F I C T I O N A N D F R I C T I O N : A G O S T I N O C A R R A C C I’ S

ENGRAVED, EROTIC PARODY OF THE

TOILETTE OF VENUS

PATRICIA SIMONS

Agostino Carracci’s erotic prints of the 1580s are chiefly discussed in

terms of their classical references, populated as they are with satyrs
and nymphs or characters like Orpheus, Andromeda, the Three Graces,
and Venus with Cupid.1 But vernacular wordplay and sexual double
entendre that rely on popular sayings and verbal wit also inform his
conception of erotic pleasure. This is very evident in his larger engrav-
ings of a satyr mason and of an old lecher with a rebus below, two
prints that, due to their size, could not have initially belonged to what
contemporaries came to call the Lascivie series.2

source: notes in the history of art. winter 2017. © 2017 by bard graduate
center. all rights reserved. 0737-4453/2017/3602-0004 $10.00
Correction: This article was corrected and reposted on July 7, 2017. In the original article,
captions for figures 3 and 4 were transposed. An erratum will appear in the next issue.

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 Wordplay, vernacular tales, and a parodic attitude toward antiquity
all elucidate one of the most obscene images in the Lascivie, the mock-
ery of The Toilette of Venus (fig. 1). A putto and a child satyr are, respec-
tively, fixated on the toenails and genitals of a seated, naked woman,
far from the usual attentions paid to Venus’s beautification. When the
brother, Annibale Carracci, painted Venus Adorned by the Graces around
1593–95, one of the putti carefully untied her golden sandal and a bluish-
white sheet covered her lower body (fig. 2).3 The goddess’s luxurious
court was located in a garden of love, marked by a Bacchic fountain
and lush foliage, whereas Agostino placed his figures against a craggy,
desolate backdrop. Actions and setting turn expectations upside down,
irreverently converting Venus into an anonymous nymph and her atten-
dants into mundane or impious creatures.
If Neoplatonism was of any interest at all to Agostino and his view-
ers, here is the third type of Venus in that philosophical scheme, at-
tractive to anyone who neglects contemplation and desires “pro-
creation beyond measure with women, or against the order of nature
with men, or prefers the form of the body to the beauty of the soul,”
as Marsilio Ficino put it.4 Such a man, according to Ficino, “certainly
abuses the dignity of love,” because he focuses only on what the Neo-
platonist Giovanni Pico della Mirandola called bestial rather than ce-
lestial or human love.5
In more popular, long-running terms, this is the licentious and first
Venus described by Boccaccio, in keeping with medieval mythogra-
phers, as the deity who oversees passion within marriage but “equally
fornication of every kind and wantonness and a multitude of coition.”6
Boccaccio’s second Venus was just as lustful: “in everything relating to
pleasure and lust she is one and the same as the preceding Venus.”7
This was the nude Venus, born of the sea, who adorned the exterior
of the brothel Filarete included in his mid-fifteenth-century ideal city.
By means of an inscription, she touted for customers, calling out: “All
you, old and young, rich and poor, who have an instrument like that of
Priapus, come visit our convent where you will be well treated by us.”8
Fiction and Friction 89

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 Fig. 1. Agostino Carracci (1507–1602), A Nymph Receiving a Pedicure from a
Putto while a Satyrino Fingers Her Genitals (B.132), ca. 1587–89. Engraving;
153 mm  107 mm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.

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 Fig. 2. Annibale Carracci (1560–1609), Venus Adorned by the Graces, ca. 1590–
95. Oil on panel transferred to canvas; 133 cm  170.5 cm. Washington, DC,
National Gallery of Art.

Agostino’s female figure is akin to the bestial Venus, inhabitant of

brothels. The artist’s impudence extends to the level of visual citation,
for the posture of his lady with finely coiffed hair recalls drunken, ag-
ing Pan, in that her raised leg supported on the back of a child atten-
dant is derived from the left flank of a well-known ancient sarcophagus
that, until the time of Sixtus V (1585–90), was on display in S. Maria
Maggiore, Rome (fig. 3).9 Representing the triumphal procession of Bac-
chus and Ariadne on its front, the sarcophagus’s side panels show fren-
zied excess, and these sparked Agostino’s interest. He either knew the
carved reliefs through some of the numerous drawings of them pro-
duced in the sixteenth century, or he saw the sarcophagus directly dur-
ing a brief trip to Rome in 1581.10 The Flagellation of Pan on the right
side, in which the piggybacked deity of the rustic wilds is being beaten
Fiction and Friction 91

