THE GROOVE ISSUE 1 - SEVEN DEADLY SINS - LUST EDITION
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I believe that creativity - the ability to come up new with ideas of value, and associations that were not thought about before, in any business, profession, occupation or industry - is humans’ most valuable resource. Creativity is never-ending and constantly renewable. It can make careers thrive and businesses flourish. But the lack of creativity does the opposite too: it makes people stall, and commercial ventures flounder. In The Groove, I want to share with you ideas and thought-provoking themes to spark your own stream of creativity.
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Love,
Maria
THE GROOVE ISSUE 1 - SEVEN DEADLY SINS - LUST EDITION
Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres, Paolo and Francesca, 1856-57, oil on canvas.
Why is it that the forbidden makes us even more attracted to that which we are meant to avoid?
Is there equal fascination with the nurturing of those qualities that Aristotle lists in his 3rd century BC Nichomacean Ethics, where he considered humans’ greatest virtues like generosity, self-control, courage, modesty, and truthfulness? According to him, these were some of the most elevated responses that men and women should pursue in the face of anger, temptation, pleasure, and pain. Do people gravitate toward these virtues with as much curiosity and desire as they do towards the Seven Deadly Sins?
It wasn’t until six centuries after Aristotle, when a Christian monk called John Cassian (aka John the Ascetic) translated some of his Greek predecessors’ writings into Latin and simplified an existing Hellenistic Greek list of evil thoughts or actions into these seven sins: Gluttony, Lust, Greed, Despondency, Wrath, Sloth, and Pride.
Later in 590 AD, Pope Gregory I, took away “Despondency” and substituted it with “Envy”. Bingo! The list of deadly sins; sins that don’t even appear in The Bible as such, was written into history and perpetuated, studied, explored in art and culture, and exploited in business continuously until today.
Dante Alighieri’s Divina Commedia, finished in 1320, and considered the most important poem of the Middle Ages, gets down and dirty with the exploration of all seven sins and labels them as corrupt versions of love for something or someone, or lack thereof. Lust, gluttony, and greed are the result of an obsessive love of good things; sloth is the absence of love; wrath, envy, and pride are twisted forms of love looking to harm another. It is in the first part of the Divina Commedia, called Inferno, (Hell) where each of the seven sins comes to life in the Cantos, becoming one of the most inspirational works of literature, generating thousands upon thousands of interpretations in all forms of art for centuries to come.
In the Second Circle of Hell, Dante writes about those overcome by lust, mentioning real and mythological people who succumbed to their sexual trysts only to lose it all: Cleopatra and Mark Antony; Helen of Sparta and Paris; Tristan and Isolde. Dante also writes about his contemporary, Francesca da Rimini, daughter of the Lord of Ravenna, who was forced to marry Giovanni Malatesta, a crippled man, in a move to secure peace between a war that was being fought between the Lord of Ravenna and the Lord of Rimini. But sweet little Francesca didn’t like “Giovanni the Lame” and fell in love with his younger brother, Paolo, who was also married to someone else. You know how lust pulls, right? So Francesca and Paolo carried a steamy love affair for many years, and in 1285 Giovanni found them in Francesca’s bedroom and killed them both.
Auguste Rodin, Paolo et Francesca (The Kiss), 1882, Marble
This scene of Inferno alone prompted hundreds of artists to interpret such tragic moments of lust into art: at least 20 different opera composers wrote versions of the story, including Feliciano Strepponi (1823) and Hermann Goetz (1877). Several dozen symphonies were created as well, like the ones by Tchaikovsky (1876) and Arthur Foote (1890) both of whom entitled their works Francesca da Rimini. In painting, between 1814 and 1819, the influential Neoclassical artist Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres produced seven versions of Paolo and Francesca, mining the lust of the couple until he had squeezed the proverbial last drop out of their sins.
Auguste Rodin, the father of modern sculpture, was so impressed and consumed by Inferno and Dante’s depictions of the Seven Deadly Sins, that he sculpted The Gates of Hell, a project that started in 1880 but kept Rodin engaged on and off for four decades, until his death in 1937. These monumental plaster and bronze gates stand at 19-feet in height by 13-feet in width and show scenes of carvings of Dante’s circles of hell on each of the doors. At the top and center of the composition, near the doorway, Rodin placed a nude male figure sitting on a rock with his chin resting on one hand, who is believed to be Dante himself. Rodin liked this part of The Gates of Hell so much, that with his foundry workers, he baptized him The Thinker, and cast him independently in multiple sizes and versions. Years later, The Thinker became one of the most studied, reproduced, and celebrated sculptures of all time. Continuously fascinated with Inferno and its lustful stories, Rodin also sculpted the damned Italian lovers in Paolo et Francesca in marble in 1882, later changing the title of the work to The Kiss. And to think that it all started with the seven deadly sins.
Most recently, in February of this year, I went crazy for one of the paintings made by Spanish-born, New York-based artist Cristina Banban, who created a compelling canvas filled with many floating, sensual, curvy nude women, inspired by Inferno’s Canto XXIV, exhibited in a group show at Chelsea’s gallery Fredericks & Freiser. It’s been 600 years since Dante wrote Divina Commedia, but its deadly sins keep on giving.
Cristina Banban, Canto XXIV. La Casa de las Ladronas, acrylic on canvas, 2020
Writers like Honore de Balzac (La Comedie Humaine, 1815-1848), T.S. Elliot (The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, 1915, Prufrock and Other Observations, 1917 and The Waste Land, 1922), Jorge Luis Borges (El Hacedor, 1960) and Dan Brown (Inferno, 2013) wrote books inspired by Dante’s Hell and his portrayal of the deadly sins.
Modern filmmakers and screenwriters keep mining Dante’s Inferno, but they are mostly fascinated by the Seven Deadly Sins. Take for example director David Fincher and writer Andrew Kevin Walker, who in 1995 released SE7EN, a neo-noir psychological crime thriller starring Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Kevin Spacey, which grossed over $327 million in box office during the fall of 1995 and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Film Editing. Throughout the movie, Morgan Freeman’s character, Detective Sommerset, reads the Divina Commedia, and recognizes it as the model that the murderer, John Doe (Kevin Spacey), is replicating in his crimes by following each of the sins.
Besides all of the other sins, how many businesses have benefited and exploited lust, which Aristotle and Dante saw as a terrible human weakness? Aside from the questionable morality of the “adult industry”, which I’m not praising nor condemning, what about the thousands of celebrities, pop-culture influencers, and reality TV stars who have built empires out of showing their bodies and multiplying fans, followers, and detractors who are looking for lust-worthy content, either to eventually succumb and buy what these people have to sell, or to tear them apart yet still generating even more publicity for them. What about the thousands of websites that sell content and products aiming at the exploration of one’s sexuality? What about apps and websites that generate millions of dollars for those who are only looking for a casual hookup? And the millions of TV shows, novels, and movies, whose creative narratives get us hooked on the infidelities of their characters?
I think we can fairly agree that lust sells and there are a million creative ways to do so.
Thank you for reading this far. Stay safe!
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