My association with Ian Tovey dates back to 1995 and to my ill-fated newspaper publishing venture. He has since gone on to do great things and his work appears at weekly intervals in one of our leading quality newspapers, The Observer, which is part of The Guardian group and hits the streets every Sunday. Whilst I am “of a certain age” when it is possible, and indeed meet, for a person to take a relatively detached view of sex and sexual matters, Ian is younger by several decades. He has a huge talent for a capturing a likeness and I kind of feel proud for spotting him at the beginning his career. OK! OK! So I am talking the talk. But if you want some proof I will walk the walk with you just a few steps to the most recent edition of the Observer where, as ever, his work is prominently featured in the main part of the newspaper.

As soon as the Decima Four had completed their detailed assessment of whatever erotic content there was to be found in the National Gallery’s paintings – the starting point for my Guide to Erotic Art in the National Gallery project - I put to Tovey the idea that he should provide the book’s illustrations. There would be twelve in total. Each illustration would re-interpret a famous National Gallery picture. The selection process proved more difficult than I had anticipated, however, and ground to a stop at just seven. These seven more or less selected themselves by combining an iconic image familiar to members of the public with very definite erotic content. The remaining five candidates for the Tovey-Samuelson treatment were less obvious either because the erotic potential was more obscure or because the pictures were not very well known.

The first-to-be-chosen seven were: Judgement of Paris by Rubens, Young Spartan’s Exercising by Degas, Venus with Mercury and Cupid by Correggio, Venus and Mars by Botticelli, An Allegory with Venus and Cupid by Bronzino, Angelica saved by Ruggiero by Ingres and The Rokeby Venus by Velazquez. These seven works are more than iconic, they are super-iconic. They are instantly recognisable to anyone with even a slight acquaintance with Old Master art. For the remaining five, we eventually settled on Cupid Complaining to Venus by Cranach the Elder, Chastity by Moroni, Judith in the Tent of Holofernes by Liss, the Bagnio scene from Marriage A la Mode by Hogarth (the same Horrible Hogarth and the same Marriage A La Mode that I have been writing about for weeks now) and Ladies and Gentlemen playing La Main Chaude by Janssens. The Cranach and the Hogarth are very iconic, the Moroni and the Liss less so, and the Janssens not at all. In fact the Janssens picture - which I picked out from the Gallery’s catalogue - was nowhere to be seen in the Gallery’s public rooms. It was eventually unearthed in the basement storeroom.

The description “Tovey-Samuelson” for these re-interpretations is appropriate because, although every molecule of ink on the drawings comes from Ian Tovey’s hand, the underlying conception of what to do with each picture was largely mine. And as the work proceeded I was never backward in putting in my two penn’orth. My brief to Tovey was that he would do “straight” pictures. By “straight” I meant without surrealist overtones. This is akin to instructing a rottweiler not to bark but I was not displeased with the outcome of our joint efforts. For most of his commercial work Tovey is left to his own devices and receives (and needs) little or no direction at all. With my work, the drawings were batted to and fro until I felt that we had sucked into the open every vestige of eroticism bottled-up within the picture on the National Gallery’s wall.

Later, I commissioned further illustrations along similar lines from Ian Tovey for two subsequent writings. One was a book with the working title A Surfer’s Guide to Erotic Art on the Internet – which in essence was a book about the still to be publishedGuide to Erotic Art in the National Gallery book – and which has been overtaken by this blog. The other vehicle for the Tovey touch was the Ten Sexiest Moments in Mythology to which references have been made in these pages. This project generated ten more illustrations (one for each sexiest moment) for the Tovey-Samuelson collaborative oeuvre. The Ten Sexiest’ book will eventually find a publisher. The illustrations for the Surfer’s Guide’ will come in handy and will not be wasted.
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The sex angles present in the twelve works selected for re-interpretation for publication with the Guide to Erotic Art in the National Gallery, aka the “Tovey Twelve”, can all be summed up in a few words. Keeping to the same order as above: Paris is judging a beauty competition between three voluptuous females without a stitch of clothing between them. Naked Spartan boys are wrestling nearly naked Spartan girls. Not everyone thinks that Venus and Mercury were just good friends. Venus and Mars (another of her boyfriends) are relaxing after making love. Cupid is French kissing his mother (Venus again). The naked Angelica is chained to a rock averting her eyes from the knight who has come to rescue her. (Tovey and I always referred to her as “the tot on the rock”.) The Venus which for years hung above the mantlepiece in Rokeby Hall (who was not Venus but a dishy piece especially well furnished in the bum department and Official Best Bum per the BBC) is the equivalent among Old Master works of art to Jennifer Lopez. Cranach’s Venus (her again) looks anorexic (which is typical for this artist) but this does not stop her strutting her stuff. Chastity is sitting very unchastely with her legs spread wide open. Whether Judith had sex with Holofernes is an open question. Bagnio, in Hogarth’s time, was the name for a brothel with rooms for renting by the hour and “La Main Chaud” (literally “hot hand”) is an old French party game in which playful socialites get to spank each other.

Of the twelve pictures, Cranach’s painting, responds the least to the Tovey-Samuelson treatment. We have her on the catwalk where she is probably infecting the male members of the fashionista audience with erectile disfunction. It has been doing that to National Gallery goers for four decades now and in today’s blame culture the Gallery should think about whether they should continue to have it on display.

The mostly widely accepted explanation for what the Cranach Venus painting is about passes over her 200 calories a day skin and bones frame and homes in on the little Cupid who, the story goes, has been trying to steal honey from a hole in a tree. It is a shame that there is no Tarzan-like figure in Cranach’s picture because then I could get to tell the story about Tarzan and Jane, unsuitable though it is for a scholarly discussion about art like this one.

The story that I am not going to tell is about how Jane (a big well fed girl) comes across Tarzan in the jungle and strips off and invites him to make love to her. Tarzan says that he “not know how”. Jane explains to him what is involved. Tarzan then moves back half a dozen paces and takes a running kick at Jane’s crotch. Jane collapses and gasps “What do you think you are doing?” “Check for bees,” says Tarzan.

Not very long after Tovey and I had finished our twelve re-interpretations of National Gallery paintings the Gallery itself embarked upon a similar project and put on a show in which 24 contemporary artists were invited to re-interpret a similar number of the Gallery’s most iconic masterpieces. The show was called Encounters - New Art from Old. The Gallery marked the occasion with a sumptuously illustrated book which would have been a fun read but for the suffocating curatorial artspeak that accompanied the pictures. This is a whole other story, the telling of which must await another day.

Inspection? What Inspection?

The correct name for the third picture in the National Gallery’s Marriage a La Mode is not, as many writers say, The Quack Doctor. It is The Inspection and even for those who get it right the one question that seems always to go unanswered is: What, precisely, is being inspected?

This picture is probably the nastiest single picture in the National Gallery. Which is saying something considering that there are walls filled with sado masochistic depictions of of dying saints, severed heads, rapes, massacres and other atrocities. (Doc Martin would also wish me to mention the paintings of Gothic churches with gaping orifices.)

