ABSTRACT
In A Tramp Abroad, Mark Twain describes his encounter with the art historical canon as an encounter with a broad who is a tramp. Twain observes that Titian’s Venus of Urbino is “the foulest, the vilest, the obscenist picture the world possesses,” due to “the attitude of one of her arms and hand,” insinuating that the canonical, Renaissance nude conceal her pubis but instead stimulates herself. While Plato described the imminent dangers of art due to its mimetic remove from the Idea, men were attempting to copulate with the Knidian Aphrodite, so enamored were they of her derriere, ideally depicted and displayed in sculpture-in-the-round. The attention to the conflicting meanings of the iconography of pudeur and the acceptable immodesty of sleep concerning the autoeroticism of the Dresden Venus directs us to a more in-depth inquiry into what sleep might figure in painting, such that it mitigates the potential here for obscenity.
