Hokusai had his One-Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji, Hiroshige had his Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido Road, Yahweh had his Decalogue and now, my prolific friend David Schoffman has his Twenty-Eight Rungs of Lust Deferred, a stunning graphic tour de force.
Chaste self-abnegation is a theme that has preoccupied David for many years. His 1998 lecture "Late Renaissance Religious Imagery and the Interrupted Urges of Michelangelo," delivered at l'Università di Eboli's Istituto di Ricerca Arcane and later published in the anthology Abstemious Art & Artists (Sheleg Books, 2001), posits the theory that immaculate self-discipline between 1490 and 1600 was a common and conscious aesthetic posture. Poets and painters, in direct opposition to Aretino's rakish, libertine excesses, proposed a more temperate trope and devoted their art toward an almost Tantric pre-climactic form of fulfillment. Michelangelo's Creation being the prime example of this type of erotic adjournment.
Schoffman's theories are what we call in France, connerie pur and I'm sure, at heart, he knows this. He apparently was up for tenure and felt the need to gild the scholarly lily.
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