CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Was there Transgressive Old Master Art in Venice?

The Persian Women by Flemish artist Otto van Veen, created between approximately 1597 and 1599. 

Viewing a pictorial scene that you didn’t think possible is a startling, often revealing experience. You ask yourself, should you believe your eyes. Maybe, you conclude, you are having a hallucination. A few years ago, in Venice, I went to review an exhibition, “Corpi Moderni: The Making of the Body in Renaissance Venice” at the Academy. And there I found Otto van Veen’s large history painting, Persian Women (1597–99), which shows a group of young women raising their skirts to show their naked bottoms to the men, who are terrified. Had I found this picture in a show of contemporary artworks, I would not have blinked. Our artists love to deal in erotic shock. But in a pre-modern art world where Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) defined the ideals of decorum in his history paintings, Persian Women was surprising indeed. What, indeed, would he have made of this picture. And while any well trained old master had the skill required to paint this picture, the subject seems in that culture unimaginable. That’s why the picture looks surprising. We can readily imagine some minor follower of the modernist Surrealist Paul Delvaux painting this fantasy scene. But how surprising to learn that it’s a late seventeenth-century work.

In our visual culture, which is permeated by psychoanalytic thinking, everyone can easily explain the Freudian implications of this picture. Whatever you think about Sigmund Freud, even if you haven’t read Three Essays on Sexuality, you cannot help knowing in a general way about his accounts of gender. And, I hasten to add, nowadays also to know also at least in a vague way the many feminist critiques of his analysis. That means that it’s impossible nowadays not to look at Persian Women without a certain self-conscious irony. That the man in the foreground and his........

© CounterPunch