On the day off, I decide to wander through Brussels, too fatigued to plan anything or prioritize tourist pursuits. I happen upon a museum in walking distance. The rain, along with my love for galleries and 17th and 18th Century paintings, is incentive to detour in.
I eventually make it to the paintings upstairs and run across a terrifying capture: Prometheus, having been strewn across and chained to some rocks, is being attacked by a vulture. Prometheus’ face is expectedly grotesque. I stare at this for at least five minutes, so breathtaking and realistic is it.
There are other moments borrowed from Greek mythology. Apollo chasing Daphne, Pan trying to rape Syrinx—both feature harsh stories too, but they captivate me less. I cannot figure out why until I study Jordane’s Pan et Syrinx a bit more.
Then it hits it me.
No matter how perfect the stroke, and accurate the lighting and detail, Syrinx’s face is lovely. Here she is, all chaste and virtuous, being attacked by a horny hooved satyr who wants to do it her, and all we get from her face is ovular perfection, innocent eyes, supple lips, no expression.
Same thing with Apollo and Daphne. She’s not even looking where she’s going as she flees. And even if we go with the idea that she’s glancing back in panic to see how close he is on her tail, her face should still show signs of stress, fright, fear, something. Instead, Daphne gives you parted lips, naturally blushed cheeks, and a hint of worry as it would look on a Botoxed face centuries later.
It is astonishing. No matter how hard these artists worked to give us the detail, angst and completeness of a story in what might be months or even years with a canvas, they refused to show us women looking as real as they would in their circumstances. No, they had to be fetching.
Fuckable.
Desirable.
No matter what.
If there was ever some bigger 17th Century artistic indication of how present The Handmaid’s Tale was back then, I will fold my arms until I see it. Because this clairty on the misogynistic role of women as objects becomes plain to me. Also clear was that I stared too long at the women; when I make it back to Prometheus, he now appears more deranged with anguish.
Around the Northeast side of the gallery is a staggering painting of Heliodorus being driven from the temple where he was trying to steal its sacred treasure. There is a horse rearing a hoof over his throat, a rider aiming a forked weapon, a messenger with fist raised, and another with jagged tree branches for flogging. They are strategically placed around all sides of the subject, except in the place where you’re sitting watching it. Straight from the Bible, Heliodorus’s face looks as if the fright decayed it in advance.
Now, were this a woman in the same rendering, she would look like Scarlet Johansson.
Apollon a la Poursuite de Daphne by Carlo Maratta
Pan et Syrinx by Jacques Jordane
Seriously, if you recast the Biblical thief as Debbie (who did Dallas), the Biblical protectors of the realm would would be armed only with their penises. They would have to be, because what other reason in this time period would artists want to make her the center of the painting? Unless she’s Mary Mother of Jesus?
Prometheus by Theodor Rombout
No wonder women have been pissed for so long.
And I’m sure this status quo of art is not news. Surely, papers and books have been written on this trend in various centuries of oil on canvas. In fact, my good friend from college who has an art history degree and a Degas could probably tell me the pieces of this that I am missing, pieces that I am too art history ignorant to write about.
But the overwhelming sensibility was restated over and over again in every museum I visited.
By the time I reach Birmingham’s museum and gallery, I thought my mind has been blown enough. Leave it to the sleepy UK city to thwart my low expectations and gag me hardcore. There is an exhibit on gender and the objectification of women through the ages:
In the ‘Male Gaze,’ a woman is visually positioned as an “object” of heterosexual male desire. Her feelings, thoughts, and her own sexual drives are less important than her being “framed” by male desire. The imagined male is notionally a heterosexual white man considered the intended audience for many films and other visual media. If things are absent from media it is often because it is seen as being unappealing to this intended audience…
You mean they have this together already in Birmingham? And this is hardly the meat and potatoes of the exhibit; it’s just the status quo panel for anybody who missed the memo. It’s nothing a lot of us don’t know, but I’ve often had to argue this white patriarchy point before I can get into the bigger discussion about, well about virtually anything in entertainment really. But this relatively small city with a population of just over a million has it on a placard with no citations or footnotes.
Then I go through a series of rooms separated by periods of art, one for 19th-20th centuries, the next for 18th-17th and so on. When I get to the 16th, I see a painting of a naked man with a sort of perfect wound, his pose a bit supermodel-esque. His face looks caught in the middle of a casual sentence about how he had been stabbed right here in the stomach at the market because he bumped into someone with tea. Or maybe spilled some tea that someone found too shady to share. But whatever, it’s just a minor gouge.
I think to myself, imagine if the subject were Jesus. Wouldn’t that be hilarious.
Christ as the Man of Sorrows by Jan Van Hemessen
I look at the description next to the painting and find out that alas, it is Jesus. And he is showing wounds from the crucifixion:
His direct gaze challenges the on-looker to respond to his suffering...
Surprised to say it, but I have not been properly flabbergasted in a long time. It takes as many syllables as that word to describe the full feeling I felt as I read and understood that Jan Sanders van Hemessen envisioned Jesus sharing pain in the same way that supermodels and snatched drag queens of today exaggerate their lack of waistline by pulling the elbow as far forward as possible while the hand squeezes the ribcage. I know this is not actually what Hemessen’s Jesus is trying to mean. But still, I wonder if the artist was ahead of his time, if perhaps he had found the flex capacitor and the Delorean and worked out the jump [if you are too young to know that reference, please pretend for now that you do].
Of course, in this 21st Century time, there is no way that the heteronormative man—white or otherwise—described in the objectification exhibit in the other room would ever pose like this outside of a comedic moment, or a denigrating one designed to make fun of a woman or drag queen. The effort it takes to show the wound in this way is also extraordinary if the body is suffering from it. It brings to mind RuPaul’s astute pearl, also featured in the one of these museums I visited this tour, that “We’re all born naked and the rest is drag.” The men of Hemessen’s era wore tights, expensive jewelry and ruffles. They also wore helmets, chain mail and pauldrons as well. Yet even with the chauvinism that left women reduced to ethereal sex toys, men were not restricted from displaying their softness, or sporting those huge collars called ruffs.
Back then, men had the privilege of being both tender and aggressive, pretty and ferocious. At what point did we swap out the privilege of these dichotomies for some restrictive, 300 warrior version of masculinity? How is it that patriarchy became so simple, asinine and boring?
If women decide one day to just start pummeling men in a general rage against this kind of silly chauvinism, I’ll get it.
And if Jesus returns via runway, I will not be surprised.