The Beefcake Art of Velazquez

In school, when you learned about Diego Velazquez (1599-1660), the great painter of the Spanish Golden Age, your teacher probably talked about how he introduced realism into the heavily stylized world of Renaissance art by depicting everyday people, drunks, peasants, workers, and dwarfs as well as the elite.

You probably didn't hear a word about his beefcake paintings, but Velazquez was also a master of the muscular male form.

This John the Baptist in the Wilderness (1622) developed some nice biceps on his diet of locusts and honey.









When you see reproductions of The Triumph of Bacchus (1628-29), they usually zero in on the three drunk workers, Los Borrachos, leaving off the beefy Greek gods who are providing the wine.

Apollo at the Forge of Vulcan (1630) also introduces a Greek god into a modern, realistic scene.  Are we supposed to find those blacksmiths grotesque?  They have obviously been working out!

Joseph's Tunic (1630) recounts the Biblical scene where Joseph's brothers bring his coat to his father Jacob to claim that he was killed by a wild animal.  But who is paying attention to that?  Your eye is drawn to the muscular backside of one of the brothers.

Christ Contemplated by the Christian Soul (1626-28): that kid is the soul, contemplating a rather beefy Jesus tied up for a non-Biblical bondage scene.

Maybe I would have liked Spanish class a little more if the teacher had brought up the beefcake instead of pontificating on the multivarious points of view in Las Meninas

Laocoon and His Sons: Beefcake Through the Ages

Laocoön was a priest who angered Apollo or Poseidon during the Trojan War, and as punishment the god sent sea serpents to kill him and his two sons.  Variations of his story, with different plots, were recorded by Sophocles, Virgil, Apollodorus, and other ancient authors, and inspired one of the most famous of all ancient sculptures, Laocoön and His Sons, now in the Vatican Museum.

After Michelangelo's David, this is probably the most famous beefcake sculpture in the world.  Interesting that one must enjoy male bodies only when they are in agonizing pain.

Similar to the boxers and wrestlers that we are "permitted" to ogle today.








The story of Laocoön has inspired many artists to try their hand at depicting bulging, straining muscles, regardless of the reason that giant snake tentacles are biting and straining at them.

Alessandro Allori (1535-1607), a painter of the Italian Renaissance, copies the pose of the ancient sculpture, but fills in the blanks a bit.

El Greco (1541-1614), one of the greats of the Spanish Golden Age, separates the sons from the father so we can see their muscles better, and has their pale forms struggling against the ruined Spanish countryside.

The older son, on the left, is Antiphas, and the younger, to the right, is Thymbraeus.  The stories make them twins, but artists usually think that it's more poignant to make one ateenager and the otehr a child.

Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997), the pop artist of the Andy Warhol school, gives us a stylized version in which the three bodies blend in to the troubled, multicolored background of the 1980s.

Contemporary painter Richard Wallace's version is grotesque, with three men who look more like brothers, and one penis visible.

See also: Japanese Tentacle Porn

St. Florian, the Patron Saint of Firefighters and Beefcake Fans

I'm not much for the veneration of the saints -- Nazarenes abhored such "idolatry."  But I could get behind St. Florian, usually portrayed shirtless, with a massive, sculpted chest.

Here his chest is ink on someone's chest.

The real St. Florian was Florianus (c. 250-304), a Roman legionnaire from present-day Austria who organized a fire-fighting brigade.  When the Roman authorities discovered that he was a Christian, they ordered him burnt at the stake, but then, noting his affinity for fire, thought that he probably wouldn't burn.








So they drowned him in the Ennis River instead.  After ripping off his clothes, of course.

Today St. Florian is the patron of firefighters, soap makers, and chimney sweeps, and also the patron of many cities in Central and Eastern Europe, including Krakow, Poland and Linz, Austria.

This is one of the more famous St. Florian statues, by Josef Josephu (1889-1970).  It stood at the main firehouse in Vienna, where it survived a bombing during World War II.  Now it's in the Firefighter's Museum.

His brother, Florian, was also a sculptor.

In German-speaking countries, "florians" are firefighters.

Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike

Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike is a 2012 comedy by Christopher Durang that brings Chekhov and beefcake to rural Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

If you need to know the plot:

Vanya and Sonia are a middle aged brother and sister, one gay and the other straight, who live together on the family farm and complain about their cherry orchard.

Their life of complacency and complaining is disrupted when their young movie star sibling Masha arrives, with her uber-muscular boy toy Spike, who is allergic to clothes.







Spike is always played by a mega hunk, who spends most of his stage time in his Calvin Kleins, thrusting his you-know-what at whoever is sitting nearby.

Everyone starts flirting with Spike and competing with each other to see who can complain the loudest.  Old rivalries surface.

After a disastrous party with a Snow White theme, Masha announces that she's going to sell the house and kick Vanya and Sonia out on their cherry orchards.

Meanwhile Sonia gets a date, Vanya gets a backer for his play, The Seagull, and Spike cheats on Masha.

Masha gives Spike the boot, decides not to sell the house, and the three siblings live happily ever after, just like in a Chekhov play.

Except for the gay character.

And the happy ending.

And the beefcake.

Did I mention the beefcake?