The scene in this third picture is set in a sleazy doctor’s consulting room. The dissolute Viscount is there with a girl who is either already his young mistress or has just been given the job. She is just a little tot. The doctor, an evil and filthy looking character, is cleaning his glasses with a dirty snotrag. The fourth person in the room is a very large lady in a very large gown who is what is know as a bawd. A bawd from Central Casting, you could say.

The Viscount is seated and looking relaxed even though he is waving his cane in the air. He is holding a box of pills and saying something to the doctor who is listening but has a disbelieving expression on his nasty face. There is a second box (or may be it is the lid of the box that the Viscount is holding in his hand) on the seat of the chair and next to his groin. The bawd is holding a knife and looking like she is ready to use it. Why? And on whom? Or on what? We do not know. The Viscount and the bawd have black spots, or possibly patches covering spots, on their faces which, in Hogarth’s private language, means syphilis. The little tot, who is about to lose what shred of innocence she has left to her, is dabbing what some say is a syphilitic sore on her mouth. She, too, has a pill box in her hand.

The room is littered with an assortment of medical artefacts that include a model of a skinned corpse (technically known as an ecorche) and a skeleton. Unbelievably, the skeleton is kissing and groping the corpse. He has a bony hand on the corpse’s crotch, and one of his leg appears to be thrust between the corpse’s skin-less legs. If I have read this last correctly it is as a good an example of a slung leg (a metaphor for sexual intercourse referred to in a previous posting here) as could be imagined. There is an art genre known as Death and the Maiden which has spawned paintings that are easy on the eye in comparison with this pair. Some of them were shown in the trailer to this posting (here) but another one won’t hurt. (”Sticks and Stones can break my bones but pixels can not harm me.”)

So much for the trimmings. So what is going on? One commentator, opining on the Internet, says that the girl is being sold as a new mistress to the Viscount by her mother. This seems improbable because it takes no account of the pills and the doctor. Judy Egerton, who is a kind of guru to me as regards the National Gallery’s Marriage a La Mode pictures, says that the woman, who she calls the virago, seems to be furious that the young girl that she has procured for the Viscount has been brought back infected with his disease. She also reckons that the doctor himself is an advanced sufferer from the disease because his face is dish shaped on account of the sunken bridge of the nose, bulging forehead, thick lips and probable toothlessness and deformed (bowed) legs.

Ms Egerton makes, what I thought when I first read it in her book accompanying the National Gallery’s 1997/8 Marriage a La Mode show a very telling observation concerning the material of the virago’s bodice and the girl’s skirt which are both red flowers on a gold background. Ah! Ah! she says, prefiguring Dr Michael Baden’s evidence at the Phil Spector trial, this is Hogarth’s way of telling us “like mother like daughter”. I had second thoughts when I later came across Hogarth’s portrait of William Cavendish, 4th Duke of Devonshire, done about the same time in which the Duke’s waistcoat has much the same look about it. Hogarth’s inventive genius, while extraordinary by the standards of other artists, was nevertheless finite. On third thoughts I think Ms Egerton has a good point and it is one that no one else has spotted. It occurs to me that the bawd’s outfit and the girl’s skirt may have been cut down from the same set of curtains, Sound of Music style.

Beyond pointing out that Hogarth’s name for the painting was The Inspection and not The Quack Doctor my guru is silent on the matter of what inspection was contemplated. And in none of my reading has anyone else ventured an opinion. I am now, therefore, out on my own.

“Inspection” means that something is going to be looked at and that something can only be the girl’s private parts. But for the pills one could be reasonably certain that the purpose was to confirm her virginity, and who better than a doctor? The second most likely reason for her coming ordeal would be to confirm that she was free from venereal disease. But, once again, the pills get in the way. And, anyway, the Viscount is already infected - so what does he care? This leaves us with one remaining possibility which is to ascertain whether the girl is pregnant. And may be, if she is, to procure an abortion.

Abortion has been around since the beginning of time. The Oxford Classical Dictionary which covers the Greek and Roman eras has an entry which refers to abortion using plant products taken orally or as suppositories and also the use mechanical means. The pills, or the bawd’s knife, may have a bearing on the situation. The question is begged: How is the inspection to be carried out? It is Hogarth who is doing the begging.

My guru says that this doctor is a real doctor and not a quack. So we should assume that the inspection would conform to best medical practice in times past which respected the delicacies of a situation in which a male doctor is examining a female. I can only find one image that shows how such examinations were carried out and it post dates Marriage a La Mode by rather more than half a century. It is nevertheless valid for the present exercise.

It is necessary to again point out that the artwork generated for the purpose of illustrating points made in posting is always conceptual and when the Guide to Erotic Art in the National Gallery comes to be published it will need to be redone professionally. It will be seen that both the doctor’s syphilitic physiognomy and the rag with which he is polishing his glasses have been patched across from one to the other and the rag now protrudes from his pocket. Ms Egerton, who should know, says that it must be the most disgusting handkerchief in the whole of British art and it seemed a pity therefore not secure for the revised artwork so unique a feature. If the wretched girl has not already contracted syphilis she will have by the time the doctor has finished examining her.

With the greatest respect to Ms Egerton, whose knowledge of British Art is exponentially greater than mine (and she actually likes the stuff), I think she is mistaken in thinking the Viscount is the principal patient and the fact that he is sitting while she is standing is because she is his social inferior. She is stood up because she is going to be inspected.

I see no room for doubt as to what Hogarth had in mind when he named this third episode of Marriage a La Mode: The Inspection. I am surprised that I am the first to work it out. For me, one great mystery remains: Why should anyone in Hogarth’s time, or at any time since, want to put this picture up on their wall?

It is just not me who thinks so, apparently. David Bindman, internationally acknowledged as an authoritative commentator on Hogarth, deals at length with the Marriage a La Mode paintings in his book devoted to Hogarth published by Thames & Hudson but totally ignores the third painting both in the text and by way of an illustration. And one of the essays in The Other Hogarth (Princeton} singles out a view expressed by another acclaimed and much quoted “Hogarthian”, Robert Cowley, that - with the introduction of child prostitution to the narrative - it looked like Hogarth had temporarily lost control of his plot.

As mentioned in the trailer to this posting, I decided that I needed to read what Robert Cowley had to say before wrapping-up my own comments on this third picture in the Marriage a La Mode narrative. And regardless of what I find in his book, I have not finished with Old Gropey (the skeleton in the cupboard in case you did not realise). So, here endeth the first ninety-five percent. Another fifteen percent to come.

In ascending order, Kenneth Clark, later Lord Clark (1902-1983) is famous for being the Director of the National Gallery between 1932 and 1945, for producing the BBC’s groundbreaking television series Civilisation, as author of the definitive work on the nude in art, The Nude, and as father of the sometime representative in Parliament for Kensington & Chelsea, serial womaniser and diarist, the late Kenneth Clark MP.

Clark the younger was for a time a minister in Margaret Thatcher’s government. He famously fucked a judge’s wife and his two daughters at the same time and wrote it up in his diary, referring to them as “the coven”. He tells of a time when he was on a train traveling from London down to his family home at Saltwood in Kent.

“…a plump young lady came into my compartment at Waterloo. She was not wearing a bra, and her delightful globes bounced prominently, but happily, under a rope knitted jersey, as the new coach/old chassis train joggled its way over the many points and junctions.

