The Velvet View added to siteroll
It has been there for a while, but if you haven’t so far you should really drop in and pay The Velvet View a visit. It’s a general blog guilt around images of erotic (or at least, sensual) art, but it’s worthy of special attention because site creator Alvaro has a real eye for the exquisite.
And yes, there’s some stuff there that’s definitely appealing to the thaumatophile. An example:
Not an image that hits you over the head with its eroticism…but one you can fall into with its level of detail. It’s “Marionette,” by DA artist dcwj.
Tartarus XV
Script for today:
Page 43
Page 44
Page 45
As we reach this point in Taylor’s adventures, I’ll try to end on an erotically-upbeat note, a harem bathing scene. Fortunately orientalist painters never seemed to get tired of painting harem bathing scenes.
Rudolph Ernst (1854-1932) The Harem Bath. Found at The Orientalist Gallery.
Tartarus XI
Script for today:
Page 31
Page 32
Page 33
I regret that I can’t think of a sexy image to go with Donna’s depressing backstory (I’ll admit I’m pulling out perhaps-overfamiliar tropes), so I’ll offer something more appropriate thereto instead.
Vincent van Gogh (1853 -1890), Woman with a Mourning Shawl. Found here, original in the Van Gogh Musuem, Amsterdam.
Tartarus VI
Script for today:
Page 16
Page 17
Page 18
The image of a naked woman facing judgment from a group of robed figures is, naturally, an opportunity to put in another striking image from Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Judgment of Phryne,who found herself in a similar situation once:
(Click on image for a larger version.) It is said that the Aeropagus, on seeing Phryne naked, promptly acquitted her of whatever it was that she was accused of.
Well, I would have, wouldn’t you?
Death or victory
I’ve often wondered what might have lead to my writing something like this exchange in The Apsinthion Protocol.
MOIRA
It would be a one-way trip for whoever did it.
NANETTA
It would mean giving up everything in this world.
MOIRA
And possibly entering a far more wonderful one.
NANETTA
Or it might mean a few moments of ecstasy, and then annihilation.
MOIRA
And there is likely very little time to decide.
(In my bleak moments I often think that what Nanetta and Moira would eventually achieve — even if it was just blissful annihilation — would be superior to the alternative: adulthood.)
One finds one’s erotic inspiration where one is. Where I was for a lengthy stretch of young adulthood was Harvard’s Widener Library. Had I had my druthers, the erotic inspiration would have taken the form of a studious-but-sultry meganekko but sadly there was a severe druthers shortage in Cambridge at the time and so I didn’t get mine.
There was, however, this mural executed by John Singer Sargent (1856-1925).
A doughboy embraces death and victory in the same moment. (We know he’s victorious because there’s a defeated figure in a stahlhelm at his feet, presumably one of those nasty wicked Germans.) At the time I would pass this mural daily (it’s on the library’s main entrance stairs) my conscious thoughts were that it was a singularly shameless bit of militaristic propaganda.
My subconscious thoughts, I conjecture, were on a different track entirely, thinking that maybe it’s cool — erotic even — to throw one’s life in like that. It’s a natural interpretation — look at the soldier’s face, it’s expression and positioning under Victory’s bared breast. It would explain a lot about the sort of things I’ve written.
Sargent didn’t do much in the more explicitly erotic line, although there is some, for example this study of a nude Egyptian girl.
Orientalist art — something I’ve found appealing before.
Depths of the sea
Well, I suppose no set of post about the process through which Aloysius Kim begins his ascent into a new form through a descent into the depths would really be complete withott a visual reference to pre-Raphaelite painter Sir Edward Burne-Jones‘s “The Depths of the Sea” (1887), shown here to the left.
The visual relevance is perhaps too necessary to merit much further comment. Various vesions of the image float around the web: this one was posted some time ago at Janitor of Lunacy, while the original can be found in the Fogg Museum at Harvard.
Bram Dijkstra reproduces this picture (among many, many others) his Idols of Perversity (p. 269) and has this to say about it:
In Burne-Jones’s “The Depths of the Sea”…a woman with hypnotic eyes and a vampire’s mouth has already completed her seduction and is carrying her prey — as if it were a huge, flowery bouquet of lost male morality — into the oblivion of her sensuality, where, we can be quite certain, he is to suffer the brain death which unfailing accompanied the state of perpetual tumescence promised by the hollows of the siren’s lair.
Gee, Professor, thanks for the fetish fuel!
Bringing light to the world
Looking for the appropriate link about Jules Joseph Lefebvre for yesterday’s post brought my eye to this lovely image, which I thought worthy of a digression.
