Erotic art: Encyclopedia II - Erotic art - Modern erotica

Erotic art - Modern erotica

In Europe, starting with the Renaissance, there was a tradition of producing erotica for the amusement of the aristocracy. In the early 16th century, the text I Modi was an woodcut album created by the designer Giulio Romano, the engraver Marcantonio Raimondi and the poet Pietro Aretino. In 1601 Caravaggio painted the "Love Triumphant," for the collection of the Marquis Vincenzo Giustiniani. The latter is reputed to have kept it hidden behind a curtain to show only to his friends, as it was seen as a blatant celebration of sodomy. The tradition is continued by other, more modern painters, such as Fragonard, Courbet, Millet, Balthus, Picasso, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Egon Schiele, who served time in jail and had several works destroyed by the authorities for offending turn-of-the-century Austrian mores with his depiction of nude young girls, and so on.

However, the Europeans pale before the great erotic artists of the east. Unencumbered by Christian dogma, Japan, China, India, Persia and other lands produced copious quantities of art celebrating the human faculty of love. The works depict love between men and women as well as same-sex love. In Japan, the erotic art found its greatest flowering in the medium of the woodblock print.

The style is known as shunga (春画 pictures of spring), with some of its greatest practitioners (Harunobu, Utamaro, etc.) producing large numbers of works. Painted hand scrolls were also very popular. The Chinese tradition of the erotic is extensive, with remarkable examples of the art dating back as far as the Yuan period (元)(1280-1367). Unfortunately not much survives as a result of Mao Zedong(毛澤東)'s revisionist destruction of pre-communist art during his Great Leap Forward.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Modern erotica", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki