Art
The bottom line
Robin Simon
Let her belly be soft But to keep me aloft Let her bounding buttocks be marble.
Canova's 'Three Graces', which may now be rescued for this country by the Hon. Jacob Rothschild, is a perfect gorgo- nisation of the above 17th-century recipe for pleasure. Three steatopygous women writhe against each other in white marble of an extreme wedding-cake opacity, fleck- ed by the hint of a single vein, a solitary flaw and a fleeting crystalline glitter. If Plainly erotic: Canova's 'Three Graces' Canova did nothing else, he chose a magnificent piece of stone. But it is also an exquisite composition, supremely well made. This sculpture fulfils all the de- mands of three-dimensional art: in addi- tion to texture of great purity, new beauties are revealed as one walks round it. Teasing patterns and subtle visual puns appear. From one angle, the arms of these sexy young women appear boneless, tentacle-like, and from another finely mus- cled, while their heads are by turns sharply profiled or softly winning.
But what has struck me most forcibly amid all the hullabaloo about the `Three Graces' is the general silence about the sculpture's plainly erotic appeal. That appeal principally resides in a spectacular display of buttocks, an area which is so often the erotic focus of both hetero- and homosexual art. It is the main reason that so many reclining nudes lie on their sto- machs, from Boucher's famous painting of Louise O'Morphy to Canova's own sculp- ture of Pauline Bonaparte. The third Duke of Dorset's mistress, Giovanna Baccelli, can still be seen bottom-up in a plaster statue by Locatelli at the foot of the stairs at Knole, a pose of which the Duke was so proud that he provided his best friends with reduced pocked-sized versions for private fondling.
But how coy art historians and museum curators are in getting to grips with this fact of life, even though art galleries are in- creasingly keen on posting helpful labels next to exhibits, to provide handy hints on what to look for in the work in question.
Alas, the remarks are invariably anodyne — the bland leading the blind. And when the work of art is erotic, these labels tend, in my experience, to become positively misleading. The silence of the V & A — and indeed the Hon. Jacob Rothschild — about this aspect of the `Three Graces' is as nothing compared with one of the displays at the Fine Arts Museum in Chicago, as I discovered on a recent visit.
A key room in the Chicago Museum features one of the most pointedly erotic paintings devoted to homosexual titillation that can ever have been produced. It is by Bartolomeo Manfredi (1587?-1620), a Caravaggesque artist about whom, perhaps mercifully, little is known. The title sug- gests its potential: 'Cupid Chastised'.
When you know that the chastiser is Mars, in a fetching combination of armour and tunic, you will realise that the potential is in a fair way to being fulfilled.
Mars stands over Cupid who is sprawled on the ground, and wields a knout of three knotted cords aimed at Cupid's naked buttocks which are the prominently lit focus of the composition. Cupid's legs are entwined between those of Mars, while his left foot thrusts against the pudenda of Venus who is attempting, not very enthu- siastically, to restrain Mars. One of Cupid's wings tickles his coccyx — not that Cupid can see any of this because he is, of course, blindfolded. He is not wearing very much else, merely a strip of blue cloth across his breast. There is an extreme subtlety in the depiction of the contrast between the ferocious grip with which Mars holds the knout and the gentler hold he takes on Cupid's appropriately limp wrist. And Cupid does not seem too upset about all this maltreatment — his mouth is open in a manner suggestive of pleasure as much as pain.
Manfredi's erotic contrasts between met-
al, feathers and flesh recall that other masterpiece of homoeroticism, Donatello's 'David' in the Bargello — and indeed one of my more embarrassing half-hours. as a student was spent there in thecompany of a More than usually shy Anthony Blunt. We did not, for example, discuss the way in which the feather from the helmet adorn- ing Goliath's severed head contrives to find its way up towards the, boy's anus via his inside leg. Manfredi's 'Cupid Chastised' is erotically in the same league. It is also a very considerable work , of. art, and its sophistication and sexuality ought ulti- mately to help in identifying Manfredi's patron — someone very like Caravaggio's own patron Cardinal Scipione Borghese.
So what does the Chicago Museum tell us? Simply this: 'The subject partly sym- bolises the incompatibility of love and wrath, as Well as the conflict between war and peace.' Oh yeah? Tell it to the fairies. I am happy to report that the great Amer- ican .public was not fooled for a moment. Singly and, even better, in couples, the reaction was one of nudge, nudge and stifled laughter, tinged with disbelief. Pic- tures speak louder than words, even in a modern museum.
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