Compared with my two previous National Gallery postings this article has to do with a matter of some gravity. The addition of a Little Black Dress to one of the Gallery’s Garofalo pictures and the transformation of a plodding Gerome picture into an erotic work with crowd-pulling potential, while desirable, cannot be said be essential for the public safety. The ground now to be covered is much more serious and deals with the risk that the National Gallery is complicit in corrupting the morals of four million visiting members of the public every year. The source of contamination is its vast holding of pictures incorporating Gothic imagery in a religious context. We have it on the authority of a foremost biblical scholar, the late Dr Ernest L. Martin, that such features are satanic symbols of the female genitalia. In Dr Martin’s published writings he provides a wealth of evidence to back up his contention and says that it is all part of the Devil’s plan to use church architecture to defeat the forces of light.

The National Gallery is particularly vulnerable to infiltration by the Devil on account of a third of the works in its collection having a Judeo-Christian theme. True it may be that most of them are spectacularly dull and hardly get ten glances a year as people dutifully traipse through the rooms in which they are hung. But ten glances can do a lot of harm if, as is often the case, the artist has filled his canvas with Gothic influences in the form of buildings and artefacts.

The Devil as we know, furthers his purpose with an incremental, drip drip, infusion of evil with a result that is plain to see. Hoodies, binge drinkers, teen-age pregnancies, graffiti artists, muggers, illegal downloading and pot smoking may all be traceable to the profusion of Gothic church architecture in our towns and villages. Such social delinquency is mostly be to be found among the non-art gallery going youth but the Devil’s work-around may be to target their elders and betters (who should be leading them in the path of righteousness) so that the pursuit of cultural enlightment in an art gallery leads them to getting an extra dose of contagion when they least expect it.

The problem falls within my remit because I am working on a Guide to Erotic Art in London’s National Gallery and although I cannot personally get a buzz from the thought that a Gothic arch represents a woman’s vulva and the point at the top the clitoris, I have to accept that it is possible that Dr Martin knows better than me.

Dr Martin was for many years the Head of the Theology Department at the Worldwide Church of God’s Ambassador College in Pasadena. On Dr Martin’s watch the Worldwide Church of God was hugely wealthy, pulling in $200 million a year from its World Tomorrow programme aired on 400 radio and 72 TV stations. At the heart of WCG doctrine was the prophesy that the world would end in 1972 and, in what it must have seen as a mixed blessing, it never recovered from the world’s continued existence after that date. Dr Martin left the WCG and founded Associates for Scriptural Knowledge, an organisation devoted to research into biblical revelation using the tools of history research, archaeology and science.

I came across Dr Martin’s work in 2002 in the form of a long two part article called The Anatomy of a Church on the Internet that he had written in 1998. The article totalled 12000 words and the title was as carefully chosen as the article was carefully reasoned because when Dr Martin speaks of “anatomy” he means just that.

Dr Martin’s premise is that, right back to when Vitruvius (active around the time of the Birth of Christ) wrote his famous architectural treatise, the design of places of worship - at first pagan temples and then Christian churches - could be seen to be based on human proportions. The Grove Dictionary of Art has a long article about Vitruvius confirming that this is precisely what Vitruvius is saying; but Dr Martin then goes off on a wordy journey that has no bearing on anything to found in Grove. According to Dr Martin, the presence of towers and steeples in churches can be traced back to the ancient Egyptian propensity for erecting obelisks to remind the populace to look for the lost penis of the god Osiris. The Doc says that it was quite common, a few centuries ago, to refer to the steeples and spires on churches and cathedrals as “pricks”. “I frankly think” he says, “that they ought to be called by this name today. At least people would then begin to understand what these steeples represent.”

