The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- Pierre Cardin: The New Master of the Marquis' Domain -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 3)

Ensconced in their Saturday-night best, the members of the mostly middle-aged audience watch it all stern-faced and stoically, taking their high culture like other people take medicine, convinced it must be good for them because it's been sanctioned from on high—in this case, literally: rumor has it that the new master of the Marquis' domain helicopters in from the capital.

Now well into his eighties, Cardin seems to have reached the stage in life where he doesn't care about keeping up appearances.

Naturally, he still sports his black glasses and navy-blue blazers, and his sneakers are Umbro this year rather than Nike, but what's left of his hair has been clipped short—not long and wavy—and he hasn't bothered shaving.

In other words, the fashion billionaire looks like an old man who's lived long enough to be at ease with himself, pushing a large belly in front of him like a wheelbarrow.

When I met him, Pierre Cardin looked more like this

than this:

In fact, Lena and I bumped into him yesterday without recognizing him, and I spoke with him earlier this evening at a soiree hosted by SCAD, the American art college.

On a garden terrace overlooking the Luberon valley, he admitted he'd never imagined owning the Marquis de Sade's castle—or Casanova's old haunt in Venice, for that matter.

'It's very funny that I live in Casanova's villa and the Marquis de Sade's,' he mused. 'I'm Italian, you know—'

—actually, I didn't—

'I'm Venetian, and I know Florence, and for me this area of France has the same atmosphere as Florence.'

After restoring the chateau's main tower, the new lord of Lacoste turned the adjoining quarry into a magnificent amphitheatre to host his month-long Festival de Lacoste.

'Last year I said to Pietra: "Why don't you imagine what happened to the Marquis de Sade when he was in the hospital with crazy people?"' he recalled, adding that he was more than happy with the result.

'It's extraordinary. Very fantastic—you'll enjoy it.'

Well, call me a philistine, but after the initial buzz of being in situ wears off, the only coherent theme I can discern from the overly long show is that crazy people are—wait for it—crazy. (If surprisingly sexy.)

By the end, the comely ensemble of three men and four women have stripped off to dance semi if not fully naked.

Who knew lunatics could be so hot?

The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- The Clit Writ Large -- (Chap. IV, Pt. 23)

Believe it or not, it wasn't until the nineteenth century that physicians finally managed to distinguish gonorrhea from syphilis, and neither disease was definitively cured until the discovery of antibiotics.

As for telegony, homunculi, and other misconceptions, scientists weren't able to prove that sperm-and-egg fusion caused fertilization until the late 1800s—and even then just in starfish.

It's only in the last half century or so that we've actually been able to witness the moment of human conception.

As for the clitoris, well, if this sounds familiar to women, I apologize: every time we men think we've found it, we end up losing it again.

The clit has been popping in and out of male consciousness ever since its rediscovery during the Renaissance.

Columbus' lyrical moniker was apparently too much of a mouthful, so an anatomist in nineteenth century Vienna circulated something catchier, based on a Greek word—kleitoriazein—meaning 'to titillate.'

FREUD VS. FEMINISM

Ironically, the man who did the most to bury the clitoris after that was another Viennese doctor who set himself up as an authority on sex.

Freud dismissed clitoral orgasms as immature and bordering on the perverse.

It wasn't until the feminist backlash of the 1960s that women began to reclaim their bits, so to speak, and now there's no getting away from them.

Amid a slew of neologisms ('clitmaster,' 'cliterature,' etcetera), the clit's writ large in modern culture, arguably bigger than ever before.

In fact, it's hard to imagine it ever being 'lost' again.

Then again, if history is anything to go by…

* * *

The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- Syphilis and Biology Gone Bad -- (Chap. IV, Pt. 22)

The surgeon to Pope Julius II (possibly the first syphilitic pontiff) worked out that mercury ointment helped, though he also advocated fumigation: encasing the victim in a box and lighting a fire underneath to vaporize the liquid metal—a 'cure' that could very well kill the patient.

Nevertheless, quicksilver soon became the treatment of choice, inspiring the pun that 'a night in the arms of Venus leads to a lifetime on Mercury'—even if you didn't have syphilis.

