“This,” says the label accompanying a 16th-century sheet in a new show at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, “is an incredibly erotic scene.” How so? “A group of half-naked and ecstatic women and girls sacrifice an ass and collect its blood in a container.” Oh.
There’s plenty of sex and violence depicted in this entertaining exhibition of 16th- and 17th-century drawings from the Low Countries, many of them lent by the Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp, as well as, closer to home, the Bodleian Library and Christ Church Picture Gallery.
A brutish torturer plucks out a martyr’s teeth with pliers; Saturn, the ancient god, devours one of his own children; Christ’s hair gets yanked as he’s crowned with thorns. Inebriated, lusty peasants dance whirligig jigs. Sour-faced women gossip intently, and you can readily imagine their prying tittle-tattle: “Have you heard about so-and-so’s affair?” Neptune gropes a virgin’s breast, and Peter Paul Rubens retouches another artist’s drawing of a nude woman encircled by a snake, so that her physique appears ampler, squidgier. He certainly had a type.
Apart from the explication of that scene of “ecstatic” revellers (one of whom, the label points out, somewhat breathily, “even strokes” a phallic statue of Priapus, the fertility god), the interpretation mostly avoids dwelling on such scabrous, blood-curdling material. Instead, the focus is the “function” that these 120 drawings “performed in artistic practice at the time”. Doesn’t, though, that dread phrase, “artistic practice”, drain away the fun?
Thus, we learn about the training of 16th- and 17th-century artists from the Southern Netherlands, about the techniques they used, and the commissions they undertook. We discover what a “modello” is (a final compositional study), and encounter vellum and blue laid paper. A section illuminates designs for works in other media (tapestries, metalwork, furniture). There are even sketches for elaborate towel racks and, possibly, knife handles.