In the second and final instalment of his article Dr Martin refers to Vitruvius’s comparison of temple design to a man laying on his back with his hands and feet outspread and says that it also applies to the human female. He writes:

“If a woman lies on her back in such a posture as Vitruvius mentioned and then lifts her knees to be perpendicular to her body, her legs will obviously be elevated above her body as two projections. Such a position, I am told, is the common one that women assume when they are given a pelvic exam by a medical doctor. The genitalia will be given full view. Transferring this posture to an architectural application in regard to building a sacred temple, as Vitruvius would use it, the temple of the illustration would reveal two elevated towers with an entrance to a temple between the towers at their base. Imagine such a building for a moment. Such a scene is not unlike prime Gothic cathedrals having two spires on each side of an entrance leading into the sacred precincts.”

Dr Martin’s articles are generally well illustrated and at this point there is set into the text a drawing showing the twin tower elevations of Notre Dame, Chartres, Abbey St Denis and Abbey of St. Etoenne. Caen. Dr Martin seemingly overlooking our own Westminster Abbey. He goes on:

“With such an architectural posture in mind, we are now ready to carry the symbolism of the human body (in this case, the female body) into the heart of Christian architectural themes that were used near the period of the Crusades when Gothic [barbaric] designs were becoming popular.”

Dr Martin then makes what (if you accept his thesis thus far) is a reasonable logical deduction that the main entrance to these and all similar churches - lying as it does between towers resembling legs as presented in a pelvic examination - is representative of the woman’s vulva.

The doctor then considers the role of the “mandorla” in church design. The mandorla in religious art is an almond shaped enclosure for a sacred figure. It is also the shape of the vulva in Shelah-na-Gig fertility figures. There are several examples of works featuring mandorlas in the National Gallery and many more across the world of art. Both the National Gallery and the Grove Dictionary of Art provide definitions of the word mandorla as being almond shaped but neither go the extra mile and say that it also symbolises a woman’s external genitalia. But for Dr Martin the sexual connotations are obvious.

“ … if you will cut the mandorla in half the two sections (if turned upward) represent the famous pointed arch that we see in profusion in all of Gothic architecture. It is also the most used form for windows (such as lancet windows) that we see in churches today.”

A few paragraphs later the doctor says that at the top of the pointed arch “representing the place of the clitoris” is where the Shelah-na-Gigs were positioned in “a blatant rendition of what the symbol was teaching.” He goes on to envisage a conversation between Satan and God in which Satan says to God that he has got his sons and daughters assembling where they can find upright and erect penises over their churches, and entering through the female vulva.

A month after the second article was posted Dr Martin returned to the subject with another four thousand words in a piece headed “Female Sex Signs in Churches” in which he identifies the flying buttresses as being analogous to the rib cages of a woman’s body and the transepts as representative as a woman’s fallopian tubes. “Today,” said Dr Martin, “only specialised professional historians know the significance of symbolic designs that are intentionally sexual. So, most doorways and windows shaped with pointed arches and superimposed with filigrees in the clitoral region which augment and highlight the symbolic role of the female genitalia in church architecture have been allowed to remain.”

The doctor then calls in aid a helpful remark by the English diarist John Evelyn apropos of the rebuilding of the churches destroyed in the Great Fire of London to the effect that the Goths and Vandals destroyed Greek and Roman architecture and “introduced in their stead a certain fantastical and licentious manner of building: congestions of heavy, dark, melancholy, monkish piles, without any just proportion, use or beauty.”

He might also have drawn attention to the Oxford Companion to Art’s “John Ruskin” entry that includes the following:

“Like Pugin he [John Ruskin] advocated a revival of the Gothic style, though he differed from Pugin in his theory of ornament. His rejection of the classical tradition followed from his assumption that art and architecture should mirror man’s wonder and delight before the visual creation of God and this demanded a freely inspired and naturalistic style to which he felt that Gothic alone was really suited. He saw ornament as an aid to contemplation of the wonders of divinely inspired Nature and introduced a highly personal scale of expressive value in ornament based on representation of natural forms. He praised the Gothic for its ‘noble hold of nature’ and for the ‘careful distinction of species and richness of delicate and undisturbed organisation which characterise the Gothic design’.

