Armors and Nudity

I am sure we all remember vividly the first sex scene we saw in a movie that really struck our imagination. In my case the film in question was Excalibur (1981) by John Boorman, and more precisely the carnal congress which happens about fifteen minutes into the film. A sequence that deeply troubled me, leaving me in a mixture of attraction and repulsion, without my being able to understand why.

Here Uther Pendragon, who thanks to Merlin’s spell has assumed the appearance of Duke Gorlois, violently possesses the duke’s wife, Igraine (from this fleeting relationship extorted with deception King Arthur will be born). The montage sequence shows this intercourse obtained by deception alernated with the simultaneous death of the true duke on the battlefield: Eros and Thanatos.

Excalibur (1981) by John Boorman

The element that struck me most was a detail with a very powerful visual impact: in the scene Uther, falling prey to erotic fury, does not bother to take off his armor and rushes on the woman who, believing him to be her husband, gives in to his impetus. Leaving aside the dubious realism of the scene (would it really be possible to do certain things while wearing an armor?), it was the contrast – the contact – between the shiny steel and the white female skin that was indelibly engraved in my imagination. I doubt it is a coincidence that, many years later, my graduation thesis ended up focusing on Crash by Cronenberg, another film in which flesh and metal clash and merge, thanks to the car accident, in a perverse erotic dimension.

When I saw Excalibur for the first time I could not know, but the iconography of a knight in armor facing a naked woman is a recurring theme in the history of art – “too frequent, too varied, too insistent to be judged random”, as noted by Roger Caillois in Au cœur du fantastique (1965).

The motif is connected to the broader topos of the clothed male figure vs. an undressed female figure: many nineteenth-century paintings are based on this one-sided nudity, in particular the representations of harems or slave markets which were very fashionable among Orientalist painters, but also famous paintings like Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe.
But, as we shall see, in the case of the fully-armored knight a much more interesting level of ambiguity can be identified.

Giuseppe Ferrauto states that there are “a whole kind of depictions of beautiful, naked and chained female prisoners, destined for the more or less openly morbid tastes of gentlemen of the past. […] Ariosto described Angelica chained to the rock of Ebuda, about to be the victim of a sea monster. Many took possession of this scene, from Ingres to Doré, who used it for his illustrations for Orlando furioso, up to Polish artist Chodowiecki, who also made a series of engravings, again for Orlando furioso , in 1772, to end up in the folklore scenes of Sicilian carts’ painted sides.” (Arcana, vol. II, Sugar 1969)

Gustave Doré, Ruggero and Angelica, 1879

Daniel Chodowiecki, Ruggero and Angelica, 1772

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Ruggero Freeing Angelica, 1819

Painters looking for contexts that lend themselves to this type of representation obviously found a perfect anecdote in the episode of Angelica and Ruggero (or in the similar classic myth of Andromeda freed by Perseus). One of the most famous examples is the aforementioned Ruggero Freeing Angelica by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1819), an oil painting that at the time caused a scandal for its representation of female nudity.

Matthias Gerung, Allegory of Love (Amor omnia vincit), 1535

Pieter Paul Rubens, Perseus Freeing Andromeda, 1620

Pieter Paul Rubens, Perseus and Andromeda, 1640

But there were illustrious and varied precedents. In 1530 Lucas Cranach had chosen the Judgment of Paris in order to show the three naked goddesses in front of the Trojan prince, while Tintoretto associated the theme with the liberation of Arsinoe, where the rescue set at the Lighthouse of Alexandria becomes the occasion for showing the armor in contact with bare skin; also worth noting is the sensual detail of the chain which slides sinuously over the queen’s private parts. As Mario Praz summarized well, “the contact of naked limbs with the chains and the steel of the armor seems to have the precise purpose of exciting special senses” (Erotismo in arte e letteratura, in I problemi di Ulisse, 1970).

Lucas Cranach The Elder, The Judgement of Paris, ca. 1528

Jacopo Tintoretto, The Liberation of Arsinoe, ca. 1556

Francesco Montelatici a.k.a. Cecco Bravo, Ruggero and Angelica, 1660

Michaelis Majeri, Secretioris naturae secretorum scrutinium chymicum, 1687

“All this – wrote Caillois – undoubtedly gives rise to an emotion which is in a certain sense natural, inevitable, and does not owe its effectiveness to the illustrated anecdote. André Pieyre de Mandiargues, describing Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara […], reports that licentious tournaments were held in the hall on the first floor in which naked girls contended with knights in arms. If the rumor is true, the strange game convinces me only of the fact that the power of suggestion of that image is even greater than I imagined. If it is unfounded, the fact that it was taken up by Mandiargues convinces me almost as much of the secret and persistent virulence of that fantasy.”

