Erotica 17-18th Century: From Rembrandt to Fragonard

Fun book that you can get a few giggles out of, I especially enjoyed the flying [...] with butterfly wings [...] a nun on pg. 153 and the cat watching the friar tugging at a rope tied around his [...] while smacking himself in the [...]. Another funny one was the guy getting shot in the [...] by cupid while he's [...] on page 171. Funny stuff aside, the highlight on the book is the de Sade engravings from page 111 to 141. Also the artistic ability by Agostino Carracci is amazing. His engravings are absolutely beautiful.

This is a small scale (pages measuring 5" by 8") high quality art book of explicit erotic painting and engravings - along with a spirited and sensitive ideological introductory essay by Gilles Neret. He starts out with the far-reaching assertion that "there is only one real antidote to the anguish engendered in humanity by its awareness of inevitable death: erotic joy." This collection focuses on the representation and the provocation of that erotic joy. Those who enjoy explicitly graphic erotica (including those who might prefer to call it 'pornography') will not be disappointed in this book. Neret has an abiding enthusiasm and a curatorial talent, for he has assembled a wide range of examples of erotic paintings, drawings, and engravings. In addition he has a sturdy confidence in the rightness of erotica's goal for its admirers: the enhancement of sexual experience. So yes, at least some of this art will do the customary and expected job of successful 'erotica.' The approximately 170 plates are by European painters and printmakers. When color was used, it has been faithfully reproduced. The range of media and mood is wide, and the subject matter is consistently explicitly sexual.'Everything' is revealed at times. Threesomes, orgies, assorted combinations and recombinations are sometimes the subjects of these works.There are boudoir scenes from the 1700's ( paintings of French artist Francois Boucher; the golden and voluptuous paintings of Jean-Honore Fragonard (softly beautiful women: dreaming - attended by cherubs - or sated and asleep in appealing disarray) and an assortment of anonymous politically satirical aat the same time sexually explicit paintings. There are social and cultural satires and a series of explicit and graphic paintings "for the education of the dauphin" that Napoleon hung in his bathroom. (Only several survived). A 1797 Dutch edition of de Sade's "The Story of Justine or the Misfortunes of Virtue" featured detailed and often gruesome illustrations - and some are included here. From Italy, Carracci's series of engravings, "The Loves of the Gods," done in 1602, shares similarities of mood and topics with much mainstream pornography of today, but Carracci named his exuberant couples after classical gods, and inserted edifying visual details into his scenes of frank and explicit sexual activity: the satyr's hooves, Bacchus' grapes, Achilles' warrior equipment, discarded in favor of Briseis, etc. Rembrandt (yes, Rembrandt) loved to paint women and evidently loved sexual subjects, for he did numerous erotic paintings, often of his wife and himself. His women (and his men) are real, often in a sort of sensuous and happy disarray, wrinkled and classically imperfect - and beautifully human. The attitudes of the lovers are unidealized, sensuous because so natural - and the drawings are lovely. English painter Thomas Rowlandson published a series of graphic and consistently and deliberately insulting caricatures of