Can You Spot The Hidden Sex In These Non-Sexual Paintings?
Think that Madonna and Child image is innocent? Not exactly. And why does Jesus have a raging erection? Let's make your next dull museum visit a bit more educational.
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Now, onto the naughty art lesson you didn’t learn in school…
Pablo Picasso once claimed that sex and art were the same for him. Given how much erotica he put into his paintings, I believe him. When he painted his 22-year-old mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter, he made the top half of her face a giant penis. Then there is the slapdash erotica of La Douceur (1903), portraying a woman performing oral sex. The painting isn't his best work, but it is sexually explicit.
Unpopular opinion coming…
Picasso's art makes me feel like I have been fed a cheesy pickup line by a dirty old man with a paintbrush. His sexuality is so overt and cloying that it leaves nothing to the imagination. Or perhaps I can't shake his misogynistic backstory. (Picasso treated every lover like a whore, and discarded them with equal ferocity.)
Not so with the following paintings. These paintings have hidden sexual symbols that many people miss.
The Bayeux Tapestry
There are 93 penises in the Bayeux Tapestry (and not a single vulva.) I didn't count. I am not that obsessed with penises. But Oxford historian George Garnett did. He found 88 well-endowed horses and five human penises up to the usual hi-jinx.
The Bayeux Tapestry was commissioned in the eleventh century to chronicle the Battle of Hastings — the conquest of England by William the Duke of Normandy.
Most people learned in elementary school that the battle ended with that traitor Harold II getting a big ole' arrow in the eye and William the Conquerer getting a sweet new throne. But the actual details of the battle are not as tame.
According to accounts from the Carmen de Hastingae Proelio ('Song of the Battle of Hastings'), Harold II's death was a tad more gruesome:
“The first of the four, piercing the king’s shield and chest with his lance, drenched the ground with a gushing stream of blood. The second with his sword cut off his head below the protection of his helm. The third liquefied his entrails with his spear. And the fourth cut off his thigh and carried it some distance away.”
So yeah, "liquefied" entrails never makes it into the kid's history books. As for the scene depicting the arrow to Harold's eye, someone added that portion to the tapestry a century later.
To confuse matters even more, the Bayeux Tapestry is not a tapestry. It is wool embroidery on linen. Nor was it created in Bayeux, France, but it is believed to have been made in England. Historians can't even agree on who commissioned it, but it was most likely Bishop Odo, William the Conqueror's half-brother.
We also don't know who created it. But Garnett thinks the penises solve this mystery.
He's not the only one. Many historians have made parallels between portraying virility and victory. For example, in the scene below, a groom presents a horse to the victor, William the Conqueror. Note the horse has a rather big shlong (or a fifth leg).
Garnett claims the penises are proof that men made the Bayeux Tapestry. His rationale is that only a guy would use the kind of sophomoric humor reserved for a boy's bathroom stall.
I am not so convinced. Some wily nuns could have been having a little phallic fun too. But alas, this won't be the only time women have been erased from the art world.
Venus Callipyge is a little hussy!
She has been called "The Mona Lisa of Asses." Even her name — Venus Callipyge — translates as 'Venus of the beautiful buttocks.' But while many people view her as a celebration of the classical female form, the truth is a bit racier.
Miss Callipyge is also a flasher. Exposing your booty was known in ancient Greece as anasyrma, which means "exposing of the buttocks or genitals." The gesture was considered bawdy exhibitionism, but the ancients also believed the gesture could ward off evil.
Eighteenth-century artists considered flashing especially vulgar and aggressive. For example, in the poem "The Devil of Pope Fig Island," Jean de la Fountain writes of a saucy little minx named Perretta who defeats the Devil by tricking him into looking at her genitals.
As you can see from the above print, our lady does not need mace to stun Lucifer. If only flashing your lady bits scared away baddies today.
Christ has risen
If you look at enough crucifixion scenes, you will notice one similarity — Jesus often has a raging erection. Don’t believe me? Well, let’s examine some passionate Jesus paintings.
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