Drawing number 7 is up and you will find it here. . I am debating whether to interpose some earlier episodes featuring the Count’s manservant. So readers can see what he’s up against.

Access to this continuing Italian erotica fumetti saga permitted only to over eighteens and unshockable.

Is it any wonder that it is taking so long to get to the root of the mystery of what lies behind the curtain covering most of a picture-within-a-picture in the second installment of the National Gallery’s six part Marriage a La Mode? Waylaying me at every turn are other leavings of the Horrible Hogarth that provide yet more clues. Illustrated here is a detail from an earlier work of Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress. It was featured in a Tate Gallery exhibition earlier this year and it is on the Tate’s say-so that I can tell you that the scene is set in the notorious Rose (brothel-cum-) Tavern close to Hogarth’s studio in Covent Garden. The Tate goes on to say in its notes:

“Standing to her left is a waiter who holds a polished salver to put on the table for the prostitute-cum-stripper, seen removing her clothes in the foreground, who will spin and pose upon it.”

I am only showing a detail, because I think that it’s the best thing in the picture by far and because - aside from its bearing on what is happening behind the curtain in Marriage a La Mode- it demonstrates that Hogarth had something approaching a fetish for the upskirt view and for stocking tops and for corsets. In this regard the soft porn of the 1930’s was something of a Hogarth revival. We saw another very similar upskirt view in the outdoor version of Hogarth’s Before and After pictures (you can find them here) and when we get to Picture No 5 in Marriage a La Mode we shall be presented with another heap of corset on the floor.

The detail is from Plate 3 of The Rakes Progress and you can find the whole thing, and the other seven plates, and more bowdlerised explanatory text (which is unlike the Tate) by clicking on its web site here.

What the Tate could have told us is that the dance the lady is likely going to dance is called “Black Joke” joke being another word for “pussy”. The chorus of Black Joke begins with: “Her black joke and belly so white”. Like Uncle Tom Cobley the words vary slightly from verse to verse but whether it be an English boy versed in Venus, a Welshman, a Highland man, a Grenadier or a Bishop they quickly discover that “a black joke will lather like soap.” The final verse, I regret to say, always ended up with a lawyer: “his client’s cause would quit/To dip his pen in the bottomless pit/Of a coal-black joke as will lather like soap.”

As I wrote this last, two things occured to me. There is a pub hard by the Temple where all the barristers have their chambers which is called “The Coal Hole”. It is very popular. In an earlier existence I had some correspondence with a senior trustee of the Tate’s Turner Prize who happened also to be a senior partner in a very distinguished City firm of solicitors of which, coincidentally I was an occasional client. Perhaps the Tate went easy on Black Joke not wishing to offend people in high places?

When performed “posed” on a plate with a candle, the candle is lit. The climax comes, presumably to a raucously emphatic rendering of the lawyer dipping his pen in the bottomless pit, with the dancer gyrating lower and lower over the candle until finally it is enveloped in her vagina and extinguished. A bit like Maria Ewing’s dance of the seven veils in the opera Salome which she performs over a grid covering a pit in the ground in which is imprisoned (one assumes face upturned) John the Baptist. I must tell you about it some day.

I have to now go into Flight of the Phoenix mode. There is a lot of stuff needing attending to and it will take a few days. I will try to put something interesting up on the web site on a daily basis, but it will be short and sweet. See here for what I mean by Flight of the Phoenix.

AN EXERCISE IN COMPARATIVE ANATOMY

The sixth drawing in the Count and the Widow Italian erotic comic (fumetti erotica) series has now been posted. The illustrated notes to the drawing discuss relative penis sizes. A penis recognised as being state of the art which belongs to the Governor of the Great State of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, is used as a benchmark for measuring and exemplifying the miniscule penises found in Renaissance art. The Governator’s member is transplanted on to Michelangelo’s statue of David and a drawing by Giulio Romano of Bacchus. Bacchus’s member is transplanted onto Governor Schwarzenegger. Giulio Romano’s Jupiter seducing Olympius is included to demonstrate the difference between public and private art as regard depictions of the male reproductive member. Giulio Romano is introduced to Robert Maplethorpe.

The sixth drawing and illustrated notes will be found here. Access to persons under age 18 is not permitted. Nor should anyone visit the page who is likely to be offended.

A digitised version of the captions to the illustrations will be found on the ARTISTS ILLUSTRATED page.

