Word: salammbo
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...priestess Salammbo danced to the seductive warbling of a flute, her long white dress slowly fell to the ground, and she stood naked before the sacred python. Taking the serpent in her arms, she "wound it round her waist, under her arms, between her knees . . . Salammbo gasped beneath this weight . . . her back bent, she felt she was dying; and with the tip of its tail it gently flicked her thigh...
...Skeptical common sense suggests that the best answer would be b or perhaps d. To Bram Dijkstra, an erudite and passionately indignant professor of comparative literature at the University of California at San Diego, the only answer is c. In case anyone thinks he is making too much of Salammbo's gyrations, Dijkstra wants us to know that a painting of the priestess by Charles Allen Winter was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1898 and a sculpted version by Jean-Antoine-Marie Idrac won a place of honor at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago...
...Hypocrisy was the order of the day. Thus Albert von Keller's lubricious portrait of a naked woman crucified bears the pious title Martyr, and all those nude beauties frolicking around that white-bearded codger represent Lovis Corinth's Temptation of Saint Anthony. Exotic suggestions of bestiality (as with Salammbo) provided another popular theme. Arthur Wardle's Bacchante cavorts with a whole herd of amorous leopards, and Frederick Stuart Church's Enchantress strolls through the wilderness with two tigers "whose growling jaws suggested the vagina dentata which turn-of-the-century men feared they might find hidden beneath this . . . beauty...