(There will be (all-male) slices of a Rubens masterpiece, but the centerpiece of this posting is an act of aggressive fellatio, so it’s not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Not at all what I intended to be doing with my morning, but Chance intervened; Chance the Bringer of Felicitous Juxtaposition has a side career as a gardener, as in Being There. First , this morning he brought me an e-ad for a new gay porn DVD, Briar Basin Ranch – Act I, the cover of which shows that aggressive fellatio, in a fine composition of light and shadow playing on tensed muscles.
Reminding me of agonistic scenes in Baroque painting. While I was trying to dredge up some specific examples, Chance kindly pointed me to a Facebook posting yesterday by Randy McDonald, reporting on a visit to the Art Gallery of Ontario, where he encountered Peter Paul Rubens’s The Massacre of the Innocents (ca. 1610), showing the biblical Massacre of the Innocents of Bethlehem by the soldiers of King Herod, as related in Matthew 2:13-18 — a painting that’s all light and shadow playing on the tensed musculature of the murderers (and on the contorted faces of the victims’ families). Bingo.
As for the facial expressions, I note once again how hard it is to distinguish ferocity from intense pleasure — or, for that matter, either of these from intense pain.
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