My top five works of art for Valentine's Day are a bit soft-centred, some might say, a bit corny and a bit cliched even - but that's Valentine's Day for you. Hardcore Japanese erotic photography is not the right thing to put on a Valentine's card or to see on a first date - is it? Who knows.
The romantic, the saucy and the disturbingly kinky are often hard to tell apart as my list gently illustrates. Rodin's great sculpture The Kiss will always be a universal icon of pure desire - a loved image of love - however many times it is reproduced, but it has a sting. It actually comes from Rodin's ambitious project The Gates of Hell, a tumultuous illustration of Dante's Inferno, and portrays the mortal sinners Francesca da Rimini and her lover. Rodin's depiction insists on the carnality of love. So do Hogarth's paired paintings Before and After.
I don't buy the view that Hogarth is sneering at lovers here or expressing Puritan fear of the flesh. On the contrary. It's a bit of 18th-century common sense, a matter of fact joke about what actually happens the moment after the perfumed idylls of romance that rococo pastoral paintings like Fragonard's lovely, ludicrous masterpiece The Swing portray. Sex is everywhere in 18th-century art, from Fragonard's hedonism to Hogarth's cynicism. If you want to go and look at one painting on Valentine's Day that broaches the subject without being over explicit, why not go and see The Swing in London's Wallace Collection?
Alternatively, you could visit the National Gallery to see Botticelli's magical Venus and Mars. The word "magical" is not used lightly - this painting may well be a talisman of Venus designed to achieve real effects on the beholder. Anyway, it can make you happy. Mars is nude, lying helpless and asleep while Venus reclines in graceful majesty - "love conquers all".
But what kind of art really can help you have a prosperous Valentine's Day? Well, as I say, the Botticelli is probably a magical device of some sort that calls down the astral power of Venus. But I've included Gérard's delicate - and really quite chaste - neoclassical vision of Cupid and Psyche here too. Mainly because I remember a postcard of it in my girlfriend's college room the first time ... I'm going to stop there.
