THE GREAT CASTRATION
Nudity and Fig Leaves in Art
To cover, or not to cover; am I a prude? Let’s talk about the Great Castration of all time!
Did you ever wonder why walking in Rome, to be more precise, the Vatican City, why most ”male genitalia” were covered in fig leaves or even shocking, were ”smaller” than ‘real life sized’ ones?? Well, by ‘real life sized’, I’m basing on what I have actually seen around…. and I have BEEN around so I have lots of proof, LOL. Well I did, the first time I visited the Eternal City, ROME!
There is an interesting story behind these two portraits. They were painted by the same artist, Masaccio, in 1424, who titled it The Expulsion of Adam and Eve, taking after one of the most famous events in the Bible. What happened is that soon after, within years or decades, someone decided the painting, exquisite as it looked originally, lacked just a little bit of a final touch.
They added the fig leaves to cover Adam and Eve’s genital area!
Charles Meynier’s 1832 Statue of Mercury in a Landscape. Musée de la Révolution française.
Adam covered again!
This is Tullio Lombardo’s Adam, ca. 1490–95. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Michelangelo Buonarroti’s David, 1501–04. Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence. For most of history, this is not what tourists to Florence would see. Rather, it was the image below:
That branch of figs was so off color there were some speculating whether someone was trying to point out that David’s wife-stealing activities left some physical trauma behind…
The Ancient Greeks, the Renaissance, and the Catholic Reformation
There is a great deal of history and lore behind the fig leaves.
For the ancient Greeks and the early Christians, nudity was nothing to be ashamed or startled about. The ancient Greeks loved the human body because a perfectly shaped figure was an aesthetic ideal far beyond mere visual presentation. Nature was imperfect, ugly even, and hardly ever showed something as beautiful as the figure below:
For the ancient Greeks, art was what defined man and separated him from animals. Animals were stuck in their figures and forms, and could never imagine or conceive a perfected figure of themselves in the same way humans did.
The Romans
The Romans largely inherited from the Greeks their sense of propriety, aesthetics about art, and many other ideas. You have seen Spartacus, and how the rich and poor would parade themselves before others in their birthday suits? Shocking for us in the modern age. Likely would have sent 18th century prudes into apoplectic shock had they time-travelled to our modern age.
For the Romans, nudity remained a casual subject and to represent a body in the nude, revealing their warts and 6-packs in equal measure, was simply to take pride in the greatest species the Earth had to date.
The Early Christians
Christianity largely rose to its present form in the Mediterranean region, absorbing the people of the Roman Empire before spreading across the rest of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. What this means is they also absorbed many of the cultural norms and trends the former pagans used to have. Where issues arose, decades, even centuries of correspondence and debate, would arise. In time, most of Christian Europe would conform to the ideas and thoughts everyone else would consider the social norm.
Nudity among the early Christians also went through this process. For many of the early Christians, most could trace someone in their genealogical tree – in some cases living members in their families – that still adhered to old traditions, norms, and pagan beliefs. Remember, it was not until the rise to power of Emperor Constantine in 325 AD that Christianity became the official state religion. Even then, there were a large number of non-Christians in the emperor’s court. Emperor Julian himself, dubbed the Apostate, was pagan.
What this means is that pagan – read old Greek and Roman aesthetes about culture, beauty, and art – remained part of what many early Christians commonly held as okay.
Carpocrates, an early agnostic Christian thinker and theologist from the 2nd century AD, actually suggested nudity in art was the greatest expression of man’s gratitude to God’s creation of his person. Today, although his school of belief is frowned upon by the Church, the influence of the Carpocratians is very much prevalent in Italian art. There are those who believe that hidden remnants of the nudists … cough cough … are what is responsible for the proliferation of nude sculptures and paintings in the world.
Another sect of secret nudists were the Adamites, who grew to prominence in the 3rd century AD, before disappearing from recorded history. Together with the Encratites, a group of vegetarians who loved the idea of returning to the Garden of Eden, and the Marcosians, the Adamites popped up in Bohemia in the 15th century, creating some of the earliest nudist communities in the world today.
A 5th century mosaic of Adam and Eve with the fig leaves added well after.
Censorship
Art censorship is a touching and aggrieving subject; on the one hand, patrons, institutions, and even States have their requirements about what they want to represent their ideas. On the other hand, the artist is a creature of creation, their ability to shape and draw something that can only be attributed to the divine as a gift God-given.
