Can we please stop acting like it's not porn if it's also oil on canvas?

I can't go through any gallery of classical paintings without being reminded that many art historians must live in some sort of collective denial.

Listen. I like beautiful naked people. Yet have to meet a person who isn't kinda into people who are dressed very lightly or even not at all (mind, I did not have this sentence reviewed by an Ace person). Naked bodies can be a delightful thing to watch, but I am aware that at least part of this delight is always, undoubtedly and in an objectifying way, sexual. We are conditioned to accept nudity as something extraordinary, as people are, in most non-sexual situations we encounter in our day-to-day lives, usually dressed. Many of us haven't even seen our closest friends or members of our own families naked if they weren't infants or we the caretakers of our elderly parents. And in Central European history, the fundamentals have been like this for quite some time with very few overtones, one of them being figure painting.
Going through a museum, being bombarded with very very plain, uninteresting, highly sexual female nudes that, to make them seem like grand art, have been titled "The Death of Cleopatra" or "Sleeping nymph/Venus/Diana/any kind of pagan goddess the church won't take issue with", is grueling. Not because they are in art museums next to actual grand paintings, but because they too oftentimes are grand paintings whose actual history we don't yet acknowledge.

Let's have an example: Jan Gerritsz van Brockhorst's "Sleeping Nymph and Shepherd" (original title "Slapende nimf") - a misleading title since the picture allegedly depicts fictional people with actual names, Cymon and Iphigenia, but by calling naked ladies "nymphs" you were probably given some time to fabricate a story - is one of the lesser known depictions of this fictional couple, and rightfully so. In my opinion, it is not a very good painting to begin with. Painted between 1645-50, it is now permanently exhibited in Germany, and the text the museum put underneath the frame reads, in translation, as follows:

"This scene is based on a story from Giovanni Bocaccio's Decameron: The crude servant Cymon beholds the sleeping princess Iphigenia. His wish to conquer her changes him. He becomes sophisticated and cultivated. Beauty and eros as cause and source of creativity and art are this depiction's intrinsic subject."

I call bullshit on so many levels, starting with the actual painting looking like this:


I mean, there are limits on how much bullshit the average art consumer can take, and this is mine.
(Also, there is quite some dispute about whether this is an actual depiction of Cymon and Iphigenia or just some rando sleeping nymph ogled by some rando shepherd, but I'll trust the museum's research in this instance.)
By the description, the main focus of the painting should lie on Cymon and the apparent change of heart he goes through. I bet most people who go through the gallery and take a look at this picture don't even see Cymon until they read the description, and that is fine because it is not their fault. The painting in and for itself isn't a masterpiece by any means. Yeah, the nude and the drapery are nice to look at if it weren't for the lady's weirdly tilted head and the alienating bump in the golden drapery which might indicate an overly prominent hip bone or a very badly foreshortened knee. But while 'Iphigenia' has definitely been painted from life, 'Cymon' is merely a background figure (and my God, is that an ugly background. I hope this is a restoration issue and not just the artist's unwillingness to look at a rock for ten minutes to get the shapes right), drawn and painted so crudely I'm not sure whether the artist even bothered to find an actual model for the lad. The artist didn't give a shit about Cymon, and of course one could argue that this painting makes much more sense if one applies the golden ratio and shit, but I beg to differ. Everybody who's attended high school once knows that it's very easy to apply seemingly mathematical and rational solutions to almost any picture one is provided with. Art, especially painting, doesn't work that way. The two defining qualities of this painting are the amount of detail and the choice of colours, which both focus on the naked lady.
Another more viable argument would be that the beholder is not merely Cymon, but us, the viewers, and we take on his role. I can't argue against this because the lady is positioned for us to look at - Cymon probably just sees her right bum cheek and part of her arm. It would make perfect sense and still be a bad painting, since just adding a cool name to a naked lady that is presented in a very consumable way won't give any of us the smarts. It's a voyeuristic image in every conceivable way.
Here's a counterexample of how this subject matter has also been approached to at least acknowledge Cymon's existence:


