Does size matter?

I had a quick peek at the excellent new Cranach exhibition at the Royal Academy this week. I didn’t know much about Lucas Cranach the Elder before I went along -- except that he was one of those few painters whose work even an amateur like me could spot a mile off.

The Academy’s Norman Rosenthal lumped him together with Modigliani and Botticelli for instant recognisability, which I thought was a bit unfair to Botticelli, but you know what he means.

This Cranach show had caught the headlines a few weeks ago when London Transport first of all banned his nude Venus advertising poster from the underground, then relented. So we can now see her on the tube in all her glory.

But seeing her in the flesh sprang a couple of surprises.

First of all, there is no good reason at all for giving this painting the title ‘Venus’. She has no particularly Venus-like attribute – no little Cupid for example. ‘Venus’. it turns out, is a just a way of putting a bit of classical respectability onto this rather pert girl. We have no clue who she was, or was meant to be.

Secondly, she’s very small, less than 40 cm by 25 cm. That’s tiny compared with her bill-board appearance on the tube. In other words, in the original, she looks like a bijou piece of private, boudoir erotic art.

Would she have found it so easy to win her reprieve from London Transport if she’d been known as some rich man’s mistress instead of the bona fide Roman goddess? Personally I’m very pleased to be able to catch sight of her smirking on the underground. But whoever it was who objected to her as porn had a point.

I also hadn’t realised that ‘Venus’ had a pair: a small nude painting of the legendary Lucretia, who killed herself under the last king of Rome, Tarquin the Proud, after one of the king’s relatives had forced her to sleep with him (whether it strictly counted as ‘rape’ or not exercised Roman and later commentators). It was this event that led to the overthrow of the early Roman monarchy ad the foundation of the Republic.

In this painting, she’s in much the same pose as ‘Venus’, except that she is about to plunge a decidedly phallic dagger into her breast.

How different would our reactions have been if we had been confronted with this female victim of sexual violence, about to kill herself, accompanying our tube rides?

Comments

[Cec Hogarth]

Tony,
Martial (somewhere in book I) says Porcia swallowed "candentes favillas". Literally these are hot embers, but the word is also used particularly for the still-hot ashes of the dead, as distinct from the "cineres", which are the ashes of the pyre. I can't remember (if I ever knew) whether she had Brutus' ashes or not. If that's what she swallowed it was a marvel of symbolism; but, coals or bones, it was an agonising death and a prodigious feat of willpower. However, she was Cato's daughter, a serious Stoic and republican and Brutus' wife (and cousin). Incidentally, Servilia had disapproved of the marriage. She had wanted Caesar's daughter Julia for her son until Pompey got her as part of his political deal with Caesar.

Porcia was a strong-minded woman and a partner, perhaps even a dominant one, in Brutus' politics, according to Cicero, who in a letter gives an account of a family policy meeting he attended at Antium in June of 44. Brutus, Cassius, Servilia, Portia and Junia Tertia (Cassuis' wife, Brutus' half-sister) were all there and all vocal. One can understand why after Philippi, her father, husband and brother-in-law all suicides thanks to the victorious Caesarians, and having been herself part of the opposition leadership, Porcia resolved to follow the example of her menfolk; and if the only means to hand were painful, so be it. Martial implies that knives had been removed as a precaution against her suicide, but that her determination prevailed.

Tacitus quotes "Paete, non dolet." as the last words of another Stoic wife committing suicide - the easy way, with a dagger. Dastardly foreigners, of course, used asps, or other poisons. The Julio-Claudians seem to have reserved poison (via the likes of the ever-obliging Locusta) for convenient in-family demises.

Neither Servilia nor Junia was the suicidal type. They both died natural deaths, the latter in 22AD, in her nineties and very wealthy.

I know it sounds like a soap opera, but politics in Republican Rome were deeply rooted in family, and vice versa, and it's all true (pace jesting Pilate). Isn't Roman history fun? Of course, it's a lot more fun in Latin, but that's another blog.

Di immortales! We're back to matters classical! Hooray! With apologies to Catullus: "desiderato acquiescamus lecto".