La Vérité (Truth) the original of which hangs in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. The Wikipedia caption notes “The painting is contemporary with the first small scale model made by Lefebvre’s fellow-Frenchman Frédéric Bartholdi for what became the Statue of Liberty, striking a similar pose, though fully clothed.”
Great Cthulhu, thinks I. If only they had used Lefebvre’s version for what now stands in New York Harbor, instead of the severe and heavily-draped figure created by Bartholdi! I for one would be so much more patriotic. (Maybe it’s a bit late but if you’re a U.S. citizen and want to write your congressman and protest the choice, you can use this form.)
All well and good, but any link to Erotic Mad Science, except the bloggage? Well, I suspect there is a connection to patron divinity Prometheus, anyway, through this piece of artwork created by Maxfield Parrish. I for one suspect a visual influence:
Prometheus bringing light to the world. In the form of light bulbs made by Edison Mazda, it would seem. A reproduction hangs right outside my study. Honest.
Created women
The process through which Aloysius and his ad hoc band of resisters swiftly wreck Colonel Madder’s mental equilibrium is the sort of Hail Mary play that makes basically no sense outside of a mad science-driven fictional world…
…and perfect sense within it. The fictional concept of resurrecting the dead to create an artificial woman has a long history. One of its most distinguished moments would be the appearance of ravishing Elsa Lanchester as The Bride of Frankenstein.
(Image source cinemastrikesback.com.) Though for my money, I think I like better the 1967 Hammer Horror production Frankenstein Created Woman, which among many other strengths has some very arresting imagery.
(Image source Frankensteinia, an entire blog devoted to things Frankenstein.) And of course Peter Cushing. Cushing might be best known to American audiences as Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars, but before that he had a whole series of brilliant British horror-movie roles. Naturally he gets a site of his own, from which this French-language poster is taken:
That’s an EroticMadScience two-fer at least, because not only does it make us of the whole “created/resurrected woman” theme, but it also makes good use of the tube-girl meme.
Unsurprisingly, “woman created to make trouble” is itself a very old idea: certainly as old as Pandora, represented here in an 1872 painting by Jules Joseph Lefebvre.
And Pandora is also an Erotic Mad Science two-fer. Not only is she herself a woman created on purpose by a god associated with technology, but she is part of a plot by Zeus to punish mankind for the transgressions of Prometheus who, if mad science ever had a divine patron, would surely be it.
Slavery morals
Let it not be said that Colonel Madder is an amoral individual. Clearly he thinks things like Marie’s abduction through.
MADDER
(handing him the dossier)
Transmit this to the Kupler op, and make arrangements to receive a transfer into the special operations account.
HORST
(leafing through the dossier)
She’s very pretty. Are you sure nothing about these ops bother you, sir?
MADDER
(leans back, calmly)
Nothing in either Hebrew or Greek scriptures forbids slavery, Horst, and some of us are inclined to the view that its classification as an evil is merely a heresy of secular liberals. Did not St. Paul himself enjoin slaves to obey their masters? In any event, we are having no one killed, and as long as the girl still lives, there will be an opportunity for repentance, as I once explained to your predecessor, prior to his unfortunate disappearance.
HORST
The girl will suffer terribly, I do not doubt.
MADDER
The evil of suffering is another liberal heresy, Horst. The presence of suffering reminds us of our fallen nature and brings us closer to God.
HORST
It is heartening to see that you have thought this through, sir.
And that’s worth reflecting on, and not just because it’s an opportunity for posters like me to post from the world’s abundant collection of slave-market art.
Jean-Léon Gérôme, "Slave Auction in Rome"
No, clearly this is an opportunity to look a little more at Colonel Madder’s reading, because when he tells us that nothing in the Greek or Hebrew scriptures forbids slavery, he’s not making it up. And he could have gotten it from Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation. Read below, or if the embedding doesn’t work, follow this link.
Food for thought.
Henri-Frederic Schopin, "The Slave Market" (detail)
Back in my graduate school days we sometimes had a saying: “One man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens,” and that seems to be true here.
The health of the state
I don’t normally comment too directly on politics here at EroticMadScience, but I should note one thing about Colonel Madder: his use of a terrorist incident to advance his program shows that he has taken to heart a lesson from a source that would seem improbable given Madder’s strongly-held though hardly-unusual politico-cultural views, to wit Randolph Bourne…
Lovis Corinth (1858-1925), "The Weapons of Mars"
…who taught us that “War is the Health of the State.”
