Recently, a romantic partner and I—let’s call it a fling—were visiting the Museo del Prado when we were overcome with a familiar urge. We were standing in the Renaissance art section, scrutinizing one of the few Madonna Lactans in the collection, an oil painting from the 16th century by Master Bartolome in which a cherubic baby Jesus is suckling at the breast of a tired-looking Mary. The nipple appears engorged, tender; baby Jesus clings to it with his mouth like a drunkard, his face slightly disfigured.
There is nothing overtly sexual about the painting. And yet it was somehow, in that moment, erotic.
“Does that baby look turned on?” I blurted out, pointing to the grasping hand and bulging eyes. I looked over at Merope, letting my own eyes fall from her face to her chest, where I could discern the outlines of her own breasts draped beneath a thin blouse. She smiled at me seductively, rolling back her shoulders to give me a better view. “No, but you do.” she said. "Cochino." She stepped forward to give me a kiss, and for a few moments we made out in front of the painting, the Virgin Mary gazing down exhaustedly from above.
“Quick," Merope said. "I think we need to find a bathroom.”
At that point, we both probably should have got down on our knees and begged Dios’ forgiveness for being such unrepentant deviants. I’m no Catholic, but I’m pretty sure “using the Virgin Mary and her tits as porn” is not considered particularly pious behavior. To be fair, we did not come to the Renaissance room to stare hornily at portraits of the Madonna. I don’t, under normal circumstances, find Renaissance art to be essentially horny (although I do wonder what Freud would say about some of these Madonna Lactans—specifically the ones depicting Mary spewing breast milk into the mouth of an ecstatic St. Bernard).
But I’d be lying if I said Merope and I had not been curious about having sex in the museum, about stealing away to some dark nook or bathroom to fuck amid the works of Spain's great visionaries. I admit that this is not a novel idea. For as long as they have existed, museums have held an erotic power, drawing horny visitors looking to marry the intellectual with the sensual. Plenty of books and film attest to this fact; so do viral social media and marketing trends. Weeks before our Prado visit, Merope—not one for subtlety—sent me a link to an Etsy shop selling a T-shirt that was blank except for a single sentence, printed in bold: “TAKE ME TO THE MUSEUM AND FUCK ME IN THE BATHROOM.”
Part of the appeal of museum sex is undoubtedly the forbidenness of it, the same intrigue that sex in any public space has; few things are as thrilling as sharing an intimate moment with your partner amid oblivious strangers. Another part is the weird psychic space one enters in a museum, where the mind, during hours spent contemplating the human body and the nature of reality in rarified silence, is given over to all sorts of fantasizing and free associating. And that includes fantasizing about the art itself, which, with its erotic subtexts and suggestive imagery, can serve as pornographic fodder for a horny couple’s libidos. A friend of mine who studies the intersection of art and neuroscience has discovered that one's interpretation of art can change drastically in the company of another, that we respond more positively to art when we share the experience with friends or family. It doesn’t take much effort to extrapolate this to romantic partners, whose attraction to each other can color their reading of artwork, helping them unlock its hidden sexual messages, imbuing it with additional meaning, perhaps even coaxing them ultimately toward what the poet Ben Lerner, in Leaving the Atocha Station—a book that coincidentally also takes place at the Prado—calls a “profound experience of art.”
Unfortunately, museums today are less sex-friendly than they perhaps once were. Particularly in major cities like Madrid, these once-exalted institutions have become veritable Art Disneylands, crawling with social media influencers, bored families with screaming kids, tourists wandering around in bucket hats and cargo shorts. Naturally, the chaos makes it more difficult to sneak off unseen and find a hidden place to fuck private. And yet for a certain kind of daring agoraphile, this can heighten the stakes, make things even more exciting…
We whipped out our museum map, breathlessly scanning the floor diagrams for bathrooms. "This one could work," I said, circling a spot on the second floor, near something called the “Treasure of Dauphine.”
We left the Renaissance room, where Mary's gaze seemed to have shifted from exhaustion and raced upstairs, adrenaline pumping, already anticipating the orgasms we were about to enjoy.
A collection of fancy bowls and cups once owned by Louis, the Grand Dauphine of France, the exhibit didn't provide much in the way of erotic arousal. But it was dark, on a floor that attracted few visitors. We found the bathroom at the top of the stairwell and, giddy as highschoolers, hatched a quick plan: she would go inside and wait for me in the bathroom, and after a few moments I would come and knock four times so she knew to let me in.
I took a stroll around the corner, my armpits beginning to sweat. When I returned, however, a woman was there waiting. "Está ocupado?" she asked innocently, gesturing to the door.
Defeated, and with waning libidos, we walked back down to the first floor to continue our search. The museum had grown busy, and we knew now that we couldn't just rush off to fornicate in the first bathroom or hallway we stumbled across. Our mission would have to be measured, methodical. This wasn't our private bedroom; we would have to show some physical restraint. We would wander through the museum like normal patrons, pretending to appreciate the art while secretly imagining all the dirty things we would do to each other once we were alone together.
