mining the museum

I have selected four paintings for this assignment. The paintings would be hung on the walls of a jail cell. There would be a sumptuous bed in the middle of the cell and nothing else. I want the paintings to say something about women using their sexual powers for violence and other evils.

As I walked through the museum last Thursday, I noticed many depictions of women. Two paintings that I have always found to be interesting are the Judith with Holofernes and Salome with John the Baptist. In both pictures the women are either in the process of decapitating their gentleman victim or have already completed the task. In both instances the men were much more capable of winning in a fight, so to battle the brawn the women used their seductive powers to lure the men into a vulnerable position and ultimately death.

I included a picture of Calypso, the sea nymph who put a spell on Ulysses and kept him captive for 7 years. Calypso is said to have "persuaded" Ulysses to stay with love and promises of immortality. This is another display of a woman using her seductive power for evil.

The last picture is of the penitent Magdalene who was labeled as a whore and cast out of her village. In the painting, dark clouds loom over a scared Magdalene and a skull sits on a stump next to her elbow. The painting seems to say that a dark and destitute death lies ahead for the promiscuous mistress of Christ.

With these paintings I hope a conversation about the different ways that violence is portrayed among the sexes, the wide disparity between women being life bearers or whore-lepers of society, and finally I want the viewers of these paintings to picture men as the women displayed here and to consider how it changes the theme.