Now that we're safely weeks past the silliness that is Valentine's Day (even though I had a thoroughly pleasant one thank you very much) I feel comfortable pointing to Jonathan Jones's wonderful collection of his favorite pieces of art that he assembled online for the dread holiday. I felt instantly bolstered when I saw his opening image was Jean-Honoré Fragonard's The Swing, pictured right and one of my favorite pieces in the Wallace Collection, i.e. the one where the dude is totally looking up the chick's skirt. Jones elaborates on some of his other picks:
The romantic, the saucy and the disturbingly kinky are often hard to tell apart as my list gently illustrates. Rodin's great sculpture The Kiss will always be a universal icon of pure desire - a loved image of love - however many times it is reproduced, but it has a sting. It actually comes from Rodin's ambitious project The Gates of Hell, a tumultuous illustration of Dante's Inferno, and portrays the mortal sinners Francesca da Rimini and her lover. Rodin's depiction insists on the carnality of love. So do Hogarth's paired paintings Before and After.
The Hogarths genuinely made me blush. Saucy indeed. And I distinctly remember the first time I saw The Kiss in person at Tate Britain and just stood there stock still for a really long time lest I move and reveal how warm I was feeling. Sometimes there's a good reason popular art is so popular.