(Mind, this image is from 1884 and by Leighton, and therefore super-duper Victorian. Van Brockhorst lived in the Dutch Golden Age and is considered an Utrecht Caravaggisto).
The painting (the Brockhorst one) even reads fairly uneasy for someone who learned to read from left to right, because the drapery and the direction of the lady's elbows suggest we should read from right to left, which could lead to assuming the brown little dot in the lower left corner of the painting really is just some smudge with no further importance. And he is.
The text underneath even goes so far to suggest that Cymon is not the center of interest here, but "beauty and eros as cause and source of creativity and art", translating to "watching naked chicks makes men want to be smart". I yet have to meet a guy who studied astrophysics because he watched lots of porn, eh, beheld lots and lots of eros. Are there statistics on this? Provide me with them, please.
It doesn't stop there. The figures are very funnily positioned, denying any form of perspective that could make sense - one can clearly see that the model and the drapery laid on some sort of table or bed and the rest of the composition has just been added in after the initial drawing - and so on. There are many much more interesting pictures of that scene, in some of which Iphigenia is even dressed, like the Leighton one. Because, go figure, in the actual story it is nowhere mentioned that she was nekkid in the first place.
In short: This painting is porn. The painter paid some chick, maybe a professional nude model, maybe a prostitute, maybe someone who was both like ever so often, to lay down on some drapery, knowing his gentleman audience would probably like that a lot, and gave the whole thing a mythical setting as it was standard operating procedure.

I know that in European art history, for a long time people agreed on Ancient Greece as a place where the naked body was hailed and gods were depicted in the nude by standard. But one has to ask how much of that was wishful thinking to justify one's own practice, because it's not completely agreed upon how far nudity in Ancient Greek sculpture, and we're almost only talking about sculpture and pottery when it comes to Ancient Greek visual art, was taken. Were the today naked statues of goddesses and gods painted? Probably, some certainly. Were they dressed in actual clothes? Maybe. The emphasis lied on nudity as something heroic though, and therefore mainly male warriors, gods and athletes were produced. Female nudity? Not non-existent, but also not in the vast majority it is in European painting traditions. Aphrodite, a goddess no European painter ever put clothes on, was usually dressed until around 400 BC, when nudity became a standard in Greek sculpture. But even then, mortal women depicted nude oftentimes were slaves. It's important to note that the relationship Ancient Greek people had with the human body was a different one than people had in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, where the nude was rediscovered. Christianity's horrid chastity and celibacy ideals hadn't warped the nude into something outrageous yet. And only with Christianity's influence, embarrassing pictures like this could happen. Erotic depictions were a taboo, so clumsily evoking Ancient Greece when painting a prostitute was pretty normal for like, forever. It was a way to sail round that time's limitations laid on one's artistic practice. Female Christian saints usually were very modestly dressed, minus the good ol' cleavage that happened on every woman except Magdalena, who was dressed in nothing but her own hair.

I'm not angry with the painter for being so cheap. I'm disappointed by every museum buying into that shit and displaying zero self-awareness when writing descriptive texts that must have been used to death for decades by now. It's bad practice to just believe what you've been told without looking at the damn thing you're trying to sell to the public and perpetuating clichés like female nudity as something made for men to consume. It ignores that the very models who posed for these depictions of the sublime were, in their era, marginalized and frowned upon. It's an outright lie. The description of this museum explains female nudity as something to grow through to become a person, which means 'man'. Let's ignore that Cymon also kidnaps Iphigenia later in that same story, as adults do, and that the Decameron wasn't an Ancient Greek piece of literature to begin with, but an Italian Late Middle Ages novella collection about people inventing stories to entertain one another while the Black Death killed their friends in Florence. I mean, if I had been in that situation, I probably would have told smutty sex stories to keep myself entertained to anybody who'd listen. And if giving Greek names to the main characters of those stories had tickled their fancy, why not. Fanfiction: Older than the Internet, officially.
But in this painting, that treats a Middle Age novella just like the real thing, it becomes apparent that Ancient Greece is a fetish and a place of desire. An artist's utopia where restrictions were few. Funny how lots of artists taking inspiration from Ancient Greece were mainly interested in the naked chicks part while the proportions of their figures were mostly based on beauty ideals from the time the paintings were conceived and realized in. It's almost like they were catering to a perceived straight male audience, which they totally were.

