How in the Sistine Chapel other cases of strange censorship in the history of art were painted over with shame

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Censorship is sometimes unpredictable. For example, Facebook has been seen more than once in censorship scandals … of nude antique sculptures, once during an advertising campaign for an international exhibition of statues. And on Iranian television, athletes are smeared during competitions in rhythmic and artistic gymnastics (which is puzzling - after all, then there is no point in following the competition). The history of censorship is impossible to grasp, but it has its own significant events.

There is a command: hide behind

In Novosibirsk, in one of the universities in 2018, students suddenly found all the antique statues placed along the corridors draped in impenetrable bedspreads. So the university prepared for the visit of representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church. Whether this was a university or priesthood initiative is not entirely clear. As a matter of fact, representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church did not come with an inspection of the morality of the interior, but within the framework of the forum on the accessibility of the urban environment for the disabled, and were not the only participants in this forum.

The statues were also covered during the visit of Iranian President Rouhani to Italy in 2016. Only the statues of the goddesses were urgently dressed, which as a result led to a small scandal: after trying to act in front of the statue of Marcus Aurelius, Rouhani said that this was impossible because of her shame. No, Marcus Aurelius was generally covered by a tunic, but he was riding on a horse, and the horse had everything that a horse is supposed to be able to distinguish from a mare. The horse had to be urgently censored from Rouhani's visit - the president was removed against a different background.

In the same year, St. Petersburg suffered a scandal over a copy of the famous statue of David. A certain pensioner demanded to wear the statue, because it stands near a Lutheran church and school, and "a man without pants in the center of St. Petersburg spoils the historical view of the city and disfigures children's souls." A competition for the best costume for David was announced in the city, and local artists solved the problem quickly and brightly: they attached a cap on David's genitals with paper tape.

Not only statues were worn in the history of censorship. A number of contemporaries called the famous painting of the Sistine Chapel suitable only for a bath, and after the scandal out of harm's way, several figures were sketched with sheets, twigs and clouds.

Even the foremost artists of the nineteenth and twentieth century sometimes had to be led by the censorship. It is known that Matisse painted the diptych “Dance” and “Music” for the Russian customer Shchukin. In "Music" one of those depicted is a boy flutist. His genitals were depicted schematically, but Shchukin still found such a picture indecent for the house. At his insistence, Matisse hid the shame with a layer of paint, but so that it could be removed if desired - which has already been done in our time.

Fig leaves

In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance of naked people, they painted quite freely, if the plot required (or justified) it. True, there was such a problem that it was not always possible to find a woman model everywhere - this profession was considered immodest even among courtesans. As a result, it was possible to see images of women for whom men were clearly posing - only their hair and breasts were then completed by women.

The fight against nudity stemmed from the spread of Protestantism, which, among other things, accused the Catholic Church of conniving at the corruption of the flock by approving of drawings of naked people. A lot of Adams and Evas were urgently painted over in strategic places with fig leaves. Why them? Because, according to legend, knowing sin and being ashamed, the first people dressed with these very leaves.

In the Vatican, a large campaign began to cover the shame on the statues. Plaster leaves were sculpted over the marble genitals. One of the dads, named Innocent, did not like the fact that the leaves were very hinting at the same time, and he ordered, according to legend, to beat off all the statues of the genitals and stick fig leaves on the resulting smooth place. There is a legend that somewhere in the bowels of the Vatican there is still a box with dozens (or hundreds) of marble penises and scrotums, and art critics sometimes delve into it, trying to find the missing part of this or that statue.

Nineteenth-century Russian sculptors also covered shame with fig leaves, making copies of famous antique statues or sculptures of the Renaissance - this was demanded by the customers. The loudest case of using a leaf in Russia is associated with our time and the statue of Apollo at the Bolshoi Theater. After the restoration, the causal place for the god of the arts was covered with a golden leaf. In general, it seems strange to censor most statues in the antique spirit (and even more so, in fact, antique ones), since they are already coming out of the sculptor's hands heavily censored: tradition requires that male genitalia be presented not as naturalistic, but modestly reduced and with a timid bush exclusively at the base of the penis. However, the bronze leaf hid the beauty of Apollo, like protection for a rugby player at the time of creation and disappeared only after the revolution.

Incidentally, the same type of artistic censorship includes the painting tradition of the nineteenth century, according to which every naked body was depicted as having no hair. Hair was considered too powerful an erotic factor, so powerful that a man had to properly wrap his neck so that not a single hair from his chest would break through. To reduce the erotic intensity, deities, biblical and mythological characters were depicted as smooth as babies - and this despite the fact that there was no fashion for total hair removal in Europe yet.

Movies, cartoons and social media

Fought for morality and Hollywood. For example, for a long time in films it was considered unacceptable to depict a human navel - that is why gladiators in old American ribbons wear something like underpants pulled under their arms. From the same prohibition, the custom went to stick a rhinestone on the navel among burlesque and belly dancers - this is how dancers did in the cinema.

A long-standing topic of jokes is bed talk in the movies. The blanket looks like it has an L-shaped shape: it invariably covers the hero up to the waist, and the heroine lying next to her - with her breasts. Nowadays, it has become impossible to see a man in too small swimming trunks in a mainstream movie - men's hips should be properly closed. They are now declared an erotic object almost to the knee. But the stomach can be opened up to the pubis.

Many social networks have banned the image of the female nipple. This made it impossible to upload many masterpieces of painting and sculpture, as well as a number of ethnographic photos and videos or historical reconstructions. The ban gave rise to a joke: if, they say, you take a man's nipple and stick it on a photo instead of a woman’s, then the photo does not break the ban, although it looks exactly the same. In response to attempts to implement the joke, social networks introduced a new ban on anything that looks like a female nipple. But even this has its own joke from the feminist Daria Goloshchapova: an image consisting of text describing the details of the female breast. The words are arranged and colored so that the whole bunch of inscriptions together resembles a woman's nipple.

The strangest censorship is in Japan. By law, the genitals must be covered with black lines or the like (for example, hidden by pixelation). The creators of cartoons and comics in the hentai genre bypass such censorship simply: they draw lines so microscopic that they do not hide anything, and they make pixelation so small that the image almost does not lose clarity.

In general, Japanese ideas about shameful things sometimes seriously shock Europeans. It's a shame not to shave your hands and receive compliments. Prohibitions that Japanese girls suffer from.