SECRETS OF LOVE

This work examines 3000 years of sexual secrets and love explored through art and literature. The pains and pleasures of love have been celebrated since the beginning of history. Literature, too - poems, plays and songs from classical times - also explore the themes of love and sex. Around the world in Mesopotamia, China, Japan, India and later Islamic and European countries, scholars and artists have explored the experience of love and making love in words and explicit image. This text explores these themes in art and literature, from all cultures through the ages to the present century. It uses a selection of visual and written sources and extracts, and examines sexual techniques and practices through time, its effect on culture, and unlocks the sexual secrets of the ancients. Beginning with artists' and poets' rhapsody and idealisation of love in their object of desire, chapters range from the anatomy of love through nudes, genitals and erogenous zones, the art of seduction, the act of love-making to the forbidden fruits of bondage, sadomasochism and orgy. 200 illustrations depict these themes, ranging from the earliest carvings and paintings BC, the wall paintings of Pompeii to the erotic caricature engravings and paintings evocative of the 19th and early 20th centuries.