Ellen (Michelle Pfeiffer) and Newland (Daniel Day-Lewis) in The Age of Innocence
Credit: Alamy Images
One fine day, though history does not record how fine, William Blake’s friend and patron, Thomas Butts, came to call on the poet and his wife Catherine in Lambeth.
He was surprised to find the couple naked in the garden, reading to one another from Paradise Lost. “Come in!” cried Blake, “it’s only Adam and Eve you know!” before putting the kettle, and presumably his trousers, on.
Blake’s own Garden of Love was a dismal place, wrecked by religion (“And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds/ And binding with briars, my joys & desires”). But he understood a great truth about gardens, which is that, as well as affording various delights to the senses, they are a realm of enchantment, allegory and outright fantasy.
Rarely does L.P. Hartley’s dictum that “the past is a foreign country” hold more firmly than in the area of sexuality in classical art. Classic erotic art, erotic images and depictions of genitalia, the phallus in particular, were incredibly popular motifs across a wide range of media in ancient Greece and Rome.
Simply put, sex is everywhere in Greek and Roman art. Explicit sexual representations were common on Athenian black-figure and red-figure vases of the sixth and fifth centuries BC. They are often eye-openingly confronting in nature.
Sex and love were major themes in classical art, as can be seen in this ancient Roman fresco in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples in Italy. (