On a field trip to the Kreeger Museum I once saw a third-grade boy encountering fine art for what must have been the first time. As the children traversed the shining hallways, past tense, smiling docents, the boy loudly expressed his view of certain paintings and sculptures.
“Inappropriate!” the child declared, denouncing with a sweep of his hand the bare bronze breasts of Renoir’s “Venus Victrix.”
“Whoa! That is totally inappropriate!” he yelled, recoiling from the full-frontal shock of Paul Delvaux’s “The Secret.”
We chaperones exchanged amused glances. The boy’s parents, in equipping him to understand and categorize the images he might encounter, had clearly forgotten to mention aesthetics.
“My kids have been going to museums since they were little,” one mother remarked. “They’re used to seeing artistic treatment of the human body.”
Rather smugly –too smugly, as it turns out! — I agreed that it certainly was comforting to know that one’s own children had seen enough art to tell the difference between, say, a vulgar movie poster and the Venus de Milo.
So it didn’t occur to me that anyone could possibly object when I brought home a framed copy of Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus,” with the idea of hanging it in one of the children’s rooms.
The painting shows a Renaissance beauty standing on a large shell, being gently blown to shore by dramatic figures depicting the winds. A lovely attendant waits to wrap the goddess in embroidered silken garments. The original hangs in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy, and it’s breathtaking.
What with the elegance of the image and the richness of the coloring it seemed to me a perfect thing to hang in a girls’ room — or perhaps just outside, in the hallway.
But I’d overlooked something.
“No way. No way!” gasped the room’s owner, when she saw me unwrap the picture.
“Why not?” I said, mystified. “It’s beautiful.”
“Beautiful? She’s naked!”
“Well, sure, but –”
Honestly, I hadn’t noticed! But it’s true: In the painting, Venus is indeed birthday-suited, in the buff, and completely starkers.
Hearing the outrage in their sister’s voice, the other children wandered over in the hopes of witnessing an argument. To my dismay, they pointed their young fingers at Botticelli’s masterpiece … and began to titter.
“Nice, Mummy. Where on Earth are you planning to hang that?”
“In the girls’ room,” I said defensively.
“No way!”
“OK, in the upstairs hallway then,” I tried.
“Then I’ll have to move,” said the boy firmly. “I’m not walking past that every day.”
The eldest girl saw my perplexity and tried to help.
“You see a famous painting. They see a naked woman,” she explained. “Worse, their friends will see a naked woman.”
“I guess,” I conceded, though really I didn’t. “But what about you?”
“I see a famous painting,” she laughed, “Starring a naked woman.”
“You’re saying this is not a good picture for a house with children?”
“Afraid so,” she said, unknowingly echoing the third-grade boy. “It’s just … inappropriate.”
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at mailto:[email protected] “>[email protected].