The Horrible Hogarth’s speciality of inserting pictures within his pictures has distracted writers with a stronger focus than me from the job in hand. At the moment I am on a detour from a detour and have been having a look at the two or conceivably three bestiality images in the National Gallery’s Marriage a La Mode. These are to be found not in the painting with the curtained-off picture but in the fourth of the six paintings, The Toilette, sometimes called The Morning Levee, which at the present rate of progress, we shall get to shortly before the End of the World or Phil Spector putting on an orange jump suite, whichever comes later.

This is like counting angels dancing on the head of a needle and it stems from wondering (in a scientific way and so forth) whether the image behind the curtain in the second painting, as envisaged by Hogarth, could take the form of a zoophilic relationship between either a) man and beast, or b) woman and beast. And, if either of a) or b), was the act committed in the missionary position (approved by the Church although not when it involves mixing the species) or a tergo (a.k.a. doggie fashion). Doggie fashion is not approved by the Church when a human is involved but is ok between beasts. And if any of the foregoing (and regardless of what the Church thinks) was it the beast or the human party on top?

In the classic art of the Renaissance images of bestiality hardly raised hardly an eyebrow and could be justified, as always, by reference to Greek mythology. Most of the bestiality stories were supplied by Jupiter, Numero Uno on Mount Olympus, who employed a modus operandi which involving disguising himself as an animal so as to get his wicked way with desirable mortals. Usually females, the exception being the boy Ganymede where Jupiter showed up at the scene disguised as an eagle.

Hogarth’s pictures within pictures include, in addition to a Ganymede, a Jupiter and Io where Hogarth painted a rampant cloud or (depending on whether you believe me or Judy Egerton) bear enfolding, in the upright missionary position, an “ecstatic” (per Judy Egerton) Io, and a Leda and the Swan. Ecstasy and being fucked against a wall do not normally go together but in art and mythology the rules are different. Since my last posting I have been taking a scientific look at whether it could have been Leda with her significant Swan who Hogarth had originally intended to put behind the curtain. It could of course have been Jupiter and Io. The thinking either way is that, needing something to put on the wall in the fourth painting, or on a silver salver bought at auction, Hogarth abandoned the idea of using either of these images in the second painting and instead curtained off the space leaving only a male leg showing.

If the man’s leg was always going to be part of the picture behind the curtain it is necessary to consider the possibility that Hogarth’s original plan was to show beast-on-man. Personally I think that this can be discounted because Hogarth’s pictures within pictures almost always referenced known works of art, engravings of which were widely available in his time and were thus known to his prospective customers. I can think of only two precedents in art for beast-on-man (or woman) - other than the boy Ganymede - and it is doubtful whether the respective images, by their nature, were in circulation. Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling portrayal of a serpent fellating an art critic who he hated would have been too gross for public consumption (no other artist has gone there) and the few attempts at achieving a plausible depiction of Pasiphae inside a wooden model of a cow were, as stated in my posting of a few days ago, very unconvincing.

Returning to the Horrible Hogarth’s Tete a Tete and the Great Curtained Picture Mystery my inclination, if we were to go down the Bestiality route, is to think Leda and the Swan because there are precedents in art for a number of variations in the way in which the act can be carried out. There is Swan on Woman missionary position (the National Gallery’s three Leda’s (counting-in Hogarth’s salver) and most of the Old Master representations show it this way. There is Swan on Woman a tergo, anatomically feasible albeit against the Church’s doctrine in more than one sense, and very rarely seen in art. And there is the Woman on Swan cowgirl style which is rarer still. The only example of the latter that I can find is a brooch made by the goldsmith and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini (1500-71) one of whose principal patrons was Pope Clement VII.

As must be clear from these progress reports, trying to get into the Hogarthian mind to see what he was thinking of putting behind the curtain requires a deal of thinking on everyone’s part. I have already laid out my stall in the first Progress Report in which I offered for consideration a female on male cowgirl image which has the advantage of being compatible with the foot projecting from behind the curtain that can only be that of a man lying on his back. The possibility of an element of bestiality cannot be excluded, however, and I think it right to lay it the pros and cons before visitors to this site so that they can make an informed judgement for themselves.

This afternoon I stumbled across a new place for showing and seeing and shmoozing about art. Or may be it is a place for enjoying DJ vibrating beat music and having something to eat and something to drink. Or may be it is all of these. I did not stick around long enough to find out because I had to get back home with Carol’s supper. It is opening for the first time tonight.