“I gave her a huge grin, couldn’t help it. After a bit I moved over and sat beside her. She was adorable. Am I crazy? Death wish? Above us in the luggage rack the Red Box gleamed like a beacon. She works as a shop assistant in Folkestone.”

[A red box, for the benefit of my overseas readers, is a box the size of a large briefcase, coloured bright red, in which government ministers receive and carry around documents of State. One of the things that I learned from following the Phil Spector trial (possibly the only thing of lasting value) is that in the USA a briefcase is called a valise.]

Inherited genes being what they are, it is possible see the man behind the many sensual passages in The Nude through the pages of the son’s diary. When Lord Clark came to describe the contrapposto pose, which he calls “dehanchement”, the phrases that he used were “vivid symbol of desire” and “swing of the hips” - the latter being the meaning in French. On the other hand an aging woman in a Durer bathhouse is dismissed as “the fat monster on the right” and on a poor Roman copy of another of Praxiteles’s Venus’s (the so called Venus of Arles now in the Louvre) he comments that “if she were placed on the staircase of an old-fashioned hotel we should not give her a second glance.”

It is because he writes so beautifully and because he shamelessly admits that the “turn on” factor is an important part of the art landscape that Clark has been given the accolade of “of blessed memory” in my own inadequate writing. He would not have earned it for his sojourn at the National Gallery because during his time there he did the equivalent of “going Hollywood”. It must surely have been contrary to his gut instinct to hang on to all the boring religious art and Grand Tour rubbish instead of selling it off and getting some good erotic pictures in their stead.

The opening paragraph of The Nude has been committed to memory by generations of students of art and art history. It distinguishes between the naked and the nude. The former, says Clark, implying embarrassment for most people, the later, in educated usage at least, no uncomfortable overtone. The projected image is not a “huddled and defenceless body” but a “balanced, prosperous and confident body.”

The sites on the Internet on which the word de’hanchement (sometimes spelled dehanchement) is used in an artistic or in any other context are few in number other than those in the French language. In fact, I have been able to discover only two for “dehanchement” in the sense in which Lord Clark used it. One of these, curiously, is the web site of a former art professor, name of Stephen Dubov, serving a thirty year sentence without parole for possessing a sizeable stash of cocaine. He spends his time in the Federal penitentiary making modern sculptures that are well received by the world outside. He has done his own version of the The Three Graces and in a well researched background note (here) he uses both “dehanchement” and “contrapposto”. It is not clear from the context whether he sees a difference between the two poses.

The second site is a recent posting by someone who is gleeful at having discovered so unusual a word. I know the feeling. You will find it here.

There is another phrase used by the blessed Clark in The Nude that has stuck in my mind. When he singles out the Limburgh Brother’s Fall of Eve (c.1410) as marking the nude’s return to the world of art’s favour as the Renaissance gets under way he says that Eve is “naked as a shrimp.” I googled the phrase back in November 2003 and came up with what I call a “constructive Googlewhack” (see here in the Glossary) there being no sightings for the phrase. By contrast “naked as a jaybird” gets an entry in slang dictionaries, my favourite definition being “bare-assed”. “Naked as a shrimp” is still to this day a constructive Googlewhack. When I googled it just now I came up with one hit - which was my posting of yesterday trailing this present piece! (The jaybird phrase apparently originates with the little featherless jaybird chicks that fall out of the nest.)

If we look carefully at the bare-assed Eve (or, if you prefer, Eve in all her shrimpiness) you will see that the Limburgh boys had not thought it desirable to bring back from the classic era the dehanchement pose. They may have reasoned that, as the book they were illustrating was to assist their patron the Duc de Berry in his private devotions, too much swinging of the ass would be counter productive.

Lord Clark sets out his stall within the first few pages of The Nude. On page 1 there is a reproduction of Valasquez’s Rokeby Venus, pride of the National Gallery which he once directed. It is, incidentally, an example of horizontal dehanchement and as Ian Tovey and I demonstrated here it retains its allure when re-arranged vertically. On page 5 of The Nude the illustration is Courbet’s La Source which, to the average bottom, is as a 12 meter yacht to a dingy. On page 6 comes a photograph by Oscar Rejlander taken in 1857 of a lady with a bottom with the lines, say, of a classic Riva power boat. At this point in the book there is the passage which I am about to quote and which, if I could parade it across the top of this web site as a permanent banner, I would.

“The human body, as a nucleus, is rich in associations, and when it is turned into art these associations are not entirely lost. For this reason it seldom achieves the concentrated asthetic shock of animal ornament [referring to images of an animal biting its own tail found in antiquity] but it can be made expressive of a far wider and more civilizing experience. It is ourselves, and arouses memories of all the things we wish to do with ourselves; and first of all we wish to perpetuate ourselves.

“This is an aspect of the subject so obvious that I need hardly dwell on it; and yet some wise men have tried to close their eyes to it. ‘If the nude’ says Professor Alexander ‘is so treated that it raises in the spectator ideas or desires appropriate to the material subject, it is false art, and bad morals.’ This high-minded theory is contrary to experience. In the mixture of memories and sensations aroused by the nudes of Rubens or Renoir are many which are ‘appropriate to the material subject’. And since the words of a famous philosopher are often quoted, it is necessary to labour the obvious and say that no nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even although it be only the faintest shadow – and if it does not do so, it is bad art and false morals.”

You will see now why, for me, Kenneth Clark, whether commoner or Peer, will always be of blessed memory.

My next posting will be a Glossary Gloss on Lord Clark, formerly Kenneth Clark (and, by whatever name, of blessed memory) and his book The Nude. Like all my postings on erotic art it will Astonish and Amaze you. Not for the genius and wit of the writing but because you will be filled with wonder that anyone can extract so much prurient spin out of a dusty old place like the National Gallery.

There is a sub-agenda to my decision to put up a longish piece about Lord Clark. Writing about erotic art on a non-anonymous web site is like getting glue on your hands that you will never be able to be get off. At 78 it does not matter as much as it would if one were forty years younger but even so the thought often crosses my mind: Should I be doing this?

So far, believe it or not, I have been holding back on some of the more extreme stuff. But as we get deeper into the subject we will be pushing at the boundaries of the literature of erotic art and I am not sure whether we (me, and you, and others visiting this web site) will be ready for it.

Lord Clark, who had a long innings as Director of the National Gallery, was as one with my view that there is nothing to be ashamed of in getting an erotic fix out of a painting of a naked woman and it was his view that if there was not an erotic fix there was something wrong with the painting. He would not have gone along with my view that it is only the paintings with an erotic content that are worth looking at, but it takes all sorts to make a world.

Which brings me back to the National Gallery. I called it, just a moment ago, a dusty old place. In all fairness to the Gallery this needs to be qualified. 90 per cent of the pictures in its collection are (metaphorically speaking) dusty old pictures but when I popped in last week to check out the Horrible Hogarth’s Marriage a La Mode paintings the place was fairly buzzing. It was hardly possible to make one’s way through the rooms without tripping over girls sitting on the floor drawing pictures on the walls and everywhere there were groups of people being told by lecturers why they should marvel at some other (dusty old) picture on the wall.

