Titian: art or porn?
From Rory Mulchrone
Sir: Roger Scruton draws a distinction between ‘the naked and the nude’, implies one between pornography and art, and illustrates these subtleties by comparing wellendowed page-three girls to Titian’s Venus of Urbino (‘Shameless and loveless’, 16 April). Is this the same Venus that Mark Twain called ‘the foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses’? ‘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 ... for she is a work of art, and art has its privileges.’ Now far be it from me to make comparisons between Dr Scruton’s attitude towards the body and John Ruskin’s, whose veneration for the classical nude left him reeling in horror upon discovering his wife’s pubic hair. But, at the least, it seems that one man’s porn is another man’s art.
Rory Mulchrone London WC1
Previous page
