Back for more
On the face of it the back does not appear the most erotic or, indeed, erogenous part of the body. People are more attracted to the face, breasts, buttocks, legs and even feet, before even considering the back. That is to say, few people are turned on by the back. Yet the back has an incredible erotic potential, indeed one of the great descriptions of sex relies on this potential, Iago’s brilliant description of the act in Othello as: “making the beast with two backs.
Artists too have capitalised on hidden power of the back as an object not only of sexual suggestion but also of erotic tension. This force has even been unleashed in the very sedate Canterbury Quad of Christ Church, where the Picture Gallery is playing host to an exhibition of images of the back drawn from their collections of Old Master drawings and etchings.
One of the most surprising instances of the allure of the unseen is the famous Rokeby Venus, otherwise known as Venus At Her Mirror by Diego de Velasquez. A painter famous for brilliantly observed and characterful yet sober paintings of the cream of Spanish aristocracy from the siglio d’oro, the Rokeby Venus is not only out of character but also unlike any of his other paintings.
Painted in a loose, flowing at times sketchy style (have a look at Venus’s reflection in the mirror), the face of his Venus remains unseen, the stark, almost anaemically white skin of her body standing in brilliant contrast to the brilliant black silk of her divan. The Putto holding the mirror focuses his attention on her vagina, suggesting the designs of the viewer upon this beauty.
It is an ambiguous image but one that is filled with an undoubted sexual tension that arises from what is hidden rather than what the viewer is shown. Ruben’s Venus At Her Mirror is a lot less reflective. She stares out at the viewer, ignoring the leering glances of both the Cupid holding up the mirror and the black servant to her right (a symbol of rampant sexuality in Flemish art). She is dominant yet inviting, not caring who sees her nudity while coquettishly hiding it from the viewer.
The back was also employed by Rubens to suggest heartbreak and the death of love, his Venus Frigida, showing Venus and Cupid cowering in a foetal position, a literal reading of the Latin tag: hunger and thirst cool love’s ardour. To continue the Venusian theme, the erotic rhetoric of the back is equally useful for seduction and desire, the lateral thrust of Venus in Titian’s Venus and Adonis, shows her desire to undress and make love to this beautiful mortal.
Equally pictures such as Annibale Carraci’s Venus With a Satyr and Cupids, shows the goddess attempting to hide her body from the seducers who surround her (the Cupid in the bottom left is so horny that his tongue is even hanging out), while failing to hide herself from the viewers stare. Indeed more than anything, portrayals of the back provide us with images of a somewhat voyeuristic nature.
As a night at the Bridge will tell you, some girls are shameless, others are embarrassed by the word ‘tits’ or the thought of sex, while most are in the middle. This erotic middle ground is perhaps most brilliantly captured in François Boucher’s Girl Resting (Mademoiselle Louise O’Murphy) or The Odalisk where the rubicund embarrassment of her cheeks has spread to her other cheeks, creating a timidly yet inviting image.
Other artists have attempted to make it appear as if the viewer was unseen, spying on the naked figures within the image. It is a voyeuristic approach that the French neo-classicists found peculiarly attractive, as Ingre’s The Bather brilliantly shows, and which can also be seen in the cultural mish-mash of Jean-Baptiste Mallet’s A Gothic Bathroom, where the sunlight coming through the stained glass hits the just visible curves of the semi-deshabillée figure.
The requisite nudity of bathing has also allowed artists to explore fetishes other than mere voyeurism: Degas’ The Tub with its prone and submissive female figure suggests the sexual dominance of the unseen yet undoubtedly male viewer, while Caravaggio’s The Rest In the Flight Into Egypt shows an angel naked save for a wispy sheet of cotton, dangerously mixing the sacred and profane, centering the image on an undoubtedly homoerotic if not twinkish figure rather than the infant Jesus.
Although not strictly a back picture, the painting by the unknown Master of the Fontainebleau School of Gabrielle d’Estrées and Her Sister where the pair are shown bathing while Gabrielle squeezes her sister’s nipple, suggests not only the possibility of the threesome to the viewer on whom the eyes of both women are fixed, but also speaks of the possible incestuous consquences. But to get back to backs.
Although Ingres painted many images that were highly voyeuristic, not only The Bather, but also The Turkish Bath, a painting whose circular shape consciously reminds the viewer of a spyhole, he was also capable of empowering the female nude, as his Grand Odalisque shows. By staring back at the viewer with something a wry smile, it is she who retains the power here.
Ingres, ironically, through his amateur violin playing, lead Man-Ray to create one of the most enduring and remarkable images of the female back, Le Violin d’Ingres, a pun on the French term for a hobby. Stencilling the f holes of a stringed instrument onto a woman’s back, he creates an image that intermingles the beauty of music and the female form, suggesting the intense humanity not only of art but also of the objects used to create that art.
Mappelthorpe, in portraits such as Derrick Cross or Ken Moody attempts to use the back as a way of turning the human form into a perfect form of artistic achievement in itself. The back, it seems, communicates a lot more than we thought, from desire to loss, and from fetish to empowerment.
1st Jun 2006