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Love through the ages

A stroll through four centuries of erotic European art
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By Tony Ozuna
For The Prague Post
August 27th, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Artist Barbara Kraftová-Steinerová draws on the legend of Caritá Romana in this 1797 portrait of Count Hartig and his wife, Eleanor.
Love-Desire-Passion: Romantic Motifs in Art of the 15th to 19th Centuries


at Clam-Gallasův palác Ends Aug. 31. Husova 20, Prague 1-Old Town. Open Tues.-Sun. 10 a.m.-6 p.m.

This expansive exhibition spanning the 15th to 19th centuries contains well over 200 works of art dedicated to humankind’s greatest and most personal preoccupation: love.
The first part of the exhibition is devoted to nonromantic love, as portrayed by European artists in paintings from the late Middle Ages to the 18th century. This section includes Allegory of Love — Caritas (1640–48) by Sebastiano Mazzoni, a bare-breasted maternal figure surrounded by three cherubic babes, and Pier Dandini’s Wisdom and Temperance, a 16th-century Venetian master’s work depicting one women’s caressing affection for a fairly younger girl.
The most curious painting in the Italian section is Old Woman with Pearls and Letter — Vanitas (after 1660) by Giovanni Battista Langetti. By portraying an old hag in splendid detail, this work is less a testament to eternal love than a warning against the folly of attempting to buy long-lost, and perhaps better-left-forgotten, love.
The German and Dutch Renaissance painters more openly reveal the human body, even in absurd scenes such as Venus and Cupid by Lucas Cranach the Elder, in which Venus coyly holds up one leg while poor little Cupid has flies swarming over his face and body.
There are sculptures and curious little delicacies spread throughout the show that have a connection to the paintings, or their general themes and origins. For instance, the first room includes plates with amorous mythological themes, and an Italian blanket with an erotic scene from 1600.
By contrast, Flemish and Danish paintings from the 17th and 18th centuries portray ordinary people in amorous activities, or biblical or mythological scenes filled with voluptuous bodies, often combined with beauties who look like contemporaries of the time. This section includes copies of two works by Peter Paul Rubens, as well as a centerpiece work by Godfried Schalcken, Venus with Cupid, Bacchus and Ceres (1690s), in which Venus bites into a peach with pieces of it clinging to her lips while even more vibrant peaches rest attractively on her lap.
The section titled “Cabinet of Painting” includes works from the 16th to 19th centuries that likely would have been kept in “secret cabinets” of collectors, including Emperor Rudolf II. Only a chosen few would have had access to these works due to their erotic undertones, a treat for connoisseurs of that time.
This section combines 17th- to 18th-century French and Central European paintings with rare collectibles belonging to Rudolf II himself. Standouts include Petr Brandl’s Cimon and Pero (after 1695), portraying an old man leaning into a younger woman’s breast, her head tilting back in offering and fading into a great black sky.
The most salacious images are on rare collectibles displayed in glass cases, including erotic scenes etched on goblets (from the 1700s) and on a man’s pocket watch (from the 1800s). Hand-painted porcelain pipe bowls have the most outrageous scenes, including one with girls being sold on the market into a Turkish harem, and one with a man sewing up a “mischievous” young woman’s labia minora (both from the mid-1800s).
While the 19th-century paintings by Czech artists are intended to fit the exhibition’s title best, their depictions of love, desire and passion are the least scandalous. For instance, Josef Mánes’ companion paintings Morning and Evening (1857) show reclining nudes in shy, modest poses in hazy atmospheres. These two sharply contrast with a nearby nude by Schalken titled Sleeping Venus and Cupid (1680–85) with Venus’ legs spread provocatively and a sharp clarity to her reclining body.
The portrayals of women by Jaroslav Čermák are the most provocative in their dress, especially his Montenegrin Women in a Harem (1877), which includes a black-caped young woman standing alone against a wall, with more scantily clothed girls at her feet.
Václav Brožík has two remarkable paintings hung next to each other: Cleopatra (1877) and Hussite Woman (Episode From the Hussite Wars in Bohemia in 1419) (1877). Cleopatra reclines nude in decadent elegance, while the captive young Hussite woman (tied to a post nude, with her hands bound behind her) has a penetrating, even seductive, look of disappointment.
Representing the style of late Neo-Romanticism and sensualism at the end of the 19th century, Beneš Knupfer has his own room filled with larger works including Spring on the Seaside (late 1880s) and Invitation to Play (1890), in which a mermaid beckons two satyrs to play with her and her jewel-filled seashells. In these, the young women are detached from the world yet immersed in nature, lying in the grass or especially by the sea.
In the 19th-century paintings of the Czech artists previously mentioned as well as Václav Sochor, Maxmilián Pirner and Vojtěch Hynais, among others, love, desire and passion are not so obviously portrayed as in the previous sections. Instead, these powerful emotions are evoked through depictions of women wielding their eternal power to trigger these possibilities.
Ultimately, this selective history of European painting shows that while love, desire and passion may be separate emotions, they are not inseparable.

Tony Ozuna can be reached at features@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (27/08/2008):

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