This new arts et aliter venue calls itself Reflections and describes itself as a bar and studio. It is in the West End of London in a part that in recent years has come to be known as Fitzrovia. I first came to know the area fifteen years ago. At that time it had at its centre the headquarters of Independent Television News and the place teamed with an exciting mix of media and journo types. ITN moved a mile or so eastward and it would have become the other side of the Moon but for the continuing presence of the London College of Fashion and rag trade businesses and the kookily dressed girls that rush around to-ing and fro-ing from one to the other.

The Reflections Bar and Studio is situated in the basement of a cafe called L’angeletto. The decor is very attractive and there is a nice guy called John Richardson running it. If you are in that part of the world it would be worth looking in. Phone numbers are 07814 740 720 and 07876 541 014. The address is 71 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 6RB

L’angeletto is on the corner of Langham Street and Great Titchfield Street. “l’angoletto” as you knew or guessed is Italian for corner. The entrance is off Great Titchfield Street. There is a web site at www.reflectionshhh.com and a click here will take you to it.

This is a brave venture starting out, like all such brave ventures, with high hopes. It looks like it might just be the one that pulls it off. At the moment it is work in progress and there is the added excitement of being in at the beginning of things.

I have been wondering whether the picture behind the curtain (as envisaged by the Horrible Hogarth in the National Gallery’s Marriage a La Mode) might have involved bestiality. Hogarth, we know, drew upon well known works by old masters (not so old in his day) for his pictures within pictures. This has taken me on a detour from the first detour, and I shall be reporting later today.

The incidence of bestiality in mythology (from which the artists of the Renaissance drew inspiration) mostly involves male-god-on-female-mortal. An exception to the general rule is to be found in the story of Pasiphae who had herself concealed in a specially made mock-up of a cow so that she could couple with a bull with which she had become infatuated. This was one of the stories in the Ten Sexiest Moments in Mythology (if you are a publisher please click here and email me) and it required considerable ingenuity (you could say thinking out of the box) to come up with a plausible solution to the logistics of the situation. Here, to be going on with, is Ian Tovey and my take on the question of how it could be done.

I had hoped by now to be able to post the second of the two detour’s from the Horrible Hogarth’s Marriage a La Mode, picture No 2, Tete a Tete. The first detour, it will be recalled, had us making the rounds of Hogarth’s defloration oeuvre. I am not sure where this second journey will end-up but it is already clear that what is required is a scientific approach. “Scientific” in the Yul Brynner sense of the word.

To show you what I mean: on the left are Fig.s 2 and 3 from the first draft of Drawing back the Curtain on Mr Hogarth. Having identified the object that we are looking at – a painting largely hidden behind a curtain - we must next proceed to a calculation of the dimensions of the painting including the part that is not only curtained-off but out of sight behind some heavy pillars. We then have to consider what was in Hogarth’s mind. Why a foot? Whose foot? What is the rest of the body to which the foot belongs doing? Are there any other images available in the canon of art that might be plausibly put forward as an embodiment of Hogarth’s thought process?

We might also ask whether the National Gallery, in whose keeping the painting has been since its earliest days, knows more than we do. We know from Ms Judy Egerton’s invaluable treatise that the Gallery has given these six pictures - its pride and joy - the CSI treatment, hosing down every square centimeter with X-rays and infra-red reflectograms. It has discovered numerous under-paintings indicative of changes of mind on the artist’s part. The curtained painting was one such instance, the Gallery having gone on record with the revelation of a previous life as a Madonna and Child. Where once was the Holy Virgin and the Infant Jesus there is now 12 inches of recumbent male odalisque and 60 inches of curtain – give or take a pillar or two. Could it have been, pre-the Madonna and Child, even worse? So disgusting that the spirit of Head Curator Hornung came down from Heaven and whispered in the shocked X-ray/infra-red technician’s ear: You have NOT seen this! Or was the Madonna and Child portrayal so scurrilous that its existence, even as a transient Hogarth doodle, would for ever have destroyed his carefully natured image as a great moral crusader?

Ms Egerton contents herself with saying that the presumption must be that the foot belongs to someone engaged in an activity so indecent that the picture has to be largely concealed. As I am writing a Guide to Erotic Art in the National Gallery (did I mention that it is in need of a publisher?) I have to look further than the foot and by scientific deduction work out what indecent activity that might be. In the course of reporting my conclusions it will be my distasteful task to describe things that are not fit for discussion even between married couples. Fig. 7 in the coming article is a present day depiction of what is technically termed “the reverse cow-girl position” and we have to consider whether this was the sort of going-on behind the curtain that Hogarth envisaged. One would hope not, for several reasons. It flies in the face of Church doctrine that the missionary position is the only position permitted. It places the woman in control and, due to the athletic demands that it makes, risks damaging her health.