I got that strange feeling that one always gets when one looks at a familiar image from a book or a newspaper or the television and then sees the real thing. If it is a celebrity he or she always looks smaller than one had imagined. The Hogarth pictures looked very small by comparison with the image that had lodged in my mind and another odd thing is that the reproductions tend to be more colourful and more revealing of the fine detail than the actual pictures themselves. Then something stopped me abruptly in my tracks, as the saying goes. The six Marriage al La Mode paintings are at the right hand end of a long wall which then turns through 90 degrees to become a short wall up to an entrance door. On the short 90 degree return I suddenly came face to face with Hogarth’s famous The Shrimp Girl. I looked at her and I said “I know your secret.” I think she blushed.

When she saw what she had done she went to the Tate and gave its Fontana rubbish forty one. I wish.

This posting began life in the early hours of a cold and rainy November Sunday as a sort of place holder for my forthcoming Glossary Gloss on Lord Clark and his justly famous book The Nude. The text of the Gloss is already finished and it awaits only completion of the illustrations. I take a lot of trouble over the illustrations and usually encapsulate the captions with the image using Adobe Illustrator software. Sometimes it takes as long to do the illustrations as it does the text. I think the extra effort worthwhile because a site like this not only has its regular visitors, it is a destination for folk searching on a particular art subject. The pictures will be what is looked at first and if you are trying to put over a message (which is what blogging is all about) you need to start there. Anyway, that’s what I think.

In the coming Glossary Gloss there is a discussion of dehanchement which is Lord Clark’s word for contrapposto. I refer to the discovery by me and Ian Tovey that the horizontally dehanched Rokeby Venus (by Velazquez, pride of the National Gallery) retains its allure when rearranged vertically. The illustration here comes from The Count and the Widow, a feature of this web site somewhat neglected in the past few weeks but still very much an on-going enterprise. As a place holder ornament I thought it would do nicely. And that, I thought, was that.

Then, during a waking-up tour of various issues surrounding my life, it occurred to me that I have a lot of stuff on the Rokeby Venus, written and not published, which made it worthy of an Art Note in its own right. This is it.

There may be no single painting in the National Gallery of which more has been written and whose image is more indelibly impressed on the minds of art lovers than the Velazquez Rokeby Venus. Some people call the painting the Toilet of Venus and some people call it Venus at her Mirror but by whatever it name the picture goes the erotic waves pulsing from it can not be ignored. As I like to point out at every possible opportunity, the ultimate accolade came at the beginning of an hour long television programme devoted exclusively to this painting by the British Broadcasting Corporation early in 2003. It opened with the immortal words “The most smackable bum in western art.”

The pose - which shows only a rear view of the lady, her face reflected in a mirror - has naturally given rise to speculation as to what she would look like from the other side. Might she, like some other famous Venus’s in art, be pleasuring herself? The expression on her face says she might well be, but from what we can see of her left arm she would have to be double jointed for her left hand to be actively employed. More likely the obverse, as a numismatist would term it, would show a royal flush of cleft, breast and nipples. All laid out on a black silk sheet ground.

I sometimes wonder if the National Gallery warders (which is what the Gallery calls it Old Master minders), in a counter-boredom strategy, allow their minds to dwell at unhealthy length on what may be the view from the other side. Unwittingly, if there is anything in the theory that the Rokeby Venus is not one but two works of art, they will be exposing themselves to subliminal imagery in which sex is combined with violence .

To begin at the beginning. The Rokeby Venus was painted by the Spanish Court Artist Diego Velazquez somewhere around 1650. It is what I call Velazquez’s Snow Knight (see here in the Glossary) because there is nothing nearly comparable to it in the rest of his considerable output. Velazquez was working in an ultra-religious enclave untouched by the blast of Renaissance liberalism blowing through the rest of Europe. No one knows who the lady was and with Spanish Inquisition spies everywhere the painting could only have been displayed privately. A less likely start in life for one of the most outstanding examples of the nude genre of all time cannot be imagined. Snow Knight, it will be recollected, was a horse who had never won a decent race in his life and would never do so again and started in the Derby as a rank outsider. (The odds of 50 to 1 were the bookies mugging the punters.) The horse led the field from start to finish. The odds against Velazquez producing the Rokeby Venus were 5000 to 1.

Snow Knight returned to obscurity but fame and fortune awaited the Velazquez painting. In 1814, having at one time been owned by the Duchess of Alba (herself famous for being painted with and without clothes by Goya), it was purchased by the Squire of Rokeby Hall, Yorkshire. At this point the painting acquired the name by which it is popularly known. At Rokeby, according to the BBC, the painting was hung over the fireplace but well above the eyeline of the ladies so as not to embarrass them. Hogarth, doubtless, would have hung it behind a curtain with one foot poking out.

The purchase by the National Gallery of the Rokeby Venus in 1905 represented a major milestone in the history of the National Gallery and a victory for the National Art Collections Fund that had been formed two years earlier in an attempt to prevent the exodus of national art treasures to wealthy overseas buyers. It immediately became the flag ship painting in the National Gallery’s collection.

Lucio Fontana

In 1905 Lucio Fontana, aged 6 and son of an Italian sculptor, arrived in Milan from Argentina where he had been born. In the years leading up to the second World War he acquired a reputation as an abstract artist producing large quantities of abstract ceramics and abstract sculptures. He spent the war years, 1940-6, in Buenos Aires further enhancing his avant-guarde credentials and providing further evidence that, whatever else could be said about him, he was not stupid. Between 1947, back in Italy, Fontana issued a series of manifestos on the subject of spatialism in which he rejected easel painting in favour of art that would “transcend the area of the canvas.” Sometime around 1950 Fontana established as his speciality works comprised of holes in plain coloured canvas. In 1958, in a move that was to make his name famous across the world of art, he replaced the holes by slits. The slit canvases and bronzes are considered to be the culmination of a conception of art that regards it as a record of action and gesture. It is an area in which Fontana is considered to have been a pioneer. There is, however, a persuasive case for saying that a suffragette called Mary Richardson got there before him.

Mary Richardson

The lone voice that attests to Mary Richardson’s place as the true founder of spatial art is a young Danish artist called Lisa Rosenmeier. Ms Rosenmeier is an artist who uses museums, the Internet and the mass media to present viewers with what she describes as suggestive, many-layered congnitive spaces in which the viewer is involved both mentally and physically. It would do Ms Rosenmeier a great injustice to say that this sounds reminscent of slits in canvas because, unlike Fontana who made a career of goosing the gullible and never produced anything worthwhile, she has produced a quite remarkable web site in which she employs state of the art web technology to tell the story of Mary Richardson’s happening at the National Gallery on 10th March 1914. If the web site is typical of her work Ms Rosenmeier is certainly someone to watch.

Mary Richardson was a militant suffragette who went up to the painting of the glass framed Rokeby Venus as it hung in the National Gallery and without warning produce a meat chopper hidden in her muff with which she attacked the painting. On hearing the sound of breaking glass a police officer who was at the door to the room and a gallery attendant rushed towards her but before they could seize her she had made seven large cuts on that part of the canvas on which Venus’ naked back and bottom were painted. The picture was, says Ms Rosenmeier, the victim of one of the most dramatic art actions in modern times.

