How Renaissance Artists Brought
Pornography to the Masses
Jacqui Palumbo
Enea Vico, Venus and Mars Embracing as Vulcan Works at His Forge, 1543. Courtesy of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Almost immediately after the introduction of any major technological advancement, humans
inevitably end up employing it for porn. “Sometimes the erotic has been a force driving
technological innovation,” John Tierney penned in 1994, the early days of the World Wide Web,
but “virtually always, from Stone Age sculpture to computer bulletin boards, it has been one of
the first uses for a new medium.”
Agostino Caracci, Alcibiades and Glycera, from “I modi,” 16th century. Image via Wikimedia
Commons.
Agostino Caracci, Hercules and Deianira, from “I modi,” 16th century. Image via Wikimedia
Commons.
Today, pornography is democratized. No longer confined to the pages of magazines, the internet
has allowed anyone the means to upload their amateur videos to Pornhub or use Instagram as a
marketing tool to tease their bits. Pornography is also crowdfunded. Instagram models lead you
to Patreon pages or cam streams, where—for a low monthly subscription fee, or the occasional
generous gift—there’s a glimmer of hope that the viewer could get to know them.
In the West, the first step in bringing pornography to the broader public came unexpectedly, with
the invention of Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press in 1440. The German publisher created the
machine to share books—most notably, the vernacular Gutenberg Bible—with the masses. Soon,
it was able to disseminate engraved images, too. Gutenberg’s press effectively opened the door
for a flow of new images and ideas around Europe.
Soon enough, explicit artworks were made readily accessible, and producing them became a
public offense. “It was the transition from the highest rungs of society to a broader public that
was the cause for concern among the private elite circles of humanists as well as Church clerics,”
Andrea Herrera writes in The Renaissance Nude (2018), a catalogue accompanying a 2018–19
exhibition of the same name.
Around the same time as the print revolution, artists revived the nude in painting as a callback to
antiquity and as a way to humanize lofty saints. Prestigious and expensive painting commissions
for explicit female nudes flourished in Europe during the Renaissance. Famous artists like
Raphael and Botticelli created illicit works meant only for the eyes of elite men.
Marco Dente, Pan spying on the nymph Syrinx who is seated on a rock, combing her hair, ca.
1516–20. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Beyond erotic pleasure, such artworks had intellectual conceits. It became a performance for the
upper echelon to view provocative, masterfully painted or sculpted nudes. “This ability to admire
the skill behind the artwork rather than give in to bodily desire demonstrated the virtue of the
viewer,” write Stephen J. Campbell, Jill Burke, and Thomas Kren in the introduction to The
Renaissance Nude.
Artists also looked to ancient texts like the Ovidian love stories, which were revived by the
printing press and circulated around Europe, for sensual subjects. The Greeks and Romans had
imagined their gods as sexual beings, and it became in vogue to do so again in the Renaissance.
Anonymous, Erotic Series with Couples in Bed, ca. 1750–1800. Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum.
Above all, female nudes were popular for their versatility: They “had a broad range of
associations, from the sins of lust and pride to love, marriage, fertility, and a range of virtues,”
writes Diane Wolfthal in The Renaissance Nude. The Valois courts of France and Burgundy had
appetites for lusty figures, while in Italy and Northern Europe, painters depicted biblical ladies
like Eve, Delilah, and Judith as temptresses and the cause of man’s downfall.
Even though Catholic Church clerics commissioned erotic works for their own pleasure, they
considered sex and nudity taboo in the dangerously shareable format of a print. When
provocative illustrations began to circulate widely, the Church stepped in.
Thomas Rowlandson, Modern Pygmalion. Image via Wikimedia Commons.
Raphael’s pupil Giulio Romano was known for outfitting the private rooms of the elite with
titillating frescoes, including at Duke Federico II Gonzaga’s Palazzo Te in Mantua and the papal
residences in the Vatican. Romano’s frescoes for the Vatican are credited as the inspiration
behind the first mass-produced pornographic work. In 1524, Raphael’s master engraver
Marcantonio Raimondi infamously copied Romano’s frescoes—which depicted 16 couples in
different sex positions—and published it under the name I Modi, or “The Ways.” Marcantonio
was temporarily imprisoned for his work on the project, and Pope Clement VII ordered the
copies to be destroyed. (A few remaining fragments can be seen today at the British Museum in
London.)
The initiative backfired, and the Catholic Church became an early victim of the internet’s
Streisand effect—when you try to censor something but wind up promoting it. Despite the
Pope’s best efforts, I Modi continued to circulate. It even inspired a collection of lewd sonnets by
poet Pietro Aretino, who released a second edition of I Modi with Marcantonio in 1527. In the
introduction, Aretino offers an invitation to the reader: “Come view this you who like to fuck.”
Erotic art and text often went hand in hand, but it took more than a century for the racy Libertine
attitude that emerged in Enlightenment-era France to manifest in literature. One of the earliest
and most popular pornographic books to be published was The School of Venus in 1680. The
bawdy, illustrated sex manual became so notorious and sought-after that it was also translated to
English. This seductive period in history is perhaps best embodied by the Marquis de Sade, who
mixed cruelty and pleasure in his life and shocking prose. Despite the proliferation of erotic
literature and imagery, when the first monthly porn journal, The Pearl, circulated around prudish
Victorian England in 1879, it was shuttered for its obscenity after only a year.
Until the advent of photography in the mid–19th century, prints reigned as the easiest medium to
disseminate nudes. In 1839, French painter and printmaker Louis Daguerre introduced his
miraculous invention: a copper sheet plated with silver that could be placed in a wooden box
with a lens and come out bearing the exact likeness of the scene in front of it. Just two years
later, William Henry Fox Talbot presented the calotype—photographic images that could be
reproduced hundreds of times.
As early as 1845, men were asking women to take their clothes off for the camera. A black
market of suggestive and explicit photographs cropped up among Parisian art dealers, evading
the French government’s registry or seizure. The modern era of pornography finally began to
take shape—in black-and-white tableaus of bosoms and bare fannies.