One of the most tragic mistakes in the history of medicine involved the misdiagnosis of gonorrhea as an early form of syphilis: doctors mistook the clap for the pox, ditching old treatments that worked on gonorrhea to switch to mercury, which didn't.

Gonorrhea rates skyrocketed, sterilizing women and blinding babies.

Meanwhile, mercury wasn't a sure-fire cure for syphilitics, either.

Manet, the painter of Olympia, was one of countless whoremongers who succumbed to syphilis over the centuries, along with the many wives who caught it from their partners and passed it on to their congenitally deformed children.

THE 'FACE' OF SYPHILIS

A truly epic disease, syphilis manifested itself across generations in three stages, starting with malevolent-looking sores that didn't bleed or hurt but were highly contagious, followed by an equally infectious rash weeks later, headaches, fever and hair loss.

After months and even years of latency, truly unfortunate victims would enter the final phase, typified by tumor-like lesions on the skin and bones, heart problems, seizures and dementia.

Oh, and their noses would collapse.

After all that, I'd be lying if I didn't admit that the conclusion of my trip is a bit of a letdown.

It's probably wrong of me, but I've been expecting to see life-sized examples of biology gone bad: in short, I want to see the 'face' of syphilis.

What I find are four small, apocalyptic tableaux by a Sicilian who lived in the late 1600s, roughly a century before the other waxworks in La Specola were created.

Judging from his surviving works—all of which are in this room—Gaetano Zumbo must have been more than a tad morbid.

The Plague, The Triumph of Time, The Corruption of the Body, and The French Disease are all miniature vignettes of suffering, featuring piles of gangrenous corpses, diseased men and women grieving over loved ones, and the odd baby trying to suckle at its dead mother's breast.

The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- The World's First Sex Plague (Chap. IV, Pt. 21)

Far more importantly, La Specola's collection taught generations of doctors how to save lives.

And it's awe-inspiring that such fragile artworks—made of wax!—have survived for more than 200 years.

One mannequin—known as 'The Doll'—can be taken apart layer by layer to reveal the embryo in utero.

In fact, the sequence showing the development of the embryo is one of the few mistakes in the whole collection: it was based on an ancient theory of baby-making—the idea that sperm contained an itty-bitty perfectly formed human being called a homunculus (or 'little man') that just needed incubation to grow into a baby.

But my main destination is the museum's last room.

Lest you think me a total goremonger, let me explain: one of the ironies of the Renaissance is that the rediscovery of the human body coincided with its ruination, courtesy of the world's first sex plague.

To me, syphilis is all the stranger because my ignorance of it is surpassed only by the devastation it caused.

The first 'venereal disease'—the morbus venereus, or 'sickness of Venus'—seems to have been similar to AIDS but arguably worse because it affected far more people at a time when medicine was still locked in the Middle Ages.

Doctors have been debating how syphilis got started pretty much since its discovery.

No one knows whether the vicious spirochetes were already lurking in the New World or Columbus and his crew introduced them during their raping and pillaging.

As the disease mutated into a decimator of men, though, people tended to name it after their enemies with amusing consistency.

As an early sexologist put it, civilization spread 'syphilization.'

The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- A Serial Killer's Delight -- (Chap. IV, Pt. 20)

Fortunately, La Specola turns out to be fascinating (though it would have to be dire before I'd concede defeat).

The museum got its start around 1770, when a professor commissioned the wax models to train obstetricians before they went digging around in women's privates with forceps.

Over the next century or so, its workshop produced precise, three-dimensional copies of bodies to make up for the dearth of cadavers and the difficulties of storing them.

THE HUNGRY CADAVER COLLECTOR

The Florentine modelers were artists as much as anatomists, working alongside dissectors to capture every vein, artery and muscular striation in translucent colors (pity their cadaver collector, who had to trawl the hospitals with a wicker basket, complaining that he often didn't have time to eat—presumably restaurateurs didn't rush to serve him).

By the end of the eighteenth century, their work had helped convince Enlightenment thinkers that men and women were different in every way, popularizing the idea of the 'opposite sex' that's culminated in the now-popular view of sexuality as the end all and be all of a person's identity.

From the ancient view of women being 'men turned outside in,' the pendulum of misperception began to swing the other way.

Whether it's the low fluorescent lighting, the glass-and-wood display cases, or the wax effigies themselves, everything about La Specola has an antiquated, yellowish tint.

