Keyholes and Confessionals

One of the oldest subjects of caricature is that of the peeping tom, utilizing sight or sound in the confessional or at the keyhole. The 'joke' goes back to the Bible with David and Bathsheba and Susanna and the Elders. Susanna was an extremely popular subject among the Classical painters. Probably examples could be found among the art of the ancients as well, in the annals of the Sumerians, Egyptians or Greeks. Of course, as Gabriel Laderman once cautioned me, ancient images which are usually referred to as caricature may not be caricatures at all. We have no way of knowing how the ancients thought.