With the passing of movie star Doris Day May 13 at her home in Carmel Valley, California, at age 97, much has been made of her goody two shoes image on film in the 1960s and the way it was pooh poohed in subsequent decades when attitudes toward women’s sexuality were expanding in the advent of feminism. (It was an image that Day, who had a number of troubled marriages, herself dismissed on “The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson,” and indeed she often played complex wives, most notably in Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Man Who Knew Too Much” and as the torch singer Ruth Etting in “Love Me or Leave Me.” )
Read MoreBartholomeus Spranger’s “Diana-Luna” (1566-1611), oil on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest. The work captures the way art eroticizes the virgin archetype.