Dr Martin could have argued that these thoughts had been put into Ruskin’s head by the Devil with a view to misleading God-fearing church goers into thinking that they were doing God’s work, Ruskin, he could have pointed out, was very close to the National Gallery at a time when its collection was being assembled and they, too, may have been mislead. Such a suggestion would not, however, sit comfortably with the thought that at one point in Ruskin’s career (as we shall see in a future posting) he took the point role in keeping the prurient works of art bequeathed by his hero W.M. Turner out of the Gallery.

Certainly demons were never very far away from Ruskin and in the last ten year’s of his life they totally took over his mind. Nor can one totally exclude the possibility that the Devil has got to the Oxford Companion to Art.

The National Gallery has a quantity of paintings of Gothic church interiors that are superficially very yawn-making but which come to life if it can be demonstrated that every door and window is a vulva with a clitoris at the pointed end. The fallopian-tube-equals-transepts theory is at first sight slightly disturbing since it was not until 1561 that Gabriele Falloppio announced his discovery and by that time Gothic architecture was already centuries old. Although he does not say so, it is likely that Dr Martin was working on the assumption that Satan knew of the existence of this part of a woman’s reproductive system even if no one else did. Did Satan not send the fallen angels to earth and arrange for them to take advantage of the fallopian tubes of mortal women and produce the race of Nephilim?

Every once in a while I have a look on the Internet to see if Dr Martin’s articles are still available and I am pleased to be able to report affirmatively. Dr Martin died in 2002 but his spirit lives on in the Associates for Scriptural Knowledge web site and you can find the two parts of The Anatomy of a Church here and here.

Dr Martin’s final essay on the subject, Female Sex Signs in Churches is here.

Away from my beat in the National Gallery, but nevertheless illuminating the approach to Church architecture for which Dr Martin has argued and therefore helpful to a study of the Gallery’s paintings of church exteriors and interiors, is an installation that I would be very proud to have done myself. And I do not say this lightly because there is a lot of art, including everything by de Kooning, Rothko, Jasper Johns and others of that ilk that I would not want to claim as my own.

The installation is by Niki de Saint Phalle and is called Hon. Click here to see a larger illustration.) It is sometimes described as a walk through vagina and I love it to bits. Hon is very pelvic and when the public avails itself of the opportunity to make a labic entrance it is doing no more, in Dr Martin’s view, than churchgoers do Sunday-in and Sunday out. When he thinks about it (and I use the present tense not just because the Doc’s theories are still with us but because, if he has had anything to do with it, he is now sitting on the right hand of God) he will envisaging not so much a brightly patterned Niki installation as a Fuseli style nightmare.

As I indicated in the trailer for this posting, I think that the Gothic art and architecture identified by Dr Martin as having a Satanic erotic content forms a discrete genre to which I have ventured a name: Clitoral Gothic. Examples of Clitoral Gothic in the National Gallery abound and no one is more exposed to it than the Gallery’s attendants, who for some reason are called “warders”. I think that the Gallery should examine to what extent their warders’ private lives have been affected. A similar research programme targeting those living close to Gothic buildings should also be put in hand. If only to eliminate the possibility of a Clitoral Gothic effect being mistaken as radiation from cellular telephone masts.

The National Gallery’s catalogue includes a large number of paintings depicting landscape views of churches of Gothic design, Gothic church interiors, and altarpieces in which the saints are enclosed in a Gothic shaped frame. And there are more mandorlas than you could shake a devil’s prong at. It is not difficult to believe that, as it gathered pace in the fourteenth century and for centuries to follow, religious art became a hard fought battleground between the faithful and the Prince of Darkness.

An example of a church interior full of Gothic orifices is the Dutch artist Gerrit Berckheyde’s Grote Kerk Haarlem. (Click here to see a larger illustration.) The Dutch burghers seem very staid but they are contemporary in time and reminiscent in their dress to our own Samuel Pepys - and we know that Pepys was a regular churchgoer and did not leave his dirty thoughts and wandering hands at the door.

