The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- Renaissance Smut -- (Chap. IV, Pt. 4)

With or without Romano's blessing, Rome's top engraver then copied the copulating couples and started circulating prints of the Sixteen Positions in 1524 among gentlemen in the know.

What happened then isn't entirely clear.

Aretino had good relations with the Pope—he'd been gifted a pension for praising him in verse—and some say the poet persuaded Clement VII to show the offending artists clemency.

Unfortunately, the pontiff soon found out that Aretino had been in on the game all along—he'd even composed verses for each Position.

The Pope ordered the prints destroyed and all three men arrested, but Aretino went on the lam.

That's how he wound up in Venice, where the authorities were only too happy to thumb their noses at Rome.

Thanks to his ceaseless self promotion, the poet also managed to rebrand Romano's artworks as his own, making them known to posterity as Aretino's Positions.

In a twist that provides some solace to us scribes, it's actually the low-tech portion of the package that's survived down the centuries.

A French take on Aretino's Positions
(Paul Avril, 1892)

The Vatican destroyed all of Romano's original images—except for a few scraps secreted in libraries—so there's no way of knowing exactly what each Position involved.

However, countless artists have hazarded a guess, based on Aretino's gleefully explicit dialogues:

'In the end, a small cock is unseemly if decorum is to be observed in the pussy,' observes the woman in Sonnet Three.

To which her lover replies:

Whoever has a tiny cock and sticks it in a pussy
Deserves an ice-water enema.
Whoever doesn't have much can screw ass day and night,
But those of us who've got it merciless and proud
Always satisfy their desires in the pussy. 

'It is true,' the woman concludes, 'But we are so greedy for dick that we want a spire in front and behind.'

Clearly, an appreciation of small penises was one thing the Renaissance didn't inherit from the ancients.

The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- Pig Ignorant Anatomy -- (Chap. IV, Pt. 2)

Of course, for women born with all their bits in the right place, this particular 'discovery' must have been an anticlimax.

But you can hardly blame Renaissance men for wanting to find a magic button that could turn women on at will—or, as the Columbus of the Nether Regions put it (no doubt with a pervy chuckle), 'even if they don't want it.'

After the official prudishness of the Middle Ages, the clitoral dispute reflected a rediscovery of the human body and the Roman maxim that 'nothing human is alien.'

Up until the Renaissance, even the most learned doctors were literally pig-ignorant about the basics of the human body. Textbooks were based on Galen's anatomies. Problem was, the Romans had banned human dissection, so he'd had to extrapolate from pigs and other animals.

It was Columbus' university mentor, Andreas Vesalius, who pioneered the use of cadavers to correct Galen's mistakes, making him the founder of modern anatomy—and a kindred spirit of artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, whose fascination with the body compelled them to dissect human corpses themselves.

Remarkably, it was only then that men began to realize the fair sex was profoundly different physiologically; previously, most great thinkers believed that women were merely males 'turned outside in.'

Columbus' reference to women's 'semen' was probably what's now called 'female ejaculate,' though in reality he was referring to the ancient theory that both men and women produced a kind of sperm that magically commingled to make babies.

Another theory as old as Aristotle was that of telegony, the idea that a woman's first pregnancy altered her womb so much that all her future offspring would resemble the father of her first child—even if they had different dads.

(Then again, Aristotle thought that men with small penises were more fertile—and more aesthetically attractive. So what did he know?)