Promethea Bound

The winner of the BP Portrait Award was announced last night. The £25,000 prize went to Wim Heldens  for his pensive portrait of a young philosophy student. But you wouldn’t know it from the coverage which overwhelmingly featured a reproduction of the runner-up: Louis Smith’s portrait Holly.

Naked, save for a silky crimson loin cloth, and handcuffed to a cave wall, Holly was the pulchritudinous poster girl of this year's exhibition.

Smith has said the painting was inspired by the myth of Prometheus, the thief of fire, who Zeus chained to a rock to suffer an eternity of attacks by a liver-eating eagle.

Smith’s soft-porn altarpiece (for she comes in an elaborate gold tabernacle frame) replaces the traditional image of an assumptive or annunciate Virgin with an S&M fantasy. The play on 'Holly' and 'Holy' isn't an accident.

Critics have drawn comparisons with Leonardo da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks (all those jagged precipices and muddy ferns) and Caravaggio’s John the Baptist (he of the red loin cloth.)

But she’s got more in common with the heroine in  Titian’s Perseus and Andromeda, the original girl-chained-to-rock painting. Same milky skin, same faux-modest crossing of the legs, and same arm arched above the head - a trick for maximum perkiness favoured by Page 3 girls and Renaissance sylphs alike.