The situation that had made Mary Richardson flip was the increasingly savage conflict between the suffragette movement and the government of the day. The struggle by women to obtain the vote had been gathering momentum since before the turn of the Century. Under Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst’s leadership women who were arrested for disrupting meetings and other kinds of disorder refused to be fined and chose imprisonment instead. Once imprisoned they went on hunger strike. The authorities responded by force-feeding, a brutal process which inevitable led to a public outcry. On June 4th 1913 Emily Davison threw herself under the King Edward VII’s racehorse Amner as it rounded Tattenham Corner in the Epsom Derby and was killed. (Amner, it may be noted, was third from last at the time – which is around where the eventual winner is usually to be found. One of the greatest ever Derby jockeys, Harry Wragg, was known as “the Head Waiter.)

Nine months passes and as Mary Richardson is making her way towards the Rokeby Venus clutching her hidden meat chopper Mrs Pankhurst is again in prison and on hunger strike. On her arrest Mary Richardson tells the police: “They are killing Mrs Pankhurst. You can get another picture, but you cannot get a life.”

Mary Richardson’s strategy, says Ms Rosenmeier anticipated some of the formal features explored by happening artists and by Fontana. She succeeded both in transforming the beautiful Venus from aesthetic object to murder victim and in transforming woman’s position in art from passive to active, from the role of model to that of actor. But first and foremost she ripped the canvas in order to expand the concept of beauty in a work of art from the “aesthetic” to the “ethical”, and thereby also to encompass justice, equality and women’s suffrage.”

First she crushes the glass with a meat axe, says Ms Rosenmeier. Then she penetrates the canvas with a sharp object. First a short slash, then long slashes placed with extreme precision. This new artistic strategy is a settlement of accounts with the tradition that has dominated painting since the Renaissance, in which illusion or trompe l’oeil is used to create spatiality. Mary Richardson does not wish to paint the illusion of space but to create real spaces. By shattering its framework she has given painting a third dimension.

Although Mary Richardson would have been unaware that she was putting down a marker for a place in the history of art she might have appreciated the connection which is often made between Fontana’s slits and the female vagina. Daniel Cottom, Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma, places them in a direct line with Courbet’s Origin of the World, Hans Bellmer’s Poupees and Cindy Sherman’s photographs of grotesque anatomical models - all of which were equipped with between-the-leg orifices. And in 1995, when the Pompidou Centre in Paris mounted its mega sex art show Femininmasculin: The Sex of Art, the front page picture in Libération was illustrated by a photograph of the Lucio Fontana exhibit which the Associated Press report described as “an abstract vagina - a black slit painted on white canvas.”

The difference between Mary Richardson’s artistic creation and Fontana’s oeuvre was that her’s was the action of a woman moved by what she perceived as a great injustice whereas all that Fontana ever set out to do was impregnate the world’s cultural heritage with holes and slits, with money passing. Mary Richardson’s action, by contrast and in Ms Rosenmeier’s words, touched upon the most essential problems of work in 20th century art history “not least the interference of the painting with space”. Comparisons, she says, place spatialism - articulated by Fontana - on a lower plane. Ms Rosenmeier’s article is here.

Be all this as it may, Mary Richardson left the Rokeby Venus with not one but seven slits and, even though the painting has been carefully repaired, the slits are still faintly visible. If there is anything in the aura theory (that there is something special about an original work of art that a reproduction just does not have) this painting must be as lethal an example of vagina dentata as any that can be imagined. The National Gallery’s warders should be beware.

“Vagina dentata” means a penis-eating woman and has little currency outside of the world of art. It is a subject for another day. It comes in a package with the Guerrilla Girls and with what Camilia Paglia calls “uppity women”, the Dwork, et al.

I have a huge admiration for the suffragettes. In another life I was what was known as an anti-smoking activist. I never quite saw myself as that, but it is what the newspapers called me in the three parliamentary by-elections that I contested. To this day, whenever I see teenage girls smoking so that the tobacco companies can make money, I wonder where their mothers are. Why are they not standing outside the offices of the tobacco companies? They could echo Mary Richardson’s words when she got arrested. “You are killing our children. You can find another way to make money, but you cannot get a life.”

You will find a clue to Kermit the Frog’s Great Art Mystery Quiz in the Glossary definition of Art here .

I started off Art Notes 4 by saying that my next posting in the matter of Samuelson, Anthony v. Hogarth, the Horrible H. was 95% complete and I hoped to put the finished article on the third drawing in the National Gallery’s Marriage a La Mode up on the site within the next seventy-two hours. That was on the 14th so the time has not run out. However…

I have decided that I will put up the 95%, as written, shortly and put up the other 5%, which is more like 15%, in a couple of days time. In the meantime I hope to have completed a Glossary Gloss on Lord Clark of blessed memory and his all time art history blockbuster The Nude and that will be uploaded as soon as it is ready.

The urgency there is that I like to use in my own writing a couple of phrases that are especially his and are, so far as I know, unique to The Nude. These are “dehanchement” which is the blessed Clark’s word for “contrapposto” and to a Frenchman means the swing of the hips (and, I would guess, “Oo! La! La!” and “Quelle Formidable!” and so forth) and “naked as a shrimp” which is how Lord Clark describes the Limburgh Brothers’ Eve in their miniature illustration to the Duc de Berry Tres Riches Heures manuscript. This was done around 1410 and Lord Clark singles it out as the first portrayal of the female form in all its shrimp like beauty in the re-birth of culture following centuries of darkness.

The delay in finalising my observations on the Horrible Hogarth’s The Inspection is that, firstly, I came to the conclusion - which I personally find extraordinary - that there were things to be said about this picture that had not been said by anyone before. Extraordinary because more, probably, has been written about Hogarth than about any other artist. This is because he was so prolific and because everything he produced was full of conundrums with no answers provided. And also because the people doing the writing are erudite and have access to libraries and are in the thick of the art milieu. I found myself quoting, at second hand, something written by Robert Cowley, who published a major critical review of Marriage a La Mode in 1983. I decided that I needed to see the full context. One Amazon click resulted in a knock on the door this morning. The book is much more comprehensive than I had anticipated and I need to digest it. Its one failing is that it does not have an index.

The second reason for delaying putting in my own two penn’orth on The Inspection is that I decided that I needed to physically eyeball the painting as it hangs on the wall in the National Gallery. There are thousands of reproductions available on the Internet, and in books, but this picture has some dark areas and I wanted to see if my theory that the skeleton is not only kissing the skinless man next to him and groping his crotch with one hand (as is generally recognised) but he is grasping the skinless (but no doubt well muscled) bottom with the other. No one, I think, has spotted this before.

So I moseyed down to the National Gallery and had a good look at the real thing. My conclusions will be included in the other 15% bringing the total of what I have to say about The Inspection up to 110%. An extra large helping considering that some commentators are content to overlook it altogether concentrating on the other five pictures. And in one seminal work, by David Bindman, it is neither mentioned nor illustrated. Marriage a La Mode was loan when the Decima Four were doing their stuff and they never got to report on any of the pictures.

