Sexual influences throughout art history
Literature featuring elaborate sexual fantasies coincided with the French Revolution and influenced the art of the period
Rome became the capital of modern European culture during the High Renaissance, temporarily losing its pre-eminence after the Sack in 1527, but reasserting itself in the 1580s. Around 1600 and in the early decades of the 17th century, it was the most important intellectual and artistic city in Europe. But northern rivals were emerging: London and Amsterdam were new scientific as well as financial centres; Paris was in the process of a literary and intellectual rebirth, with the first official academies charged with overseeing literature and the arts.
During the early years of Louis XIV’s reign, especially from the 1660s to the 1680s, the cultural and economic centre of gravity of Europe moved to Paris, where it remained for much of the 18th century, although Rome never really lost its role as the capital of art teaching, and became still more important with the rise of Neoclassicism. Paris eventually took Rome’s place as the centre of art teaching in the later 19th century, by which time it had been displaced by London economically and politically.
Under Louis XIV, France excelled in literature above all; none of its painters equalled the earlier French artists who had chosen to live in Rome, especially Poussin and Claude, nor were its architects as original as the giants of the Roman baroque, but the scale and splendour of Versailles were overwhelmingly impressive and, together with the efficient centralised administration that underpinned the visible splendour of the Sun King, became a new model for modern monarchy.
By the time Louis’ long reign ended with his death in 1715, however, a younger generation was tired of the relentless formality of Louis’ theatre of kingship, and exhausted by the disastrous wars of his last decades. Under the Regency from 1715 to 1723, coinciding with the beginning of the Enlightenment and the importation of new ideas from England, the cultural tone became lighter, more sceptical, more frivolous and at the same time melancholy, as often happens in the wake of an age of greatness.
Antoine Watteau was the painter who epitomised the uncertain mood of an interregnum. He was of Flemish background, which explains the affinities of his work with the style of Rubens, and was not formally trained in the modern academic way, and was less comfortable with the nude than for the body in contemporary dress: he had a particular eye for the movements and gestures we instinctively adopt when wearing a certain kind of clothing, and some of his most important paintings, like Gilles (c. 1718-19), make full use of the expressive qualities of the sitter’s theatrical costume.
Many of Watteau’s pictures depict individuals in theatrical or fancy-dress, reminding us that we are playing roles in a bittersweet comedy; often they are performing music or singing in romantic landscape settings. But his most characteristic theme is love. One small work exquisitely captures the ambivalent sensibility of the period: in The Faux pas (1717), a young man tries to kiss a girl, but she gently pushes him away. The real subject of the picture is the difficulty of communication and the misreading of signals. He thought she was ready to be kissed; but somehow he misunderstood her intention.
Perhaps Watteau’s best-known work is the painting known as The Embarkation for Cythera (1717), although it clearly represents a departure. The point is that all these amorous couples have spent the day on the island sacred to Venus, but now it is evening and it is time to get up and go home to the real world. The setting is idyllic, but the point is that we must leave this idyll and awake from the brief dream of happiness.
The mood of the subsequent period, under Louis XV, is much less dreamlike, less moody and melancholy. There is a bright but also rather pedestrian carnality about the paintings of François Boucher, who was enormously talented but had no qualms about using blatantly formulaic devices for his figures and landscapes, or staging all his mythological subjects as though they were pantomimes performed in a girls’ boarding school.
In fact the king did keep a residential house for girls in the vicinity of the palace, at the Parc-aux-cerfs (Stag Park), but it was not quite a boarding school; it was rather accommodation for his junior mistresses, known as the “petites maîtresses” to distinguish them from his official mistresses, called “maîtresses en tître”, of whom the most famous was Madame de Pompadour. Whereas the marquise was a close friend and confidant, the girls of the Parc-aux-cerfs were kept for much more casual entertainment.
One of the most famous is the subject of a portrait by Boucher, Marie-Louise O’Murphy (1752) an Irish girl born in France, and who was about 14 or 15 when she became a royal mistress. Boucher painted her twice in the same position, reclining face down on a chaise-longue. A similar type of plump and very young girl appears in his earlier Leda and the Swan (1741) in which Leda and a companion writhe in excitement at the sight of the phallic swan. This picture is incidentally an excellent example of the x-pattern made by two crossing diagonals that is typical of Rococo art, replacing the strongly directional diagonals of the earlier Baroque.
