Love, Kisses and All Things Warm by Preeti Shenoy

Author:Preeti Shenoy [Shenoy, Preeti]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-04-05T16:00:00+00:00

The Kiss of Life

A kiss on the lips has always been a subject guaranteed to quicken pulse rates and hold anybody’s interest. This ultimate symbol of passion and romance has been depicted for many centuries now in several celebrated works of art, each one an image of an unforgettable love story.

Francesca was an Italian aristocrat who lived in the 13th century. She fell in love with her husband’s brother Paulo and they managed to carry on an affair for about ten years till her husband walked in on them in bed. He instantly killed them both. Dante later used her as a character in one of his works, The Inferno. The story of Francesca and Paulo has inspired several theatrical and symphonic adaptations, poems and many artworks including Auguste Rodin’s most famous sculpture, ‘The Kiss’, where the lips of the lovers never actually touch, denoting the tragic end to the love story.

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses of Pygmalion, a sculptor envisions the ideal woman and she is brought to life by Goddess Venus. Overjoyed, hardly believing his luck, swept by passion, he kisses her on the lips. The New York Metropolitan Museum houses the artwork inspired by the story—‘Pygmalion and Galatea’, painted by Jean-Leon Gerome in 1890.

‘The Kiss’ by Gustav Klimt, which is one of my favourite works of art, is an erotic masterpiece that depicts a couple in a tight embrace, the man bending down to plant a kiss on the welcoming cheek of a lover, shown with eyes closed, a close-lipped smile and a look of pure rapture. If ever put up for sale, it is likely to be the most expensive piece of art in history, as Klimt’s earlier work sold for a record 135 million US dollars.

Sometime back, a short film by Tatia Pilieva released on the internet went viral, gathering more than 70 million views on YouTube, the number burgeoning every day. It was purportedly a candid recording of twenty people, complete strangers to each other, being asked to indulge in an intimate kiss on the lips for the camera. They are awkward and shy at first and then turn very intimate, the chemistry sizzling. It turned out that the film was actually an advertisement for a new clothing line, and the ‘strangers’ were in fact models, actors and musicians. Most people who were initially floored by its candidness—for they believed it was a slice of real life magic—felt duped to discover it was just hot models making out, and they poured out their disappointment on Twitter and Facebook.

In the recent Bollywood movie Queen, a kiss on the lips with a sexy Italian chef becomes the ultimate symbol of liberation for a middle-class Indian girl, raised with ‘proper-Indian-values’ and ‘proper-Indian-culture’. She leaps gleefully, having broken a taboo, and leaves him, even though she has a chance to pursue a relationship with him if she had so wanted.

However, among all the kisses immortalized, whether through paintings, sculptures, movies or the internet, my personal number one favourite remains René Magritte’s painting ‘The Lovers’, which shows a man and a woman kissing.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.