The first pornography of the New Age - Weekend - Kommersant

The first pornography of the New Age - Weekend - Kommersant



In 2007, Michael Nyman wrote a vocal cycle based on the texts of eight sonnets by Pietro Aretino, a prominent 16th-century Italian author. At first glance, the idea is somehow even defiantly respectable: for the academic music of the last hundred years, it is a great respectable tradition to turn to the late Renaissance sonnets, from the Michelangelo cycles of Britten and Shostakovich to the Sonnets of Louise Labe (2008) by Marc-Andre Dalbavy, written for Philip Zharussky. Nevertheless, when the recording of the cycle was released on CD, in America, discs were sold with a panicky huge sticker “Not recommended for children under 16” - in the “classic” departments of music stores, this is still a curiosity. And when the cycle was performed in London's Cadogan Hall in 2008, there was a scandal: at the last moment before the concert, the administration of the hall decided not to sell already printed programs with the text of the sonnets and their translation into English due to "obscene content." In the same 2008, Nyman performed in Moscow and the audience also did not know what, in fact, they were singing about from the stage of the Tchaikovsky Hall. But I could guess, given that the cycle is called "8 Lust Songs" - "Eight Songs of Lust."

Text: Sergey Khodnev

The scandal here is actually old, it has been almost 500 years old, and it didn’t even start with poetry. In 1524, Giulio Romano, a glorious student of Raphael (now dead for four years), created a series of drawings depicting, as Vasari angrily wrote, "all sorts of ways, positions and poses in which depraved men sleep with women." This undertaking does not seem to be doomed to immortality: well, these drawings would end up in the collection of some voluptuous cardinal, and after his death, the indignant heirs would immediately burn them - you never know what happened with Renaissance erotic graphics. Romano, however, had something else in mind, and so he turned to friend and colleague Marcantonio Raimondi. Yes, to that Raimondi, the most successful engraver who found a bonanza: it turned out that prints from frescoes, paintings and drawings by the same Raphael or the same Romano are a terribly demanded commodity, that they diverge throughout Europe in huge circulations, making new Roman art with in all its sophistication, a broadcast media phenomenon.

Here Raimondi engraved and published these “all possible ways” (they, 16 in number, were dubbed “I Modi”, “methods”, “modes”). The effect was deafening. It must be remembered that this is taking place in Rome in the 1520s, where they were seriously worried about the spread of the “Lutheran contagion” - and at the same time Protestant propaganda, which declared the papal capital a “great harlot” and a receptacle for all abominations. The prominent Vatican dignitary Gian Matteo Ghiberti, indignant that those who were looking for a reason received such a tasty reason in the form of Raimondi's bestseller, launched thunder and lightning: Romano disappeared into Mantua, but Raimondi was imprisoned, and all the obscene prints that he managed to collect (together with boards), destroyed by the hand of the executioner.

At this moment, Pietro Aretino appears on the stage - a little bit of a writer, but mostly a pamphleteer, even a lampooner, a libertine, a swindler, a self-serving friend of kings and artists, a reputation maker and a great master of scandals. He stood up for Raimondi and, as an eloquent gesture of support (whose commercial prospects he also probably calculated), wrote a sonnet to each of the 16 "modes". There, in a dialogue form, on behalf of those who copulate, what is happening is described; is described, it must be said, with the utmost frankness, without any "wands of masculinity" and "grottoes of pleasure" there. Come on put your cazzo in my potta! Yes, my dear, let's be fottere, fottere, fottere! Wow! Oh! What a cazzo! Here is potta! Delight! Stronger! And now I want not in potta, but in culo! Wow!

Naturally, Aretino's "Voluptuous Sonnets" ("Sonetti lussuriosi") merged with Raimondi's somehow surviving engravings; they immediately began to be printed in the form of pamphlets - sonnets with graphic illustrations. All new generations of censors destroyed all new editions, and not entirely to no avail: from the original set of Raimondi's "modes", only a couple of engravings survived - and one "pirated" copy of a book from the middle of the 16th century with rough woodcuts (also, however, not completely surviving). And another touching artifact in the British Museum - a collage of several scraps, where all the fatal ones were cut off, and decent fragments were left out of respect for Romano and Raimondi. But the demand for what over time began to be called simply “poses of Aretino” did not disappear, and in the 18th century the “poses” diverged already in a new iconographic version - it is believed that these were engravings by Agostino Carracci, who, they say, with some liberties sketched prints by Raimondi.