The production of painted altarpieces as devices to assist illiterate worshippers in their devotions gathered pace during the fourteenth century. The artist’s design brief was “the more saints the better” but with the saints corralled inside Gothic shaped frames the overall effect may have been neutral. In Jacopo di Cione’s High Altarpiece, painted about 1370, (click here for larger illustration) the Holy Virgin is pictured in the act of being crowned Queen of Heaven by her son Jesus Christ in the presence of saints by the dozen and choirs of angels. As so often happens, Satan has contrived to rain on her parade with a Gothic three part frame resembling a church entered through a door between two towers. The proportions between the three parts of the altarpiece are the reverse of those found in Notre Dame and Westminster Abbey – the “entrance door” being taller than the “towers”. So this is more Mount of Venus (one of Fanny Hill’s favourite expressions) than a pelvic knees-up.

It is interesting, but not something that needs to be discussed at length here, that the artist, perhaps intuitively, has kept Saint Blaise and Saint Catherine of Alexandria well apart. Saint Blaise is in the third row of the left hand panel and Saint Catherine in the second row of the right hand panel. 150 years later Michelangelo will paint Saint Blaise buggering the naked Saint Catherine on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

This was the occasion of much angst to the Church authorities and it was put to some expense to get it removed with a hammer and chisel. The replacement, painted on new plaster, showed the pair a respectable distance apart and Saint Catherine decently dressed. This extreme treatment was in contrast to the over-painting that was all that was judged necessary to remove a profusion of saintly penis’s from the upward gaze of the faithful.

Another National Gallery painting full of Satan inspired elements is Rogier van der Weyden’s Exhumation of Saint Hubert (about 1440). (Click here to see a larger illustration.) Any time up to five years ago this work would have been considered too grisly to reproduce in a family blog. Now - what with CSI and Prime Suspect – it is just another manifestation of common-or-garden necrophilia. Such images today might even be considered suitable for a greeting card or a jigsaw. The Gothic detail in this picture is full of clitoral and pubic hair touches and I dare say that someone can be found to say that the elongate brass furnishing and pillars are phallic symbols. For my part, what I find to be of most significance in this painting are the winkle picker pointy shoes worn by the smartly dressed dude on the right and, more surprisingly, peeping out from under the monk’s cassock in the foreground.

Winkle pickers, known as poulaines, were the footwear of choice throughout Europe for the best part of three centuries, gradually going out of fashion in the 1500’s. They were at the height of their popularity when Weyden’s picture was painted. At one time they became so long that it was the custom to hold up the pointed ends by chains attached to the knee to prevent tripping. Young men took to stuffing the toes with wool and moss to keep them erect and (according to one commentator) “the vulgar trend of painting these extensions in a flesh colour began. A favourite pastime of the younger crowd was to stand on the street and wiggle their feet suggestively at any young lady who happened by.” Not surprisingly the Church found this sort of conduct reprehensible and Pope Urban V banned the lower classes from wearing pointed shoes on pain of excommunication or death. The Black Plague was widely supposed to have been God’s revenge for pointed shoes.

Winkle picker shoes did not come within Dr Martin’s purview so we do not know whether or not he saw them as an invention of the Devil. We do know what he thought about Gothic architecture. Is the case that he makes so strong as to not allow a degree of scepticism on the part of an independent observer? I am minded to tell a funny story here that goes to the point but before doing so must explain that the word “Fanny”, on this side of the Atlantic, means either a girl’s name (as in Fanny Hill) or slang for the female vulva. The US equivalent slang word for vulva is ”snatch” or “pussy” and State side “fanny” has the same meaning as “ass” or “tail” or “butt”. Having to make this point works as a slight spoiler but it cannot be helped because without it my story will be incomprehensible to my American readers. As George Bernard Shaw famously said: We are two nations divided by a common language”. This is the funny story:

A man takes his daughter to see a psychiatrist. There are already two fathers, each with their daughters, waiting to see the psychiatrist. The partition between the waiting room and the consulting room is a very thin one.