From the middle of the century, a new generation of artists turned away from the Rococo style to initiate the movement of Neoclassicism that we will discuss next week. But it was nonetheless in the second half of the century – and even as the drama of the French Revolution was about to erupt – that late Rococo produced some of its most interesting manifestations, particularly in the pictures of Jean-Honoré Fragonard.
This was also a time when erotic themes were the subject of a number of remarkable and sometimes notorious books. One of the most interesting is a very short story by Vivant Denon, later known as a friend of Napoleon and director of the Louvre Museum, where the Pavillon Denon today bears his name. Point de lendemain (No tomorrow) was first published in 1777 and later came out in a revised edition in 1812: its subject is a brief sexual encounter between an inexperienced young man and an older woman, and his gradual realisation that she has only seduced him in order to put her husband off the scent of her real lover.
Another masterpiece of this time was Choderlos de Laclos’s epistolary novel Les Liaisons dangereuses (four volumes from 1782). The two anti-heroes, the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil, former lovers and now friends and accomplices, amuse themselves by seducing individuals who pose a challenge either because they are in love with someone else or because they are not promiscuous; thus Valmont is not interested in easy prey but enjoys the game of conquering the strictly virtuous Madame de Tourvel.
Rétif de la Bretonne is another notable figure, although not of the same literary quality as Laclos; he wrote a large number of books, the best-known today being erotic-sentimental works of which the Marquis de Sade is said to have disapproved as obscene.
One of the best-known was Le Paysan perverti (1775), whose title parodies Marivaux’s earlier novel Le Paysan parvenu (1734-35), and which he followed with La Paysanne pervertie (1784), about an innocent peasant girl who sinks into a life of vice and appalling abuse, her misadventures vividly represented in the engraved illustrations by Louis Binet.
Finally, the Marquis de Sade himself produced among other works Justine, or the misfortunes of virtue (written 1787, published 1791), about a girl who tries to be virtuous and suffers endless misadventures; Juliette, or the prosperity of vice (1797-1801) about Justine’s sister who is the opposite: a nymphomaniac who indulges in the extremes of perversity with her various accomplices; and The 120 Days of Sodom, written while Sade was locked up in the Bastille in 1785 but not published until 1904. These unprecedentedly elaborate sexual fantasies coincide, whatever we make of the fact, with the years of the Revolution.
None of the late Rococo painters is more interesting that Jean-Honoré Fragonard, whose most famous painting today is The Swing (1767) in the Wallace Collection in London. Of all the authors just mentioned, this picture is closest to Vivant Denon in tone, and yet even more innocent in its eroticism. The original title is Les Hasards heureux de l’escarpolette, the happy chances of the swing, and its subject is not premeditated vice but surprise and unexpected delight.
In an idyllic forest that is like a wilder version of one of Watteau’s landscape settings, a girl is perched on a swing that is being pulled by an older companion, possibly a tutor, in the background; in the foreground a young man lies on the ground watching. As the girl reaches the climax of her upward momentum, she extends her right leg and her slipper flies off; at the same time her petticoats open to the youth. Above him a statue of Cupid holds his finger to his lips as though telling him to keep this secret to himself.
Closer to the more complex mood of Laclos’s novel (illustrated by Fragonard and his pupil Marguerite Gérard in the 1796 edition) is a picture painted 10 years later, The Bolt (1777). Fragonard’s style in this painting is harder than in The Swing, and he has assimilated some of the new manner of Neoclassicism. The composition is dramatically asymmetrical: a young man holds an almost swooning young woman in his arms while he reaches up with his right hand to bolt the door of the room. Is this so that they will not be disturbed or so that she cannot run away? She seems to push him away rather half-heartedly; it is like the exchange in Mozart’s Don Giovanni 10 years later again (1787) when Zerlina says “vorrei e non vorrei” (I would and I would not) and Don Giovanni replies, “Là mi dirai di sì” (there, you will say yes to me).
The fact that more than half the composition is given over to the bed draws our attention to this motif, not only as an obvious allusion to what comes next, but especially to the extraordinary and voluptuous way it is painted, an extravaganza of draperies that, as the late art historian Daniel Arasse pointed out, evokes both male and female sexual organs. Even the pillows on the bed are pointed like the breasts of a reclining woman, but immensely enlarged, like the red folds and hollows of the curtain. Far from being empty, the left side of the painting evokes a phantasmagoric state of erotic intoxication.
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