But in the 18th century, erotic publishing was a familiar and solid industry, but for the 16th century, the voluptuous experience of Raimondi and Aretino turned out to be a huge transgression. Firstly, how is it possible, like the most lost pagans, to publicly savor not even the sexual intercourse itself, okay, but a variety of poses? It's not just a matter of morality - although no one has canceled church punishments for "unlawful" positions (and in general for sexual pleasure that does not lead to reproduction). The medicine of that time also saw unhealthy excesses in such experiments. A man should be on top - and if a woman is on top, then as a result of such a deeply unnatural act, which is good, a hermaphrodite will be born.

Second, it was explicit squared, even cubed. Not one "obscene image", but a whole consciously invented cycle, in addition, supported by equally insane lyrics, and all this is done for excitement. And it is intended not to entertain a certain closed circle of “their own” (like other happenings at the Borgia court or like indecent antiques that illustrious collectors quietly showed to selected guests), but to be widely distributed and bring commercial benefits. In other words, before us is the first real example of modern European porn.

It may seem that the targeted image of completely naked people having sex without any equivocals is some kind of thing outside of historical and aesthetic coordinates, that all this is filmed along with clothes and washed away by a rush of lust. This is not so, and the “Poses of Aretino” is also the first evidence of this. Foreshortenings, sophisticated layout, ancient allusions, the rhythm of intertwining limbs, chiaroscuro on the surface of athletic bodies, folds of crumpled sheets - a very definite time bursts into all this, all this is the same maniera as in the pious Vatican paintings. In the same way, Aretino is trying to be a pure pornographer, scorning poetic conventions and reducing his speech to timeless cazzo-potta-fottere, but still, somewhere there slips a hint that the then, 1520s, medical practices, somewhere - on social practices, and somewhere - something topical and satirical like hairpins addressed to the immoral clergy.

The life of the “poses of Aretino” as a phenomenon of (near) sexual culture, of course, was destined for a terribly long one - until the end of the 19th century, they excited the minds and stirred the imagination even of those who had never seen either the sonnets themselves or the corresponding engravings. Just for the fact that it was a catalog of depraved poses. The phrase "poses of Aretino" was used in the same way as in more recent times - the word "Kama Sutra": as an emblem of especially plentiful and especially intricate bed comforts. Hardly anyone took "I Modi" seriously as a practical visual aid; in Casanova's memoirs, for example, there are expert complaints that other poses are "difficult", "impossible", "absurd". But, as usual, artistically refracted theory still turned out to be more exciting than practice (especially the bed practice of Victorian times), and Aretino and Raimondi involuntarily began to seem like singers of the era of Homeric sexual exploits - after all, they came up with this, after all, entertainers, grandfathers lived in the old days more fun than your grandchildren.

In general, it is clear how all this could hook Michael Nyman, who back in the 1960s, as a student, helped to make a new critical edition of Purcell, restoring in his secular polyphonic songs any textual obscenity that had been erased by earlier bashful publishers.

Both at the time of his collaboration with Peter Greenaway, and later, Nyman, a film composer, many times and willingly worked with visual material that was strange, shocking, repulsive - but also obscene too. Actually, Lust Songs themselves appeared as a "soundtrack". The curators of the exhibition, dedicated to the history of sex in art, initially asked Nyman only to make some kind of an anthology of what could be called "erotic music" from different eras. It would also be much more interesting, probably, but the composer was so carried away by the theme of “poses of Aretino” that instead he wrote his own vocal cycle.

It has the same moment of distance that arises in Naiman's film music, when between the direct statement of a shocking shot and the neo-baroque rhetoric of music, if not a contradiction, then a gap is felt. In "Lust Songs" this distance sometimes even looks like a mockery. Nyman does not have any “pornophony”, for which Pravda once cursed Shostakovich, the figurative structure of the music itself sounds emphasized and programmatically does not coincide with Aretin’s harsh obscenities. You can’t even say what the latter is funnier combined with - with a cold mechanical enthusiasm or with a detached "lyricism". But it is precisely here, perhaps, that this method seems to be most appropriate.

Obscenity, turned over the years into a museum piece, no longer seems like something violent, powerful, obscuring the sky. So, an amusing and funny spicy toy - although it has not lost its humanity at all, only now this humanity looks vulnerable and therefore even touching. As Kuzmin wrote a hundred years ago, “Oh, little darlings! / And we, and we, and we? / Flying toys / of unawakened darkness.


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