I guess we’re supposed to laugh at a painting like this.

There was a thin line in the 19th century between art and pornography, and the best way to get lots of sweetly-scented pink flesh into a painting was to set it safely in the past.

Homoerotic art of the time was usually signaled by a resort to ancient Greece and Rome.

The British academics — that is artists that painted in a style certified by rigorous art academies — were particularly good at this homoerotic slight of hand.

Here Lord Frederick Leighton — an artist all but forgotten but once so celebrated he was elevated to a peerage — shows us Icarus being fitted out with wings for his famous flight of hubris, an ascent too close to the sun that would end in a fiery, topsy-turvy plunge into the sea.

Forget that the story has particular relevance to the bloody war-torn, page-strewn headlines of this week. We offer this as an antidote to all that. Public servants that we are, Nightcharm brings you your prettiness break.

A little burst of beauty from a Victorian “confirmed bachelor” — Lord Freddy to you, O fair-haired lad — that is too charming to resist.

Oh we know. This lovely long-limbed youth contradicts everything we learned about modern art, with its emphasis on the abstract and the non-representational. And our college professors, were they not dead already, would roll their eyes and accuse us once again of being hippie barbarians with no stake in Western Civilization. Pop Art disciples with a much too developed taste for kitsch. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We are what we are, Teach.

The technique of Lord Leighton, we concede, seems slavishly exact at a time — the late 19th Century — when the camera had made such fastidiousness irrelevant.

Alas, to our grief, we draw our modern heritage from the French, not the English, the Impressionists, with their blurry brush stokes, not the British academics of the late 1880’s, with their attempts to outdo the camera so that everything was in super focus — a quality that we can only appreciate today as a sort of precursor to Surrealism. (At left, Lord Leighton’s eerie shipwrecked vision of the Day of Judgment, entitled And the Sea Gave Up the Dead that Were in It.)

In an academic painting, nothing is arbitrary or remotely naturalistic. Everything aspires to the perfection of an overlit stage tableaux, with figures frozen in meaningful gestures. Even fabric, supposedly caught up in a breeze, as in the Icarus above, seems nailed to the sky.

Lord Frederick Leighton made his name not with the occasional half-clad youth that he might insert on the sidelines of a painting but with sentimental studies of beautiful women (most famously Flaming June), often garbed in Grecian togas, impersonating goddesses and mythological heroines in languid, thought-filled poses. Meticulously lit and rendered, these were the sort of plushly built women known as “Junos,” after Jupiter’s sturdy consort, a nod to the classical education of his upper-class collectors.

For his men, Leighton did what many a confirmed bachelor did at the time: toured Italy. We imagine him as the sort of British tourist who peoples the E.M. Forster novels — A Room With a View, for instance — where English Italophiles seek to recapture not so much the flavor of ancient Rome, as the sanitized, rational “classical Rome’”of the Renaissance. One need only peruse his sometimes sallow skinned males, with their sleepy-eyed dreaminess and lush Latin features to imagine him approaching Florentine laborers and delivery boys for naked art studies.

Leighton also favored a certain sweet-faced actress for his Roman paintings. It is speculated that George Bernard Shaw who knew both the artist and his model, based the characters of Professor Higgins and Eliza Doolittle on them in Pygmalion (better known, perhaps, in its musical adaptation My Fair Lady).

We have no hard evidence that Leighton was homosexual, but the fact that he was in a Professor-Higgins relationship with a beautiful woman is suggestive. There is a whole species of gay men who see women as beautiful dolls to dress and fuss over — but never muss with anything as coarse as — ye-haa! — bestial sex.

Just another little tidbit to chew over during your prettiness break.

Feel free to take your time and enjoy it.

Courtesy of Nightcharm, Pornographers with a Heart.