'It took genius to chisel these buttocks' – the top 10 bottoms in art, chosen by our critic
Raphael died 500 years ago, it is said, after a night with his mistress left him in a weakened state. He had said that to paint perfect beauty he needed to see lots of different women. This geometrical arrangement of interlocking nudes revolving around a bottom reveals his addiction to the female body, from all angles.• Château de Chantilly, France
9. Damiano Mazza: The Rape of Ganymede, c1575
The rich lawyer who commissioned this brooding, confrontational painting probably wanted to say something about himself. Homosexuality was clearly defined in Renaissance Italy – and the myth of Ganymede, a shepherd boy carried off by the god Jupiter who had taken the shape of an eagle, was a symbol of it. Just to make it boldly clear this is about sex and violation, Mazza focuses attention on Ganymede’s naked rear.• National Gallery, London
8. Diego Velázquez: The Rokeby
An artist of supreme intelligence and irony, Velázquez takes apart the idyll of the nude in this gravely beautiful painting. Venus shows us her back and her curvaceous bottom, painted in tones of shimmering silk. But her backside is not all there is to her. In the mirror, her face is sad and uneasy. She’s not enjoying this. You realise she is not a god but a model, showing her rear for ever in a museum while wishing she was somewhere else.• National Gallery, London
7. Hieronymus Bosch: The Temptation of St Anthony, c1501
A man is slumped with his bare buttocks in the air in this stupefying triptych of the demons and perversities that besieged the early Christian hermit Anthony. But his humiliation doesn’t end there. A woman has built her house under his sheltering form. He howls in misery but can’t escape. You have to pass between his legs and under his bottom to enter the little cottage.• Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon
6. Unknown: Motya Charioteer, 5th century BC
Classical Greek sculpture is often summed up as “nude”. This has come to suggest something cold and formal: The Nude. The Motya Charioteer’s sensual behind refutes that. This captivating statue of a chariot-driver is clothed but in a garment so slinky and tight-fitting it draws attention to every contour of the youth’s body. It took genius to give this robe such delicacy in chiselled stone. And it brings us faceto-buttocks with the ancient Greek pas
sion for male bodies.• Museo Giuseppe Whitacker, Mozia, Sicily
5. Donatello: David, c1440
When Donatello created the first free-standing nude statue since antiquity, he went out of his way to make it provocative. The artist wanted to challenge and defy the Church and its disdain for human beauty. Like the ancient creator of the Motya Charioteer, he uses clothes – in this case boots and a hat – to set off David’s physique. It’s a sort of bronze lingerie. The real shock comes when you walk around and see the statue’s opulent, geometrical, smooth buttocks. They belong with the dome of Florence Cathedral as the founding curves of the Renaissance.• Bargello museum, Florence
4. Michelangelo: David, 1504
No one in Michelangelo’s lifetime doubted that his interest in the male nude was erotic. He said so himself, but insisted his adoration of male beauty was spiritual. The artist even claims as much in a love poem to a man. Homosexuality was a capital crime but, in this ecstatic monument to youth and courage, he rejoices in the hero’s rear. Picture how he lovingly carved those perfect buttocks and you’ll know what his contemporaries knew about him.•
Accademia, Florence
3. Titian: Venus and Adonis, 1554
Philip II of Spain was in London, having just married Mary Tudor, when he took delivery of this ripely painted rear. As Venus begs her lover to stay, her rump is like a heavy cushion rooting her to the spot. Though she hugs and he pulls away, her bottom does not shift but appears glued to a heap of her discarded underwear. Titian expresses her desperation and determination to keep her man both in her shadowed face and in her immovable backside.• Prado, Madrid
2. François O’Murphy, c1752 Boucher, Louise
This is a Rococo rear. In 18th-century France, new ideas of reason and liberty were propounded by Enlightenment philosophers and discussed at such salons as that of the royal mistress, Madame de Pompadour. The art style of this optimistic age was sensually playful. Maybe Boucher’s depiction of this young woman of Irish descent boldy displaying her posterior in a luxurious boudoir doesn’t look that philosophical, but it is a libertarian manifesto of great eloquence.• Alte Pinakothek, Munich
1. Leonardo da Vinci: A standing male nude, c1504-6
The artist adored young men with long hair, according to Vasari’s 1550 Life of Leonardo. This is a different model of male beauty: powerful, stocky and exhibiting the best rear anyone has ever drawn. It is so expertly shaded that when you stand in front of the original drawing, it seems to be a solid, 3D pair of spheres blossoming in space. Leonardo is famous for his drawing of Vitruvian Man, holding out his limbs in a star shape to show the perfect human proportions. But this drawing is greater, stranger, with its faceless man whose centre of gravity is his rotund rear.• Royal Collection, London
sical career beckoning, she then upped sticks and went to Paris to join Peter Brook’s newly founded International Centre for Theatre Research.
