Goddesses and Girls

Nicholas Penny

‘It’s a speaking likeness.’ For centuries these words carried nothing but praise, but today, if used by the sophisticated, would suggest that some artistic quality was lacking. It is ‘so true and so alive’, wrote Aretino in 1527, in commendation of a nude Venus by Sansovino, ‘that it will fill the thoughts of all who look at it with lust.’ This would now be considered crude and philistine, not only as a reaction to a modern painting or sculpture, but to a Venus by Sansovino. Has high art, in our time, cut itself off from one of its immemorial attractions, leaving to publicity, to the glossy portraits of stars and to centrefold nudes, the task of encouraging the suspension of disbelief and stimulating the fiction that the image responds to us, and hears our proposals and prayers? Or is it that our art-loving ancestors could only convey their enthusiasm for art by making this sort of claim for it?

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[1] Titian by Charles Hope. Jupiter, 240 pp., £12.50, 26 June 1980, 0 906379 09 1. Nude Painting by Michael Jacobs. Phaidon, 79 pp., £2.95, 1979, 0 71448 19190.

[2] Rubens by Kerry Downes. Jupiter, 208 pp., £12.50, 26 June 1980, 0 906379 04 0.

[3] Bodies of Knowledge by Liam Hudson. Weidenfeld, 163 pp., £12.95, 14 October, 0 297 78117 0.

[4] Portrait Painting by Malcolm Warner. Phaidon, 80 pp., £2.95, 1979, 0 7148 1922 0.

Vol. 4 No. 22/23 · 2 December 1982 » Nicholas Penny » Goddesses and Girls (print version)
pages 20-22 | 3356 words

Letters

From Mary Rogers

SIR: Nicholas Penny (LRB, Vol. 4, No 22/3) quotes approvingly Charles Hope’s belief that Titian’s paintings of a reclining nude female (not, for him, Venus, but a mortal) with a musician ‘simply show a man attempting to win the favours of a woman through the power of music’. This would be fine if the women were clothed, but they are nude, yet neither hostile nor encouraging to the men. The notion that ‘a moral woman’ in the 16th or any other century would voluntarily get undressed and recline on a bed in front of an amorous man, yet, after having done so, need both the allurements of music and the urgings of Cupid to pursue the encounter to its logical conclusion, seems to me as bizarre as any of the ‘odd claims’ made about Titian’s Venuses which Hope and Penny like to mock. I cannot see how the women’s comfortable nudity can be reconciled with their indifference unless either that nudity indicates they are Venuses, or the paintings are not the naturalistic narratives Hope and Penny claim, but allegories.

Mary Rogers
University of Bristol

Nicholas Penny writes: I cannot see why ‘indifference’ in these circumstances should be considered more appropriate for Venus than for a mortal woman. The goddess did not consort with men in order to be bored by them. But Titian’s women are not indifferent: they are captivated by the music. The power of music to unlock hearts is a common theme in the sonnets and songs of Titian’s period, and that this is the subject of Titian’s paintings is also suggested (as Hope points out) by the presence of Cupid, who usually prompts the passions of mortals rather than those of his mother. Neither Hope nor I ever claimed that these highly poetical (but also earthy, uncomplicated and erotic) narrative paintings were ‘naturalistic’, or shed any light on what really happened in the Renaissance bedroom. What did happen there, however, was surely less bleakly mechanical than Mary Rogers allows. Many who have undressed and prepared themselves for a ‘logical’ conclusion are still not filled with desire.