While I continue to concentrate most of my efforts on a A Guide to Erotic Art in the National Gallery (publisher wanted) my other book project, Anatomy of Titillation, is never far from my mind. The recent Glossary Gloss on the Decima Four (here) with its superb - Best in Gallery - Pohlenburg bottom reminded me that I had decided, some time ago, to utilise the Baubo imagery to demonstrated how the naked female form can be made to engage the erotic senses more powerfully by the addition of clothing. The degree of enhancement depending on the extent and type of clothing and how it is arranged and what ideas are triggered in the mind of the viewer.

The Baubo story first appeared on this web site here and was continued here. I have done some work on the Baubo illustration to make it ready for application, paperdoll fashion, to other portrayals of the female nude. In Art Notes 6 we will see what the effect of skirt-lifting is on such images, beginning with the National Gallery’s Pohlenburg lady.

The principal book on the nude in art is by the late Kenneth Clark. It is called The Nude and there ought not to be any student of the history of art who has not read it. Kenneth Clark, later Lord Clark, has his own entry in the Glossary and whenever referred to in my writing is given the appellation “of blessed memory” - a phrase that I do not use lightly. Once you start dressing-up nude paintings to see what the effect is you are getting into deep psychology and I need to have Lord Clark close upsides when I venture into what can be very tricky territory. I will therefor put up a Glossary Gloss on Lord Clark before I do anything else. The entry in the Glossary is under the name of his famous book and is here.

My next posting in the matter of Samuelson, Anthony v. Hogarth, the Horrible H. is 95% complete and I hope to put it up on the site within the next seventy-two hours. The second picture in the National Gallery’s Marriage a La Mode six-pack, Tete a Tete, has now been seen off, thankfully, and the coming posting will deal with the third picture, The Inspection. It will not turn into a long running saga like the second picture did.

In the course of putting the illustrations together for The Inspection I looked around for something to highlight the similarity between the grisly German Death and the Maiden genre of erotic art and the Horrible Hogarth’s near in flagrante Skeleton and Ecorche which form part of the decor of the doctor’s consulting room which is the scene of the third picture. I think that “near” would have been superfluous but for the fact that there is no bone in a man’s penis. If there had been, it is doubtful whether Hogarth would have been able to resist the temptation of having the male skeleton buggering the skinless ecorche.

We are all assuming, by the way, that the skeleton in Plate III is indeed that of a man. It could turn out to belong to a woman. Ms Egerton (who wrote the National Gallery’s book of the show) has a line to the medical profession that she was able to use to check out the symptoms and treatment of syphilis. I hope that she will ask for their opinion on the gender of the skeleton. If it is male skeleton doing the kissing and the groping the popular conclusion that Hogarth is making some kind of statement about homosexuality would not be unreasonable. The ecorche looks certainly to be male on account of being notably flat chested. Whatever criticisms can be levied against Hogarth, he can not be accused of being scared of drawing a breast. His work teems with dropped necklines and exposed nipples. But if the skeleton should turn out to be a female it would be a whole new ball game (no pun intended).

In Death and the Maiden pictures there is often quite a lot of groping going on. However, it is always Death who is doing the groping and the Maiden (young, lush and naked) is always on the receiving end. To turn the tables and have the woman (albeit a skeleton) feeling up the man (albeit one that has no skin) and taking over the traditional male role of Death would have the feminists (Juno and Andrea Dworkin’s ghost among them) in ecstasy. The headline in the Olympius Mountain Times would read: “Underworld’s glass ceiling shattered!” Come to think of it, I would not put it past the Dwork to have seen off the old git with the scythe.

It was not difficult to find a Death and the Maiden image to accompany the Hogarth clip but it was not easy to choose from among them. Here are some of the rejects.

The National Gallery has a painting by Puvis de Chavannes entitled Death and the Maidens, note the plural. If I left it there I would have everyone thinking that this must be a swinging version of the story with the ladies climbing all over Death in a climactic orgy and the National Gallery would be wondering what had brought the crowds in.

Sad to say, nothing could be further from the truth. Firstly we have only got a rough sketch, not the finished art, which is in Massachusettes. Much good it may do them. Death is crashed out on the ground and the six ladies are posing in neck-to-toe nighties. Loose fitting nighties.

The National Gallery has three other works by the same artist. One of them is a decapitation picture entitled the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist. As remarked in a previous posting, the public likes nothing better than a decapitation picture and, true to form, the Gallery mounted an exhibition around this painting. It was back in 2002 and I seem to remember seeing in a newspaper at the time an Xray photograph of the painting which was part of the show which revealed that the artist had originally painted Salome in the nude leaving nothing to the imagination. I do not have a note about this, much less a copy of the Xray photo, but it is not something that I am likely to mis-recollect.

The National Gallery has another picture by Puvis de Chavannes of interest. It is called A Maid combing a Woman’s Hair and there are a pair of world class breasts on display. The Decima Four never got a look at them because the picture has been on loan to the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin since 1979. The National Gallery should get it back. Aside from the fact that it is our painting, and it falls into a category where we are very thin on the ground, last time I was in Dublin there were gypsies breast feeding babies in the street. Dubliners must surely be so familiar with the sight of a bared breast as to be completely de-sensitised.

One of the great things that comes from having a blog like this is when there is some feedback from a reader. A few days ago I got an email from a Mr J.T. (name supplied) about my reference to Pasiphae (the Queen who fell in love with a Bull) and a possible solution about how she managed to get the animal to mate with her. (The original article is here.)

J.T. wrote:

I saw your website and was quite impressed by your prospective book about Greek Mythology and erotica. The artwork looks very well done. I have tried my hand at short stories and novels in the past (alas…with little monatary success) and know how hard it is to find a publisher. I wish you the best of luck. I was most curious about your take on the myth of Pasiphae and the bull. I had once tried my hand at setting this myth to paper but found it very difficult. It’s an intriguing myth - few myths have a mortal taking the initiative (and a woman mortal at that!) and without a god involved, but an actual animal! I wasn’t sure how I wanted to tell the story - I could see portraying Pasiphae as an early feminist, a dim witted trophy wife, a haughty Queen, tragic figure, a figure in need of humiliation, and so forth. I wasn’t sure if I wanted her cursed or to act of her own accord. The biggest problem I had was the cow - its cumbersome, but that also makes it interesting. I wasn’t sure if I wanted her fitting to be an act of humiliation, comedy, or erotica. Anyway, just curious what path you took this with this myth, if you don’t mind sharing. It’s a wide open myth and one seldom retold from the Queen’s perspective, which makes it all the more intriguing in my opinion. Best of luck on finding a publisher.

For what it is worth - and by way of an answer to J.T. - here is the story of Pasiphae as told in my (unpublished) 10 Sexiest Moments in Mythology.The book is written both for enthusiasts for Greek mythology and for people who might become enthusiasts on further acquaintance. So it tends to underscore a racey approach with a scholarly detail. On re-reading the Pasiphae piece, I think that some of the other nine stories in the book are more fun because I have managed to put a modern day spin on the recorded facts. The Pasiphae story tells it the way it is and always has been and it is the drawing and the solution to the conundrum of how Pasiphae did it that makes it stand out.

