When you come to conventional art history, a quality that is noticeably missing in the discussion is pleasure. The pleasure that a work of art gives you. It's as if the sensuous and sensual in the work of art is omitted in favour of an 'objective' discussion. That's not to say that discussions about art totally lack mention of pleasure, but these are more often found in accounts like travelogues or stray criticism, or blogs and the like.

Here is a selective discussion of works that give the viewer pleasure and are also about pleasure, starting with the erotic sculptures of Khajuraho, then moving to Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, then to other examples as a gold table ornament for a king to a painting by Rembrandt. These examples give a fuller picture of how artists responded to pleasure—for the viewer, about the subject, about themselves—in so many different ways.

The Erotic Sculptures of Khajuraho

Located in the middle of India in Rajasthan, below Agra to the north-west and Varanasi to the east, lies Khajuraho, once home to the Chandella dynasty, one of the most prominent dynasties between the tenth and thirteenth centuries who, between 950-1050, erected no fewer than 85 temples, about a quarter of which survive.

It was the scene of the kind of cultural flowering comparable to Knossos in Crete between 1600-1400 B.C., or Florence in the Renaissance, which, in its density and extent, remains mysteriously unaccountable. Khajuraho is a place concealing several deep spiritual strata: there had earlier been Buddhist settlements there and the different sects of Shaiva, Vaishnava and Jain shrines, attesting to the Chandella’s religious tolerance.

As abruptly as it began, Khajuraho toppled in 1203, and by 1309 the Delhi Sultan Alauddin Khilji had all but eradicated any Chandellian trace. For the next five hundred years, Khajuraho lay derelict beneath the surrounding jungle's languid arms, which had formerly acted as deterrence to foreign invaders.

Khajuraho India, DulaDeo Temple, Sculptures Outer Wall. Via Wikipedia Commons

Like some Eldorado, it was rediscovered in 1832 when a British engineer, T.S. Burt, stumbled across the ruins. However, it took more than a century for their true significance to be recognized.

The temples are festooned with intricate masonry. The most lasting impression is the explicit erotic carvings that decorate many of their surfaces, a writhing, serpentine mass of strong, confident forms of whom are engaged in ravishing, carnal pleasure.

Gothic cathedrals may have their share of incidental irreverent and what we would call ‘inappropriate’ sculptures. Still, there is nothing in Western architecture or sculpture to match these carvings' ribaldry and sensuality.

The two images below are coy compared to the explicit nature of many other carvings. Still, they are characteristic of the swaying sexual arousal of the bodies and their wanton surrender to one another. In one scene, a woman with full thighs and breasts rotund enough to make any cosmetic surgeon's pupils dilate decorates her eyes; diminutive figures stand in attendance while in the neighbouring recesses writhe panther-like forms, flanked by the smaller beings, crouching and twisted. In the other image, Siva fondles a woman's breast whose body is bent to fit snugly into the arc of his. In this imaginary world of plenty, each encounter is topped and bottomed with foliage and decoration. Just looking at these buildings leaves a feeling of surfeited physical indulgence.

There are three popular explanations for the erotica lacing these temples. The first has to do with the myths behind the genesis of the place. A Brahmin priest's daughter was seduced by the moon god while bathing one evening; she bore a son, Chandravarman, but, because her demigod status incited vilification, she sought refuge in the forest.

After her son became the first ruler of the Chandellas, he received a visitation from his dead mother. She charged him with building shrines devoted to the human passions to reveal human desire's vanity and transience. The other justification is that the sculptures were made to instruct the boys bound to the law of 'brahmacharis' about the human passions for them to graduate to the role of 'householder'.

The last is that the Chandellas were devout practitioners of Tantrism, a belief that promises the infinite through disciplined and exhaustive satisfaction of earthly desire.

Why isn’t there Anything in the West to Compare to This?