[Tony Francis]

Dear Cec: I have to concede that the US is a gun-toting society. So maybe you are correct in challenging the knife/suicide info I provided. In a somewhat related vein, it should be noted that perpetrators of abdominal injuries in knife fights (where it can be presumed the assailants were seriously intending to inflict real damage) only penetrate the peritoneal cavity (abdominal cavity) 25-33% of the time. There is some old work by Dr. Nance, the New Orleans knife expert indicating this (click on the pages to enlarge):
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1353488 I've run into to some newer info that indicates the number may be as low as 10%. But I can't find it as I am sitting here, now. This is interesting, since gunshot wounds of the abdomen have to be surgically explored. Knife wounds, not necessarily. Concerning Europe, it appears to be the suicide capitol of the world:
http://www.psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2005/01/16/europe-is-worlds-suicide-hotspot/
No mention of how many knives were involved, though.
The one that gets me is Porcia: did she really swallow hot coals? If so, she was more of a man than I am. If I had to commit suicide by swallowing hot coals, I would just go on living, no matter how miserable life was. I am just too big a weenie. Was the Bard full of Lard about Porcia (variously called Portia)?
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porcia_Catonis
There is a painting of Porcia doing superficial damage to her thigh with a little frog sticker, presumably before swallowing red-hot coals.

[Cec Hogarth]

When the first European colonists landed in America, firearms were part of their standard equipment. The US has been a gun-owning society since its inception. Hence US suicide statistics, and especially current ones, are wildly irrelevant to Cranach's fifteenth century German scene, let alone to the pre-republican Roman Lucretia he was painting.
Get real. Societies without firearms were (and are) highly competent in the use of edged weapons and tools of all kinds. Suicide by knife is a piece of cake under those circumstances - almost as easy as killing thousands at a time in battle! Heck! Millions of us even today carry a pocket-knife!

[Tony Francis]

Dear Cec H: In the US, there are about 50 suicides per day from gunshot wounds. There is only about 1 suicide per day from stabbing/cutting.
http://www.suicide.org/suicide-statistics.html
In the scope of suicide attemtps, there is a gradation between people who are serious about suicide, and those who aren't serious about it (so-called cry for help). This is combined with people who know how to engage in deadly activity, and those who are ignorant of the lethality of methods. For instance, someone might take 10 aspirin, thinking this will be lethal. Sometimes, people who aren't serious about suicide will bungle into a lethal method by accident. Usually knife wielders are not serious, but only end up making a superficial cut. These end up in the Emergency Room. A person who is knowledgeable about lethality of a knife (such as an ex-military person) will probably know how to commit suicide. I think many writers of literature, through the centuries, have used "suicide by knife" as a dramamtic vehicle, which, unfortunately, has little basis in reality.

[Cec Hogarth]

Tony,
The Japanese seem not to have heard how "impossible" it is to commit suicide with a knife. Not to mention our own dear Shakespeare's frequent mention of having a pal hold one's sword while one runs on it. The ancient world appears to have coped reasonably well with the problem - Seneca, for instance? Then there's Cicero - an early example of "suicide by cop"?

[Paul Potts]

Dear Lucy

Perhaps I should have said "Be happy". It was your own puzzling "Um, Oh." that I was trying to respond to. There was I thought, a worry there. My list of authors was intended to claim that Universty education is a kind of cul-de-sac at least as far as writing English is concerned, and that the further you go, the worse it gets. I'm now tempted to extend my list, but shall restrict myself to Francoise Sagan, who failed to enter the Sorbonne, P G Wodehouse, Shakespeare, and of those who rejected the whole business, Evelyn Waugh and his son Auberon,who was expelled from ChristChurch Oxford for "Stupidity". I am further tempted to add the observation that one reason why more modern writers have little or nothing of interest to say is because they their ability to write has been screwed up by their university education.

Paulo

[Lucy]

Paulo,

Why on earth should I be worried? And English BA/PhD degrees are a very recent tradition - what is your point re. your list of authors?

Bemused ...

[jt from PA]

Dr. Mary - Great blog. Sorry I have not had the pleasure of taking one of your studies.

[Paul Potts]

Dear Lucy

Just about all academics are pseudo-such, OK. The whole PhD rigmarole is little more than a rehearsal of what it might be like if you were ever to do real research, I copped out to my cost and satisfaction.

What is really good is to become a topic on which the postgraduate researchers show, or try to show interest in, but they are best avoided.

What good English writers ever had a PhD, or even a BA? Joyce, yes, but not Lawrence or Dickens or Gaskell or Brontes or Austen or Keats or Hardy or Orwell or Churchill or Socrates or ..... And if they had been through that, they despised or rejected it: Byron, Shelley, Gibbon, and well, you name them.

Don't worry.

Paulo

[Lucy]

Um ... ok ...

[Tony Francis]

http://www.healthmad.com/Teen-Health/Identifying-Stages-of-Female-Puberty.74527

http://womenshealth.suite101.com/article.cfm/female_puberty

http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puberty

[Lucy]

Wow, thanks for posting back! I'm glad we sorted out the MB thing (I think I leapt up in arms because of all the scary 'grr, grr, Mary Beard is evil' on the Prince Harry article. I think some of the details you're talking about probably need to be seen on a larger reproduction, so I'll take your word for it.

