OMG.
I'm in lust.
With a statue.
I happened to be visiting Our Nation's Capital and touring our nation's art museum when I happened upon this statue. It's so gorgeously androgynous that I wasn't sure at first if it was a woman with very small breasts and a figleaf in her crotch or a thin man with a figleaf in his crotch. It turned out to be the latter.
His name is Apollino ("little Apollo" -- I knew he was divine) and he's apparently a copy of one in the Villa Medici made by Francesco Righetti in the late 18th, early 19th century.
All I know is that I wanted to jump the bones of this adorable young man the minute I saw him.
Noted heterosexual poet Percy Bysshe Shelley knew what I mean. Writing about the original statue in Italy (I think), he wrote:
It is difficult to conceive anything more delicately beautiful than the Ganymede; but the spirit-like lightness, the softness, the flowing perfection of [the Apollino's] forms, surpass it. The countenance, though exquisitely lovely and gentle, is not divine. There is a womanish vivacity of winning yet passive happiness, and yet a boyish inexperience exceedingly delightful. Through the limbs there seems to flow a spirit of life which gives them lightness. Nothing can be more perfectly lovely than the legs, and the union of the feet with the ankles, and the fading away of the lines of the feet to the delicate extremities. It is like a spirit even in dreams. The neck is long yet full, and sustains the head with its profuse and knotted hair as if it needed no sustaining.
Updated: I assumed Shelley was straight because he married two women, the second of whom was Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. Apparently he was bisexual.
Photo by Ed Uthman. Some rights reserved.
