Encountered on Pinterest on 10/28, in a collection of mostly homoerotic images — Pinterest strives to cater to your interests, and mine aren’t hard to suss out — this painting, identified as being an early 19th-century work by Russian painter Alexander Ivanov (an artist completely unknown to me):
(#1) My first response was that the painting was truly creepy, looking to modern eyes like high-class kiddie porn: a beautiful young man (wearing a laurel wreath, therefore noble or divine), naked but with drapery over his lower body (his gaze fixed dreamily on something in the middle distance), embracing a totally naked young teenage boy (whose eyes are closed, apparently in enjoyment), while another fully naked boy, considerably younger, plays a wind instrument (apparently an aulos, an ancient Greek double-reed) for his companions’ pleasure; a lyre hangs from a tree in the background
A gauzily Romantic painting, set in a rough scenic wilderness, apparently of some classical or mythological subject in which music plays a significant role. Ok, so the beautiful young man is probably the god Apollo, famously skilled at the lyre (bonus: by far my favorite of the pantheon of ancient Greece and Rome). In this painting as the god of music and also the protector of the young. The boys are naked because they are true pre-pubertal innocents. Or just because the scene is set in the Arcadian wilderness, suffused with divine presence, a territory in which the gods and those within their aura have no need for the garb of ordinary mortals. Well, certainly not in artworks; consider the famous Apollo of the Belvedere statue (my 9/23/24 posting “Godlike beauty” has a section on the Belvedere Apollo and his full-frontal divinity).
So I tracked down #1: it’s Alexander Ivanov’s Apollo, Hyacinthus and Cyparissus making music and singing (painted during 1831-34), which I’ll call AH&C for short. At this point, things just got puzzling. The Russian painter Ivanov (1806-58) was new to me; he turns out to have a remarkable life history (summarized below). And then there’s the scene in #1.
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