And so, an old and ancient struggle arose the artist would ignore certain parts of a patron’s instructions when it came to a commission. The patron would grit their teeth, smile at the crazy person who at any moment might decide to lope off their ear, and say the sculpture they received was perfect and could not have been better.
Then they would rush off to commission a more conforming artist to make the work more perfect. A fig-leaf here and there and voila! Came up The Great Castration!
Michelangelo is one of the more famous artists who suffered this abuse, as well as one of the earliest.
It is said that the Vatican would periodically host some of the most famous shouting matches between Cardinal Carafa and Michelangelo, the Church prelate unable to touch the genius because the Popes Alexander VI, Julius II, and Paul IV during the early years of his Pontificate, all could not bear the weight of depriving the world of such genius.
There are some that say Julius II was actually scared of the artist. He was the leader of the Catholic faith but before a man likely touched by God, the issue of precedence was not something to explore.
On the other hand, Cardinal Carafa would go on to initiate the Fig-leaf Campaign. They targeted all instances of nudity in art and strove to have the offending members covered. One of their bitterest of struggles was Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment, a fresco Julius II commissioned to decorate the Sistine Chapel:
Many in Rome were very much against these portrayals of nudity in the Holy center of the religion. Many others were ambivalent; like Julius II and other Popes, they likely believed the artist was another way hidden scripture was being revealed to man. Who were they to speak on the subject?
[Watch this clip on MICHELANGELO’S MASTERPIECES IN ROME which includes the famous Sistine Chapel.]
This long and brutal war would last decades. It was not until the Council of Trent, held over the years between 1545 and 1563, that the Church came to consensus over nudity in art.
Saw that? 1545-1563. Almost 20 years just to decide what place nudity had in art.
The Council of Trent in 1563 would go on to decide that art may portray beauty, but not in such a way that one would be provoked to lust. This was a modification of a similar decision in 1547 when in Spain, it was decided that imagery disrespectful to religion would forever be banned. Pope Paul IV would shift gears and lanes, and actually ordered that the ancient statues be castrated.
In 1565 – interestingly only a year after Michelangelo died and thus metaphysically impossible for him to come back from the dead – Danielle da Volterra was commissioned to paint over the offending bits in the Last Judgment. This was two years after the Council of Trent had decided on what form of beauty was acceptable, and 6 years after Pope Paul IV passed away.
See what I mean about the terror a divinely inspired artist can provoke?
Things would go further in the succeeding years…
In 1592, Pope Clement VII did a tour of Rome, sniffing our all art that was not covered.
Pope Innocent X (1644-1655) took things even further, ordering another round of castrations of Vatican sculptures that might have escaped Pope Paul IV’s castrations. Pope Clement XIII was rather tame by such standards; he simply ordered all statues in the Vatican covered with fig leaves.
Note:
In 1680, Masaccio’s Expulsion of Adam and Eve, after over 250 years, was finally targeted. Fig leaves were painted over their genitals. They were restored in 1980, but that’s a story for another day.
The Great Castration | Why, why??
There are a number of reasons, some speculative, some true. My take?
In the 1500s when Protestantism grew to prominence, some of the criticisms that the Catholic Church faced were that the priests, bishops, cardinals, and the Pope himself were too grounded in the human experience. Pope Alexander VI actually housed his family in the Vatican and would openly parade them before crowds.
For the Protestants that rose up in the Northern parts of Europe, nudity in art was just a symptom of the illness. You will notice that Dutch artists from the period largely avoided such nudist displays – for those that centered their work and living in the Northern parts of Europe anyway. Faith was about man demonstrating his gratitude to God, not using himself to laud God’s favor to him.
The Catholic Reformation that arose in reaction wished to counter these objections and observations about Renaissance art. Even when the contention between Catholic and Protestant art representation faded away before more pressing matters, the snowball was rolling, the momentum too strong for the madness to stop. It is only now, in the modern modern age, that the fig leaves are being removed, and perhaps, genitals attached back on.
What are your thoughts on The Great Castration?
P.S:
If traveling to Rome for the first time, here are the TOP 15 FREE THINGS TO DO IN ROME
If you are interested in A Brief History of Rome, check out my History of Roman Emperors blog articles.
If you have more days to spend in Rome, check out my 10 Beautiful Day Trips Around Rome.
