Name: The incredulity of Saint Thomas - Caravaggio - Look but Don't Touch
Uploaded: 2021-03-24T10:55:29.000+01:00
Duration: 201 s
Description: Is Saint Thomas' touching of Jesus' wounds homoerotic? It's certainly in stark contrast to Mary Magdalene, who is told not to touch him and spends the rest of her life living in a cave.

Touch me

Bitte nicht anfassen! Touch me

The incredulity of Saint Thomas - Caravaggio

"La incredulidad de Santo Tomás", de Caravaggio

"Niewierny Tomasz" Caravaggia (1601–1602)

Is Saint Thomas' touching of Jesus' wounds homoerotic? It's certainly in stark contrast to Mary Magdalene, who is told not to touch him and spends the rest of her life living in a cave.

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Look but Don't Touch

Is Saint Thomas' touching of Jesus' wounds homoerotic?

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Depictions of Venus and nude women in general in art can be considered objectifying and insulting. In 1914, a suffragette even slashed a painting in the National Gallery in protest. But Venus is perhaps more inclusive than she looks at first glance. 

Depictions of nude women can be objectifying and insulting. But Venus is perhaps more inclusive than she looks

Aphrodite's Child

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Olympia is a classic Venus with a 19th century twist: she's a prostitute

Olympia by Édouard Manet

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The Origin of the World by Gustave Courbet

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A famous image that at first glance looks totally innocent, but is in actual fact full of innuendo

The Milkmaid by Johannes Vermeer

Diana, the mythological goddess of the hunt, lives with her band of nymphs in the forest, free of men. Representations of her in painting are a contradictory mix of fantasy and repulsion. These nympths are both virgins and lesbians, naked and threatening, seductive and violent.

Representations of Diana in art are a contradictory mix of fantasy and repulsion. 

Diana and Callisto by Le Titien

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Hercules is known as an allegory of strength and virility. But his love life doesn't quite match up to that

Hercules and Omphale by Pierre Paul Rubens

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The painter explores the sensuality of the encounter between Leda and Jupiter

Leda and the Swan by Paolo Veronese

In the 1980s, a Japanese television channel financed the restoration of the Sistine Chapel and during that restoration, workers discovered the garish colours and parts of the body that had since been covered up. So which version of the painting is more important to preserve?

The Sistine Chapel could have looked very different...

Original Sin by Michelangelo

Written in the Middle Ages, the accounts of the life and death of the saints occupy an important place in the Catholic tradition, especially accounts of their torture... JK, this is actually an episode about BDSM. But no worries! We're just doing soft stuff.

Is this an episode about Catholic saints or BDSM? Maybe... both?

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In France, the bungalow evokes holidays in the sun. In the UK, they are humble everyday dwellings for grandparents. But in Germany or the United States, they take on a very different form: they are a bourgeois luxury, a single-storey villa with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking nature. Inspired by the "bangalo", a traditional one-storey Bengal house open to the outside, this style was also a staple of colonial architecture. 

In the US and Germany, bungalows are a bourgeois luxury: a single-storey villa with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking nature

The Beauty of Bungalows

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The Music of Cape Verde

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Twist

Love is political, says journalist and author Şeyda Kurt. In her book Radical Tenderness she does away with the myth of romantic love

Why is Love so Hard?

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Nobody captured the atmosphere of 1990s Berlin better than than German photographer Daniel Josefsohn.

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Tanglewood Festival 2021

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Aix-en-Provence Festival 2021

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Ground Control

After four years of waiting London Grammar have finally released a new album. To celebrate ,the British trio are invited onto the Ground Control set to perform.

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Portait of troubled Texan folk singer Townes van Zandt (1944-1997) who wrote beautiful and despairing country songs.

Townes Van Zandt: Be Here to Love Me

 French swimmer Florent Manaudou, German pentathlete Marvin Dogue and French sabre fencer Cécilia Berder all trained hard for the Tokyo Olympics, but the most important part of their training they say is in the mind. Mental conditioning is a growing science designed to get the best out of sports champions at a time when they could crumble under the pressure. At the beginning of World War Two, American airforce pilots struggled to face off against the Japanese fleet. Cue Bud Winter: in peace time, a sports coach, and in war, a mental conditioner who taught the pilots how to keep their head in the game even in life-or-death situations. Gradually, the idea that sportsmen and women were as much mind as they were muscle took hold. 

 For Olympic French swimmer Florent Manaudou, his greatest challenge is mental, not physical

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In Japan where you stand in the lift, how you get into a taxi, and especially how you greet others, depends on your social standing