Abstract

AbstractThis article interrogates constructs of sexuality and gender in Western art. Since the early Renaissance, art flaunts sexuality almost exclusively through the female nude, while the male body and desire remain invisible. In Titian’s erotic Danaë, Zeus is morphed into golden rain; in Rembrandt’s version, he immaterializes into pure light; with Klimt’s Danaë, the sexual act becomes a female autoeroticism. Those images that show the male partner in sexual action and without mythological disguise are rare in Western art. The problem is not misogyny but asymmetry. Even modern and avant-garde artists perpetuate traditional conceptions that equate culture and intellect with man, and sexuality and passivity with women. A change only occurs in the 1990s with artists confusing such conceptions. Traditional art history has suppressed the eroticizing effects of erotic art, although the boundary between art and pornography continues to be reframed.