Biblical eroticism  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

"As formerly [painters] had searched through classic authors, so now they searched through the Bible for erotic scenes; and what they found there was not as harmless as the joyous legends of the Hellenes, but such scenes as Lot and his daughters, the expulsion of Hagar, the two elders peeping at Susanna in the bath, or Herodias confounding by her dance the senses of old Herod. If Judith is represented with especial frequency as the murderess of Holofernes, the reason probably is that the thought was akin to the episode of Beatrice Cenci."--The History of Painting: From the Fourth to the Early Nineteenth Century (1893/94) by Richard Muther

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop

Featured:

Throughout the history of painting, the bible has been used as a pretext to depict nudity.

In the visual arts, its best-known depictions are the nudity of Adam and Eve, especially during their expulsion from the garden of Eden.

Other passages that have lent themselves to erotic depictions are Bathsheba at her bath, Susanna and the elders, Potiphar's wife, the story of the Penitent Magdalene and Lot and his daughters.

Furthermore, the obsession of some early Church Fathers with sexual abstinence led to the development of very explicit passages in penitential books, see texts on lust by the early Church Fathers Saint Augustine, Saint Jerome and Clairvaux.

Contents

[edit]

Scarlet women

bad women of the bible, strange woman

Jezebel, Salome, Eve, Delilah, Maacah, Potiphar's wife, Lot's daughters, Lot's wife, Herodias, and Athaliah are the bad women of the bible.

[edit]

Historiography

Mirabeau in his Erotika Biblion (1783) laments the fact that the sexual practices dating from Antiquity related in the Old Testament were translated using euphemistic language.

The "Terminal Essay" (1885-86) by Burton refers to the "Old Testament" and "its allusions to human ordure and the pudenda; to carnal copulation and impudent whoredom, to adultery and fornication, to onanism, sodomy, and bestiality?"

[edit]

Other elements

[edit]

Examples in the visual arts

[edit]

See also


Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Biblical eroticism" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Retrieved from "http://artandpopularculture.com/Biblical_eroticism"
Personal tools
Metas