Torso of Venus and a Landscape Torso of Venus and a Landscape Torso of Venus and a Landscape is a sketch by Post-Impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh. It now resides in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. This drawing was created while van Gogh was staying with his brother in Paris (in 1886-1888), a period during which they did not write any letters to each other. As a result, little is known about the artist during this period except for his still-life paintings and "Agostina Segatori Sitting in the Café du Tambourin". In 1887, he sketched this drawing onto a piece of paper with black chalk
Venus in the Cloister as a result was a popular theme in literature during the reforms of Protestantism and Counter-Reformation. Denis Diderot's "La Religieuse" is a later example of this theme. The author of "Venus in the Cloister" satirizes the constraints of convent life which expected nuns to live in a "cloister" of sexual repression and suffering and the use by the state of religious ideology as a means of control. Sex becomes the only means of protest against such rigorous controls of the state. A careful parallel is drawn between the act of sexual pleasure and protesting against repressive state control. "At the