coldturkey
Magistrate
Actually, I found a roundabout way to save using the print function... Another image in the Boadicea series, in which the queen of the Icenni discovers one of her ravished daughters, after her own flogging...
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Erotic helplessness : a study of the history of the Damsel in Distress theme in art
- Thread starter coldturkey
- Start date
Our James VI ('the wisest fool in Christendom') picked up the witch panic in Denmark where he went to collect his finacee - he wrote a book, Daemonologie, warning against witches and those who dared to doubt their wickedness, and set off the persecution of witches in Scotland. When he became King of England too, the infection spread south, though James himself had moved on to worrying about rather more real threats - Catholic extremists who tried to blow him up, and Puritan extremists who would have chopped off his head, as they did in due course with his son.
Anonymous
Spectator
It don't get much macabrer than that!
Anonymous
Spectator
Lorena Bobbit's great-grandmother, no doubt.
Anonymous
Spectator
Are you sure?
mysterybadger
Assistant executioner
Matania's playground was of course Rome and he even built some of the Roman furniture that features in his paintings.
But take a closer look at the last one. Whatever is going on is happening in a Victorian or early 20th century theatre.
Did this really happen? Victrian circus performers sometimes wore tight fitting pink "fleshings" that could, with a bit of imagination and limelight be imagined as nudity, so has Matania taken a real show and sexed it up a bit? Or is it all just an agreeable fantasy?
But take a closer look at the last one. Whatever is going on is happening in a Victorian or early 20th century theatre.
Did this really happen? Victrian circus performers sometimes wore tight fitting pink "fleshings" that could, with a bit of imagination and limelight be imagined as nudity, so has Matania taken a real show and sexed it up a bit? Or is it all just an agreeable fantasy?
mysterybadger
Assistant executioner
Serendipity is a strange thing. I was looking at something else entirely and I discovered exactly what this is...the original inspiration is Vernet's painting of Byron's story of Mazeppa and the Wolves which somehow came to be a stage performance featuring a woman....more to come.
mysterybadger
Assistant executioner
You can find an index to (some of) Matania's incredible output here: http://www.philsp.com/homeville/fmi/m00/m00962.htm
RedOrc
Magistrate
She sems oddly happy to be riding that bull, and the feet with heels are just weird! If the picture was recent I would suspect AI art.
Yes! Byron's poem, 'Mazeppa's Ride' was hugely popular, and inspired a good many paintings revelling in the (obviously homoerotic) idea of a handsome nude male bound to a horse driven wild and galloping across the steppe. This is a link to Vernet's vision of one scene in the poem:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazep...t,_Horace_-_Mazeppa_and_the_Wolves_-_1826.jpg
There are others (including, no surprise, Géricault) illustrating the Wiki article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazeppa_(poem)
Whether there were re-enactments, whether those involved females, and - whatever their gender - whether they were really naked or wearing fleshings, I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised ...
Mazeppa is of some topical importance: the historical Ivan Mazepa (sic) is a national hero of Ukraine, though the legend of his unusual horse-ride seems to have come out of the mists and may have originally been told of some earlier hero.
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coldturkey
Magistrate
coldturkey
Magistrate
malins
Stumbling Seeker
For a while it seems to have been a major happening ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adah_Isaacs_Menken
Adah Isaacs Menken was an American actress, painter and poet, and was the highest earning actress of her time. She was best known for her performance in the hippodrama Mazeppa, with a climax that featured her apparently nude and riding a horse on stage. After great success for a few years with the play in New York and San Francisco, she appeared in a production in London and Paris, from 1864 to 1866.
Goodness!
The audiences were thrilled with the scene, although the production used a dummy strapped to a horse, which was led away by a handler giving sugar cubes. Menken wanted to perform the stunt herself. Dressed in nude tights and riding a horse on stage, she appeared to be naked and caused a sensation. New York audiences were shocked but still attended and made the play popular.
