"the obscenest picture the world possesses"
PUDENDUM, n. I recently finished reading Ross King’s The Judgment of Paris, a nonfiction book about Impressionism and French history, in particular the artists Édouard Manet and Henri Meissonier. I loved it, not just because there were several etymologies mentioned, most memorably the one in this long excerpt (page 104):
Visiting Florence on a tour through Italy in 1853, [Manet] had been entranced in the Uffizi by Titian’s Venus of Urbino, a painting later described by Mark Twain as “the foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses.” Painted for the Duke of Urbino in 1538, the Venus of Urbino depicts a nude woman reclining horizontally on a divan as she fixes the beholder with an inviting gaze and places her left hand lightly across her pubic region in a gesture suggesting either modesty or—so Twain pretended to believe—masturbation.
Pausing the excerpt to look at Titian’s Venus of Urbino because I like to look at paintings and because that Twain quote is the best possible marketing.
Titian’s Venus of Urbino
Picking up the excerpt where we left off:
Paintings of Venus concealing her privates and with either a hand or another obstacle to sight (such as the conveniently placed tresses of golden hair in Sandro Botticelli's Birth of Venus) were a genre known during the Middle Ages and Renaissance as Venus Pudica, “shameful” or “shamefaced” Venus. The genre may have had precedents in illustrations of the Expulsion from the Garden of Eden that showed the naked Eve covering her breasts and genitals out of shame (which is precisely how Michelangelo, obedient to this tradition, portrayed her on the vault of the Sistine chapel). The link between female genitalia and shame has actually been inscribed in language, since the word pudenda comes from the Latin pudere to be ashamed. However, Titian appears to have subverted the genre of Venus Pudica, since his Venus with her bold gaze and seductive manner is anything but shamefaced.
Wow. I made it through years and years of reading the word “pudique” in weird old French literature, only ever translating it as “modest” in my head, and it didn’t occur to me until just now that the concepts of “modesty” and “shame” were linguistically connected. A woman who is “pudique” in French is modest, that is to say, she feels the proper amount of shame.
Things have only gotten more misogynist since Latin, as pudendum used to refer to any genitalia, but now in English it usually means the vulva. I don’t think any genitals are anything to be ashamed of—I mean, don’t show them to anybody who didn’t ask to see them, that’s the most important rule—but it certainly feels extra wrong to heap shame on one kind and one kind only.
So Titian’s Venus is doing the Venus Pudica pose, but not displaying any shame—impudence!—which is why Mark Twain finds her foul, vile, and obscene. Twain and the conservative French artists and critics of the nineteenth century were in agreement: it’s only good to look at a naked lady if she’s not looking back at you.
Manet, on the other hand, came home from the Uffizi and a few years later he painted this:
Manet, Olympia.
So in addition to reading about which paintings of nude women were scandalous and which were acceptable to nineteenth-century viewers, I continued to live my life in a way they would have condemned as shameful, which included reading a lot of small-r romance. Here it is:
A Marvellous Light (m/m, both cis and gay, fantasy, historical) by Freya Marske. This was an eagerly anticipated book for me and it did not disappoint. It’s such a treat to find an author who does everything—prose, character, setting, pacing, tension, plot, action, sex, art-history-related details—so right. From prickly intellectual Edwin and cheerful jock Robin initially not caring for each other and then being forced to solve a magical murder together, to the country house party full of excruciatingly awful guests, to the canny old lady who enchanted her hedge maze to attack intruders, every single aspect of this book is a delight. This is also the second book I’ve read these past few months where there is a magic system that is initially presented as gendered, men doing more powerful magic and women doing less, and over the course of the book, that assumption proves false, and I love it. (The other book is Xiran Jay Zhao’s Iron Widow.) I also cannot fathom how Freya Marske had the time and the energy to make every single sentence sparkle—there’s unknowable magic in our world, too. Content guidance: murder, abuse, torture, sex.
Big Bad Wolf (m/f, both cis and het, paranormal) by Suleikha Snyder. It’s been such a long time since I read a plotty paranormal romance with a big cast of characters—multiple points of view, even!—that this was nostalgic for me. It also feels current, since it’s set in an alternate contemporary United States that is just a hair more fascist and racist than the real one (plus, you know, werewolves), but still utterly recognizable. This book is dark and brutal and very, very horny. It also has many moments of humor—when lawyer and profiler Neha Ahluwalia goes on the run with her murderous client Joe Peluso, they hide in an apartment owned by one of her aunties, and she muses that the Desi auntie network is more untraceable and impenetrable to government surveillance than any burner phone. Content guidance: murder, violence, abuse, sex.
The Girl with Stars in Her Eyes (m/f, both cis and het, contemporary) by Xio Axelrod. Xio Axelrod knows music, and it comes through in every description in this book about a young Black woman named Toni who is a talented rock guitarist with a horror of fame. Toni wants a career as a session musician and a sound engineer, but fate offers her the chance to be a rock band’s backup guitarist—and to reconnect with her lost childhood love, Sebastian, who manages the band. I found the world of this book totally immersive and loved all the band members and their (sometimes difficult!) friendships. The flashbacks to Toni and Sebastian’s adolescence were great, and I love the angst-filled slow burn of the two of them working things out as grownups. Content guidance: abuse, addiction, sex.
And in things that are neither Romance nor romance, but kiiind of romance-adjacent, I read The Bone Shard Daughter, a fantasy novel by Andrea Stewart that does have some passionate star-crossed lesbians in one of its many intertwining threads. I was very taken with the many different moving islands of this fantasy world and the unusual magic—the emperor requires all subjects to provide a tiny bone shard, taken when they are children, which he uses to power magical monsters that fight and spy and think for him. People whose bone shards get used in this way have their life force sucked out and die in pain—that’s empires for you—so it seems like an obviously terrible practice, except that we meet some of the emperor’s “constructs” and they’re also individuals with the will to live, so this book has a really thorny moral dilemma at its heart. More importantly, it has a charming magical animal companion who completely stole my heart and it’s very important to me that he never come to any harm, so I guess I have to read the sequel now.
I also read Deacon King Kong by James McBride, which I picked up earlier this year after I noticed so much love for it among the Tournament of Books commentariat. It’s a vivid, incredible novel that takes places in a housing project in South Brooklyn in 1969, incorporating the zany and the tragic into its wide scope and huge cast of characters. It starts with an affable old drunk—Cuffy “Sportcoat” Lambkin, AKA Deacon King Kong—shooting the most ruthless young drug dealer in the project for reasons that nobody, not even Sportcoat himself, can figure out. This sets off an unpredictable chain of events among the residents of the project and the nearby gangsters. I spent a lot of time thinking about the wonders of third-person omniscient narration while reading this, because there are so many different characters in this novel—older Black residents who migrated from the South, younger ones raised in Brooklyn, Puerto Ricans, first-generation Italian gangsters, Irish immigrant gangsters and cops—and they each have their own distinctive voice, and the narration skillfully dips in and out of their interior lives. The book is also stuffed with funny and colorful digressions, like the first chapter explaining about “Jesus’ cheese,” some imported cheese that mysteriously gets shipped to the housing project every month and whose origins no one knows. These anecdotes often come back to prominence later in delightful and unexpected ways. I really loved this book, which was wild and rich and sweet and bitter.
