Sexuality in its many guises has preoccupied Western artists from Michelangelo to Picasso, Rubens to Robert Mapplethorpe. Almost every form of the subject has been portrayed, whether covert or overt, crude or highly sophisticated. Edward Lucie-Smith considers the fruits of this obsession in his incisive, invigorating text. From the conflation of the sacred and the erotic in Paleolithic art, to the

ethereal sensuality of Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus," to imagery of cruelty and amorous suffering in nineteenth-century Symbolist art, Edward Lucie-Smith explores both the cultural context and the pictorial language of sexuality in Western art. 274 illus., 29 in color.