Two Miles High

Women in Trousers

Rousseau and Fables

The patron saint of Sexual Fables is Jean-Jacques Rousseau (leavened with a little Cervantes and a little Montaigne). In Confessions (which are not really confessions), Rousseau wrote that fables "wrap useful truths in sensible and agreeable forms." By this he meant that sometimes naked truths are difficult or

Splendour in the Grass

Rousseau's 'Émile, or On Education and Illegitimacy'

The revolutionary impact of Rousseau's Émile, or On Education (1762) lay in the implication that if we are all born equal ("In the natural order men are all equal"), then there is no inherent difference between a child born illegitimate and a child of wealthy, even

The Age of Consent

Rubens' 'Castor and Pollux'

Peter Paul Rubens' Castor and Pollux Abduct the Daughters of Leukyppos, alternatively known as The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus (1617-1618). Virtually no art critics (feminists aside) are willing to address the 17th century context here of sexual violence - the abduction and rape of women by men.

Homer's Women

Nausicaa in paintings

Pieter Lastman's Odysseus and Nausicaa (1619) is not quite how I imagined her. This is by French caricaturist and painter Jean Veber: Ulysses and Nausicaa (1888). Valentin Serov's version (1910) reminds me of a Fellini movie... Finally, this is French painter Lucien Simon's Nausicaa

The Judgment of Paris

Goethe and 'The Rape of Ganymede'

It is difficult to miss the homosexual theme in the painting below, The Rape of Ganymede by Rubens (1611), where the eagle is Zeus, but most major painters and writers treated the theme at some point in their career. So what, then, was on Goethe's mind when he

A Tale of Two Women

Rubens' 'The Virgin as the Woman of the Apocalypse'

Rubens' The Virgin as the Woman of the Apocalypse (1623-24): notice the moon on which she stands and the blue shroud. She is accompanied by the warrior Archangel Saint Michael on the left and God at the top and of course she has already delivered the child. The lines

Dreaming of the Virgin Mary

Sacred Geometry

Sacred Geometry is the notion that the divine can be found in art, music, landscapes, pretty much anything. In architecture and astronomy the metaphors are usually horizontal or numerical in nature, often reflecting the idea that the earth below could reflect the heavens above: pagan circles (the Sun and Moon)

Kama Sutra

'Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam'

Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam is set in Calcutta (now Kolkata) and it is Bollywood's Citizen Kane. It traces a historical arc, from the turn of the 20th century, when the British Raj was at its tipping point, through 1962 when the film came out, when India was suffering

Dreaming of the Virgin Mary

'Sailing to Byzantium'

Arguably the most brilliant poem ever written about aging, W.B. Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium (written 1926-27) is about sailing off into eternity. Yeats died in 1939. I deliberately chose the image below not from Byzantium itself, because Byzantium is a state of mind. To attempt to identify its

Voices and Saints

Saint Catherine of Alexandria

Many paintings and altarpieces of Saint Catherine are particularly brutal. The Martyrdom of Saint Catherine of Alexandria (below), painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder around 1506, is from the beginning of his career. Catharine was said to have converted 50 scholars to Christianity and, for this, she was sentenced to

Voices and Saints

Saint Margaret of Antioch

I have included a selection of paintings of St. Margaret and in none of them does she have a hair out of place, let alone blood on her dress. Below is Raphael's version from around 1518. Supposedly she has just survived being eaten alive by Satan in the

Voices and Saints

Saint-Denis

Saint-Denis on Notre Dame holding his head... This image is circa 1475-1500 by miniature painter Jean Bourdichon.

Sacred Prostitute

Sainte-Baume

The sacred grotto of Sainte-Baume (Grotte Sanctuaire de la Sainte-Baume) is at the foot of a massif a little southeast of the small town of Plan-d'Aups-Sainte-Baume and it's not easy to visit. The grotto or cave is a 45-minute drive southwest of the town of St.

Sacred Prostitute

Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer

The town has an official population of less than 3,000 people for much of the year but when it swells to almost 80,000 in May and through the summer holidays, it can become a tourist trap. The Gypsy (Romani) tradition is the most interesting and the most controversial:

Sacred Prostitute

Salome and Judith

Above is a painting of Salome holding the severed head of John the Baptist, by Titian early in his career, around 1515. Or at least that is the popular view. She appears in a sensual madonna-like pose. An alternative view argues that it is in fact Judith with the Head

Sacred Prostitute

Salome and the Medusa

Caravaggio's Salome with the Head of St. John the Baptist was painted at the end of his career, around 1609-1610. He had explored much the same idea in his earlier Judith Beheading Holofernes and David with the Head of Goliath, and his Medusa paintings like this one from

Life as Opera

Salome in modern paintings

Early Christian accounts of Salome do not feature any erotic dances, but by medieval times she has most of her clothes off and she is a dangerous temptress. That reputation stayed with her through the centuries, and it's fair to say she was always very popular. Gustave Flaubert,

Dreaming of the Virgin Mary

Salvador Dalí and Hitchcock's 'Spellbound'

Dalí was surely the greatest painter of dreams. The image below was one of his studies for Hitchcock's Spellbound in 1944. Is blue the color of dreams? To see how it was used in the film, click here and look at the back of the image. Up top

Angel Incarnate

'Salvator Mundi'

This small painting has been the subject of much debate: is it by Leonardo or not? It was restored and revealed in 2011 and it has many of his trademarks - the focusing gaze directly back at the painter and the viewer, the soft and gentle hues of the face,

Splendour in the Grass

Samuel Butler's Erewhon

Erewhon in Samuel Butler’s satiric fantasy of 1872 bears no resemblance to high country New Zealand really, for all the rapt descriptions of thundering rivers, glaciers and rugged peaks on the way there. For one thing, there are many people in Erewhon: "Both the girls and the men

Voices and Saints

Sanssouci

Voltaire wrote the bawdy poem The Maid of Orleans (La Pucelle d'Orléans) initially in 1730 and it was instantly popular. But, by 1740, there were hundreds of varying versions in circulation. Maybe it appealed to Frederick the Great? Voltaire spent a lot of his time after that in

Life as Opera

Sappho

Below is Sappho by French painter Charles Mengin in 1877. It pretty much captures her racy reputation throughout the 19th century. Although it was said that Sappho wrote love poems to her female students, this painting chooses to illustrate a story that said she threw herself into the sea when

The Age of Consent

Satan Exulting Over Eve

What exactly is happening here? We have Satan above, Eve below, with the snake wrapped around her. This William Blake painting is from 1795, in the Getty Museum, Los Angeles. The Getty website says that "Satan hovers in malevolent glory over Eve" but this pose hardly seems malevolent.

The Age of Consent

Satan in the Bible

Satan does not appear by name in Genesis at all, unless we identify him with the Snake (as many do), or we rely on mis-translations of the original Hebrew into Greek (the Septuagint). For example, in The Book of Job, chapters 1-2, what is often now translated as "Satan&

Precious Bodily Fluids

Scandalous 16th Century Italian Murders

Desdemona was not the only celebrated woman murdered by her husband in 16th century Italy. There were many others and here are some of them. A few have stayed around as ghosts. First, there was Laura Lanza, Baroness of Carini (in Sicily), and her lover Ludovico, who were murdered in