William Etty, Britomart Redeems Faire Amoret, ca. 1833

Arthur Hughes, La Belle Dame sans Merci, 1863

Joseph Paul Blanc, The Liberation – Ruggero and Angelica, 1876

In time the motif no longer needed much historical anecdotes to lean on. Millais’s Knight Errant does not refer to any precise mythological or literary episode – if not, perhaps, to John Keats’ ballad La Belle Dame Sans Merci (1819) – as it will happen with other variations on the theme by the Pre-Raphaelites.

John Everett Millais, The Knight Errant, 1870

Edward Burne-Jones, The Doom Fulfulled, 1885

Charles Napier Kennedy, Perseus and Andromeda, 1890

Arthur Hacker, The Temptation of Sir Percival, ca. 1894

One of the most interesting declinations is undoubtedly the one chosen by Delacroix in 1852, in which the knight-errant is actually a woman: it is Marfisa, once again a character drawn from Ariosto.
It is worth summing up the background story of this scene: the warrior-woman on her steed is giving a passage across the river to the witch Gabrina, when they meet the knight Pinabello and her beautiful but insolent lover, who laughs at the old woman. Determined to avenge this offense, Marfisa defeats the knight in a duel and forces Pinabello’s mistress to strip off her rich garments and give them to her old woman.

In stripping the knight’s cheeky lover, Marfisa seems to parody the very artistic motif we are talking about. In fact unlike all the other armored knights we’ve seen so far, who fall at the feet of the girl in déshabillé, here the intrepid warrior, being a woman, does not let herself be duped: to the pretty girl (to paint which, according to Armando Sodano, Delacroix had rediscovered “the lyricism of odalisques of his youth”) Marfisa prefers the old hag she carries on her steed. Who certainly isn’t beautiful, but intelligent.
An ironic punishment for female vanity that comes from a female in armor, one that I find amusing to read in a metanarrative sense: “if you are a woman who cannot go beyond appearances”, Marfisa seems to warn, “then you deserve to be naked , as happens to all the other maidens in this very type of paintings!”

Eugène Delacroix, Marfisa, 1852

Finally, let me go back to Excalibur. Over the years I have often found myself wondering what was special about that scene, and why did it end up being engraved so strongly in my imagination.

Uther’s passion is cruel, compelling, violent. He encompasses all the arrogance of the well-known masculinity centered on possession: a vision made of fury, of rights arrogated and obtained even by deception, a vision in which the longed-for woman must be taken by force. It could be said that the character of Uther, who even recurs to a magic spell in order to satisfy his desires, is “blinded by passion”: a phrase that is sometimes used even today as an extenuating circumstance for rapes and femicides. This is why it is a dark, disturbing sex scene; it is no coincidence that it is interpolated by Boorman with the images of the massacre on the battlefield and with the shots of the innocent child (Morgana) who witnesses this furious embrace, while the soundtrack by Trevor Jones, through pulsating strings and choirs of wavering voices, creates a surreal and deadly atmosphere.

Excalibur (1981) by John Boorman

Yet Igraine does not shy away from aggression: perhaps because she truly believes that he is her husband – or perhaps because there is a subtle complacency in causing such a fury in any lover. Which of the two is dominant, the knight who attacks, or the female who has the power to make him fall prey to passion?

The scene is therefore suspended, as its power relationship is ambiguous. This ambiguity is also intrinsic to the artistic theme we have talked about. On the one hand, the artists tend to highlight the contrast between feminine weakness and fragility, as symbolized by the tempting softness of naked flesh, and strong masculinity as signified by the hard appearance of metal. On the other hand, however, the very armor that should be a symbol of might and virility almost seems like a shell that encloses and constrains all impulses.

John William Waterhouse, La Belle Dame sans Merci, 1893

John William Waterhouse, Lamia and the Soldier, ca. 1905

Such a representation inevitably raises questions: is the knight’s “macho” allure amplified by this encounter with a beautiful lady in Evitic costume, or does he on the contrary appear to be mocked? After being victorious in countless battles, isn’t the warrior conquered by the irresistible seduction of women? Is his armor a symbol of power or rather impotence (as it prevents intercourse)? Is the naked woman, in all her soft and helpless charm, really a compliant prey or is she the one who bewitches and leads the game?

Rose O’Neill, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, 1905

The opposition between these two extremes (manhood enclosed in war vestments, and naked seductive femininity) is the embodiment of a dialectic between the sexes that has been handed down for a very long time as if it were an immutable truth. Yet the dynamics of the relations of power, domination and submission, are never as univocal as they might seem; the mechanism is delicate, and  the opposing components at its core are in constant tension towards overturning one another.

