Scandals in art

The Gleaners by Jean-François Millet seems innocuous today, but the large size of a painting, generally reserved for religious and mythological subjects, depicting the rural poor was seen by the upper class as an endorsement of the type of grievances that had erupted in the revolutionary violence of 1848, just 9 years earlier.

She was deliberately called "Venus" by Giorgio Vasari to minimize the scandal, in the context of a decree issued by the Council of Trent, imputing to artists the responsibility for everything arising from their creative representations.

[3] The Feast in the House of Levi (1573) by Paolo Veronese was investigated by the Roman Inquisition, who asked, "Does it seem suitable to you, in the Last Supper of our Lord, to represent buffoons, drunken Germans, dwarfs, and other such absurdities?

Furious, Girodet ripped up the original painting and made another, the Portrait of Mademoiselle Lange as Danaë, a satirical allegory in which the heads of most figures are crowned with peacock feathers, but her husband Michel-Jean Simons, a wealthy purveyor to the French army, is represented by a turkey, while golden coins fall from the sky.

Godoy and his curator, Don Francisco de Garivay, were brought before a tribunal and forced to reveal the artists behind the confiscated art works which were "so indecent and prejudicial to the public good.

"[11] In 1819, to a public accustomed to historical tableaux painted in the Neoclassical style, Théodore Géricault presented the brooding Raft of the Medusa depicting survivors of a shipwreck in 1816, an embarrassment to the restored Bourbon monarchy, as Louis XVIII had appointed an incompetent nobleman as the captain for political reasons.

[16][17] Critics were divided in 1857 by The Gleaners painted by Jean-François Millet: some saw the gleaning women as a symbol of a popular uprising ("the scaffolds of 1793",[18]) others complained about the realistic representation of the rural poor on a large canvas of the size reserved for religious scenes.