NOW SHOWING: PORN FIT FOR SPANISH KINGS

By JASON FARAGO.

Titian’s “Venus With an Organist and Cupid,” part of “Splendor, Myth and Vision: Nudes From the Prado” at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass. CreditMuseo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — “Splendor, Myth and Vision: Nudes From the Prado,” a weighty but also steamy exhibition at the Clark Art Institute here, makes a tricky demand: Can you look at art with both a historian’s detachment and a lover’s intimacy? Stripped-down white cube galleries have conditioned us to look with dispassion upon paintings like the large-scale ones here, which depict goddesses and nymphs, heroines and victims, with full breasts and bountiful thighs. (There are a few boys, too, in the homestretch.) We look at the handling of figures, at angles and light, at the development of painterly style, or else at the political and social context that gave rise to them.

“The Rape of Hippodamia” by Peter Paul Rubens, including in “Splendor, Myth and Vision: Nudes From the Prado” at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass. CreditMuseo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

But in the 16th and 17th centuries, when Europe’s greatest painters sent their work to Madrid, there were other, less intellectual ways of looking at these tableaus of heaving flesh. The artists knew it; the kings who commissioned them knew it; the Catholic Church knew it, too, and was none too happy about it. The 28 paintings here — by Titian, Tintoretto, Peter Paul Rubens, Francisco de Zurbarán and other late Renaissance and Baroque all-stars — may leave you a little hot under the collar, but imagine how they looked to the rigidly devout elites of the Spanish Golden Age. For them, these erotic images were a moral minefield.

In an early gallery here are two somber portraits of Spain’s Habsburg kings: the expansionist Philip II, painted by Titian in stern semiprofile, and his grandson Philip IV, depicted by Diego Velázquez with his trademark handlebar mustache. Both doctrinaire Catholics, both keen supporters of the Inquisition, they still had a marked taste for mythological and allegorical painting. Between them hangs a painting of Fortune, commissioned from Rubens by the later monarch and personified as a nude woman on an angry sea, her foot balanced precariously on a crystal ball. The mantle she holds in one hand has blown off her stout, fleshy body, though somehow the wind has no effect on her long hair.

Domenico Tintoretto’s “Lady Revealing Her Breast” (circa 1580 – 90), part of “Splendor. Myth and Vision: Nudes From the Prado.”CreditMuseo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

Spain in the 16th and early 17th centuries ruled over Flanders and large parts of present-day Italy, and both kings called on foreign painters to decorate the palaces of Madrid and El Escorial. Philip IV commissioned dozens of mythological paintings from Rubens, including “The Rape of Hippodamia” (1636-37), a choreographed, even acrobatic rendering of a centaur carrying off a tumbling, bare-breasted horsewoman.

The sexiest pictures, however, were reserved for the kings’ private chambers. That was the case for this show’s money loan: Titian’s dumbfounding “Venus With an Organist and Cupid,” dating to 1550-55. Venus lounges on a red velvet blanket, which Titian renders with stunningly free brushwork; gashes of purple and mauve run through the velour. Her son whispers in her ear, making her turn away from the musician in her bedchamber — who indiscreetly gazes at her uncovered genitals. The goddess of love has an untroubled face and a slight paunch in her belly. They make her seem more mortal, and make the painting even lewder.

Guido Reni’s “Saint Sebastian” (1617-19) CreditMuseo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

When Philip IV acceded to the throne, he moved this painting to a special chamber in the Alcázar Palace, called the Titian Vaults. (Rubens, naturally, got access. He was a Titian freak, and his impressive copy of the older artist’s “Rape of Europa” is here, in which a masculine Europa is carried through the water by a sad-eyed bull.) This sala reservada, or private room, was not just a discreet place to look at dirty pictures; it was a response to ecclesiastical displeasure.

We’re at the height of the Counter-Reformation, remember. In 1563, at the last session of the Council of Trent, the church lays out the role of art in Catholic society — and insists that “figures shall not be painted or adorned with a beauty exciting to lust.” It’s hard to square that directive with much of the art here, notably an exquisite portrait from the royal collection by Domenico Tintoretto (the son of the more famous Venetian painter) of a woman in a diaphanous dress, peeling down her décolletage to reveal breasts of grayish white.

Diego Velázquez’s portrait of Philip IV (1653-55).CreditMuseo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

The salas reservadas offered art-loving kings and other nobles — though not queens; ladies were not allowed — a place to appreciate these paintings, both as allegorical lessons and as erotic stimulation, without directly contravening church teachings. By the 18th century, when more conservative Bourbons succeeded to the Spanish throne, these private rooms became guardhouses for masterpieces they would have been happy to burn. And the tradition of sequestering nudes continued when the Prado opened as a public museum in the early 19th century. “Venus With an Organist and Cupid” and several other paintings here were hung in their own sala reservada so as not to disturb.

All but four of the paintings in “Splendor, Myth and Vision” have never been shown in the United States. (The loans are a reciprocation of sorts for a 2010 exhibition at the Prado of the Clark’s copious collection of Renoirs.) Though they only begin to plot the complex history of Spanish royal patronage, the contrasts are illuminating, especially between the many nude women and the fewer men. Commissioned to paint Hercules’ labors for Philip IV’s Buen Retiro Palace, Zurbarán depicted the superhero as a tightly wound package of muscle, with little of the individuality Titian afforded to Venus, or Rubens to personified Fortune.

Titian’s portrait of Philip II (1549–50).CreditMuseo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

Yet a trio of paintings from the early 17th century of St. Sebastian, that icon of eroticized suffering, affirms that sometimes the male nude could be sexed up, too, even in religious context. Jusepe de Ribera, in 1636, painted a wiry, swimmer’s-build Sebastian with four arrows through his sides and arm; his flesh is flat and milky, rendered with the solid brush strokes that would so appeal to Manet and other French painters more than 200 years later.

Guido Reni, by breathless contrast, painted Sebastian in dramatic chiaroscuro. He has just one arrow in his abdomen and is gazing up at the sky in an ecstasy at once physical and metaphysical. In other versions of Reni’s painting (notably in the collection of the Dulwich Picture Gallery, in London), Sebastian’s loincloth droops so low that it reveals his mons pubis, and it probably fell as low in this one, but in the 18th century a sensitive soul ordered the loincloth repainted, hiked further up the waist.

“That day, the instant I looked upon the picture, my entire being trembled with some pagan joy,” Yukio Mishima wrote of this painting in his 1949 novel “Confessions of a Mask.” What his narrator then does with a printed reproduction of Reni’s image of rapture through suffering is not necessary to describe. But the Japanese author’s physical reaction to the tormented, near-naked saint should be a reminder that even we modern folks are not invulnerable to the sex appeal of gods.

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