ARTRAVESTY: The Forbidden Fruit - Video

This is the first of the twelve 2022 SUMMER instalments on the salacious elements in great art which, although obvious, go mostly unnoticed. These lectures are meant to remove the cataracts from our eyes and make the invisible visible.

So often we look at great art having no idea what we are looking at. Learning art history helps of course, but even with that knowledge, one frequently misses many an element, particularly the salacious details. Yet artists were humans first, often very intensely so, and one would be well advised to seek the “human” in their works, in addition to the “didactic,” the “moralistic,” the “illustrative,” and, above all, the “ineffable.”

We shall thus begin with the most human of all human qualities – SIN – more precisely the ORIGINAL SIN, and even more narrowly, MICHELANGELO’s “Original Sin,” as depicted on the Sistine Ceiling, where the artist clearly showed that his idea of the FORBIDDEN FRUIT WAS NOT AN APPLE.