Boucher, one of the most celebrated French painters of the 18th century, was in the eyes of his detractors (like Diderot), nothing but a pimp. He used his beautiful wife as a model and he privately indulged in erotica like the painting below, Leda and the Swan, which is only

Hans Christian Andersen’s sexuality has been a matter of some controversy over the years, especially in Denmark. Many academics and journalists have claimed him as a repressed homosexual or bisexual or ambisexual, with The Little Mermaid, The Little Match Girl, The Ugly Duckling trotted out as evidence. Indeed there&

Was the Harlequin of the Commedia dell'arte originally Black? This is not a new idea. In his heyday Harlequin wore a black mask as in the picture below. Just as there is a tradition of White Face clowns (e.g. the Pierrot), there is also a tradition of

Up top is a painting that surprised me when I first saw it: how did Jean Delville get away with this L'Ecole de Platon? It may be titled "The School of Plato" but it looks like Jesus and the Disciples in coy homosexual poses. But what

Was there ever a filmmaker so drawn to literary sex? Ken Russell's adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love came out in 1969 and won an Academy Award for Best Actress, but what made it interesting was the first full-frontal nude wrestling scene between

The famous German legend of the Lorelei (or Lorelay) is really not that interesting. Neither as a sexual fable nor as a tourist destination. It's just a rock (above). What is interesting is why these pilgrimage sites lure us there at all. But, with magical and sacred places,

Is mystical ecstasy really displaced sexual ecstasy like in the image above? I find it difficult to interpret medieval mystical writing any other way, especially by women mystics like Teresa of Ávila (Teresa de Jesús) and Margery Kempe, and what am I to make of Catherine of Siena's

Oxford, the “city of dreaming spires” can lay claim to most of the great writers of English fantasy literature: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Philip Pullman, Dr. Seuss (American of course - did you know he went there?), but also Oscar Wilde and T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia), who

Nowadays, if the Internet is awash in erotic images, many of them were placed there by women, but a century ago only the leisured classes had access to such images. It is more interesting when the pornographer, back then, was a woman. What were her motives? Was it just the

Should a man lose his life over a beautiful woman? These days it's hard to comprehend the death in 1837 of Alexander Pushkin, the father of Russian literature, from a duel. Duels were illegal of course, but Pushkin, who had dueled before, took the bullet in his stomach

Do Shakespeare’s homoerotic sonnets mean he was as gay as Dumbledore? Are Rembrandt’s etchings sacriligious? It’s the private work of these two giants that arouses the most interest these days. The idea that Shakespeare was gay is based primarily on Sonnet 20 (there are others), and his

Eugène Delacroix traveled to Algeria and Morocco in 1832, where he imagined an intense eroticism in the people, their clothing, the culture and the landscapes. The irony was that none of the women, Muslim or Jewish, would take their clothes off so Delacroix had to do it for them. The

London’s celebrity art world was rocked by controversy in 1775. The glamorous Angelica Kauffman, whose self-portrait is shown above, had arrived in London a decade earlier, shortly after Casanova’s misadventures there. Like La Charpillon, she was born in Switzerland and already had a professional career as a

This naked, reclining woman shown below could be Nell Gwyn, the mistress of Charles II. Or not… Nowadays, art historians alternate between her and the King’s earlier mistress, Barbara Villiers, shown above, who had several children by the King. You be the judge. Is it the same woman? This

Aside from the mysterious death of Jesus Christ, or Rasputin perhaps, it's hard to think of another figure whose death has been so controversial or so colorful. Whether it was an accidental death from cholera, or suicide via arsenic, theories abound. Tchaikovsky's homosexuality and his supposed

Sex between humans and other species obviously occurs. There’s simply too much evidence. In 2013, Scientific American stated: "DNA analyses find that early Homo sapiens mated with other human species and hint that such interbreeding played a key role in the triumph of our kind." But most

The Great Masturbator (1929) below was a gift by Salvador Dalí to the Spanish State, and it must have appealed to his sense of humor that the painting would go on display in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid. At bottom (no puns intended) is Dalí

Strip away the clothes and what you find at the heart of the Holy Grail myths is sex and sexual passion. The virgin knight errant must first climb the holy mountain, cross the perilous bridge to the castle and there explore the chamber of mysteries to claim the rose and

Heinrich von Kleist, one of the most fascinating of German writers, died by suicide here on the shores of Kleiner (Little) Wannsee in 1811, near Potsdam, in what is now the distant outskirts of Berlin. He was only 34 and he was not alone. After a final picnic, the former

Enter through the narrow gate. The gate that leads to damnation is wide, the road is clear, and many choose to travel it. But how narrow is the gate that leads to life, how rough the road, and how few there are who find it – Matthew 7:13-14. Is

This Velásquez painting was the victim of a celebrated case of art vandalism in 1914, when suffragette Mary Richardson took a meat cleaver to it. The question is: why this picture when there were others to choose from? The Rokeby Venus, otherwise known as The Toilet of Venus or La

Possibly the nastiest painting ever produced, this is called A Grotesque Old Woman or simply An Old Woman and it is attributed to Flemish Renaissance master Quintin Massys in Antwerp sometime between 1513-1530, with many favoring 1513-1515. It served as a model for John Tenniel’s Duchess in

Haven't we all been there? That is Laurence Coe's Venus and Tannhauser, circa 1896, up above. Eden, Arcadia, Cockaigne, the Holy Grail legends, Utopia, Shangri-La, the Venusberg, etc.; the mystery is that no one knows where any of them are. Below is Tannhäuser in the

Wartburg Castle is on a hill above the town of Eisenach, in the most mythic part of Germany. To the west is the Fairytale Road, associated with the Brothers Grimm, and to the north is the Brocken in the Harz Mountains, where the witches ride on Walpurgisnacht in Goethe’s

The most interesting aspect of witches is that they like to have sex with the Devil, according to most experts, and the best paintings and woodcuts of these orgiastic witches are by the Renaissance Germans. There was none better than Hans Baldung Grien, whose Three Witches and Witch and Dragon,