Sex-drenched Renaissance art spices up New York Metropolitan Museum of Art
It's wonderful to see Cupid's arrow hit home. Even better to watch Venus disrobe.
So it goes this holiday season at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Its new exhibition, "Art and Love in Renaissance Italy," offers continuous bodice-ripping and much evidence that romance has its price.
The love-token-heavy show makes upper-crust Italians of the 15th and 16th centuries into libidinous serial divorcers who only courted, married and sired children to get the jewelry, ornamental jugs, commemorative plates, portraits, fertility objects and erotica with which they celebrated weddings, betrothals and birthdays.
Full of marvelous gift ideas, especially for the rich and titled, the show's first two galleries resemble the bridal registry at a Renaissance-era Neiman-Marcus.
Among the items on view are rings engraved with clasped hands; a woven silver girdle with an enamel portrait buckle; gilded dowry chests; a phallic leather case (ostensibly for writing implements) with an inscription professing love; and one plate after another bearing the painted faces of available young women.
This show wants us to know what it means to give in to lust. Venus and Cupid figures abound in paintings throughout, as do large female nudes and dewy young couples making goo-goo eyes or presenting bratty babies to fawning hangers-on.
The exhibition also lifts more than a few skirts, particularly in dark red galleries unveiling period pornography in paintings, prints and objects, such as a ceramic plate showing a manís head formed entirely by interlocking phalluses.
Full Exposure
Nearby, a titillating Titian nude reclines on her bed, petting her puppy and exposing herself to a lecherous, fully dressed man — her husband — playing a boudoir piano and homing in for a closer view.
Aside from its appeal to carnal appetites and dangerous liaisons, this show, on the whole, is more chaste than lewd. Leaning heavily toward the scholarly and the saintly, it's mostly prim and distant, disheveled rather than defiled.
Yet falling in love is not a remote activity, nor is sex academic. "Art and Love in Renaissance Italy" is most interesting on the subject of love that withers, or is interrupted by infidelity or death.
Take the diamond-etched glass plate depicting the strained marriage of Isabella de Medici and Paolo Giordano Orsini. (He strangled her in 1576.)
Or the 1490-1500 portrait of a snooty young widow in mourning dress, clasping her arms and looking offended by her wedding ring, which she holds between two fingers as if about to drop it in a well.
Chastity, Fame
More curious are the two-sided "childbirth trays," 15th- century wooden service platters used to celebrate a babyís arrival. Painted front and back, they make use of mythological figures like Chastity or Fame to picture new mothers, fortunate unions or future rulers. The trays might qualify as folk art if not for the mastery of those who made them.
One tray pictures an adolescent Cupid riding a unicorn- drawn cart, attended by 21 virgins. Another has two naked boys tearing at each other's privates. A particularly striking example portrays aristocratic singles out on dates in a garden cafe. Its back, however, dispenses with the people, representing their imagined offspring as an overgrown field of wildflowers instead.
In later paintings, infants appear so tightly swaddled in textiles they look bandaged, imprisoned or dead, like the poor cradled child in a 1583 painting by Lavinia Fontana.
Mousy Laura
Venus provides the showís finale, in a gallery where she appears as different women of note. None is more affecting than Giorgioneís 1506 "Portrait of a Woman (Laura)," a self-assured figure in a fur-collared robe, exposing one breast. Plain-faced with mousy brown hair and lacking the blush of youth, she gazes into the distance with a jaw set more like Hillary Clintonís than any usual Venus.
Unlike so much else here, the painting doesnít have to flatter its subject to be fascinating; it only has to be honest. That's why the work stands out. A show about fertility and romance should be more than mildly interesting or simply appreciative of the craft involved in it. Love is complicated and messy, while "Art and Love" is just too neat.