All the stories have illustrated notes and in this posting those for Pasiphae follow the story. In the book the notes are altogether at the end and run from page 22 to page 39!. Of course, with the 10 stories come ten Ian Tovey illustrations which I think are worthy of publication in their own right. (Many thanks, J.T. for saying that you liked them.) Once the book is published I think that we shall see the illustrations take on a life of their own as posters, greeting cards and so on and in other people’s writings on the subject. For obvious reasons, I am having to be careful not to put too much up on the Internet.

PASIPHAE - A TALE OF LOVE IN THE DUST

The imagination of artists challenged by a load of bull

There is nothing in Greek mythology that places a greater strain on the reader’s credulity than the story of how Pasiphae, wife of Minos, King of Crete, managed to get herself pregnant by a large white bull.
The numerous fantastical elements of a legend that begins with the gift of a bull in response to a prayer by Minos to Neptune and the bull’s miraculous appearance before a delegation of citizens when it thunders ashore from the Sea God’s watery lair (thereby underpinning Minos’ authority as ruler), followed by Neptune’s anger when Minos decides to renege on the deal and put the bull to stud instead of straight away sacrificing it back to him, and Neptune taking his revenge by making the Queen fall head-long in love with the beast, are very much all in a day’s work for the Mount Olympus divinities.
The result of the coupling: a monstrous creature that is half-human, half-beast, called “Minotaur”, and so dangerous that it must be caged inside a labryntine maze and fed seven young men and seven young women annually, is likewise the common stuff of mythology. It is the circumstances of the coupling between Queen Pasiphae and the bull that provides the glue for the two parts of the narrative that present so formidable a hurdle for the imagination to jump.
What we are asked to believe (by such noted authorities as Apollodorus and Ovid and also Philostratus) is that Pasiphae, overtaken by her passion for the bull, persuaded the great craftsman Daedalus to make a counterfeit cow out of wood, hollow inside and covered with hide outside. We can be sure that it would have been a good likeness because Daedalus was known to be able to do sculptures that could walk about and even speak. Daedalus fitted his device with an access hatch through which the royal personage could insert herself. It had wheels allowing it, once she was inside, to be rolled into position in the sun soaked
enclosure in which the bull was kept. Once there, intercourse could take place. This is the sum total of what we are told and, on the face of it, it was a mission impossible.
There is no enlightenment to be gained from artists. Most painters have shied away from the subject . They would have been conscious of the inherent difficulty of rendering in a coherent way a set of impossible facts. There is a well known Pompeian wall painting showing Pasiphae, dressed as if for a garden party, alongside a spindle-legged cow fixed to a trolley. The proportions of the cow relative to the lady and the size of the hatch are such that not even the magical abilities of Daedalus could have got her inside. Not surprisingly the expression on Pompei Pasiphae’s face is one of resignation rather than anticipation.
Presumably, because they were baffled, Renaissance painters - required though they were by market forces to seek out every opportunity to portray the female nude - rarely attempted the subject. Pasiphae would, of course, have had to prepare for the coming encounter by removing her clothing, either in its entirety or to a revealing (and so more titillating) extent.
It is not possible to argue that the element of bestiality per se made Pasiphae’s tryst a taboo subject because there are many examples in Renaissance art in which Jupiter has assumed an animal form for the purpose of seducing a female goddess or mortal. The actual act, while easy to imagine, is rarely depicted. An exception is Leda and the Swan in which Leda and the swan traditionally adopt the missionary position (swan on top) and only the point of penetration is hidden. This story about Pasiphae and the bull is different because the actual act is not easy to imagine and requires a mechanical solution that would have taxed even so inventive a genius as Leonardo da Vinci.
In our own day bulls used to produce semen for artificial insemination are trained to mount simple wooden structures incorporating an artificial vagina. What is required here,
however, is a contraption that presents Pasiphae’s vulva to a rampant bovine with its
member homing in like a cruise missile but which looks exactly like a real cow.
Generations of artists have missed the only possible solution to the conundrum. Daedalus must have constructed his hide covered wooden cow with a body big enough for Pasiphae to assume a crouching position inside it with her legs spread apart. She would have entered it on her knees via a slit in its belly when it was turned upside down. Once in position, with padding placed around her and the edges of the slit sewn together, the cow would be turned the right way up. Pasiphae would have awaited the bull Leda fashion - lying on her back!

PASIPHAE NOTES

Sources: In addition to the sources named in the narrative, a modern day discussion of Pasiphae’s arcadian lovemaking deserves honourable mention. It comes in the 1967 novel The Maze Maker by Michael Ayrton. He gives a graphic account of the proceedings that largely corresponds to the author’s view as to how it must have been done. Ayrton has the Queen assuming a crouching position having entering the artificial cow when it is upside down. Ayrton does not, however, make it clear whether she is laying on her back after the cow is uprighted, ready to receive the bull in the missionary position, or on her knees so as to take him a tergo.
Artistic Legacy: The opportunities were there for the taking had artists been more imaginative in their approach to the subject. In The Maze Maker Ayrton ticks off the boxes moment by moment. When the Queen arrives ready for the great event only the women in her retinue accompany her into Daedalus’ workshop. They reverently raise her from her litter and disrobe her. “She stood naked and as white as cream,” says Daedalus, who Ayrton has telling the story himself. “They lifted her and laid her in the cow and spread her open. That I, a man, should have been present was only permitted because I had made her bovine bed and was needed to bed her in it.” Daedalus (per Ayrton) says that no one spoke or regarded him. To them he was just a “sexless ministrant performing an ordained rite.” [Imagine how a Caravaggio or an Artemisia Gentileschi or a Rembrandt would have captured the scene.] “But I was a man,” Daedalus continues. “When I looked down on Pasiphae and saw her hunger laid tight against the soft opening in my effigy, I rose hard as a man [an opportunity here for a Tom of Finland] and shook so that my hands could scarcely arrange even the slight comfort of the padding I had prepared for her hips.” Pasiphae is then trundled into the field and the bull - the god Poseidon (aka Neptune) in disguise, according to Ayrton - trots up slowly and after scenting her his “obsidian black spear” slides out and goes home to the hilt, striking her like the blows of an axe. At this point, much to its maker’s alarm, the double-braced forelegs of the artificial cow crack and give way at the knees. “But still he beats upon her and the liquid of his flood splashes back across his straddled hocks, spuming and drenching his hooves.” When it is over Daedalus feels his own legs wet. Ayrton was a sculptor, painter, theatrical designer, filmmaker and art critic as well as being a writer of elaborately crafted prose. He died in 1975 aged 54.
It’s a small world: The lives of Pasiphae and Procris (wife of Cephalis who we have already met) later cross. The Queen, who was a sorceress, had put a spell on her husband Minos, a notorious womaniser. Its effect was that all the women having intercourse with him were killed by snakes, scorpions and millipeds ejaculated into their vaginas. According to some accounts, Procris did allow herself to be bribed into sharing his bed, first making sure that he would not harm her by giving him a Circean root drink. If this was the same potion that the goddess Circe used to turn Ulysses’ soldiers into swine it was heady stuff. But it seems to have worked for Procris.