As to the sword/Freud issue: yes, I'm sure people thought in those terms. Cf. Antony and Cleopatra: 'She made great Caesar lay his sword to bed; He ploughed her, and she cropped'. (Could just be about giving up warfare, but I doubt it in that context - there's a nice Biblical play on turning swords into ploughshares there.) Also, the term 'prick' (which is a term of affection (!) in earlier poetry had for Shakespeare as it does for us connotations both of sex and violence.

Hmm ... there's my pseudo-academic done for t'day. :-)

[Tony Francis]

Lucy, actually my "Dear MB" was directed at friend Michael Bully. It just occurred to me that this could also be interpretted as "Mary Beard". My Bad! Starting with the portait of a Saxon Princess, we can see this girl is fairly young (6-8 years old). Next we see pictures of her naked and in early pubescence. There is a progression from a girl I would estimate to be about 12 to 13 (possibly 14) in the Venus portraits. I am looking at the fat accumulation in the thighs and buttocks. By the time we get to Lucretia, she is older, with more fat (what you are calling curves). The Water Nymph shows a hint of pubic hair. The others don't. The head is always conspicuously small for the body. By the time we get to Lucretia, the head is tiny (and deformed) compared with the body. We have a body with a developed female "south of the border", but no pubic hair, an adolescent chest and a miniscule head. The hallux valgus deformity meticulously portrayed elsewhere has disappeared. A knife angled at 30 degrees is pointed at the chest. What are we to make of this? I don't know. But it doesn't pass the smell test, to me. You raise another interesting question: did we think of swords and scabbards in sexual terms before Freud? (I have seen precocious 11 year olds who start showing secondary sex characteristics, although it is admittedly rare.)

[Lucy]

Can I just ask, how do we know she's an adolescent apart from the lack of hair? Or is it just that? At a glance I assumed she was grown-up - she's quite curvy-hipped for a 14-year-old, and ridiculously so for an 11 year old.

Tony Francis, I enjoyed your comments but don't you think you're being a little patronising with your 'Dear MB: Swords and knives have probably been associated with the phallus since antiquity.'? I would guess she knows that: I dropped Latin after A-level, but we'd already learnt at GCSE that the word for the sheathe of a sword is 'vagina'. Nuff said, surely?

Interesting article; I enjoyed it!

[Tony Francis]

Dear MB: Swords and knives have probably been associated with the phallus since antiquity. Note the Old German similarity of "fuchen" for both the sex act and "to strike" as "in a violent act"; or the Dutch "fokken" for both; the Old German/Old English "fihala" for "knife" or "sharp instrument" and "fehida" for feud or hostility; "faege" fated to die. The name "Saxon" means "warrior with a sword". The similarity to "sex" is obvious. There are other examples. In more modern times, we can thank Freud for bringing attention to knives and swords as being surrogates for the phallus. According to one observer, it is only radical feminists who see every knife as a penis:
http://www.sobran.com/columns/1999-2001/000928.shtml
Of course, the Cambridge Professor sees repressed sexuality in the library. But I have to concur with her on this one. Taken in context of the repetitive nature and sexual content of the paintings by Cranach with this young girl, the knife as a sexual symbol seems an appropriate one. In Lucretia, the model, whom we have observed "grow up in the nude" before our eyes, appears to be about 16-17 years old. Yet she is depicted as a pre-pubescent female. This is odd. The 30 degree angle of the knife does it for me.
It is almost impossible to commit suicide with a knife, although it can be done (look at the bottom of the page):
http://www.hbo.com/autopsy/baden/qa_5.html
Somewhat related is Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. Two common dreams are the "naked" dream and the "failure to take a test" dream. I have both of these. According to Freud, the lack of embarassment in the naked dream is normal. I usually have a dream where I forget to go to a class, then try to make it all up on the last day, trying to cram it all in.
http://www.psywww.com/books/interp/chap05d.htm

[Michael Bulley]

Like PL, I was puzzled by the description of the dagger as "decidedly phallic". In what way is it? It doesn't look like a phallus and it doesn't look as if it's going to be plunged where you'd expect phalluses to be plunged. It looks more as if it's going to go into her right armpit. Maybe this is a new new sexual activity I haven't caught up with yet.

