Orphée endormant Cerbère by Henri Peinte (1887). It’s often difficult to imagine a perfectly innocent motive when looking at works such as these. Did the world really need another statue of Orpheus or is the true intention revealed by those carefully sculpted buttocks, with the mythology added as a convenient subterfuge? We’ll never know, of [...]
It was the slightly gamy residue of the super-elegant and exotic pictures of Aubrey Beardsley. I have always considered the 1900 period as the psycho-analytical end-product of the Greco-Roman Decadence. I said to myself: Since these people will not hear of aesthetics and are capable of becoming excited only over “vital agitations”, I shall show [...]
David (c.1872). I’d marked out this statue as a suitable addition to the burgeoning men with swords archive some time ago but it took the discovery of a piece of writing to prompt this post. Antonin Mercié’s statue of David resides today in the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, but I managed to miss it on my [...]
Men and their swords. • Swords against death • Tamotsu Yato’s men with katanas • Fechtbuch von 1467 • The Classical alibi in physique photography • Men without swords • Totem and tattoo • Vintage swordplay #5 • The art of Dmitry Dmitriev • Vintage swordplay #4 • Sabre-rattling • Salomé scored • Fencing fashion [...]
Stay updated via RSS.
