1430. Having finished with the annual exhibit Agnes returned again to the Egyptian room to look at jewelry that some Egyptians were supposed to have worn in their pyramids, and finally she worked up the nerve to have a look at the naked ladies.
1431. Agnes was shocked and disappointed with what she found in the formerly locked room. There is a category of paintings found in great abundance in small American museums. If Raphael painted a Madonna, there are a million Madonnas painted in Raphael's style. If Rubens painted some paintings full of half draped overweight women, others produced thousand of canvases that attempted to achieve the same effect.
1432. For each Rembrandt there are a million Rembrandt like paintings; for each Caravaggio, a million Caravaggisque canvasses. All of these works with 90 percent of their surfaces restored in museum workshops, made there way at the turn of 20th Century to American museums to satiate an appetite for European culture.
1433. What these paintings are about as a rule, nobody knows. Some are religious, but more are mythological, and many are historical. They all share a desire to present unclothed figures in contorted poses in which agony, tragedy, despair and desperation plunge muscular men with blue tinted flesh toward moments of religious epiphany.
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