In De humani corporis fabrica, Andrea Vesalius dedicated seven volumes to defend the practice of dissection to a society even rooted in the medieval conception of the body as a divine creation. To penetrate the secrets of the flesh, including for medical purposes, was in some way sacrilegious. The engravings of this treatise on anatomy reveal the difficulty of this change of mind: the flayed are not pure helpless residue; They suffer and think of […]
Maybe the first artist who broke away from the archetype of virile man was Bas Jan Ader, when in early seventies introduced in a gallery pleas and sentences of melodrama as please do not leave me; when filmed himself crying uncontrollably (I’m too sad to tell you), arranging vases of flowers or delighting in front of a sunset. Although his intention was not to undermine the segregation of roles but to parody the image of […]
Originally, pornography was an artistic genre used by heretics and revolutionaries, political dissidents and freethinkers. During the French Revolution, depravity was equated with corruption in the erotic imagination of poets and artists committed to harassing the Old Regime: to show monarchs being sodomized or fellating the servants, to reveal the impotence of ones and the promiscuity of others, in short, to make public the goings of royal bedchamber, contributed to the collapse of hierarchies and […]
In condemning the eroticism, Christianity propitiated that the lubricious imagination concentrate in hell, making it the sky of the sinners, the paradise of lust. Artists of all the times have been filling the underworld by all kinds of paraphilias, apparently to damn them but in practice to satisfy the scoptophilic appetite of their patrons or clients. But the confessed anticlericalism is not embodied in art (literature first) until the eighteenth century, when dissident artists release […]
