Erotica in Art

 

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

                                                     August Rodin

 

 

Around the year 1520 the Italian artist Giulio Pipi, known as Romano, made sixteen very explicit erotic drawings of men and women having sex. These were reproduced as engravings and titled I modi (The Positions). None of them seems to exist anywhere. The engraver, Marcantonio Raimondi did his time in jail, but after his release he worked on another version of this series together with Pietro Aretino, a writer and commentator who also wrote erotic literature.
Their version of the engravings together with sonnets was published in 1527 with the title Sonetti Lussoriosi (Lustful Sonnets). Again, none of these seem to have survived. 
But a myth had been created, or, has been taken up in later times. Baron Frederick Waldeck (1786-1875) claimed he had copied them.
The heliogravures in this exhibition were published in 1892 in France as another re-edition of Aretino's Sonetti or Romano's Positions. 500 copies of this book were handcoloured and numbered.