Octave Tassaert, The Temptation of Saint Hilarion, about 1857 (oil on canvas, 111.4 x 144.3 cm)

The catalogue entry for this work describes Tassaert’s unique style as “somewhere between Romanticism and Realism” (1), although this painting is hanging in the Romanticism gallery. This work has many of the hallmarks of Romanticism, including drama and emotion as well as the setting, a mysterious, exotic, and fictionalized East (2).

This painting depicts Saint Hilarion in his ‘home’ in the desert. Saint Jerome describes it, saying: “he built a little poor cell for himself, which is still extant to this day. It had but the breadth of four foot, and the height of five, so that it was lower than he; in length it was a little longer than the extent of his body; so that you would rather have esteemed it to be a grave, than a house” (3). Tassaert draws on stories about Saint Hilarion from Saint Jerome, whose text describes the saint’s commitment to chastity.  He writes: “many were his temptations, and many snares were set by the Devils for him… How often would naked women appear to him, as he was resting? How often would most sumptuous diet be set before him, when he was fasting?” (4).

The intense, stark contrast between the cool colours outside, illuminating Saint Hilarion and the surface in front of him, and the warm light coming from inside the cave creates two different worlds within the painting: one stark and pious and one decadent and hellish. In a very unreal, otherworldly way, the different colours and lights don’t seem to mix. Further suggesting hell and evil, if you look closely you can see some devil-like and grotesque figures among the nude women - there is a horned devil in the bottom right corner and a floating face emerging behind a female figure above that. However, these are hard to see - clearly what is being emphasized is the female bodies. Tassaert invites the audience to visually appreciate this evil but “delectable” (5) mass of female bodies, even if Saint Hilarion won’t. The wall text notes that Tassaert “loved women” (6), and he was also known for his sensuous Courbet-esque female nudes.

1. “The Temptation of Saint Hilarion,” Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Collections Online, https://www.mbam.qc.ca/en/collections/?t=hilarion#detail-14805

2. Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, “Romanticism: Breaking the Canon,” Art Journal 52, no. 2 (1993): 19.

3. Jerome & Henry Hawkins, Certaine selected epistles of S. Hierome as also the liues of Saint Paul the first hermite, of Saint Hilarion the first monke of Syria, and of S. Malchus: written by the same Saint (Saint-Omer: printed at the English College press, 1630), 90.

4. Jerome & Hawkins, Certaine Selected Epistles of S. Hierome, 90.

5 & 6. “The Temptation of Saint Hilarion.”

Some random school anime parody screenshots of High Renaissance artists as high school students

 I got inspired after watching a documentary about Mona Lisa and other paintings

designs based off an older story concept I made (below)

characters shown below (from center left: Raphael, Correggio, Titian, Giorgione, Michelangelo, Vasari, Fra Bartolomeo; center: Leonardo)

J.C. Leyendecker (1874-1951), american illustrator.

since everyone is freaking out, I’m just gonna wait till everything blows over. websites only die when people stop using them. if you have any of your posts that were unjustly flagged, get it reviewed. maybe if they see the myriad of false flags they’ll either redact or fix their bots. if they’re trying this hard to make their site family friendly, I can only hope that they will try this hard just to keep it alive

in the meantime, lets all just draw in monochromatic blue.

Following professional art tutorials like…

ah yes. the four art styles. realism, cartoon, disney, and Anime

this is so wrong. I have lots of posts that are now deleted,there is difference between porn and art/beauty. It’s almost 2019 but tumblr is going backwards.

A better, more positive Tumblr

Since its founding in 2007, Tumblr has always been a place for wide open, creative self-expression at the heart of community and culture. To borrow from our founder David Karp, we’re proud to have inspired a generation of artists, writers, creators, curators, and crusaders to redefine our culture and to help empower individuality.

Over the past several months, and inspired by our storied past, we’ve given serious thought to who we want to be to our community moving forward and have been hard at work laying the foundation for a better Tumblr. We’ve realized that in order to continue to fulfill our promise and place in culture, especially as it evolves, we must change. Some of that change began with fostering more constructive dialogue among our community members. Today, we’re taking another step by no longer allowing adult content, including explicit sexual content and nudity (with some exceptions).  

Let’s first be unequivocal about something that should not be confused with today’s policy change: posting anything that is harmful to minors, including child pornography, is abhorrent and has no place in our community. We’ve always had and always will have a zero tolerance policy for this type of content. To this end, we continuously invest in the enforcement of this policy, including industry-standard machine monitoring, a growing team of human moderators, and user tools that make it easy to report abuse. We also closely partner with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Internet Watch Foundation, two invaluable organizations at the forefront of protecting our children from abuse, and through these partnerships we report violations of this policy to law enforcement authorities. We can never prevent all bad actors from attempting to abuse our platform, but we make it our highest priority to keep the community as safe as possible.

So what is changing?

Posts that contain adult content will no longer be allowed on Tumblr, and we’ve updated our Community Guidelines to reflect this policy change. We recognize Tumblr is also a place to speak freely about topics like art, sex positivity, your relationships, your sexuality, and your personal journey. We want to make sure that we continue to foster this type of diversity of expression in the community, so our new policy strives to strike a balance.

Why are we doing this?

It is our continued, humble aspiration that Tumblr be a safe place for creative expression, self-discovery, and a deep sense of community. As Tumblr continues to grow and evolve, and our understanding of our impact on our world becomes clearer, we have a responsibility to consider that impact across different age groups, demographics, cultures, and mindsets. We spent considerable time weighing the pros and cons of expression in the community that includes adult content. In doing so, it became clear that without this content we have the opportunity to create a place where more people feel comfortable expressing themselves.

Bottom line: There are no shortage of sites on the internet that feature adult content. We will leave it to them and focus our efforts on creating the most welcoming environment possible for our community.

So what’s next?

Starting December 17, 2018, we will begin enforcing this new policy. Community members with content that is no longer permitted on Tumblr will get a heads up from us in advance and steps they can take to appeal or preserve their content outside the community if they so choose. All changes won’t happen overnight as something of this complexity takes time.

Another thing, filtering this type of content versus say, a political protest with nudity or the statue of David, is not simple at scale. We’re relying on automated tools to identify adult content and humans to help train and keep our systems in check. We know there will be mistakes, but we’ve done our best to create and enforce a policy that acknowledges the breadth of expression we see in the community.

Most importantly, we’re going to be as transparent as possible with you about the decisions we’re making and resources available to you, including more detailed information, product enhancements, and more content moderators to interface directly with the community and content.

Like you, we love Tumblr and what it’s come to mean for millions of people around the world. Our actions are out of love and hope for our community. We won’t always get this right, especially in the beginning, but we are determined to make your experience a positive one.

Jeff D’Onofrio CEO

i’ve come to terms with the update. i overall would have enjoyed a free platform more but i still (of course, secretly) like tumblr. thanks for getting rid of all that child porn, jeff. -urs truly, an ios user

less weird shit is fine with me.