Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus, c. 1616-17.	Bernini, Pluto and Persephone, 1621-22.
	Titian, Rape of Europa, 1538.
Rubens, The Toilet of Venus, 1612-15.	Titian, Venus with a Mirror, 1555.
	Rubens, Judgement of Paris, 1638.
Rubens, Raising of the Cross, 1610.	Laocoon and his Sons, Greek, 1st c. B.C.
Rubens, drawing of the Laocoon, c. 1600-1608.
	Rubens, Descent from the Cross, 1612.
Rubens, Portrait of Suzanne Fourment, c. 1620-25.	Rubens, Landscape with the Chateau de Steen, 1635.
Velazquez (1599-1660), Adoration of the Magi, c. 1619.	Caravaggio, Entombment, c. 1604.
Velazquez, Las Meninas (Ladies in Waiting), 1656. See webpage discussion	Detail of Las Meninas.
Velazquez, Philip IV in Brown and Silver, 1631-32.

Rubens, Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus, c. 1616-17.	Bernini, Pluto and Persephone, 1621-22.

These are two examples of a large number of other works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that focus on the representation of rape. As works of culture, these works can be connected to the following quotation from the contemporary feminist art historian, Griselda Pollock: "Culture is the social level in which those images of the world and definitions of reality are produced which can be ideologically mobilized to legitimate the existing order of relations of domination and subordination between both classes and sexes." Use this quotation as a critical perspective from which to discuss early modern representations of rape exemplified by this comparison, and contrast this to contemporary representations of rape informed by feminism. For the latter part of this discussion, you might want to consider the high visibility given to legal cases like William Kennedy Smith rape trial, the Bobbitts' trials, the controversy over Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas, and of course O.J.

Weblinks

16th and 17th century images of rape have been the focus of several recent critical studies. Excerpts from an article by Margaret D. Carroll entitled "The Erotics of Absolutism: Rubens and the Mystification of Sexual Violence" and excerpts from the opening chapter from the book by Diane Wolfthal entitled Images of Rape: the "Heroic" Tradition and its Alternatives explore this imagery.

Griselda Pollock, "Vision, Voice and Power: Feminist Art History and Marxism," in Vision and Difference, p. 20: Culture can be defined as those social practices whose prime signification, i.e. the production of sense or making orders of 'sense' for the world we live in. Culture is the social level in which those images of the world and definitions of reality are produced which can be ideologically mobilized to legitimate the existing order of relations of domination and subordination between both classes and sexes. Art history takes an aspect of cultural production, art, as its object of study; but the discipline itself is also a crucial component of the cultural hegemony by the dominant class and gender. Therefore it is important to contest the definitions of our society's ideal reality which are produced in art-historical interpretations of culture.

Frederick Hartt, Art, 1976, p. 723:[Rubens's] Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus, of about 1616-17, recalls forcibly Titian's Rape of Europa, which Rubens carefully copied while in Spain. Although the figures have been made to fit into Rubens's mounting spiral, such is the buoyancy of the composition that the result does not seem artificial. The act of love by which Castor and Pollux, sons of Jupiter, uplift the mortal maidens from the ground draws the spectator upward in a mood of rapture not unrelated to that Bernini was soon to achieve in the Ecstasy of St. Theresa. The female types, even more abundant than those of Titian, are traversed by a steady stream of energy, and the material weight of all the figures is lightened by innumerable fluctuations of color running through their pearly skin, the tanned flesh of the men, the armor, the horses, even the floods of golden hair. The low horizon increases the effect of a heavenly ascension, natural enough, since this painting ... constitutes a triumph of divine love; the very landscape heaves and flows in response to the excitement of the event.

Margaret D. Carroll, "The Erotics of Absolutism: Rubens and the Mystification of Sexual Violence," in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, eds. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, p. 139: Rubens's Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus confronts its viewers with an interpretative dilemna. Painted about 1615 to 1618, the life-size composition illustrates the story recounted by Theocritus and Ovid of how the twin brothers Castor and Pollux (called the Dioscuri) forcibly abducted and later married the daughters of King Leucippus. Rubens's depiction of the abduction is marked by some striking ambiguities: an equivocation between violence and solicitude in the demeanor of the brothers, and an equivocation between resistance and gratification in the response of the sisters. The spirited ebullience and sensual appeal of the group work to override our darker reflections about the coercive nature of the abduction. For these reasons many viewers have wanted to discount the predatory violence of the brothers' act and to interpret the painting in a benign spirit, perhaps as a Neoplatonic allegory of the progress of the soul toward heaven, or as an allegory of marriage. Although I agree that a reference to marriage may be at play here, I also believe that any interpretation of the painting is inadequate that does not attempt to come to terms with it as a celebratory depiction of sexual violence and the forcible subjugation of women by men....
...[O]ne art historian...[concludes] that Rubens is celebrating the triumph of natural impulse over conventional inhibition: "The battle of the sexes is a necessity of nature. With Rubens it is a primal impulse of life, a fight for unification.....In being raped Pheobe discovers her destiny as a woman. Her rape reveals and enhances her nature." In claiming something like a truth value for Rubens's celebratory depiction of this rape, this scholar mystifies it in terms of a misguided notion of what is natural in human sexuality. My point is that we must consider Rubens's painting not as a revelation of primal human nature but as a phenomenon of sixteenth- and seventeenth- century European culture. In particular we may view Rubens's painting as issuing from a tradition that emerged among princely patrons at the time, of incorporating large-scale mythological rape scenes into their palace decorations. With fundamental shifts in political thinking and experience in early sixteenth-century Europe, princes came to appreciate the particular luster rape scenes could give to their own claims to absolute sovereignty....

Details of Las Meninas

Rubens, Apollo and Marsyas.	Rubens, Minerva and Arachne.