum, Haarlem)

Note the odd deathlike pallor in this high Mannerist work, which is quotidian in its subject matter at the same time that it is very strange and perverse.

The artist is trying to have it both ways: i.e.  to enjoy the thrill of the profane while also claiming that it is a painting with a pious message.  All the signs of the momenti mori are there in the table’s still life, providing warning us about the dangers of worldly sensuousness that is all going to rot.  Talk about buzz kill.

Neither the priest or the nun seems to be enjoying themselves very much.  It suspect that he may have  dropped a roofie in her glass of wine.

Naturally it is  from Northern rather than Southern Europe because they clearly don’t seem to know how to enjoy themselves.

As amusing, in a creepy sort of way, as it is to see a priest feeling up a nun, I’d hate to end this discussion on this rather downer note.

Furthermore, there is evidence that the Northern European Renaissance was just as randy as the South.  At least as far as England is concerned.  Their forte was literary more than the visual arts.  In contrast to the dour message of the Priest and Nun, think of the “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may” writings of someone like Robert Herrick (1591 – 1674), a Cavalier poet, who was also a member of the clergy.  Not surprisingly, the eroticism of Italian, French, and Spanish Renaissance art was appealing to the carpe diem sentiments of such writers.

King Charles  had the good sense to collect some saucy images to hang in his chambers, such as this lovely painting, entitled, The Lovers, c1510, and attributed to Titian.

The work is in England’s Royal (i.e., Buckingham Palace) collection.  It shows a young buxom woman fainting in the arms of a man whose hand is inside her dress, apparently holding her up by her breast, in a manner that just happens to display the nipple.

This brings me back to the poetry of Robert Herrick, who has the best and last word for this painting, and indeed for the art of breast appreciation in general,  which has, as I hope I have shown, a  fine and noble tradition.

UPON THE NIPPLES OF JULIA’S BREAST
HAVE ye beheld (with much delight)
A red rose peeping through a white ?
Or else a cherry, double grac’d,
Within a lily centre plac’d ?
Or ever mark’d the pretty beam
A strawberry shows half-drown’d in cream ?
Or seen rich rubies blushing through
A pure smooth pearl and orient too ?
So like to this, nay all the rest,
Is each neat niplet of her breast.