BLOODY  FUNNY  HISTORY 

The Cover painting of David’s ‘Rape of the Sabine Women’ shows Hersilia trying to separate her husband Romulus from her father Tatius, while Cupid fires love-arrows from above. Rubens’ foreground painting is of a mangy wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, lying next to a comic theater-mask mosaic from the emperor Hadrian’s Villa. “Venus brandishing her sandal,” one stuffy critic has written, “is one of the most disliked statues in classical scholarship, due to the bad taste of her ridiculous nipples!” (See p.166 which illustrates her points more clearly.) Venus is beating two bald heads – a comic actor and an austere senator – with more to come. The back cover sports a statue of a boy wrestling a goose.