Before pornographic magazines and websites, there were religious and mythological paintings.
Two paintings of Vulcan’s exposure (pun intended) of Mars and Venus’ infidelity, which appear in the National Gallery of Art’s exhibit “Pleasure and Piety: The Art of Joachim Wtewael (1566–1638),” are “among the extremely rare 17th-century works in which copulation is explicitly and openly portrayed,” writes Liesbeth Helmus, curator of old master paintings, drawings, and sculpture at Utrecht’s Centraal Museum, in the exhibition catalog.
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