The art of the orgasm: why figures are sexualised
Images of female ecstasy in art can be traced back to the Ancient Greek medical theory that the female orgasm, as well as male, was essential for conception.
When Cassiano dal Pozzo died in 1657, he was mourned by the many artists and scientists whose careers he had fostered. He even paid for the funeral of Valentin de Boulogne, when the painter died suddenly and penniless in 1632. He had been a particular supporter and friend of Nicolas Poussin and had commissioned the first set of the Seven Sacraments from him in the late 1630s.
As a tribute to his friend, Poussin painted a uniquely original interpretation of the Annunciation to be hung above his tomb: instead of the more usual image of a young girl surprised by the angel’s visit, Poussin’s Mary is sitting cross-legged on the ground in meditation, her eyes closed, not looking at the angel but silently communing with the divine. It is a completely philosophical interpretation of the theme of the incarnation of the word, which could also be read as an image of the individual soul returning to the universal spirit.
But Poussin’s painting was also a kind of reply to the dramatic evocation of spiritual communion that had been completed some five years earlier by his great contemporary Gian Lorenzo Bernini in the Cornaro Chapel at Santa Maria della Vittoria. In this extraordinary work, members of the donor family sit on either side as though in boxes at the theatre, gazing at the spectacle of the Spanish mystic collapsing on to a bank of clouds suspended in the air as a smiling angel is about to drive a golden arrow into her breast.
Bernini’s depiction of the saint is based on the vision of an angel that Teresa experienced on several occasions: “I saw in his hands a long golden spear, and at the point of the iron there seemed to be a little fire. This I thought that he thrust several times into my heart, and that it penetrated to my entrails. When he drew out the spear he seemed to be drawing them with it, leaving me all on fire with a wondrous love for God. The pain was so great that it caused me to utter several moans; and yet so exceeding sweet is this greatest of pains that it is impossible to desire to be rid of it …”
The erotic nature of the imagery is unmistakeable in our post-Freudian era, but was not lost on earlier times either. Indeed it is our modern reading that tends to be simplistic when we read this as essentially or merely a sexual image; we forget that the erotic has been used to express spiritual experience since the time of the Old Testament. On the other hand there is without doubt a literalness and physicality to the sexual metaphor that would be hard to match in earlier periods, and which cannot be fully understood without considering Bernini’s earlier erotic sculptures.
As we mentioned last week, Bernini was a true prodigy: not only immensely talented but fortunate to be born into the art, trained in it from childhood, and to work in a world that had an insatiable appetite for the kind of sculpture of which he was the unchallenged master.
Born in Naples in 1598, four years after Poussin, he had produced his first important work, representing Aeneas carrying his aged father Anchises from the burning city of Rome, accompanied by his son Ascanius, in 1618-19. At the age of 20 or 21 he could already do something no sculptor in the world today could hope to emulate.
And yet that work was eclipsed, as his stupendous talent evolved to maturity, by The Rape of Proserpina a couple of years later in 1621-22. The story is taken from Book V of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as so often, but is much older. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, some six centuries earlier, tells how Demeter’s daughter Persephone was carried off by Hades to be his bride in the underworld, an aetiological myth that explains the cycle of the seasons.
Bernini has developed far greater dynamism and freedom of movement in this work compared to the more columnar form of the Aeneas. The axes of the bodies diverge powerfully as the girl struggles against her captor, pushing his head away with her left hand while she raises her right in a vain gesture of supplication. But most remarkable is the artist’s virtuosity in evoking the different qualities of male and female flesh, the sinewy arms and legs of the god against the girl’s soft waist and plump thigh into which his hard fingers sink like a cushion.
As we observed before in the case of the Farnese Gallery, it may seem strange for a work of this nature to be commissioned by one prelate, Cardinal Borghese – in whose villa it is once again housed today – and given to another, Cardinal Ludovisi, especially as by now there was little of the old Neoplatonic sense that being ravished by a god was an allegory of spiritual rapture. But it reminds us what a tolerant environment, perhaps surprisingly, existed in Rome and even at the Vatican, in contrast to the repressive tone of Spanish Catholicism in particular.
