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Watch the first minute here. The full film, with the painter, the history and a close reading of the details, is in Hear Art.
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Chapter 1 of 7
Before you hangs one of Western art's quietly subversive paintings. Velázquez painted The Rokeby Venus around sixteen forty-seven, when Spanish Catholicism made the female nude audacious — she is the only surviving nude by his hand. In nineteen-fourteen a suffragette slashed the canvas seven times.
The cuts are mended; the defiance shimmers still.
119 masterpieces, each with its own film, in eight languages. Ten are free; one purchase unlocks the rest. No subscription.
