Secret room of Roman erotica
is finally openedFrom the London Sunday Telegraph,
Copyright ©2000, all rights reserved.Date: 03/04/00
A collection of sexually explicit art, locked away nearly 200 years ago when it shocked a royal heir, is about to open to the public. Alasdair Palmer takes a preview.
It has been described as a "fearsome drama of Pleasure, Sin and Death" -- the depiction of a life "so unremittingly sensual that it fatigued and revolted us".
It has been locked away for nearly 200 years, supposedly because it was too lewd to be seen by anyone except those possessed of that very rare combination of great age and extremely strict morals. But next week, and despite vociferous protests from the Roman Catholic Church, the "secret room" of the National Archaeological Museum in Naples is finally opening its doors to the public.
The room houses a collection of erotic objects from Pompeii and Herculaneum, the two Roman cities obliterated when Vesuvius erupted in AD79.
Ash buried the cities, and when excavations of the sites began in the 18th century, streets, houses and shops were found in near-perfect preservation -- providing a snapshot of life in the pagan Roman Empire.
Early archaeologists were surprised to discover just how drenched in sexual imagery that life was: statues, paintings, mosaics, amulets, bracelets, necklaces, images on shop fronts, in dining rooms, bedrooms and gardens -- not to mention the pictures in brothels.
The material was initially displayed openly, first in the private collection of the Bourbon kings and then in the Naples museum. But in 1819, Francis, heir to the Neapolitan throne, visited the museum with his young daughter. He was
shocked by what he saw. He ordered the offending material to be taken out of the public collection and placed in a locked room. There it has remained ever since, expanding inexorably as further excavations have added ever more erotic objects to it.The most commonly depicted object in the exhibition is the penis. Images of the organ abound, in various stages of excitement.
Romans did not consider male genitalia obscene or pornographic, or even particularly arousing. Instead, erect penises were regarded as a good-luck charm. Painted or sculpted, they stood in every part of the town, and measured all possible
lengths, from four feet downwards. They appeared on shops, factories and taverns, above the doors of houses, on statues adorning fountains, gardens and private houses, on lamps, tripods, necklaces, bracelets. Several comic depictions show men -- and, on occasion, gods -- with grotesquely enlarged penises. In one case, a gladiator is pictured in apparent mortal combat with his own penis.If erect penises did not strike the Romans as pornographic, what did? Not the naked female form, which was on display almost everywhere, and certainly not female genitalia, in which -- in sharp contrast to today's pornographic magazines -- the Romans appeared to have had little interest.
Depictions of sexual intercourse were considered pornographic, but the extent to which they were thought indecent is less clear. Among numerous paintings and sculptures of sex, the exhibition contains a series of fairly graphic pictures of couples in various sexual positions.
Four were found in a brothel, each one on the door of a different cubicle. Marinella Lista, who helped prepare the exhibition, believes that they indicated the specialities of the resident prostitutes. Classical authors refer to sexual positions such as "the racehorse", with the woman on top -- one of the most expensive -- and the mysterious "lion on the cheese-grater", although no one has worked out quite what that involves.
A collection of four similar paintings was found in the bedroom of a private house. Dr Lista believes that they may have adorned the room in which the master of the house entertained his mistresses and concubines. Fidelity was not viewed as a male virtue. It was expected that a married man would have sex with women other than his wife.
"Courtesans we keep for pleasure, concubines for attending day by day to the body, and wives for producing heirs," wrote Apollodorus, who seems to have summed up the attitude of most rich Romans before the advent of Christianity. Still, Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, director of the British School in Rome, who has worked extensively in Pompeii, insists: "The Roman world wasn't a sexual free-for-all. They had their own rules and anxieties. They were just different to ours."
Erotic paintings certainly did appear in private houses, but usually in the rooms reserved for banquets.
Examples from dining rooms in the exhibition use mythological themes, frequently involving gods forcing themselves on young women whom they are shocked to discover -- at the vital moment -- are hermaphrodites. Occasionally in the
background are more graphic exhibitions of sex involving much smaller figures. The gardens of villas were also frequently home to depictions of sex. One meticulously carved example shows the half-beast god Pan fornicating with a goat."But I don't think that was supposed to be sexually arousing," says Dr Wallace-Hadrill. "It was rather a reminder of the beast in man -- of the fact that nature is savage, that man is not an animal, but is mid-way between nature and god."
One of the most remarkable aspects of the exhibition is the extraordinarily fine quality of most of the erotic work. Modern pornography is notable for its extreme ugliness. Ancient porn artists strived after, and occasionally achieved, beauty.
Many of the most distinguished artists of antiquity painted explicitly erotic pictures. Tiberius had a picture by the great artist Parrhasius, showing Atlanta performing fellatio on Meleager. All of Parrhasius's work has disappeared, but similar
scenes are on display in this show, almost certainly modelled on famous works by artists like him. There appears to have been no anxiety about the images. No one seems to have worried about their effect on children, for instance.Christianity put a stop to all that. Early Christians had extreme -- and, to pagans, unintelligible - views about sex. Adultery was "worse than many murders", according to Clement of Alexander, who, along with most of the Church Fathers, was
convinced that a life of total chastity was best.Christians were so hostile to sex that some even castrated themselves. They believed that sex was radically evil and the cause of almost all the ills of the world - however it was performed.
That idea was unknown to pagans. It may explain why -- as this exhibition demonstrates -- it was possible for them to produce images of sex that are graphic without being ugly or offensive.
The Secret Room opens on April 10 at the National Archaeological Museum, Naples.
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