And really, everybody knew that portraits and depictions of women, naked or not, oftentimes were just a display of how much pussy you got. Ludwig I of Bavaria's Gallery of Beauties is just one example of a giant jerk-off via oil on canvas.

Victorine Meuret got constantly attacked for being too ugly to be in the nude. You know, the woman who modeled for Manet's "Olympia" and "Dejeuner sur l'herbe"? It was common practice to dismiss these paintings by writing something equivalent to today's "3/10, would not bang".

Or take Kenneth Clark, who said:
"No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even though it be only the faintest shadow. And if it does not do so it is bad art and false morals. The desire to grasp and be united with another human body is so fundamental a part of our nature that our judgment of what is known as 'pure form' is influenced by it, and one of the difficulties of the nude as a subject for art is that these instincts can’t lie hidden."

It's a nice quote because it tries to explain why nudity is essential to art, or why pandering to the audience is good. Because of course he wasn't talking about the male nude, which was idealized in ways for men to look up to instead to insinuate entitlement to the ownership of this body, and who was sexual when awake, for God's sake. There aren't many sexy unconscious or dead male bodies in art history (some, though).
I won't say there weren't sexy porn pics of men. No, there are many. But first, they weren't a majority, and second, men had a different standing in society back then. Your fiancé wouldn't break up with you if they recognized you in an art exhibit, therefore automatically knowing, or being free to assume, that you were a prostitute. Lastly, naked men were not painted with a straight female audience in mind.

People in private, it seems, were quite open about these issues and treated it as the norm that it was. None of it made it to galleries dedicated to classical painting were the same drivel about the sublime of the female nude accompanies every little pornographic delight people had back then.

Mary Richardson, a suffragette who later turned fascist, cut the Rokeby Venus in protest of the arrest of Emmeline Pankhurst, knowing very well what she was doing there. Mentioning that doesn't justify this specific act or this kind of vandalism per se, of course. It just means that people generally might not be gullible enough for intentionally naïve classifications of art. And that's the beef: I believe that this lack of self-awareness is intentional. That way, you don't have to rethink your practice. You don't have to reflect on complicated things like the male gaze, feminism, post-colonialism or any branch of what happened in the heads of rather intersectionally minded, transgressive folks after you first opened your museum. If it's not your intention to perpetuate regressive bollocks, but infallible art history based on what the artists or early historians said they were doing, you're not actually doing any harm, one could argue. One could also rip out one's toenails with a coat hook, but few people do that. Try find a catalogue text implying that the Cremaster series, to have a rather present-day example, maybe mystifies female reproduction a tad too hard. Many written pieces about art just sound like outright commercials.

I think art has, and I dare to sound essentialist here, more often than not been about desire. Desire to be close to the gods, desire to show sublime ideals, desire to be free of society's boundaries, desire to show reality at its crassest, desire for porn. We'll never get entirely past that. It's fine. It's not a bad thing and it's one of the ways in which art could be subversive and therefore oftentimes was regarded as dangerous. And porn paintings show a desire for less regulation of sexuality and physicalness while still not making any progress moving beyond the dominating heterosexual male dimension of this desire. And not acknowledging that when you're an educational institution is a shame, and people who are going to the museum deserve the respect of not being bullshitted by fancy words over petty horny matters.

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