She was evidently some character! I think I've heard of her as a writer, but no more than that, I certainly wasn't aware of this - or a good many other - sides of her multiple personality!
mysterybadger
Assistant executioner
So...it turns out I was basically right and this is Matania's sexed up version of what was, at one time, one of the most popular attractions in the VIctorian era. It's a strange story that will take us from Lord Byron to Star Trek by way of Sophia Loren.
Let's rewind. This is Mazeppa, a Ukrainian prince who, according to Byron was tied naked to a horse and pursued by wolves. As painted by Horace Vernet:
This image was so well known in the 1830s that it could be used as the basis of political cartoons, and became a "hippodrama" . Charming prince Mazeppa became a "breeches part" for a woman, albeit subsitituted by a dummy for the final wild ride up a mountain on an untamed stallion pursued by wolves.
Fast forward to the American Civil War and Adah Isaacs Menken comes up with the bright idea of riding the horse herself while wearing a pink bodystocking.
But according to cub reporter Samuel Clemens, soon to become Mark Twain --"she appeared to me to have but one garment on-a thin tight white linen one, of unimportant dimensions“. You can see how this worked from this still from "Heller in Pink Tights" in which Sophia Loren plays "Angela Rossini" a fictionalised verson of Menken.
BTW the circus flyer from this film reappears in the Star Trek episode "Spectre of the Gun", extending the life of the meme far into the future.
Menken's photos sold widely, especially to soldiers in the Civil War. She became the first pinup. Here she is in the saloon in Yellow Sky (1948):
Menken's success propelled her to Europe, where she cultivated such literary figures as Charles Dickens (to whom she dedicated her book of poems) Algernon Swinburne and Alexandre Dumas (with whom she had an affair). Even dying of TB in Paris at the age of 33 did not slow her down as she became the most requested dead person at seances. Which brought to the attention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle...and some have suggested that Adah Isaacs is the inspiration for the adventuress Irene Adler.
Naraku
Draconarius
Adah Isaacs Menken as Mazeppa c1866.
She died just 2 years later of "consumption", which could mean tuberculosis, although some modern sources say it might have been cancer. She was 33.
mysterybadger
Assistant executioner
Talking of Horace Vernet (yes we were) the first painting her is his "Lenore" followed by a few more. In the 18th century ballad by Gottfried Burger Lenore curses god when her fiance William does not return from the wars but that very evening William arrives on horseback at her bedroom door and
"All in her sarke, as there she lay,
Upon his horse she sprung:
And with her lily hands so pale
About her William clung.
...
To-night we'll ride a thousand miles,
The bridal bed to finde."
But "William" moulders away to reveal he is Death and the bridal bed is William's grave.
"Then knew the mayde she mighte no more
Her living eyes unclose."
According to scholars no German poem was translated more into English and Lenore "exerted a more widespread influence than perhaps any other short poem in the literature of the world". And that's despite it not mentioning the part where her tits fall out of her nightie.
"All in her sarke, as there she lay,
Upon his horse she sprung:
And with her lily hands so pale
About her William clung.
...
To-night we'll ride a thousand miles,
The bridal bed to finde."
But "William" moulders away to reveal he is Death and the bridal bed is William's grave.
"Then knew the mayde she mighte no more
Her living eyes unclose."
According to scholars no German poem was translated more into English and Lenore "exerted a more widespread influence than perhaps any other short poem in the literature of the world". And that's despite it not mentioning the part where her tits fall out of her nightie.
gerembeau
Tribune
Every day, this subject reaches new heights, as is normal when Eulalia adds her touch -
@mysterybadger, many thanks for all your finds
The Vernet pose evidently worked well for women on the back of the bull in the final scene of Quo Vadis - for example:
by one A. D. M. Cooper. Even more similar is this sculpture by Giuseppe Moretti:
https://www.mutualart.com/Artwork/Depicting-A-Scene-from-Quo-Vadis-by-Henr/FD20EBD947D0413D