Antoine Pesne

Antoine Pesne, Girl with Pigeons, Butterfly Tattoo, and Pipe, 1728.

As the court painter of Prussia, Antoine Pesne certainly had the opportunity to hobnob with the most royal of royals. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I study Prussian royal genealogy as a dilettanteish hobby.) But here we have a simpler subject: an alluring, plump young woman of the Prussian countryside, dress sloughed lightly from her shoulder to reveal a playful lepidopterean tattoo, clutching and displaying several pigeons to us.

I read a few things into this simple picture: birds typically represent flight, departure; even these inelegant birds, often kept as pets, hold within themselves the possibility release and uplifting ardor. I link this to the young lady's tattoo – symbolic of the lower castes, of course, something rebellious even then – in displaying her tattoo so boldly, and giving her such control over her womanliness, Pesne (like Pietersz, in my post of October 9) has imbued his picture with something of sexual subversion. Birds fly free of their nests; young women likewise uplift themselves in strange and novel ways.