| History A History of the Fig Leaf The best sight gag in the history of art. By Hugh Aldersey-Williams
Posted Tuesday, Jul 16, 2013, at 09:30 AM ET  The following is excerpted from Anatomies: A Cultural History of the Human Body by Hugh Aldersey-Williams, out now from W.W. Norton. The best sight gag in the entire history of art must be the fig leaf. How large it is! And how very suggestive in its shape! How it engrosses what it purports to hide. How many other plant leaves might have done the job with less blatancy. And yet the fig leaf it assuredly is that artists have elected to use when asked to preserve the public decency. The Bible gives them their cover story: In Genesis, when Adam and Eve realized their nakedness, "they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons." But aprons are garments that surely provide rather more coverage than the single, strategically positioned leaf of artistic convention, with its three major lobes simultaneously screening and outlining the penis and testicles behind, and two further vestigial lobes appearing so neatly to represent curls of pubic hair. The artistic fig leaf became all but mandatory when in 1563 the Roman Catholic Council of Trent ruled that "all lasciviousness be avoided" in religious images "in such wise that figures shall not be painted or adorned with a beauty exciting to lust." Up until that date, in classical statues and in the Renaissance art inspired by them, false modesty had taken a different form. The human figure was often modelled on the bodies of athletes, who performed their exertions naked. In a monument to a civic dignitary ... To continue reading, click here.
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