Where are all the penises?

Trust me, this post is about art. Ok, including the word penis in my blog is sure to increase traffic, but that's only a side benefit.

Given that there are literally thousands of statues and paintings of nude men in Rome, you'd be hard pressed to find a penis on any of them. But that's not how it has always been. Romans were proud of their appendages and carved them in a realistic, although not always flattering proportion. It was during one of the Catholic churches many bouts of paranoia that the male genitalia become too "distracting" to have protruding from statues. Apparently the housework was falling behind.

So there were a couple of approaches taken to cleanse art from such troubling sights. For many of the old Greek statues, the penis was simply chiseled off. I don't know about you, but the site of a fully intact scrotum with nothing but a stub of rough broken stone is far more disturbing than an anatomically correct rendition. Did the young Roman boys just think this was what would happened when they hit puberty? I'm pretty sure their ancient talks about the "body changing" during puberty were as cryptic as our household. It just made sense that my thingy would just fall off after a while. I wonder if there's a museum somewhere with thousands of stone penises.

The second approach to cleansing was used for more valued works of art and involved putting a stone fig-leaf over the groin on a statue or painting a strategic handkerchief where required. I'm surprised there isn't a line of fig-leaf shaped thongs for men - The Roman Thong. The pope even asked a painter to cover up Michelangelo's nude men on the front wall of the Sistine Chapel. Now that's sacrilegious. If Michelangelo wanted me to see Adam's private bits, then that's what I should see.

Meanwhile, I will keep up my search for stone penises and report back if I stumble into one.
By the way, if you want to comment on this or any of our blogs, we'd love to hear from you. Just click on the word "comments" below the post and let us know what's on your mind. Well of course, I know what's on your mind right now.