Flogging The Nun
“Flogging the nun” sounds like it ought to be some sort of sexual euphemism, but in this case, it’s literal. One Italian auction site through which this painting passed called it “Scena erotica con suora fustigata da frate” or “Erotic scene with a nun flogged by a friar” which seems literal enough.
At first I thought that the flogger that looked like fur animal tails was an archaic convention to show the tails of a whip blurred by motion, but then I noticed the spare flogger hanging on the pillar, painted in the very same way. So I’m left wondering if it’s still just an artistic convention, or perhaps a lack of painterly skill. More intriguing would be the possibility that the floggers used for this sort of religious discipline were indeed fluffy-bunny soft, to enable a ritual of penance that involved humbling or humiliation without actual pain. That doesn’t sound like any historical version of Christianity that I’ve ever heard of, but the church is vast and its history extremely long, leaving room for all kinds of unexpected variations of practice.
The painting is said to be “French School of the 18th century” and I am not enough the art historian to argue.
See Also:
Yes, I do believe it is French School. The University of the Sore Bun, in Paris.