Ian Tovey will be the subject of a Glossary Gloss in the near future.

I started out on the journey that brought me to this web site in the Autumn of 1998. The central concept of the book that I had decided to write, and which (to my thinking) the public interest demanded be written, was a guide to erotic art in the National Gallery in London. Then as now I strongly held the view that art collections, regardless of whether the building in which they are housed is called a gallery or a museum, are exceedingly boring to most visitors. The tedium could be alleviated, I thought, by identifying those pictures with an erotic content. Such pictures were less likely to be boring to the average male. And, for all I knew, to the average female, likewise. Looking for erotic paintings in the National Gallery seemed to me to be a task akin to hunting for truffles in the Sahara desert, the more worthwhile for the challenge that it presented.

Having reached this conclusion it was but a step to seeing the merit in providing itineraries for the use of short stay visitors to London who were engaged in the standard tourist preoccupation of eyeballing all the available iconic images to the extent necessary for them to be able to give a good account of themselves on their return home. Beyond the mandatory requirement of a visit to the National Gallery which is common to visitors of either sex, there is a divergence between the needs of of the two sexes. Women (who must expect to be thoroughly de-briefed by their hairdressers, manicurists and fellow guests at bridal and baby showers) feel compelled to look at everything there is to look at. Accompanied men, trailing along after their wives past wall upon wall of Holy Virgins, landscapes, seascapes, fruitscapes, flowerscapes and facescapes, cannot but welcome concise directions to the most expansive bosoms and delectable bottoms. They do not need to be able to debate whether or not Mrs Arnolfini was pregnant when she got married.

THE DECIMA FOUR

To implement such a scheme it was necessary to devise a system whereby the physical attributes of the subjects depicted in the Old Master paintings were individually rated for their erotic content and then ranked in order of merit. This was clearly a task best entrusted to youngsters and it happened that, about this time, I chanced upon a group of recent art graduates who were struggling to establish an art gallery in Bermondsey, south of the River Thames and hard by London Bridge. Their gallery was called the Decima Gallery after Decima Street where it was located. Parts of Bermondsey are fairly sleazy and Decima Street not the least. Although geographically it is not a very long way away from Cork Street, Mayfair, where the most fashionable galleries are situated (and the Atrium bookshop of blessed memory once was), the contrast in the local environments could hardly be greater. My suggestion that these young people might care to undertake the assessment of the works in the National Gallery collection for me, paying each of them the handsome sum of £4 per hour, met with the same enthusiastic response as might have been expected by a mid 19th century Montmartre café owner offering a square meal to impressionist painters starving in nearby ateliers.

The membership of the Decima Four, as I came to think of them, was made up by David West, Alex Chappel, Derrick Welsh and Karen Morgan. Karen, I seem to remember, was co-opted onto the team for the project and was less of an anarchical character than the other three.

Previous to our coming together David and Alex had had a lot of fun with a pantomime cow called Diana who made a number of high profile street appearances including a cow walk from St Paul’s Cathedral on the first anniversary of her Royal namesake’s untimely death. They were also responsible for a number of media hoaxes, among them Fuck Art and Pimp and the Dennis Nielsen Tour Company . Alex’s recent credits include a pop video for the notorious poet Micalef whose works bear such titles as No Pussy without Pork Scratchings and We Like Harold Shipman ’cause he kills Old People. Derrick Welsh was described as the Decima Gallery’s resident artist although his role there seems to have been not only permanent but leader de facto. His recent works have parodied corporate brands such as Nike and Tate Modern.

Congratulating myself on finding a group of young people who, if not quite in my own image, were possessed of the independence of thought that I deemed necessary for the task in hand, I prepared three different kinds of questionnaire. Each was individually numbered and ring bound into volumes, a hundred to a volume.

THE PICTURES

In the first set of volumes, labelled “Pictures”, boxes numbered 1 to 50 were provided for ticking according to the salient erotic features of a particular work. The object of collecting this information was to enable the identification of which pictures had the most female breasts, nipples, bottoms and genitalia on view, the size of the portrayal (lifesize, plus or minus) and whether the subjects were human or mythological beings such as satyrs or centaurs, or angels or putti. Male attributes could similarly be noted. Boxes were also provided for the name of the painting and its collection number, the observer’s first impression, any other remarks, and his or her initials. In addition there was a box for a sketch map showing the exact location of the work in the room in which it was hung in relation to the entrances and exits. Men who are short of time, I reasoned, do not want to hunt for an erotic fix among scowling canvases of long dead princes and prelates and the living rooms of dull middle class Dutch dry goods merchants.

THE SUBJECTS

The second set of volumes, labelled “Subjects”, contained pages that could be cross-referenced to the works recorded in the first volume and allocated on the basis of one page per subject of interest. Thus a typical Rubens might have up to half-a-dozen pages, one for each naked female. Each of these “subject” pages contained 67 boxes, just over half of them requiring a subjective 1 to 5 rating to be awarded by the observer. Features such as lips, eyes, neck, fingers, breasts, nipples, areolae, navel, thighs, under-arm hair, pubic hair and genitalia all had their separate boxes as did attributes such as “20th Century Realism”, “Sensuality”, “Provocativeness” (either vis-à-vis another subject or the viewer), “Shyness”, Exhibitionist, “Availability” and “Social Status”. As with the judging of ice skaters, you can see at a glance from the number of fives and fours whether or not you are on to a good thing. A box for remarks was again provided but to describe those which were proffered as “laddish” would be to elevate them to an unjustifiably high literary status. Karen’s perhaps less so, but her remarks were anatomically explicit nevertheless.

THE DRAWINGS

The pages of the third set of volumes, “Drawings”, cross-referenced as before to the first volume, were devoted to a simple line drawing of each of the pictures. These were executed by one or other of the Decima Four team who initialled the page. These line drawings were thought necessary because at that time there was no comprehensively illustrated catalogue of the National Gallery’s collection and there was not much of any use available on the Internet. It was clear to me that the guide would have to have illustrations of the “pictures of interest”. This expression, incidentally, is borrowed from the police who use it to describe a suspect who they are convinced is guilty of the crime that they are investigating but have not yet caught. It will crop up from time to time in postings to this web site.

To ensure that the National Gallery did not get an inkling of what was afoot the covers of the volumes in which the Decima Four were to be seen scribbling as they stood day after day in front of the Gallery’s paintings were suitably cryptic: The Depiction of the female form in classical art - Preliminary Survey. To the extent that the Decima remit covered male subjects as well as female subjects the title was a misnomer. It was, I thought, definitely preferable to something along the lines of the probable title for the book which, at that time, was The Complete Guide to Tits and Arse in the National Gallery

The Decima Four started their work at the beginning of November 1998 and were in the National Gallery every day for a period of six weeks with a day or two off when the Gallery was closed over the Christmas and New Year period. To this day I marvel at the dedication that they brought to their task. It would have driven most people mad. Obviously, with so much imagery now available on the Internet, one would do it differently today but their meticulous assessment has provided a unique and valuable resource without which no guide to erotic art in a gallery could do justice to its subject.