One reason why there is nothing in the Western tradition to compare with this is not just because the West didn't invent anything like Tantrism. It has to do with the Neoplatonist values dominant since the fall of the Roman Empire to the Italian Renaissance. Taking its cue from Plato, of course, the Neoplatonist viewpoints to a world as the appearance of things.

The great Neoplatonist Plotinus (204-70), although influenced by Aristotle in several branches of his thought, did not condone the body's pleasures, which were to be subordinated to the gratification of the spirit. In the section on happiness in the Enneads, Plotinus warns against distractions from the development of the intellect.

Plotinus rejects the doctrine of hedonism espoused by Socrates' contemporary Aristippus, and equally the ideas of Epicurus, who advised that we must always attend to satisfying our senses since they are components of our being.

To Plotinus, happiness is related to the Good, which on this mortal earth is but the image of the higher Good. Sensations are nothing without ‘Reason and Authentic Intellection’ without which a ‘perfect life’ cannot be realized. The body is full of sensory fluctuations, whereas to Plotinus, the mind’s aim is for constancy. ‘There is nothing but to cut away the body or the body’s sensitive life and so secure that self-contained unity essential to happiness.’

Let me now bring some of these co-ordinates together. What we are presented with on the subject of pleasure is either to surrender to the fruits of bodily desire or sublimate the sensuous world. To take this latter course too literally is to suspect sensual material as wicked and distracting, as we find with fundamentalist religions.

It is also for this reason that some religions have and do treat art with suspicion. Pleasure is always somewhere in the work of art. This may not at first be due exclusively to beauty, or rather, the beauty that the viewer finds is in the idea, the sentiment, or the objective of the art object. What compels people to art is the pleasure taken in being challenged, pleasure in being stimulated, and the extreme pleasure from how the work of art satisfies the instinct for displeasure.

Pleasure is what we receive from the work, while beauty is a quality of it. Beauty can be a sensuous, physical phenomenon, or it can be an idea. Art has always had a troubled relationship with the decorative, the quality of beauty that announces itself out of hand.

A work of art may look commonplace or ugly at first until it works upon the sensibility and the understanding, which finally accepts it as beautiful.

Pleasure in Art is not the Same as Pleasure Taken in Tasting Wine. For Example

The particular stimulation we draw from many works of art is not only that they give us pleasure, but they also engage us in the way in which that pleasure is to be achieved. In his Introduction to A Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts, Riegl remarks that 'Visual Art is thus a cultural phenomenon like any other, and ultimately its evolution depends upon the same factor that governs all human cultural evolution: the world-view (Weltanschauung) as an expression of the human need for happiness’.

Happiness is the extension of pleasure, yet the pleasure from the work of art is not the same as pleasure in a good wine or a pretty dress. Instead, it poses compelling questions about how happiness might be achieved and maintained.

If the pleasure we get from art were reducible to gratifying one or more of our senses, we would not be concerned with it the way we are. It would join the ranks of eating or copulating.

When we see art that represents pleasure, we perceive the suspension of that state and a promise that we can maybe achieve it. When we are glad to experience stimulated displeasure in the work of art, we might undergo a relief in experiencing a pleasure not betokened by society's mores, or the work tries to rupture the status quo to open up an alternative for a better state of affairs.

Non-sacred Pleasure

There are three main topics that I will explore below. Firstly, a handful of works which are examples of a state of profane pleasure. Secondly, the dislodgement in Modernism of beauty from its service to religion. This dislodgement, or break or whatever you want to call it, results in making the work of art an active agent in experimentation and critique, and thirdly the perversion of pleasure in art when pleasure is conflated with entertainment.

In Modernism, pleasure and especially beauty are treated with particular philosophical interest, as something belonging to human awareness as distinct from belonging to a deity. Once humans took active responsibility for their thought, the meaning and apprehension of beauty were cast in a different light, as were the uses of pleasure.

And if art no longer serves a higher power, what function does it serve? The answer is inconclusive except to accept that the pleasures are in the making, the seeing, and the thinking. With exceptions, no doubt, in the main, art represents a higher form of living, either in what it conjures or what it aims to dispel, or what it brings to those who give it the time.

