In Praise of the Backside

№ 7 Biederer Studio, c. 1925

Gelatin silver print, 24 × 18 cm

Private collection

As we fragment the body, we make its parts the subject of a fetish. Each individual part can become a focus of erotic passion, an object of fetishist adoration. On the other hand, the body as a whole is still the sum of its parts.

The Three Graces

Anonymous, Roman copy of a Greek original created during the 2nd century B. C. E. (restored in 1609)

Marble, 119 × 85 cm

Musée du Louvre, Paris

The division of the body that we carry out here brings to mind the worship of relics. Relic worship began in the Middle Ages with the adoration of the bones of martyrs and was based on the belief that the body parts of saints possessed a special power. In this respect, each fetishist, however enlightened he pretends to be, pays homage to relic worship.

Sleeping Hermaphrodite

Anonymous, Roman copy of a Greek original from the 2nd century B. C. E. (?)

(mattress carved in 1619 by Gian Lorenzo Bernini)

Marble, 169 × 89 cm

Musée du Louvre, Paris

At first, this dismemberment only happened to saints, in accordance with the belief that in paradise the body will become whole again. Only later were other powerful people such as bishops and kings also unearthed after their deaths. In our cultural survey of body parts, we are particularly concerned with the history of those with “erotic significance”.

Leda and the Swan

Anonymous, 3rd century B. C. E.

Mosaic

Museum of Nicosia, Nicosia

Regardless of whether their significance is religious or erotic, they all attain the greatest importance for both the believer and the lover because of the attraction and power inherent within them. This way, fetishist heritage of older cultures survives in both the believer and the lover.

The Three Graces

Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio), 1504–1505

Oil on wood, 17 × 17 cm

Musée Condé, Chantilly

The Pastoral Concert

Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), c. 1508

Oil on canvas, 109 × 137 cm

Musée du Louvre, Paris

Anatomical Blazons of the Female Body appeared in 1536, a newly printed, multi-volume collection of odes to each individual body part. These poems, praising parts of the female body, constituted an early form of sexual fetishism. “Never,” wrote Hartmut Böhme, “does it sing the ‘whole body,’ let alone the persona of the adored, but rather it is a rhetorical exposition of parts or elements of the body”. In these poems, head and womb represented the “central organs”. It was to be expected that representatives of the church suspected a new form of idolatry in this poetic approach and identified a sinful indecency in this depiction of female nakedness:

Hebe and Proserpina

Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio), 1517

Sanguine and silver point, 25.7 × 16.4 cm

Teylers Museum, Haarlem

Jupiter and Io

Correggio (Antonio Allegri), c. 1530

Oil on canvas, 162 × 73.5 cm

Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

This is how such condemnation is expressed in a document entitled Against the Blazoners of Body Parts, written in 1539.

The Rape of the Sabines

Giambologna (Giovanni Bologna), 1581–1583

Marble, height: 410 cm

Loggia dei Lanzi, Piazza della Signora, Florence

The poets of the Blazons were “the first fetishists in the history of literature”. “The Anatomical Blazons represented a sort of a sexual menu à la carte: from head to toe, a series of fetishist delicacies (and in the Counterblazons from head to toe a series of sensual atrocities and defacements). Such a gastrosophy of feminine flesh is only conceivable when the woman is not regarded as a person.

Venus and Mars

Palma Giovane, c. 1585–1590

Oil on canvas, 130.9 × 165.6 cm

The National Gallery, London

The fetish of the female body involves the abolition of woman as such”. From this perspective, the Blazons would be womanless.

The poetic dismemberment of the female body satisfies fetishist phallocentrism, which, as Böhme points out, also lies at the root of male aggression. Today it would be called “sexist”.

The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus

Peter Paul Rubens, c. 1618

Oil on canvas, 222 × 209 cm

Alte Pinakothek, Munich

“A woman is a conglomerate of sexual-rhetorical body parts, desired by men: one beholds the female body in such explicit detail that the woman herself is negated. A courtly, cultivated dismemberment of a woman is celebrated in the service of male fantasy”. Is the female body thus reduced to a plaything of lust?

Allegory of Fertility (Homage to Pomona)

Jacob Jordaens, c. 1623

Oil on canvas, 180 × 241 cm

Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels

Böhme’s analysis echoes much of contemporary feminist critique: The corporeal should be given homage only when it is united with personality, as if the body itself was something inferior.