chasteté

Richard Phillips

l’âne bâté

Pierre Subleyras, le bât (d’après Jean de la Fontaine, Contes)

Subleyras’s The Packsaddle is a ‘cabinet painting’, showing a young woman seated on a bed and a man kneeling right in front of her. She is lifting up her nightdress to expose her thighs and abdomen. The man is holding a long painting brush horizontally and his eyes are focused on the tip of brush, which is almost touching her skin below the navel.

The man with the brush represents her illicit lover: the woman’s husband, a painter, painted a picture of an ass on her navel but her lover erased it in the throes of passion. The lover cleverly repaints the image but is later exposed as the returning husband discovers a detail that was not there before.

les clés

Maître S (connu de 1505 à1530/1545)
La ceinture de chasteté

Evelyne Axell, 1965

le verrou, l’indice et l’icône

Enfin, enfin, le Verrou de Fragonard. Il était temps…

‘La scène se passe auprès d’un lit, dont le désordre indique le reste du sujet’ ( dans le catalogue de vente après décès du marquis de Veri, premier propriétaire du Verrou)