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 Fig. 3. Roman, Pan Carried by a Faun and Two Amorini, 2nd century CE. Carrara
marble; 48.7 cm  62.5 cm. London, British Museum.

near a tree, became Venus Chastising Cupid in the Lascivie set. From the
other side panel, Carracci cheekily transformed a Roman amorino into
a satyr, his arm on our left similarly raised over his head, his back sup-
porting the adult leg at the bent knee.
Venus, or perhaps generic nymph, Agostino’s female character is
the subject of lust rather than admiration. The small but ithyphallic
satyr may prop up her leg, wittily acting like a male caryatid, but his
servile act enables him to simultaneously explore her vagina with his
left index finger. His companion files the nails of her raised right foot,
ostensibly playing his part as though appearing in the standard scene of
a woman’s toilette. The reference to foot fetishism and the very direct-
ness of the young satyr’s digital penetration might lead to the assump-
tion that there is no further meaning or other connotations here be-
yond straightforward indecency. However, the actions of each male
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 figure slyly refer to familiar vernacular tales and phrases about sexual
activity.
The satyrino’s act reminds viewers of one of Poggio Bracciolini’s
most infamous, popular facetiae or joking tales, first printed in 1470.
Using the humanist Francesco Filelfo as the butt of the joke, Poggio
told an anecdote about the jealous husband dreaming of a demon who
promised him a way to keep his wife forever faithful. The demon gave
him a ring that was to be kept diligently on his finger and would thereby
ensure that she never engaged in adultery without his knowledge. The
punch line is that, upon waking, Filelfo discovered his finger “in uxoris
cunno,” in his wife’s cunt, the very situation of Carracci’s satyrino.11 An
international audience would have quickly comprehended the visual
joke too, for the story spread across linguistic borders, usually known af-
ter Rabelais’s telling of the tale of the “ring of Hans Carvel.”12 Around
1521, the poet Ariosto retold it in his Satires, and there the beringed hus-
band was one Galasso, a painter.13 Ariosto used the story to illustrate his
satire against idealized marriage, a point certainly made in Carracci’s en-
graving, for illicit, nonreproductive copulation is the satyrino’s sole in-
terest. His action and his animal form suit Ficino’s description of undig-
nified, carnal lust.
The Florentine philosopher drew a distinction between homoerotic
abstraction (exercised when “celestial” Venus, representing Angelic
Mind, was contemplated by master and male pupil), licit love between
two people for reproductive purposes, and sodomitical physicality (ex-
emplified in the abuse of love). In actuality, Plato’s Symposium pre-
sented only two Venuses, with same-sex love between men and late
adolescent youths allowable under the rubric of Heavenly Aphrodite,
while love between men and women belonged to the common form of
Aphrodite Pandemos.14 The necessarily Christian synthesis of the Neo-
platonists resulted in a new, third category of excessive and “unnatural”
sex that relied on conventional, widespread notions of sexual sin.
Other interpretations of Venus also kept alive the possibility that
she personified lust. In his Mythologiae, first printed in Venice in 1567,
Fiction and Friction 93

