Erotica in Art

 

" In art, immorality cannot exist.
Art is always sacred"

                                                     August Rodin

 

Erotic art in Pompeii

From Wikipedia

 

Ancient Pompeii was full of erotic or pornographic frescoes, symbols, inscriptions, and even household items. The ancient Roman culture of the time was much more sexually permissive than most present-day cultures.

When the serious excavation of Pompeii began in the 18th century, a clash of the cultures was the result. A fresco on a wall that showed the ancient god of sex and fertility, Priapus with his extremely enlarged penis, was covered with plaster and only rediscovered because of rainfall in 1998. In 1819, when king Francis I of Naples visited the exhibition at the National Museum with his wife and daughter, he was so embarrassed by the erotic artwork that he decided to have it locked away in a secret cabinet, accessible only to "people of mature age and respected morals." Re-opened, closed, re-opened again and then closed again for nearly 100 years, it was made briefly accessible again at the end of the 1960s (the time of the sexual revolution) and has finally been re-opened in the year 2000. Minors are not allowed entry to the once secret cabinet without a guardian or a written permission.

Erotic art

As previously mentioned, some of the paintings and frescoes became immediately famous because they represented erotic, sometimes explicit, sexual scenes. One of the most curious buildings recovered was in fact a Lupanare (brothel), which had many erotic paintings and graffiti indicating the services available -- patrons only had to point to what they wanted. The Lupanare had 10 rooms (cubicula, 5 per floor), a balcony, and a latrina. It was one of the larger houses, perhaps the largest, but not the only brothel. The town seems to have been oriented to a warm consideration of sensual matters: on a wall of the Basilica (sort of a civil tribunal, thus frequented by many Roman tourists and travelers), an immortal inscription tells the foreigner, If anyone is looking for some tender love in this town, keep in mind that here all the girls are very friendly (loose translation).

Also, in the Thermae suburbanae, the only known Roman artwork describing a sapphic (lesbian) scene was recently discovered.

The function of these pictures is not yet clear: some authors say that they indicate that the services of prostitutes were available on the upper floor of the house and could perhaps be a sort of advertising, while others prefer the hypothesis that their only purpose was to decorate the walls with joyful scenes (as these were in Roman culture). The Termae were, however, used in common by males and females, although baths in other areas (even within Pompeii) were often segregated by sex.

Collected below are high quality images of erotic frescoes, mosaics, statues and other objects from Pompeii and Herculaneum.
 

Erotic images from Pompeii

The older version of the painting is from Schefold, Karl: Vergessenes Pompeji: Unveröffentlichte Bilder römischer Wanddekorationen in geschichtlicher Folge. München 1962. Schefold explains (p. 134) that the picture was locked away "out of prudishness" and was only opened on request. Also note the much more brilliant colors in this only slightly older version. Here is a retouched version of the younger, higher resolution image to use the same colors.

Pompeii - Priapus

Pompeii. House of the Vettii. Fauces and Priapus
 

Pompeii. House of the Vettii. Paintings

Wall Painting of Priapos, House of the Vetti

Here's a classic that never grows old, the god Priapus measuring his manhood.
If you've ever been to Pompeii, this is the piece of art you remember. 
 

Pompeii. Temple of Apollo

Pompeii. House of Loreius Tiburtinus. Narcissus

Pompeii. House of the Ara Massima. Paintings

The mural of Venus from Pompeii was never seen by Botticelli, the painter of The Birth of Venus, but may have been a Roman copy of the then famous painting by Apelles which Lucian mentioned. In classical antiquity, the sea shell was a metaphor for a woman's vulva.

Erotic objects from Pompeii

Erotic objects from Herculaneum

Marble sculpture of the God Pan copulating with a goat

Erotic art

(From Wikipedia)

 

Erotic art covers any artistic work including paintings, sculptures, photographs, music and writings that is intended to evoke erotic arousal or that depicts scenes of love-making.

 

Definition

Some believe defining eroticism may be difficult since perceptions of what is erotic fluctuate. For example, a voluptuous nude painting by Peter Paul Rubens could have been considered erotic or pornographic when it was created for a private patron in the 17th century. Similarly in the United Kingdom and United States, D. H. Lawrence's sexually explicit novel Lady Chatterley's Lover was considered obscene and unfit for publication and circulation in many nations thirty years after it was completed in 1928, but may now be part of standard literary school texts in some areas. In a different context, a sculpture of a phallus in Africa may be considered a traditional symbol of potency though not overtly erotic.

A further distinction needs be made between erotic art and pornography, which also depicts scenes of love-making and is intended to evoke erotic arousal, but is by definition not fine art. However, no such objective distinction exists; the distinction is sometimes facetiously summed up as "That which I like is erotica; that which you like is pornography."
          

At the palaestra
Youth, holding a net shopping bag filled with apples, a love gift, draws close to a man who reaches out to fondle him; Attic red-figure plate

Ancient erotica

Among the oldest surviving examples of art are paleolithic cave paintings and carvings. Among the more common images of animals and hunting scenes, depictions of human genitalia, thought to be fertility symbols, may be found. For example, a recently discovered cave art at Creswell Crags in England, thought to be over 12,000 years old, includes some symbols thought to be stylized versions of female genitalia. However we have no indication that these were made for erotic stimulation, it is far more likely that these were objects used in religious rituals.

The earliest clearly salacious depictions of sexual behavior can be found on ancient Greek ceramics. Some of them are renowned because they contain some of the earliest known depictions of same-sex erotic behavior.

 
Hermit monk performing auparashtika on a princely visitor. Temple of Chhapri, Central India, 12th century CE. Khajuraho
 

Another famous example comes from the Roman town of Pompeii which was simultaneously destroyed and preserved by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. Several of the houses excavated had rooms with detailed and sexually explicit murals.

 

Gustave Courbet
Musee d'Orsay, Paris

Modern erotica

In Europe, starting with the Renaissance, there was a tradition of producing erotica for the amusement of the aristocracy. In 1601 Caravaggio painted the "Love Triumphant," for the collection of the Marquis Vincenzo Giustiniani. The latter is reputed to have kept it hidden behind a curtain to show only to his friends, as it was seen as a blatant celebration of sodomy. The tradition was continued by other, more modern painters, such as Fragonard, Courbet, Millet, Balthus, Picasso, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Egon Schiele, who served time in jail and had several works destroyed by the authorities for offending turn-of-the-century Austrian mores with his depiction of nude young girls, and so on.

However, the Europeans pale before the great erotic artists of the east. Unencumbered by Christian dogma, Japan, China, India, Persia and other lands produced copious quantities of art celebrating the human faculty of love. The works depict love between men and women as well as same-sex love. In Japan, the erotic art found its greatest flowering in the medium of the woodblock print.