[Tony Francis]

Mary, Your gal pal Parker Posey has a new television show. She plays a character variously reported to be named "Jezebel Jones", or alternatively, "Jezebel James". It is being produced by the woman who brought us "The Gilmore Girls".
http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20039476,00.html
I tried watching the Gilmore Girls, but had to give it up because of unrelenting waves of nausea.
Sorry Mary, but Parker P is now going around with a new guy. One blogger decribed him as a "goofy faced dude". You decide:
http://www.jezebel.com/365159/parker-posey-downtown-dress-uptown-dog
The girl bloggers want to have her hair.

[Paul Potts]

Dear Mary

You might well have done better to visit the exhibition at Dulwich, showing paintings of Saint Sebastian, all supposed to be by the 17th-century Bolognese painter Guido Reni. Most of them are copies of each other, according to the commentator in our Independent newspaper, rather like some of the Cranach. He raises the question whether it is possible for painters to plagiarise themselves. The paintings are better than the Cranach you display, and they raise a question for me: was this female-directed porn, or male? I suspect the latter. I also suspect that the word "nepotism" applied to the Vatican cardinals of that and previous periods was a euphemism not for "male children", but for boyfriends. Well, see Vasari "Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects", in the splendid and cheap Everyman edition. Vasari did not make a meal of it, just took it for granted, throughout the 2,000 or so pages. And what about Carravagio?

Is there any female-directed porn? If not, why not?

Paulo

[Tony Francis]

http://www.usdoj.gov/olp/pdf/adam_walsh_act.pdf

http://www.usdoj.gov/olp/pdf/28cfr.pdf

http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/ceos/mission.html

http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/ceos/trafficking.html

[Tony Francis]

There are actually two Venus portraits by Cranach. Here is the other one:
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Lucas_Cranch_the_Elder_Venus_Standing_in_a_Landscape.jpg
It looks like he starting using this girl when she was much younger (about 6 or 8 years):
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Lucas_Cranach_d._%C3%84._052.jpg
This is all similar to the 6 year old JonBenet Ramsey who was killed in her home in 1996:
http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/famous/ramsey/photo_1.html

http://www.perfectpeople.net/celebrity-star/888/jonbenet-ramsey.htm
And yes, that knife in the Lucretia portrait looks like a phallus. To be honest, this whole Cranach - young girl thing is starting to look like one big WEIRDO-O-RAMA- CREEP-O-RAMA to me.

[anthony alcock]

RichardH:

I used the term "pornographic", because Mary wrote that the poster of Miss Pert had initially been banned by London Transport. I tend to associate this sort of public censure with what is usually regarded as "pornography" (down-market and aesthetically unacceptable) rather than with what is usually regarded as "eroticism" (up-market and aesthetically acceptable). The painting itself, I am sure, would not be considered "pornographic" by anyone (including the authorities of London Transport), but the use of it to produce a poster for display in a public place might. In some ways, a delightfully old-fashioned view of public responsibility. Well played, Ken.

[arindam bandyopadhaya]

Nabakov would have approved.A 'Lolita' without a trace of pubic hairs!

Regards

[Mary]

I take PL's point about daggers..(though the nakedness here does rub it n).
But both Lucretia and 'Venus" are standing on the same kind of surface.

[PL]

What sort of dagger would you say was not "decidedly phallic"?

[PL]

That she's standing on a sphere suggests a planetary goddess, hence Venus.

[RichardH]

Anthony Alcock:

I am quite sure that there was an erotic (pornographic if you prefer) factor in most, if not all, of the nudes of the renaissance period, think for example of Phillip II of Spain's discreetly curtained Titians. The artists were dependent on their patrons, who evidently liked the idea, and the classical and other themes allowed them to get past the church.

[Tony Francis]

Cranach the Elder appears to have used this same girl in many of his paintings. She seems to be, at best a precocious 11 year old, or perhaps no older than 14. This girl posed for Cranach as Judith, a Saxon Princess and a Water Nymph (see wiki Cranach feed provided by the Cambridge Professor). The girl has a definite resemblence to a Pug:
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pug
She also has a hallux valgus deformity apparent in the Water Nymph and Venus renditions. Cranach downplayed this in his rendition of Lucretia:
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunion
Whatever we may conclude from this, it must be noted that this is yet another example of an exhibitionistic adolescent and a horny old man; i.e. another case of the Jennifer Syndrome.

[anthony alcock]

On reflection, I suppose there is a point of contact between early female nudes and contemporary pornography, viz. the hairless female pubic area. If only Ruskin, "prophet of the post-modernist era", had had the opportunity to experience this relatively recent phenomenon, his marriage to Effie might not have involved the tedious readings to her from the works of Gibbon.

[anthony alcock]

I didn't realize that you could regard pictures of this venerable age as pornographic. Surely they belong to some sort of canonical tradition, which effectively has made them into not much more than objects of study.