The strength of the image of the knight and the naked woman lies precisely in the fact that, at a deep level, its balance remains undecidable.

Vereker Monteith Hamilton (1856 – 1931), The Rescue

23 comments to Armors and Nudity

  1. Luciano says:

    Interessante; mi ha portato alla mente una scena ‘erotica’ del Cavaliere Inesistente, di Calvino. In questo caso l’accostamento è ancora più estremo, in quanto il cavaliere in questione è soltanto armatura.

  2. Eva says:

    Bellissimo articolo e meravigliosi esempi dei vari artisti, grazie!

  3. Analisi estremamente affascinante di una tipologia di scena che nei miei studi artistici mi ha sempre intrigato, forse per la sua ambiguità… Hai colto in pieno le riflessioni che tendo a fare osservando immagini di questo tipo ?

  4. Giusi Ganci says:

    Che articolo suggestivo e intrigante! Sei riuscito come sempre ad unire al piacere della lettura lo stimolo alla riflessione.. Buon San Valentino tra il romantico e la frenesia dell’eros a te e a tutti!

  5. Viviana Treu says:

    Sono rimasta sorpresa del tuo incipit perchè anche a me quella scena di Excalibur mi ha turbato ed eccitato notevolmente. E la tua domanda “Chi dei due è dominante, il cavaliere che aggredisce o la femmina che ha la facoltà di farlo cadere preda della passione?” è l’ago della bilancia. Molto interessante l’articolo e i contributi artistici. Rimane il mio sogno erotico dell’uomo in armatura! ?

  6. Viviana Treu says:

    Sono rimasta sorpresa del tuo incipit perchè anche a me quella scena di Excalibur mi ha turbato ed eccitato notevolmente. E la tua domanda “Chi dei due è dominante, il cavaliere che aggredisce o la femmina che ha la facoltà di farlo cadere preda della passione?” è l’ago della bilancia. Molto interessante l’articolo e i contributi artistici. Rimane il mio sogno erotico dell’uomo in armatura! 😉

  7. Antonello says:

    Hai già dato un’occhiata alle sequenze finali di *Nostra Signora dei Turchi*, pellicola di Carmelo Bene del 1968?

  8. Angelica says:

    Sei stato coraggioso nell’affrontare questo tema e l’hai fatto come sempre, con sapienza, stile e pensiero generoso.
    Il sottile equilibrio del gioco erotico infinitamente conturbante… che meraviglia siamo!
    Grazie BB

  9. Allen Knutson says:

    One of the weirder things about that Excalibur scene is that the ravished woman is played by the director John Boorman’s daughter. How did that discussion go?!

  10. gaberricci says:

    Bellissimo, grazie mille per questa disamina e per le tue riflessioni! Mi ha colpito in particolare questa frase: “Chi dei due è dominante, il cavaliere che aggredisce o la femmina che ha la facoltà di farlo cadere preda della passione?”, perché mi ricorda molto la dialettica tra sub e dom nel BDSM, dove il dom conduce il gioco ma, ad un livello più sottile, è la volontà del sub, che decide di sottomettersi, che gli permette di cominciare. E forse, essendo tutto sommato un tema potremmo dire “potenzialmente perverso” (ed uso questo termine in senso non moralistico), potrebbe essere che quei quadri rappresentavano una “sublimazione”, sempre per usare un termine freudiano, di un desiderio che non poteva esprimersi liberamente.

    Infine, ti faccio una domanda: secondo te, l’immagine del cavaliere in armi (frutto di arte) e della fanciulla “nature”, può essere anche una rappresentazione del contrasto (eterno) tra “natura e cultura”?

    • bizzarrobazar says:

      Sul primo punto siamo d’accordo, perché alla fine il BDSM non fa che portare alla luce dinamiche di potere preesistenti, per “gestirle” in maniera aperta e condivisa e trasformarle in un gioco.
      Sul secondo punto sinceramente non direi; la dialettica natura/cultura aveva le sue iconografie codificate (prima i barbari o i “green men”, poi tutti i “selvaggi” sette e ottocenteschi, ecc.). Qui le donne sono tutte bianche – perfino le odalische nei dipinti di harem orientali lo erano – e piuttosto idealizzate, quindi direi che si tratta più che altro di un discorso sulla seduzione femminile.

  11. Andrea says:

    Non c’è più religione… persino Carlo Martello si prese il tempo di togliersi l’armatura!

  12. […] Bizzarro Bazar racconta il topos della contrapposizione tra figura maschile vestita e figura femminile svestita: […]

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.