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 Natale Conti stated that, in actual rather than allegorical terms, Venus
and Cupid entailed “desires and raw passions,” merely representing
the “repulsive and disgusting name of lust and people acting as crazy
and as wild as animals.”15 In particular, sodomy was widely considered
bestial and literally included sex with animals, a type implied by Car-
racci’s depiction of cross-species sexual feats. Nonprocreative and lust-
ful, the animalistic and aroused satyrino blatantly represents the broader
cultural understanding of sodomy, yet in an amusingly ineffectual
manner.
While fingers are the focus to one side of the engraving, at the op-
posite extreme, it is nails. But both manual tasks are about touch and,
implicitly, a rhythmical friction, the very core of sexual action. What
was later Ficino’s celestial Venus born of the sea and of no mother was
Boccaccio’s second Venus, who was intimately associated with sexual
friction. According to the earlier writer, this Aphrodite was partheno-
genetically generated from the genitals of castrated Saturn [sic] that
produced foam (aphros) when semen mixed with the surging sea, a no-
tion present in Aristotle’s influential discussion of reproduction and
painted by Botticelli. Boccaccio observed that “as foam rises from
the motion of waters, it also comes from the friction in coitus.”16 In-
fluential compendia by later mythographers, such as Lilio Gregorio
Girlandi (first printed in 1548), Vincenzo Cartari (first printed in
1556), and Conti, continued to emphasize her birth from foam.17 Fric-
tion and fluids were the two main components of sexual pleasure ac-
cording to both medical authorities and vernacular beliefs.18
While the ithyphallic satyr performs genital contact overtly, the
charming putto to the left does so on a metaphorical level. Each is su-
perficially engaged in tasks of hygiene, filing nails and “cleaning” fe-
male genitals by way of repetitive motions back and forth.19 In the case
of the pedicurist, the joke is that he acts out a saying that is documented
in obscene works by or attributed to Aretino, referred to in Agostino’s
rebus beneath the scene of an aged lecher accosting a woman.20 A sex-
ual itch had to be scratched. Having done so, one removes the nails
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 from the thighs, “le unghie dalle cosce” as Aretino’s saying went.
The “scratching” of the toenails is equivalent to satiating a sexual urge.
Furthermore, in Italian, a woman’s genitals were likened to a grater,
grattugia, and the related verb grattare meant to scratch.21 While the
nymph/Venus is having her nails filed, the satyrino is having his penile
finger grated.
Carracci is also parodying a motif of Tintoretto’s, whose work he
clearly knew, because he produced reproductive engravings after the
artist’s paintings during both of his visits to Venice (in 1582 and
1587). In fact, the two were friends, so much so that Tintoretto report-
edly stood godfather to Agostino’s illegitimate son Antonio when he
was born in Venice.22 The painter several times treated the story of
Susannah and the Elders, and in what is thought to be his first venture,
a canvas now in the Louvre that was painted around 1550, Susannah
is accompanied by two attendants, one of whom clips her toenails
(fig. 4).23 The naked, virtuous exemplar of chastity looks out at the
painting’s viewers, challenging them to consider their potential com-
plicity with the Elders, who appear in the far reaches of the secluded
garden (a move adopted in Carracci’s engraving of Susannah for the
Lascivie series too in that her gesture and open body, although not
her gaze, are addressed to viewers). A mundane act of toilette is trans-
formed by Carracci’s wit into a sexual pun, all the more amusing for its
contrast with Susannah’s virtue.
Carracci’s Lascivie prints were much sought after and generated var-
iants or additions into the late eighteenth century. An important rea-
son for their success was the tone of open-ended, erotic liberation and
self-aware humor, in this case due to the parody of Venus’s toilette and
of her supposed personification of abstract purity. The release from
somber admiration of all things ancient fostered the loosening of other
cultural and moral restrictions. Irreverence toward the idealized imag-
ery of antiquity had surfaced before, in the woodcut that pictured the
Laocoön as a struggle among apes, credited to Titian’s design, for in-
stance.24 Close to the time of Carracci’s print, in the 1580s, Ambrogio
Fiction and Friction 95

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 Fig. 4. Jacopo Tintoretto (1518–94), Susanna and the Elders, ca. 1550. Oil on
canvas; 167 cm  238 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre. Photograph: Art Resource.

Brambilla released an engraving of eight grotesque heads of ancient

characters, caricaturing the supposedly eternally beauteous Narcissus,
Venus, Adonis, Apollo, Juno, Jove, Diana, and Ganymede.25 Agostino
Carracci combined the notorious sexual laxity of the ancient gods—
which had already justified series of erotic prints by Gian Giacomo
Caraglio (c. 1527) and Giulio Bonasone (c. 1545)—with the innovative
playfulness and daring cheek that had been somewhat evident in Are-
tino’s erotic sonnets written around 1527 to accompany the set of I Modi
prints. But Carracci’s wit is both visual and subtle, paying homage to
the classical tradition while at the same time engaging in productive,
intertextual rivalry with previous works of art, ancient and modern.
Dignified classicism, ponderous philosophy, and learned mythography
are overturned by vernacular word play and inventive, wry, and even
parodic licentiousness.
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 NO TE S

