EROTIC ART & PHOTOGRAPHY  –

Victorian and Edwardian “Gentlemen’s intimate postcards”.

Woman and the photographic nude The intimate postcard Paolo Mantegazza and the New Europe Fernande; an incomplete story — Pictures: Cherchez la femme Types and beauties Qualities and defects The instruments of seduction The career of women. – In the late 19th and early 20th century more than a few middle-class men jealously guarded “intimate postcards” depicting beautiful naked women among their personal belongings, despite the prevailing puritanical morality of the time. The fashion for these postcards, in which woman was revealed as nature intended her through the magic of the dark room, spread a flavour of the Belle Epoque and of transgressions of unmistakable Parisian origin throughout Europe. “Candid”, “artistic”, a far cry from the squalor of pornography, these shapely women have been transformed, through the passing of time, into a precious and pleasing testimonial to the ‘eternal feminine’ as portrayed by our grandmothers. To accompany the portraits there is a selection of contemporary texts taken from the Physiology of Woman (1893) by Paolo Mantegazza, in which, surprisingly, the writer sings the praises of “the daughter of Eve”, his contemporary.

pp. 174 #080226