My nose is pointing at the ceiling. I feel my neck hurt from looking up, but the Michelangelo’s ‘Last Judgment’ staring back at me is definitely worth it. The way he portrayed the bodies in such detail, with such meticulousness, each muscle, each body part, every… fig leaf?
Don’t get me wrong, each painting and each statue in the Vatican Museums is still stunning, but where are their dicks? Who goes around wearing a fig leaf over their junk?
Don’t get me wrong, each painting and each statue in the Vatican Museums is still stunning, but where are their dicks? Who goes around wearing a fig leaf over their junk?
Censorship has been the plague of artists throughout the centuries. In Ancient Greece, winners used to destroy the images and statues of the defeated as a sign of power. But the biggest curse in art history has always been the relationship between ecclesiastical power and artists.
In the XIV century, Pope Julius II summoned Michelangelo and Raffaello, two of Italy’s finest artists, to the Vatican, to adorn the place with their art, just to have it censured years later after the Council of Trent in the 1550s.
The Counter-Reformation, the reformative period of time the Catholic Church went through to preserve its power, hit Italy’s art hard.
Michelangelo’s poor ‘Christ Carrying the Cross’, covered with a horrendous mental garment; a baby Jesus in Piero Della Francesca’s ‘Brera Madonna’, covered with red paint to hide his nudity – a naked newborn? Shocking!
The great use of fig leaves over anything else comes from a Bible passage explaining how, after eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve, realizing they were naked, used fig leaves to cover themselves – hence the fig leaves to cover the ‘sinful’ body parts.
Artists would not take this, though, and from 1600 onwards, bang on in the middle of the Counter-Reform, pictures and statues with the most ambiguous meaning popped up left, right and center. Take Bernini’s ‘Ecstasy of Saint Teresa’: the woman looks like she’s having the greatest orgasm of her life – we like that attitude, Gian Lorenzo.
Art censorship is not a thing of the past, either; just recently all the statues, and their poor, lovely dicks, at the Capitoline Museums in Rome were covered for the Iranian President, Hassan Rouhani’s state visit.
Although figs are great (they’re juicy, sweet and all that) dicks are a whole lot better and should not be covered in any way, especially not with random leaves clearly no one wears ever.
Besides, as a good friend of mine recently told me: “Looking at statue’s dicks makes me feel so much better about my life; sure, they’re ripped, but their dicks are so tiny, it’s a pleasure to look at them!”
Give us a self-esteem boost and stop censoring art already.
