cheesyradfem: thatsonemorbidcorvid: ms-hells-bells: callmejoey:gohth: not to be a nerd but it’
cheesyradfem: thatsonemorbidcorvid: ms-hells-bells: callmejoey:gohth: not to be a nerd but it’s so crazy how he (Bernini) really did that from cold hard stone……. truly a spectacle, truly breathtaking, an honor to behold I think you should know he was 23 when he finished this and the ass gets a lot of attention but the hand on Persepina’s side/tummy is also exquisite this is a statue depicting an abduction and rape :( Do you ever think about the women who had to model for pieces like this?Holding perfectly still in a mimic of sexual violence for hours on end, with a man grasping her so firmly she probably got bruises. Going home at the end of the day, maybe to a husband or father who abused her. And then returning, day on day, to model victimhood for an artist whose name is remembered when hers is not. This is Gianlorenzo Bernini’s bust of Costanza Bonarelli, wife of one of his assistants. Bernini (age 38) was having an affair with her (age 22), but when he found out she was also seeing his brother Luigi, he had one of his servants cut open the side of her face “as punishment for being a courtesan”, which scarred her for life. She was imprisoned in a monastery for adultery and only released after a year due to her impassioned plea to the governor, and back to her husband. By contrast, Bernini was only fined for ordering her assault, and then pardoned by his patron Pope Urban VIII, who arranged for his marriage to Caterina Tezio, a 22 year old minor noblewoman, by which he had 11 children.Bernini didn’t just depict violence against women in his sculpture (this and Apollo and Daphne are some of his most famous works); he participated in it himself, and thanks to a man willing to ignore what he did in favor of his talent, he got away with it scot-free. The sculpture is called the Rape of Proserpina. Ive seen it argued that it’s not sexual violence because rape used to mean to take/kidnap, but that argument is bullshit because that’s WHERE we today got the term rape, and it’s the story we know most commonly as the hades/persephone story, which is very much a myth about rape. -- source link