The rooms contain case after case of flayed and disemboweled male and female bodies, as well as countless limbs and organs in various stages of dissection.

Many of the reclining waxworks have faces, with the men wearing powdered wigs and the women waist-length hair.

Obviously, I'm out a century or two, but their flowing locks and classical features remind me of the Venus of Urbino—or maybe Botticelli's Birth of Venus—

—only with their guts hanging out.

If this sounds gruesome, well, it is: La Specola would probably be a serial-killer's delight.

In a last stab at credibility, though, I should point out that La Specola supposedly inspired the skin-peeling effects in Paul Verhoeven's invisible-man movie, Hollow Man, and Jean-Paul Gaultier once hosted a fashion show here, inspiring a fashionista to deem the museum 'the most contemporary place I've been in for some time':

'The flayed wax figures really speak to our contemporary consciousness, our obsession looking into the body—whether we're talking about Damien Hirst or AIDS.'

Or talking out our collective, contemporary backside.

The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- 'Good Luck With the Syphilis!' -- (Chap. IV, Pt. 19)

The current best guess by academics is that the Duke of Urbino had his mother buy the painting to help stoke the passions of his fourteen-year-old bride.

And what makes Urbino's Venus truly erotic is her 'attitude' in the modern sense of the term.

Titian's Venetian mentor had also dared to depict Venus with her hand betwixt her legs.

But in that earlier work, the naked goddess appeared to be sleeping.

Giorgione's Venus

When Titian copied the pose, he painted his Venus with her eyes wide open, giving the viewer 'bedroom eyes.'

In Twain's own time, the painter Manet had shocked tout le monde by borrowing Titian's Venus and recasting her as Olympia: a courtesan lying naked in heels, staring dead-eyed at the spectator with her hand clamped firmly over her moneymaker.

Manet's Olympia

And from the Renaissance love goddess to the high-class French hooker, it's just a short slide down the culture curve to the lowbrow porn of today, when women masturbating into the camera are never more than a few clicks away.

Rather than buying a masterpiece, today's urban Urbinos can gift their partners a DVD starring a woman called Venus in She Squirts #4!

But what I've really come to see are the consequences of all this venereal veneration.

If Venice is Italy's tourist stop for the Age of Decadence, then Florence represents the 'respectable' Renaissance, with more art than space to display it.

In a café, Lena and I meet a nice American couple who've come over to visit their daughter during her semester abroad.

The three of them are dutifully huddled over their guidebooks, planning how to beat the queues at all the must-see museums, when they ask us where we're headed.

'He wants to see some sculptures of syphilis,' Lena tells them.

Cue three quizzical looks—four, if you count my treacherous companion.

I try to explain, but not very convincingly, since I don't know what to expect myself. Every time I've mentioned it to a Florentine or a foreigner, I get the same reaction: you want to go where?

From what I've read, La Specola—part of the Natural History Museum—houses the world's biggest collection of anatomical wax models, including teaching specimens for nasty Olde Worlde diseases like syphilis.

When Napoleon visited, he was so impressed he ordered a complete set of duplicates for doctors in Paris to save them the trouble of experimenting on criminals.

'Soooo—the syphilis! Good luck with that!' the mother says brightly, before shooting Lena a sympathetic look.

The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- Mark Twain and 'Titian's Beast' -- (Chap. IV, Pt. 18)

The morning after the masque, Lena and I take a boat to Venice's train-station-on-the-water to see the fallout from the Renaissance.

One of Titian's most famous works hangs in the Uffizi in Florence.

When Mark Twain saw 'Titian's beast' in 1879, he suffered a near total lapse of humor: 'There, against the wall, without obstructing rag or leaf, you may look your fill upon the foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses,' he fulminated.

'I saw a young girl stealing furtive glances at her; I saw young men gazing long and absorbedly at her; I saw aged infirm men hang upon her charms with a pathetic interest… Without any question it was painted for a bagnio'—or brothel—'and it was probably refused because it was a trifle too strong. '

Visiting the Venus of Urbino now, you wonder if you've got the right picture.

The lisping Englishman on my audioguide—he starts off describing 'the grotethqueth frethcoed on the theilings'—refers to it as just 'a nude woman.'

