The Gabinetto Segreto (the so-called “ Secret Cabinet ”) of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli best typifies the modern response to classical sexuality in art: repression and suppression. This bewilderment only intensified after excavations began at the rediscovered Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum. When the collection of antiquities first began in earnest in the 17th and 18th centuries, the openness of ancient eroticism and classic erotic art puzzled and troubled Enlightenment audiences. (Marie-Lan Nguyen / CC-BY 2.5 ) Modern Responses to Classic Erotic Art Tintinnabulum (wind chimes) in the form of a phallus, and other types of classic erotic art, were commonly found in the gardens of Pompeii houses, such as this quadruped-shaped bird with a phallic-shaped scorpionic tail discovered in Pompeii and on display in the Secret Cabinet of the National Archaeological Museum of Naples. And our interpretations of these images - often censorious in modern times - reveal much about our own attitudes to sex. Classic erotic art and depictions of sexuality and sexual activities in classical art seem to have had a wide variety of uses.
However, these classical images of erotic acts and genitalia reflect more than a sex obsessed culture. The phallus, sculpted in bronze as tintinnabula (wind chimes), were commonly found in thegardens of the houses of Pompeii, and sculpted in relief on wall panels, such as the famous one from a Roman bakery telling us hic habitat felicitas (“here dwells happiness”). Sex and love were major themes in classical art, as can be seen in this ancient Roman fresco in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples in Italy.
They are often eye-openingly confronting in nature. Explicit sexual representations were common on Athenian black-figure and red-figure vases of the sixth and fifth centuries BC. Simply put, sex is everywhere in Greek and Roman art. Classic erotic art, erotic images and depictions of genitalia, the phallus in particular, were incredibly popular motifs across a wide range of media in ancient Greece and Rome. Hartley’s dictum that “the past is a foreign country” hold more firmly than in the area of sexuality in classical art. Sweeping in scope, elegantly crafted, and lavishly illustrated, Homosexuality and Civilization is a stunning exploration of a rich and terrible past.Rarely does L.P. In the samurai tradition of Japan, Crompton makes clear, the celebration of same-sex love rivaled that of ancient Greece. Homosexuality also flourished in the court intrigues of Henry III of France, Queen Christina of Sweden, James I and William III of England, Queen Anne, and Frederick the Great.Īnti-homosexual atrocities committed in the West contrast starkly with the more tolerant traditions of pre-modern China and Japan, as revealed in poetry, fiction, and art and in the lives of emperors, shoguns, Buddhist priests, scholars, and actors. Yet from this cauldron of fears and desires, homoerotic themes surfaced in the art of the Renaissance masters-Donatello, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Sodoma, Cellini, and Caravaggio-often intertwined with Christian motifs. The root cause was religious superstition, abetted by political ambition and sheer greed.
But Protestant authorities were equally committed to the execution of homosexuals in the Netherlands, Calvin’s Geneva, and Georgian England. Louis Crompton traces Church-inspired mutilation, torture, and burning of “sodomites” in sixth-century Byzantium, medieval France, Renaissance Italy, and in Spain under the Inquisition. When these two traditions collided in Christian Rome during the late empire, the tragic repercussions were felt throughout Europe and the New World. branded male homosexuality as a capital offense and, later, blamed it for the destruction of the biblical city of Sodom. By contrast, Jewish religious leaders in the sixth century B.C.E. How have major civilizations of the last two millennia treated people who were attracted to their own sex? In a narrative tour de force, Louis Crompton chronicles the lives and achievements of homosexual men and women alongside a darker history of persecution, as he compares the Christian West with the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome, Arab Spain, imperial China, and pre-Meiji Japan.Īncient Greek culture celebrated same-sex love in history, literature, and art, making high claims for its moral influence.