Out of that came a journey to Africa in 1972, with Brook and a team of actors seeking to explore the origins of performance. The trip was rigorous and exhausting, but Brook paid tribute to Mirren’s improvisatory gifts. The basic performance tool was a carpet, and Brook has described how, one day in a village in northern Nigeria, “without warning this beautiful young actress jumped on to the carpet and twisted her body into a crumpled, limping, twisted hag”. She was so successful, in fact, that several distressed spectators rushed forward to help her.
Mirren returned Brook’s admiration in a way that had unforeseen consequences. In 1974, I went to Paris to cover his opening production of Timon of Athens at Théâtre des Bouffes-duNord. My review ended up containing a plea for the British – at a time when the embryonic National Theatre and the RSC were facing endless crises – to rediscover some of the “empty space” simplicity of Brook. To my astonishment, Mirren wrote to the Guardian endorsing my view and suggesting that the expenditure on sets and costumes at our national companies was “excessive, unnecessary and destructive to the art of theatre”.
Her letter opened up a big debate and even led to a question in parliament. What was extraordinary was that she wrote it as she was playing Lady Macbeth on the Stratford stage. Seemingly, however, she suffered no sanctions for her reckless candour.
Although Mirren had by now done a good deal of film and television, it was still the stage that seemed her natural métier. It was a sign of her versatility that, in 1975, she played both a selfdestructive rock star in David Hare’s Teeth’n’Smiles at the London’s Royal Court, and Nina in The Seagull in the West End. I wrote of her Nina that instead of presenting us, in the final act, with the usual depleted wraith, she “showed us a woman who has learned through suffering how to endure”.
Back at the RSC, she also followed – not for the first time – in Ashcroft’s footsteps by playing Queen Margaret in Henry VI. I still remember her disdainful cry, as she viewed the chaos of civil broils: “Is THIS the government of Britain’s isle?” At the Royal Exchange in Manchester, she was also a stunning Duchess of Malfi: proud, sexy and impetuous.
If today Mirren is known to most people through her work on screens large and small, I suspect a turning point came in 1991 with Prime Suspect, written by Lynda La Plante, in which Mirren played Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison. Watching the first episode again, I was struck by how big a breakthrough this was and how it confirms my impression of Mirren as someone who can simultaneously be steely and vulnerable. Mirren’s Tennison is determined, obsessive and constantly battling the oppressive institutional sexism of the police force, yet she also shows the private cost of forever having to prove her right to operate in a man’s world.
Mirren did seven series of Prime Suspect and, while she has periodically returned to the stage, her fame now rests very much on film and TV. It would be tedious to list all her credits but it strikes me that, as when young, she is still a mix of the imperious and the adventurous.
Take two of her performances as Elizabeth II. In 2006, she played the title role in The Queen. Stephen Frears, who directed the film, said that when casting the role “it seemed essential to have someone who made you nervous”. Although the movie is about the Queen’s annus horribilis, when the death of Princess Diana exposed her failure to catch the public mood, Mirren still suggests that the monarch’s aloofness is ultimately a source of strength.
Mirren was back in royal robes in 2013 for Peter Morgan’s play The Audience. What impressed me was her capacity to convey the Queen’s mix of the extraordinary and the ordinary. She caught all of the monarch’s gift for adapting to a wide range of prime ministers: standing up to an ageing Winston Churchill, or smoking out the pretences of Anthony Eden during the Suez crisis. Yet Mirren also reminded us that virtually all plays about monarchy are studies of solitude: she gave us a woman who, for all her wealth and privilege, suffered a visible sense of entrapment.
Dipping into the scores of recent Mirren movies, it seems to me that her qualities remain constant. She has the poise and serenity that comes with age but she also suggests inner resilience. Look at her in Hitchcock, playing Alma Reville, the wife of the director; or her vengeful mark to Ian McKellen’s conman in The Good Liar.
Most fascinating of all is her role as Maria Altmann in Simon Curtis’s Woman in Gold, where she plays a woman seeking the restitution of a Klimt painting stolen from her family by the Nazis. She catches precisely the arrogance and impatience of an upper-class Austrian who will brook no argument. In fact, I was strongly reminded, yet again, of Peggy Ashcroft, who played a similarly authoritarian Austrian in a Stephen Poliakoff TV film, Caught on a Train.
So who exactly is Helen Mirren? She is a fiercely committed, hard-working, hugely gifted actor equally at home on stage or screen. But I cling to my belief that, although she has developed and widened her range with age, she is not vastly different at 75 from the woman I first saw playing Cleopatra when she was 20.