“No one is claiming that the French actually invented erotic art. It existed in Egyptian, Roman, pre-Columbian, Indian and African cultures. There is no shortage of sexual charge in paintings by, say, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Rubens or Velázquez. Even religious art was frequently sensual as well as solemn. The case for 18th-century France is that the death of Louis XIV in 1715 set in motion a social revolution marked initially by licentiousness and then by intellectual liberation and philosophical inquiry. And it was in this context that love — and, yes, sex — came to be closely re-examined in art and literature.”