In comparison to the splendid art of the Aegean or of Khajuraho, which was still about ritual pleasures, art occasioned by pleasure alone comes into force by the middle of the sixteenth century.

At this time, the main text on pleasure and happiness was Book Ten of Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics:

The view may be held that all men seek pleasure because of all desire life. Life is a form of activity, and when a man engages in an activity, it is always connected with those objects and by means of those faculties he likes best. Thus the musician exercises his sense of hearing on musical sounds, the student uses his brains upon the problems of science, and so on. The pleasure which supervenes these activities perfects them, and so perfects life, which all men desire to have. It is understandable then that we seek pleasure, for it perfects life for each of us, and life is a desirable thing. But the question of whether we desire life for the sake of pleasure or pleasure for the sake of life is one which must be dismissed for the moment. At least we may say that they appear to be bound together too intimately to admit of separation. There is no pleasure without some activity, and every activity is crowned by pleasure.

Pleasure in Dischord

One of the curious things about this period between the High Renaissance and the flowering of the Baroque is that it is associated with a fair amount of discord, which is reflected in the tensions and compositional imbalances in works that gave their name to Mannerism. The year 1527 had a singular effect on Italy, and the rest of Europe in that Rome was brutally sacked by the troops of Charles V, who ravaged the city and imprisoned the Pope, Clement VII.

The bitter effect of the pope's fall was to cast his probity into doubt, an unimpeachability that popes like Julius II (1443-1513) and Leo X (1475-1521) had struggled so hard since the end of the fourteenth century to resolder. The rape of Rome is a convenient marker for the end Renaissance and the beginning of a new period of uncertainty, the age of doubt (Michel de Montaigne was born in 1533 and René Descartes was born in 1596, four years after his death), and blighted by two centuries of conflict between Catholics and Protestants.

Mannerism is said to be symptomatic of the feeling of insecurity and loss, as seen in the loss of the harmonies found in the works of artists like Raphael and Perugino. Michelangelo's last phase, signalled in his Last Judgment (1536-41), commissioned by Clement VII shortly before his death in 1534, is one of the first masterpieces of the Mannerist period, and a manifesto work that combines faith with doubt, for the goodwill of God is depicted entirely through terror.

All the calm of spiritual equilibrium is sacrificed in favour of contorted bodies and gyrating in the throes of their retribution.

Last Judgment. Circa 1536-41. By Michelangelo. Via Wikipedia

Despite the dilemmas of faith, or perhaps because of them, the mid-sixteenth century witnessed an outpouring of a wide variety of works that celebrated the marvellous, the indirect consolation, as Romanticism was later to prove, of an increasingly confusing and enlarging universe.

With the adoption of gunfire in warfare and duelling, weaponry became a constant resource for artists' revenue. The smaller works, objets d'art from statuettes to table settings to pistols to sword pommels, which were the bread and butter of artists of the period, who took advantage of the growing availability of gold, gems, and ivory thanks to increasing naval trade.

As we know in our overly consumerist culture, secular culture seeks satisfaction in the material world and the feats of its own ingenuity.

I would advise anyone interested in art but dislike of war to suspend the aversion and visit an exhibit of historical weaponry from the sixteenth and seventeenth century where there are some of the most remarkable examples of intricate decoration found anywhere. Take this sporting rifle, Saxony, from the early 1600s adorned with images related to hunting in a filigree of brass, with fruitwood, horn, and mother-of-pearl inlay. Such objects were prized among the gentry who were fond of using them for ceremonial purposes, such as gifts to honoured guests before the hunt.

Wheellock Rifle. Circa1680–90. By Johann Michael Maucher. Via The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Salt Cellar for François I of France

By the end of the Renaissance, sculptors had to be skilled metalworkers and carvers and clay modellers. We need only scan the achievements of Flemish-born Florentine Giovanni Bologna, known as Giambologna, who is credited with being the first artist since antiquity who made his career from secular to sacred works.