1. On the Lascivie, see especially Diane DeGrazia Bohlin, Prints and Related
Drawings by the Carracci Family: A Catalogue Raisonné (Washington, DC: Na-
tional Gallery of Art, 1979), 289–305, nos. 176–90 (with earlier bibliogra-
phy); Babette Bohn, The Illustrated Bartsch 39 Commentary Part 1 (Le Peintre-
Graveur 18 [Part 1]), Italian Masters of the Sixteenth Century: Agostino Carracci
(New York: Abaris, 1995), 242–44, 310–44; Michael Bury, The Print in Italy
1550–1620 (London: British Museum Press, 2001), 196–98, nos. 137–140;
Lionel Dax and Augustin de Butler, Augustin Carrache: Les Lascives (Paris:
Les Éditions de l’Amateur, 2003); Marzia Faietti, “. . . carte belle, più che
oneste . . . ,” in Mythologica et Erotica. Arte e Cultura dall’antichità al XVIII
secolo, ed. Ornella Casazza and Riccardo Gennaioli (Livorno, Italy: Sillabe,
2005), 98–103, and entries on two prints, 185–86, 236, nos. 62, 114.
2. Patricia Simons, “Agostino Carracci’s Wit in Two Lascivious Prints,” Studies
in Iconography 30 (2009), 198–221.
3. In the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (1961.9.9); Diane De Grazia
et al., Italian Paintings of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. The Collec-
tions of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue (Washington, DC: Na-
tional Gallery of Art, 1996), 49–54.
4. Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love, trans. Sears
Jayne, 2nd rev. ed. (Dallas, TX: Spring, 1985), 54 (2:7).
5. Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, enlarged ed. (London: Pere-
grine, 1967), 139.
6. Giovanni Boccaccio, Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, vol. I, Books I–V, ed. and
trans. Jon Solomon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 383
(3.22).
7. Boccaccio, Genealogy, 399 (3.23).
8. Filarete. Treatise on Architecture. trans. John R. Spencer (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1965), 253–54.
9. Phyllis Pray Bober and Ruth Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique
Sculpture, 2nd ed. (London: Miller, 2010), 128–31, no. 83 and fig. 83ii (Brit-
ish Museum 1805, 0703.126).
10. For drawings, see Bober and Rubinstein, 130; on a possible trip to Rome in
1581, DeGrazia Bohlin, 138–39.
11. Poggio Bracciolini, Facezie, ed. Marcello Ciccuto (Milan: BUR, 1983), 260,
no. 133.

Fiction and Friction 97

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 12. Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth,
UK: Penguin, 1955), 368 (3.28); Gordon Williams, A Dictionary of Sexual
Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature (London:
Athlone, 1994), vol. 3, 1159–60.
13. The Satires of Ludovico Ariosto: A Renaissance Autobiography, trans. Peter
DeSa Wiggins (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976), 141.
14. Plato, Symposium, trans. W. R. M. Lamb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1925), 108–11 (180D–181E).
15. Natale Conti’s ‘Mythologiae’, trans. John Mulryan and Steven Brown (Tempe,
AZ: ACMRS, 2006), vol. I, 314 (4:13).
16. Boccaccio, Genealogy, 401 (3.23), “confricatione venitur in coitum.”
17. Lilio Gregorio Giraldi, De deis gentium varia & multiplex historia (Basle,
1548), 531–32; Vincenzo Cartari’s ‘Images of the Gods of the Ancients.’ The First
Italian Mythography, trans. John Mulryan (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2012), 406;
Natale Conti’s ‘Mythologiae’, 314, 325, 326 (4:13).
18. Patricia Simons, The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 34–36 passim, 170, 193–94,
220, 227, 243, 260, 275, and passim.
19. For sexual “cleaning” by implements such as phallic plungers, lead lines,
and brushes, see Simons, “Agostino Carracci’s Wit,” 203–04; Simons, Sex of
Men, 19, 220, 227–29, 267, 288.
20. Pietro Aretino, Ragionamento: Dialogo, ed. Paolo Procaccioli (Milan:
Garzanti, 1984), 32, repeated in Il Piacevol Ragionamento de l’Aretino. Dialogo
di Giulia e di Madalena, ed. Claudio Galderisi (Rome: Salerno, 1987), 62;
Simons, “Agostino Carracci’s Wit,” 212.
21. Aretino, Ragionamento, 40, 376; Antonio Vignali, La cazzaria, ed. Pasquale
Stoppelli (Rome: Edizioni dell’Elefante, 1984), 54; Simons, Sex of Men, 277.
22. Giovan Pietro Bellori, Le vite de’ pittori, Scultori e architetti moderni, ed.
Evelina Borea (Turin: Einaudi, 1976), 121; Roberto Zapperi, “I ritratti di
Antonio Carracci,” Paragone 38, no. 449 (July 1987): 3–5.
23. Rodolfo Pallucchini and Paolo Rossi, Tintoretto: Le opere sacre e profane
(Milan: Electa, 1982), vol. 1, 160–61, no. 144, and vol. 2, pl. 191. Susannah’s
pose, in reverse and without the pedicure, appears in the background of
The Finding of Moses in Dresden: pl. 266.
24. David Rosand and Michelangelo Muraro, Titian and the Venetian Woodcut
(Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1976), 188–90, no. 40.
25. Arcimboldo: Artista Milanese tra Leonardo e Caravaggio, ed. Sylvia Ferino-
Pagden (Milan: Skira, 2011), 229.

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