We began making our way through the main gallery to the other side of the museum, stopping here and there to inspect an artwork. We admired Titian's Adam and Eve, remarking on how closely their bodies as depicted—his dark and wiry, hers soft and glowing—resembled our own. We marveled at the muscularity and dynamic contours of other bodies, men and women both, featured in paintings by Rubens and Rafael. We grimaced in front of another work by Titian, Tityus, in which the Roman giant lies prostrate while a huge black vulture picks away at his liver through an open wound in his chest.
"I guess there's something sexy about it," Merope said. "The violence, the gore. Also, what is that saying you have in English—eat your heart out? It's about love and jealousy, no?"
"I'd sure like to eat something out," I said with a smirk.
We next entered the Flemish and Northern Schools art room, where, our libidos stirring again, we stood wide-eyed at Bosch's The Garden of Earthly delights. The triptych rose hallucinatorily from an illuminated space at the center of the room, a kaleidoscopic, multi-layered universe-in-miniature that I could feel drawing us in, inviting closer scrutiny, like a 15th-century version of Where's Waldo. For a moment I thought about the scene in Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station in which a man has a “profound experience” in front of the painting, almost a mental breakdown, and wondered if I could summon the same energy.
Then Merope appeared by my side, her bare shoulder brushing against my arm. We stood amid a crush of viewers in front of the painting, squinting at all the fine details, challenging each other to find increasingly weird—and increasingly horny—scenes amid the fantastical landscape.
"Look, there's a man with a blueberry for a head!" Merope exclaimed, pointing to the center panel. "And over there a woman is stuffing another woman's ass with flowers."
"That's nothing," I said. "Look at the people in Hell. Every other figure has something stuck up their ass. There's a guy with a flute stuck up his ass. And another with an arrow in his ass. And there—is that man about to make out with a pig in a nun's dress?"
"Are you getting turned on again?" she teased.
We walked away in a state of agitation, our clasped hands growing moist with sweat.
"You know, most people think the painting is a moral warning, a story about sin and humanity's fall from grace," I said, trying to impress my compañera with a factoid I had probably read somewhere on Wikipedia. "But others argue that it actually represents humanity before the fall, when we were still innocent, like children. A paradise lost."
"So Hell is just... the BDSM version of paradise?" she deadpanned.
Now the pressure was on again. We hurried through an exhibit on El Greco and Picasso, pausing in the dark shadow of a corridor to embrace and exchange a few more kisses. "Picasso said that sex and art are the same thing," I whispered in my suavest voice while giving her ass a little squeeze. "I bet you heard that on TikTok" she responded, groping me between the legs.
We disentangled and went back out into the main gallery, making our way past heroic portraits of the great kings and barons of Spanish history. "All of these macho men, painted on huge muscular horses to hide their fragile masculinity," Merope said. "I bet that guy never even made a woman cum.”
We took one turn and then another, desperate now to find a place to release our pent-up desire before we exhausted ourselves. Nearby we stumbled across one room, possibly some kind of utility closet. But when I reached for the handle it was locked. “Maybe we should just do it right here,” Merope said. “If someone finds us we’ll tell them it’s performance art.”
Suddenly we found ourselves in a gallery that felt smaller and darker than the others. Grotesque images were smeared across the walls, snapshots of terror and grief, scenes full of ghostly apparitions painted in heavy brushstrokes of black and grey. We slowed our bathroom search to contemplate the paintings, each one more haunting than the next. Here was a coven of witches gathered around the silhouette of Baphomet, the devil in goat form. Over there was a fresco of two women cruelly mocking a man who appeared to be in the act of masturbating. Near that was another horrifying portrait, this one of a ravaged figure with crazed eyes clutching the body of a much smaller figure, devouring it piece by piece.
These were Goya's Black Paintings. They did not, in that moment, strike me as erotic.
"Supposedly Goya was deaf when he painted these," Merope said. “Spain was in crisis. The Napoleonic Wars had killed millions. He must have been miserable.”
"It feels like being in someone's nightmare," I said. "Totally pessimistic. What's sexy about that?"
“Why can’t sex be nihilistic?” she responded. “It’s natural to turn to carnal pleasures to escape the misery and suffering of life. In all those movies where the world is ending, there’s a reason some characters decide to spend their last moments fucking a stranger.”
“But I don’t mean that sex is only ever a distraction,” Merope added. “It can also be transcendent, especially when it leads to love.”
I turned again to look at her but this time did not let my gaze wander to her chest. Her face was radiant against the dark backdrop of Goya’s paintings, but also fierce and a little perverse; it reminded me of Klimt’s version of Judith, minus Holofernes’ decapitated head. Our eyes locked, I began to sense my arousal transform into something different, something deeper. Something more profound—a kind of awe.
I grabbed her hand and together we walked out of the room, back down the gallery toward the end of the museum. There, in a small corridor leading away from the main hall, we found a set of family-friendly bathrooms. Quickly, quietly, and with the impatience of two people facing down an apocalypse, we slipped into one and locked the door behind us. 36
Este articulo es parte de The Posttraumatic VOL.7 "GENOCIDE".
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