The first father and daughter go in and the psychiatrist can be clearly heard telling them to sit down and make themselves comfortable. “What is your name, young lady?” says the psychiatrist to the girl. “Penny,” she answers. “Well,” says the psychiatrist, “we don’t need to go any further. It is clear to me that your problem stems from your father’s complex with money. He is greedy and he is miserly. Why, he even named you after the smallest possible coin of the realm. Now that you know, you will be able to deal with it. Please see yourself out. Next!”

The second pair go in. After they have sat down the psychiatrist asks the daughter her name. “Sherry” she replies. “I can see what your problem is,” says the psychiatrist. Your father is a hopeless alcholic. I do not doubt that you are named after his favourite tipple. I am afraid that it is all to clear what lies at the root of your trouble. You must learn how to come to terms with it. See yourself out, please.

Outside in the waiting room the third father stands up. “Come on, Fanny,” he says. “We are going home.”

In an early draft of my Guide to Erotic Art in London’s National Gallery I told this story at the beginning of a chapter headed “Fanny Go Home”. The chapter dealt with the tendency of art critics and historians to emulate the psychiatrist in the story and draw out meanings from works of art that would never occur to the rest of us and would probably never have occurred to the artist either. As often as not the meanings are of a sexual nature and it would be useful to a writer on erotic art for there to be a name for it. Since there is not one already I have donated “the Fanny tendency”. I have added both “Clitoral Gothic” and “Fanny Tendency” to the Glossary. The Glossary (here) is a living, evolving thing and this, I trust, is evidence of a ground breaking approach to art.

The Fanny Tendency will be the subject of a future posting. To be going on with, I offer for your consideration a painting from the National Gallery’s religious content. The painting by Hieronymous Bosch, is - on the face of it - as shocking an example of Stitch-up as can be found. This artist produced paintings full of surreal sensuality which delight visitors to art institutions all over the world and all we get is a mediocre pot boiler that may not even be by him.

Well: Yes and No. It may not be much to look at but what is interesting about this alleged Bosch is the view that has been put forward by a legendary writer of science fiction that when the picture is turned upside down what you see is a giant penis. (Click here to see a larger illustration.) I shall have to say more about this at another time. There is a lot to say because Christ’s penis from childhood to manhood, as depicted by artists, is the subject several hundred pages of discussion in a highly controversial book by Professor Leo Steinberg. Even the title of the book is in-your-face to the Art Establishment. It is called The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion. “Oblivion” referring to a concerted effort by the entire art world, other than Prof. Steinberg, to ignore the evidence of its eyes that the central theme of most depictions of Jesus, as a child or as a man, is his willy.

The Boschish picture is called Christ Mocked (The Crowning with Thorns). It has two other special attributes: The right way up it can be seen as a groping picture, one of 13 (my researches show) in the Gallery’s collection. And the groper who is targeting the Holy Crotch is the only Jewish Moslem in art, having on his head-dress the yellow star of David and a crescent moon.

The penis that supposedly jumps out of the painting when it is inverted appears to have been circumcised. Again, there is a big heading: Prepuces and the art of the Renaissance, to come. In the course of researching the subject it emerged that certainty as to what a painting depicts, one way or another, is not always possible.

“Stitch-up”, by-the-by, is a special term of art and is defined in my Glossary. I would be anticipating a very large subject heading if I were to say more here than that, if our young aristocrats on their Grand Tours had spent more time routing around the crumbling palazzi of the impoverished Italian nobility and less time in the houses of tolerance our galleries would have had some much more interesting stuff to look at. The National Gallery could make the best of a bad job with its Crowning with Thorns by mounting it on a rotating fixture and allowing it to turn through ninety degrees once in every minute or so.

I leave you with this thought: the legendary author who came up with upside-down analysis of the H Bosch painting is the late Damon Knight. His most famous story, which spawned the The Twilight Zone TV series, was entitled To Serve Man. It turned on a single joke which was that the name of the story was also that of the Aliens’ cookbook - as the human collaborators discovered to their cost. If Dr Martin is right, the National Gallery, as Chef de Cuisine to Satan, is serving us up as hors d’oeuvres at a table hard by the threshold of Hell.