I am telling you this now because I do not want you to be too shocked when the article is uploaded, probably tomorrow but definitely by the weekend. It is a matter of breaking it gently. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so forth.

There were three formative influences when I started out on the research that will eventually lead to a Guide to Erotic Art in London’s National Gallery once a publisher has been found. There was Ian Tovey, the illustrator with whom I go back to 1995 and the World’s first newspaper to be worn on the head. There was the Decima Four - four young art graduates whose lair was an small art gallery which they had set up in Decima Street, Bermondsey. They did the initial trawl for erotic art in the National Gallery on my behalf, tramping through room after room with clipboards ticking boxes on pre-printed forms. And there was the Atrium Bookshop in Cork Street Mayfair, alas no more.

Tovey and the Decima Four are prime subjects for special articles on this web site but I am dealing with the Atrium Bookshop now because it jumped into my mind when I was thinking about what to write about the curtained picture in the Horrible Hogarth’s second of six Marriage a La Mode paintings. This mysterious picture will be the subject of a detour from the main body of discussion of this famous work under the title Drawing back the Curtain on Mr Hogarth. One of the books that I found at Atrium introduced me to Courbet’s The Origin of the World which is a seminal work in the history of erotic art and which spent a large part of its early life hidden from view behind a curtain. Hence the connection.

The Atrium Bookshop was probably the best specialist art book shop there ever was. It was run by a group of Sloan Rangerish young women which always made me feel slightly uncomfortable given the kind of literature that I was looking for. I quickly discovered that Atrium kept the more scholarly of their pornographic books (or may be I should say the more pornographic of their scholarly books) on a shelf 2 inches above floor level. The Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris has its famous L’Enfer (literally “from Hell”) collection and the British Museum its “Private Case”, access to both of which is as closely guarded as if they were the repositories for state secrets. Atrium did almost as well, as far as I was concerned, by positioning the books in a place where it was necessary to endure considerable pain in order to get at them if one happened to be of a certain age and stiff of joint. But get down I did and there I discovered a trove of books on erotic themes which taken together effectively defined, as it turned out, the project.

Among the books that I purchased from Atrium on a single day’s foray were: Ganymede in the Renaissance - Homosexuality in Art and Society (James Saslow), Heaven & the Flesh - Imagery of desire from the Renaissance to the Rococo (Clive Hart and Kay Stevenson), Taking Positions - On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture (Bette Talvacchia), The Invention of Pornography - Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity 1500 - 1800 (Lynn Hunt, Editor), Solitary Pleasures - The Historical, Literary and Artistic Discourses of Autoeroticism (Paula Bennett and Vernon Rosario, Editors) and The Rear View - A brief and elegant history of bottoms through the ages (Jean-Luc Hennig).

Solitary Pleasures was notable for providing as fine an example as could be imagined of literary badge engineering - the equivalent of Bride stripped bare by her Bachelors Even as a name for a work of art. The literary “come-on” took the form of a contribution by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick re-running an earlier piece by her entitled Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl. Fans of Jane Austen were, of course, outraged on the article’s first appearance but Ms Sedgwick’s career prospered. (I was later to discover that she is a highly respected feminist sex maven - her field of expertise being sometimes referred to as “queer theory”).

Taking Positions is all about I modi, the sixteen drawings produced by Giulio Romano in the 1520’s illustrating sixteen positions of sex. In that moment pornography was born and although the Church promptly moved to suppress them, hunting down those involved, the genii was out of the bottle. The author deserves credit for her identification of a phenomenon in erotic art largely unnoticed by other writers: the slung leg. It is a device developed by artists during the Renaissance to signify copulation without depicting the act itself.

In 1997 The Origin of the World was one of the main attractions in the Women in the 19th Century exhibition put on by the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, where the painting has found a permanent home. The book of the show took the form of a folder containing each of the twenty four paintings on cards with an introduction penned by the well known feminist art historian Linda Nochlin. Nochlin and I met on the Shelf L’Enfer, one might say. Ms Nochlin relates the Courbet picture to the then recent invention of photography which had immediately lead to the creation of pornography for the consumption of a new male market for visual erotica. One result of the impact of the visual realism of photography, says La Nochlin, is that when the ageing Ingres was putting the final touches to his La Source (1856) he added an inviting droop of the belly and a come-hither glance not seen in his earlier nudes.

