ABSTRACT
The birth and rise of pornography, from Renaissance subgenre to twentieth-century multimedia industry, is perhaps less a sign of emancipation than another symptom of Foucault's grand narrative of the history of sexuality. The increasing control and censorship of sexual matters observed by Foucault runs in parallel with the rise of sensuousness in painting and the expansion of erotic imagery addressed to masculine private consumption. Writing in the early teens of the twenty-first century it is somehow impossible to approach historical aspects of sexuality without referring to Michel Foucault's much quoted and debated Histoire de la Sexualite. Titian's Bacchanal of the Andrians is among the foundation stones of Western erotic art and pornography. It describes the drunkenness of the inhabitants of Island of Andros when the god Bacchus transformed the water of their rivers into wine, following the account of Philostratus' Imagines.
