Nude vs Prude in the Vatican Museums

On the left, a 2nd century BC bronze Hercules in the Capitoline Museum in Rome, dressing to the left. On the right, a similar Hercules in the Vatican Museums, chastened. Around half of the Roman and Hellenic nude statues in the Musei Vaticani have had their genitals crudely covered by fig leaves. These peculiar blotches are visually incoherent. They interrupt the continuity of nude musculature and rather undermine the effect of the nude as a representation of human beauty. They are also conceptually weird, floating, glued or perhaps stapled on. They lack the symbolism imbued by the artist to each other object in the production of allegorical art. As with all censorship, in the end it is the censor who exposes himself. There’s nothing funnier than an enraged prude, and above all these sheaths show to comic effect the self-defeating nature of censorship, in this case intended to sustain the decency of the Papacy. They have surrounded themselves with cocks and fannies, eye-catchingly prominent by their conspicuous absence. In fairness, many have been uncovered, but only in the sculptures which are deemed to have particular artistic value. 

The Victorians are just as guilty or this inverted perversity. Unfortunately for the majority world, while Victorian values cling on only in a few outposts (by-passed rural islands, public schools) the Vatican continues to dictate half the planet’s policy on sexual health and gender issues. From a theological perspective, this prudishness serves to place men firmly outside the garden, into a place of sin and shame. The Ancients, the creators of these works of art, had lived in paradise, before Adam was cast out, before God hated men. These Ancients were not ashamed of themselves, living with philosophy, culture, debate, democracy, tragedy, games, as well as nudity and occasional sexual freedom. The Papacy, graphically and literally, imposed shame upon them, defrocked them of innocence and beauty, and dragged them into God’s new fig-fringed repression. The natural state of man, they claim, is not a Greek ideal: the hero, the youth, the philosopher or athlete, but the sinner and the guilty. Having enforced on men self-embarrassment, this doctrine can then monopolise self-worth through confession, indulgence and absolution. Thus the same cause spreads the illness and then sells the cure, like an itinerant quack with the lurgy.