Bernini’s next masterpiece was Apollo and Daphne (1622-25), also based on Ovid, and this time on a story narrated vividly yet with a sense of irony in Metamorphoses I. Apollo, who has just slain the monstrous Python, makes fun of Eros’s little bow, but the god of love demonstrates its power by shooting Apollo with a golden arrow of desire, and the nymph Daphne with a leaden arrow of aversion. After a pursuit during which Apollo is afraid she will stumble on the rocky ground and hurt herself, and offers to chase her more slowly if she will run more slowly, he is at the point of catching her when she appeals for help to her father, the river god Peneus, and he turns her into the laurel tree, which is ever afterwards sacred to Apollo and worn by his bards.
Although the treatment of the flesh is astonishing here too – especially in contrast with the bark that gradually encloses the girl’s body as her metamorphosis begins – the emphasis is less on naturalism and more on evoking a sense of lightness, movement and grace. Bernini is particularly concerned too, as we mentioned a couple of weeks ago, to disprove the charge that stone is lifeless by endowing his figures with the illusion of breath.
Breath and animation are vital considerations in his portraits too, but nowhere more than in the bust that he made for himself of his mistress Costanza Bonarelli (1636-37). The young woman, in her early 20s, seems to have just risen from his bed, her nightshirt open, her lips parted and her expression neutral but with an edge of apprehension, perhaps betraying a guilty conscience. It is an unprecedentedly intimate portrait in which the sitter seems to set no boundary between herself and the artist who is her lover.
The relationship was not a serene one, however; Costanza, herself descended from the noble Sienese Piccolomini family, was the wife of one of Bernini’s many assistants; he was by now by far the dominant figure in Roman sculpture with few rivals and a large studio team. But in 1638, Bernini discovered that Costanza was simultaneously having a passionate affair with his younger brother Luigi; enraged, he attacked Luigi, who fled Rome, and had a servant assault Costanza and cut her with a razor.
Costanza ended up being locked up either for adultery or on suspicion of being a courtesan, but she was released after some months and went back to her husband. Bernini was condemned to a heavy fine but then pardoned and advised by the Pope to marry; he took this suggestion, made a happy marriage that produced 11 children and seems to have been well-behaved after this turbulent and distressing episode.
When Bernini came to depict an experience of spiritual ecstasy that was already implicitly framed in the sexual metaphor of being pierced by an angelic arrow, he was thus well-equipped by years of meditating on themes of desire and rapture. Perhaps this is why his vision of ecstasy seems more overtly sexual than that of many contemporaries, in their endless figures of the penitent Magdalene, for example. The blandest expression of rapture is perhaps represented by Guido Reni, but Bernini goes to the other extreme, which is why the figure looks to modern eyes so much like a representation of orgasm.
And perhaps it is. For there is another factor that should probably be taken into account. Ever since the Ancient Greek medical writers, it was believed that the female orgasm, as well as male, was essential for conception. It was only in the 18th century that it was discovered that conception had, apparently, nothing to with the female orgasm, and this in turn led to a debate, still not fully resolved today, about why it exists at all.
Classical medical theory took a very different view, however, and this was carried on in the works of great medieval medical writers like the Persian Ibn Sina, better known as Avicenna, whose Canon of Medicine, an authoritative reference for centuries throughout the Christian as well as Moslem world, was completed in 1025. Avicenna, an Aristotelian who integrated the post-Aristotelian discoveries of the Hellenistic medical writers summed up in Galen, not only insisted that the female orgasm was vital to conception, but drew the logical conclusion that men must ensure that women were properly prepared.
He recommended, in Book III of the Canon, taking time for erotic play – ludus in the Latin translation of his work – until the woman’s eyes are seen starting to turn red – “incipiunt oculi eius mutari in rubedine” – her breath coming more quickly and her speech growing disconnected or halting – “et eius anhelitus elevari et verba eius balbutire”. It is of course highly unlikely that Bernini had read this text, but equally almost certain that he was aware of the theory that female orgasm was necessary for conception.
Previous generations had known this too, but the art of the baroque, for all its religious exuberance, is also underpinned by a new material objectivity that coincides with the scientific revolution. The special kind of naturalism we find in Caravaggio, for example, corresponds to a new conception of strictly inanimate matter, foreign to the Middle Ages. It is that sense of the stubborn materiality of the body that makes baroque spirituality so dramatic, explosive and surprising.
The corporeality which first appeared in Bernini’s work in the yielding thighs of Proserpine thus manifests itself fully in the unprecedentedly sexual figure of Saint Teresa, justified by the artist’s intuition that her ecstasy, like the orgasm of a woman in lovemaking, is what makes her capable of receiving and being impregnated by the arrow of divine love.
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