Together with that of Cellini, his work signal a conclusive change already staged in Renaissance works that incorporated classical mythology, toward a sumptuousness whose limits are never too great. A memorable example of this is Celiini's Salieri (1540-3) or Salt Cellar commissioned by François I.

His only known work in gold, the table setting's allegory is not concerned with culinary delights as might be expected, but the whole world, the sea is depicted as a man and the earth, predictably, a woman; at the base are the four winds, the times of the day and general human activity. Think of this gorgeous relic next time you salt your potatoes.

Saltcellar of King Francis I of France. Circa 1540-43. By Benvenuto Cellini. Via Artsy

The Pleasures of Love and the Joys of Sharing the Fruits of the Earth: Velazquez, Rembrandt, and Goya

Then there are the pleasures of love and the pleasures of sharing the fruits of the earth. There are two works from roughly the same time in the early seventeenth century that celebrate these things, Velazquez's Feast of Bacchus (1628), and Rembrandt’s Artemisia (1634).

The Triumph of Bacchus. Circa 1628-29. By Diego Velázquez. Via Wikipedia Commons

Painted under the spell of Rubens, Velazquez elaborates on the high realism of his early Seville bodegones or still-life works, for an image that combines pageantry with the common man savouring everyday things.

The picture comes with several interpretations, one being that the semi-nude figure to the left is a 'false Bacchus'; another is that it depicts a scene where Bacchus pays a visit to mortals to present them with the gift of wine.

Whether or not Velazquez handles his subject with the same assurance as his later works are open to debate, but what is undeniable is that this image celebrates mere humans' efforts to partake in worldly experiences that, all too briefly, give them a taste of higher things. It is also about bountiful charity: giving abundance to the poor. Bacchus, the spreader of miracles discovered the mixed blessing of inebriation.

With Velasquez, one always needs to look closely at the paint handling, masterfully controlled, whilst always responsive to its physical lusciousness. From the startlingly clear glint of the glass at Bacchus' feet to the heavy folds of the brown blanket on the right, this is a work of an artist whose discipline never eclipses the joy in what he does.

Judith at the Banquet of Holofernes, also known as Artemisia. 1634. By Rembrandt. Via Wikimedia Commons

Rembrandt’s Artemesia (1634) comes from the artist's earlier period when he was more materially prosperous. His paintings betray an optimism that would later be replaced by introspection and melancholy in later life. Here Artemisia, queen of Pérgmo, receives the cup containing the ashes of her loved husband, Mausolus. It is a painting exuding the fullest love with the least mawkishness and most extraordinary frankness. Executed in the same year as his marriage to Saskia van Uylenborch, there is no doubting the artist’s sincerity, for whom the glowing gold figure Artemisia seems to exude light.

The Flower Girls or Spring. By Francisco Goya. Circa 1786-87. Via Wikipedia Commons.

Much like Rembrandt, Goya was exuberant in youth and sombre in old age. This work, The Flower Girls (1786/87) was painted for the royal dining room for the El Pardo Palace and is characteristic of the artist’s positivity that reigned until the death of Carlos III.

The subject is the wine harvest, and it is a work that stands out for its absence of any negativity while avoiding triviality. It has a lightness that comes from relaxed comfort and happiness.

This genre of work was also popular in France, though candied with more lavish hedonism and provocative sensuality. In the late eighteenth century, writers such as the Goncourt Brothers looked back nostalgically on the eighteenth century as an age of lost joy.

When we look at Goya's later paintings such as his gathering of crones in Witches’ Sabbath (1821/23), a work drained of any happiness or redemption, and his brooding etchings, there is a distinct fall from grace. It is as if the artist nurses a deep, unhealing wound.

By the late eighteenth century, however, there was growing identification with the role of pain and terror within beauty. That’s a subject for a different day.

Where has Pleasure Gone from Art History?