Dan MacIsaac

Karsh’s The Roaring Lion (1941)

That scowl a gathering storm, Churchill glares at the glass eye, the lens a gunsight in the steel bore,

the shot like a break through an armored line, capturing the clamped hands, the crowbar elbow,

shoulders braced, the stark cuffs and linked watch chain glinting across his bulk.

Call the assault an eye for an eye, confronting the cold warrior stare.

Prud’hon’s L’Impératrice Joséphine (1805)

The stone-cutter’s son did right by the slaver’s daughter. Brushing in a soft visage, he hid her bad teeth rotted from sucking sugarcane stalks in the green fields of Martinique.

He showed off her magdalen charm with that long scarlet shawl unfurling like a dragon’s tongue, draping those round, peasant knees, not those shapely arms and breasts pale as curdled cream.

Deep in the labyrinth of dream, lost in the dark maze of reverie, by Malmaison woods, she ponders, cast off by le petit caporal, yet possessed—heart, pose and spirit—by the rapt artist.

Note—The Musée du Louvre, formerly named the Musée Napoléon, houses this masterwork by Pierre-Paul Prud’hon depicting the Empress. A year after the portrait was completed, the little corporal Napoléon divorced his Créole wife.

Titian’s Venus of Urbano (1534)

Undressed except for ring and bracelet, and one teardrop earring glistening, the other hidden by a torrent of hair, the patron’s bride waits for her lover. Passion is patient. Behind her, a servant girl kneels before the trousseau chest, rummaging through silks while another servant bears over her shoulder the bride’s brocade gown like a skinned pelt. Only the lapdog looks bored, curled asleep on the rumpled sheet. A goddess’s bared body becomes the dowry, her open gaze the nuptial gift. Naked, except for trinket bribes, she holds red roses for her ravisher.