The Prude

She must have vagina but does not own up to it, and may or may not be aware she has a clitoris. What does she do if she gets a yeast infaction?

She eats food but does not acknowledge the she defecates. Where does it all go? Does she have hemorrhoids?

She has 20/10 vision for every off-color of the rainbow even in the dark and is aghast at the faintest intimation someone may be passing gas, but she does not acknowledge having [big, flaccid] buttocks.

Does she pick her nose when people are not looking? She can never get enough of "blessed events"💗 which must arrive by Stork Express from The Netherlands because she will not hear about menstruation or heaven forbid! f*cking. Was she ever premenopausal?

Her home is full of Hamilton Collection (A Division of The Bradford Exchange) collectible figurines.

She has little nieces and nephews who must at all times comport themselves as proper cherubic putti💗, whom she will harshly scold if they ever touch their unmentionables.

She knows everything, i.e.: nothing about anything except good manners. Her tongue is sharp for spreading salacious rumors to get decent people in trouble: she is the morality police. Her business is poking her nose into everybody's bsiness that is none of her business, especially children's. Her profession is: chaperone. Her mission: to protect young ladies from enjoying their hormones.

She is a prude.

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The painting: "Two Women on a Balcony", by Vittore Carpaccio, Venetian, c. 1465 - 1525/1526, from which the above is a detail, is from an exhibit at The National Gallery (Washington, DC) thta got a huge and largely flattering review in The New York Times: Mysteries of a Venetian Perfectionist Revealed in Washington. A reevaluated artist, blah, blah, blah. Of course that smelled suspicious to me.

The 2-diensionsl silhouette Prude^[1] really struck me, but the whole of Mr. Carpaccio's stuff looks like the output of a loyal apparatchik (A toadie). "Never quite as moving as Bellini. Far less cerebral than Titian. Definitely less edge-of-your-seat than Tintoretto" – in other words, second rate stuff toned down to please every flavor of the entitled hypocricy.

"The women appear in profile: a frequent choice for Carpaccio, who favored static composition that can feel timeless, or even a little medieval." Timeless? The dexesualied angels in heaven are timeless. Showing a head in profile can be a good wy to show none of its expressivity of lack of same. It is clear that Mr. Carpaccio was technically capable of the difficult work of rendering the human face in other angles, but he chose the flattest angle: two dimensional.

My idea wouold be to make life-size reprouctions of everytihng in this exhibit (so as not to harm any of the high-price originals) and put them all up as a shadow exhibit somewhere and let Marcel Duchamp have at 'em. Chivalry? Shrivelry!

Having been childearended in The Dark Age of "in loco parentis" (translate: "parents as insane"), Mr.Carpaccio leaves me cold and I will be cold soon enough: when I'm dead.

A gifted enough, competent mid-brow hack, CNN and Fox News for the Keeping-up-with-the-Jonses set, the S. Atherton Middletons, the salarymen of his time. The Yawns and the Yuckies who give mother whom we will pretend doesn't menstruate dead flowers for Mother's day to show her we asexually love💗 her. Contrast with the people who don't pretend they don't have bodily functions in Peter Brueghel's paintings. Let's raise a fitting toast to you, Mr. Carpaccio: a big juicy fragrant fart! Pffft! Yum!

Appendix: A question about the audience

The audience for both Mr. Carpaccio's and Mr. Brueghel's paintings must have been upper middle class persons of means and influence. What kind of persons were they? It is easy to imagine prigs and prudes and other bourgeois-equivalents of the time self-sataisfying themselves on their goo dtawse with Mr .Carpaccio's very skillfully crafted paingings. But as Hermann broch argued: Kitsch is not inept art but art then contravenes humanic values. Mr. Brueghel's patrons present a more interesting situation: His paintings are full of life and death, not prudery (well you can abstract many of the landscapes to avoind the promiscuous vltality of life and death). So were thee persons "cool cats" who enjoyed their bodies as well as their minds? Wer ethey prigs who saw nothing except the artist's signature as confirming their exalted esthetic sense to buy his paintings? Were they hypocrites who showed pruditanical public faces but behind closed doors and drawn drapes over the windows either healthily or in debauchery or both enjoyed their bodies while they had them, while keeping from political trouble by giving the masses who can control their hormones only if they can repress them bad ideas? [I do not have a clue as to th answere here.]

A prune