MARIO DONIZETTI

THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS

LUST

 

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LUST

Calm, collected, balanced painting, and pure even when it portrays the sin of Lust. Overall it is arranged like a group sculptured in very audacious partial views of bodies bound together in a sensual tangle of legs. A lost expression of she who is lost in lust, an exclusively carnal pleasure. The snake lurks there greedily. The sexual act, in itself sacred, is thus inserted in the context of evil due to the abuse of those who follow "their appetite like beasts".

"Lust is a mysterious sore in the side of the species - Bernanos writes. - What am I saying? In its side? At the source itself of life". It reserves all the pleasure for the body. But the body, separated from the soul, precludes that fulfilling joy of the spirit which is also capable of satisfying the body. The sexual revolution of this century is still flying low among pleasures occasionally taken, sometimes offered by the market or guaranteed by a drug. It is still a long way from the capacity to bring body and soul into harmony, whilst the exaggerated idolatry of external beauty and youth alienates us from our own imperfect body, no less important than the spirit, as the English poet John Donne (1572-1631) so marvellously writes: "So must pure lovers soules descend / T’affections, and to faculties, / Which sense may reach and apprehend, / Else a great Prince in prison lies. // To’our bodies turne wee then, that so / Weake men on love reveal’d may looke; / Loves mysteries in soules doe grow, / But yet the body is his booke."

 

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