Jean-Luc Hennig’s masterly exposition on bottoms is by turns chatty and erudite. Its failing grace is that it lacks illustrations. Which is like picnicking in a parking bay on the side of a motorway. Jean-Luc Hennig tells a good story about Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa which, without an illustration, is less than user friendly. He quotes a Quebec art critic Suzanne Giroux as saying that the painting, if turned on its side, conceals a boy’s behind. The artist’s homosexuality, hidden during his life time as best he could, provides a plausible explanation, she says, as to why he should take the trouble of painting the remainder of the picture just to put on to canvas this tiny vignette of desire. The book does have one illustration. The dust cover shows an appropriate view of Canova’s Three Graces - the Pepysian Moment of sculpted bottoms.

Atrium, sadly, proved too good to be true. Even though they were never shy of pricing-up a difficult-to-find book (Heaven & the Flesh, 235 pages, I recollect, cost me £35) and although they clearly did an extensive mail order business, it was a mystery to me that they could afford to pay a Cork Street rent. All around them in Cork Street were galleries with large expanses of light coloured walls punctuated by an occasional Lichtenstein, Pollock, Rouchenberg or Warhol and patrolled by sloopy looking receptionists. True that Atrium’s complement of sloopy girls was the equal of any, but there is a difference in terms of economies of scale between selling books, even at £35, and a nice Roy Lichtenstein with an impeccable provenance at $2,000,000. Eventually Atrium were taken over by Christies, the fine art auctioneers, and soon after that they were shut down.

Of the books liberated from Atrium’s Shelf L’ Enfer, Solitary Pleasures was perhaps the greatest eye-opener. It deals with masturbation which is still a taboo subject in most sections of society and is an anthology of papers submitted by university academics to a symposium held in 1989 under the title The Muse of Masturbation. If the dictionary meaning of “prurience” is correct - “characterised by or appealing to an inordinate interest in sex” - it is not possible to write about masturbation in a wholly clinical way such as one might find in a textbook about gynaecology or urology. Nevertheless the six men and four women brought to their task a certain aplomb and can not be accused of failing to explore the subject in all its ramifications

Amazon.com. completely filled the yawning gap left by the demise of Atrium. Indeed, even if Atrium had struggled on after the takeover, Amazon would surely have dispatched it to an honoured place between the Great Bookends in the Sky. If I had to chose the most significant titles in my bookcase which were born of a click on an amazon.com or .uk web page they would be: Leo Steinberg’s The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, Marylin Yalom’s A History of the Breast and The Guerrilla Girls’ Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art. The Indispensible Hall’s Dictionary and Kenneth Clark’s The Nude I had previously acquired from Atrium, although not from the Shelf L’Enfer. The Story of Art by the All Knowing Gombrich, The Arts by Guru Hendrick Willem van Loon and the Dictionary of Art and Artists by the always dependable Murrays I bought in second hand book shops. This still leaves several hundred books that came from somewhere and I am getting one or other down from the bookshelf all the time. Anyone writing about erotic art cannot live by the Internet alone.

During my short acquaintance with Atrium a very strange thing happened. The shop’s clientele included photographers and from time to time a small area at the back was put aside for a display of their work. Whether as a publicity stunt or for whatever reason the girls behind the counter allowed one of the photographers to photograph them in the nude. The event made a newspaper diary piece and reading it made me want to see it for myself. Very strange feeling walking past the girls on the way to look at the photographs of them without clothes. Particularly as I was not sure where the back room was and had to ask for directions.

Iconic images both and, sadly, neither of them in our National Gallery.

Many artists have taken as a subject the erotic dreams that agonisingly tempted the two hermits St Jerome and St Anthony the Great but they have not been willing to apply the same treatment to St Augustine whose erectile problems are well know. “Lord make me chaste,” St Augustine famously said, “but not yet.” As we see in the fifth drawing from the Italian fumetti erotica comic book story the Count, for his part, is no less prone to experiencing independent action on the part of his member but is not troubled by it. In the notes to the fifth drawing Saint Augustine comes in for what must surely be a well deserved and not before time roasting. The illustration on the left, The Temptation of Saint Augustine, owes a great deal to the National Gallery’s Saints Augustine and Monica by Ary Scheffer and even more to the Limburg Brothers’ daring picture of a devout young man being forcibly groped. For more about how all this plays out in the world of art, go here. But not unless you are 18 years old and unlikely to be shocked by explicit illustrations and text. A larger version of The Temptation of Saint Augustine has been placed in the Gallery here.