And not a particularly comely one at that: to be a modern sex goddess, she'd need to shift a few pounds from her waist to her breasts.

But this Venus dates from an arguably more female-friendly era, at least in that respect: most men were grateful just to see a woman naked.

For Twain, though, that wasn't the point. 'It isn't that she is naked and stretched out on a bed—no, it is the attitude of one of her arms and hand.'

The 'attitude' that offended him is the positioning of the woman's left arm so that it drapes over her waist, with her fingers curling provocatively in the cleft between her thighs.

Not only that, but the goddess' smooth mons veneris—her Venus' mount—is the painting's focal point.

The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- Machiavelli the Whoremonger (Chap. IV, Pt. 6)

During the Renaissance, the main role open to an ambitious woman was that of muse to a great man (assuming said man actually liked women).

The ultimate boys'-own age invented the chastity belt—known throughout Europe as a Venetian or Florentine Girdle—and also revived the ancient office of the courtesan.

These 'bad girls' made a very good living indeed, ranking far above common prostitutes—such as the clapped-out Tuscan hooker who horrified Machiavelli when the lights came up.

'Suddenly, I threw up all over her. And so having paid her with the exact coin that she deserved, I left.'

In contrast, famous courtesans such as 'Imperia' in Rome could afford to live in imperial splendor.

Manuela Arcuri in the Italian TV movie, Imperia

The novelist Matteo Bandello recounted an anecdote about the Spanish ambassador being so impressed by Imperia's chambers that, when he needed to spit, 'he turned to a servant and spit in his face. For this he apologized by saying to the servant, "I hope that you do not mind, but in this place your face is the most base thing."'

(Next time, Imperia told him, use the carpet.)

In another work, Bandello—who penned the source material for Romeo and Juliet—played on stereotypes about greedy Venetians by reporting that there was 'an infinite number of whores' in Venice.

'One notes there, however, a custom which has not yet been heard of elsewhere; namely that there are courtesans who will have five or six Venetian gentlemen for their lovers,' he wrote, noting that high-ticket prostitutes would organize their lovers in shifts and collect monthly retainers.

Even so, 'if some outsider arrives with a fat purse, she may accept him. But first she must tell the man to whom the night belongs that if he wishes to grind his grain he must do so during the day.'

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?)

The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- And Man (Re)Discovered Flesh -- (Chap. IV, Pt. 1)

Chapter Four 

AND MAN (RE)DISCOVERED FLESH 

Waving Hello! to the Flesh in Venereal Venice and Syphilitic Florence 

Let's make love, my beloved,
If you adore my cock,
I love your pussy,
And the world wouldn't be worth a fuck without this.

--The 'Divine' Pietro Aretino, c1527 

The Renaissance produced not one but two great explorers named Columbus: the first, a discoverer who spread syphilis; the other, an anatomist who 'discovered' the clitoris… and died shortly thereafter. 

The latter Colombo was a professor in his forties when he published his text On Things Anatomical in Venice in 1559, claiming to have found something that everyone in the history of medicine had somehow overlooked—the very 'seat of woman's delight:' 

'It should be called the love or sweetness of Venus,' declared Renaldus Columbus. 'If you rub it vigorously with a penis, or even touch it with a little finger, the pleasure causes women's semen to fly this way and that, swifter than air, even if they don't want it to.' 

Tragically, the cocksure prof died later that year—I blame the flying female semen—and his successor at the university promptly accused him of plagiarism.

The Columbus of the Nether Regions: 
Renaldus Columbus

Gabriel Fallopius claimed he'd already had a good look under the hood years earlier; ultimately, though, he had to make do with being immortalized for his less-sexy discovery of the egg tubes connecting the uterus with the ovaries. 

It took centuries before a Dane pointed out that, like Christopher Columbus' 'discovery' of the New World, both the Italian anatomists had got it wrong: the great guru of Western medicine had caught sight of the clitoris way back in the second century AD. 

Sadly for women, though, Galen had thought the clit simply protected the vagina. 

He'd even compared it to the thingamabob at the back of the throat—nearly eighteen centuries before a porn-flick doctor informed a would-be nymph that her clitoris was lodged deep in her Deep Throat.

Would you pierce your uvula?