The History of Sex: Geneva -- John Calvin's Old-Fashioned Remedy For Lust -- (Chap. V, Pt. 4)

Born the year before Luther's pilgrimage to Rome, Calvin is usually depicted as thin and sickly, with a long, drawn face, a needle nose and a pointy beard, as if he's half dead already but sticking it out just to make life miserable for the rest of us.

Notably, the first book in his extremely prolific career was a commentary on that old Stoic, Seneca (the one who warned against rushing 'headlong into copulation').

Having been run out of Paris because of his Protestant ties, Calvin found himself kicking around the Continent in 1536 when he made a fateful detour to Geneva, then an independent city-state divided by political and religious squabbling.

The city council had officially plumped for Protestantism, but it initially resisted Calvin's radicalism and soon expelled him. 

Calvin then migrated to Strasbourg, where he surprised some of his friends by falling in love—or as close to it as he could.

Having been schooled in Renaissance humanism, Calvin preached that beauty was a gift from God; consequently, it wasn't inherently 'wrong for men to regard beauty in their choice of wives;' equally, it wasn't 'wrong for women to look at men.'

But he also added a common-sense caveat: 'Those who excel in beauty are exposed to many dangers, for it is very difficult for others to restrain themselves from lustful desires.'

Calvin promoted marriage among his followers as a 'remedy' for lust—'Satan dazzles us… to imagine that we are polluted by intercourse'—while also telling husbands and wives that they should not 'withhold sex from each other.'

Personally, though, Calvin seems to have been inclined toward celibacy, having married mainly to practice what he preached.

'The only beauty that seduces me is of one who is chaste, not too fastidious, modest, thrifty, patient, and hopefully she will be attentive to my health,' Jean wrote to a friend.

After a few false starts (including a young woman with a large dowry—Calvin thought it would be 'crazy' to marry her just because of her wealth; she didn't even speak French), he settled on a widow who had two children of her own.

Not only did Idelette tick all the Calvinist boxes (pious, frugal, etc.), Jean's friends were surprised to find that she was 'actually pretty.'

Idelette de Bure, Calvin's wife,
on a Belgian stamp

The plague cut short their honeymoon, and all their children were stillborn or died young, but they seem to have genuinely loved each other.

When Idelette passed away, Calvin never remarried.

The History of Sex: Geneva -- Protesting Too Much?: From the 'Protestant Rome' to 'Le Petit Paris' -- (Chap. V, Pt. 1)

Chapter Five

PROTESTING TOO MUCH?

From the 'Protestant Rome' to 'Le Petit Paris' in Geneva 

'Twice a week is the woman's due.
Makes in a year twice fifty-two.' 

--ex-monk Martin Luther, the 'Father of the Reformation,' advising husbands on how to keep their wives happy, c1530 

At the same time that Renaissance men were turning Venice into the world's porn capital, a greater threat to Rome was gathering force on the far side of the Alps.

Whether it was Martin Luther getting hitched to a nun or Henry VIII getting rid of his wives, sex played a crucial role in the world-changing split between Catholics and Protestants.

Though mainly a spiritual movement, this other cultural 'Re-Birth' also focused on matters of the flesh: particularly the age-old debate about celibacy.

By establishing a rival 'City of God' on earth, the Reformation ended up revolutionizing sexual mores around the world, paving the way for gender equality and creating laws on marriage, divorce and sex crimes that survive to this day.

In 1510, a provincial German monk hiked 850 miles across the Alps during winter to make a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Rome.

Martin Luther soon returned disillusioned, not least because of the sexual hypocrisy he'd seen in the home of his Mother Church.

St. Peter's was on the verge of being rebuilt in the glorious incarnation we know today, financed partly by the proceeds from prostitution.

Sixtus IV, the man who commissioned the Sistine Chapel (hence its name), had also been the first Pope to tax prostitutes (and sanction the Spanish Inquisition).

And when that still wasn't enough, the Vatican stepped up its sale of indulgences, effectively doubling its money on whoremongers.

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 -- Hedging Bets on the Afterlife (Chap. IV, Pt. 7)

Aretino, too, drew on personal experience to write a send-up of the dialogues of Plato and the ancients.

In his satire, a prostitute teaches her daughter the tricks of the trade, including how to resell her virginity and fleece naïve lovers: 'I tell thee as a secret: that Man is most happy whom we most hate and disdain.'

Aretino tactfully set this dirt-dishing in Rome but wrote it while living in Venice, surrounded by at least a dozen girlfriends, mistresses and houseboys.

At the same time, he churned out pious guff, belying the modern view that his was a secular age: many Renaissance men opted to hedge their bets on the afterlife.

In a story that may be too good to be true, the dirty old man supposedly died laughing—at a filthy joke about his sister.

As far as I can work out, Aretino's truly great contribution to history was his championing of Titian among Europe's elite.

In return, the Venetian master painted him at least three times, on one occasion casting him as Pontius Pilate—apparently as a compliment, just as the bronze medallions stamped with Aretino's bust on one side and a penis-haired satyr on the other were meant to reflect the root of the word 'satire' rather than imply that he was a 'dickhead.'

'Besides the medallions stamped or cast in gold, bronze, copper, lead and plaster,' Aretino boasted, 'I have had a lifelike copy made of my portrait on the façade of palaces and had it stamped upon comb boxes, on the frames of mirrors and on majolica platters just like Caesar, Alexander and Scipio.'

* * * 

For all his knowledge of antiquity, you would think Aretino would have learned a thing or two about hubris.

Despite being the sixteenth-century equivalent of the most photographed man on the planet, Aretino is best remembered today, if at all, as a historical footnote, and then mainly for his porno-poetry.

One of Titian's portraits of Aretino

Most Venetians give you a blank look when you ask about him, and there's no marker on his former mansion to distinguish the decaying palazzo from all the others on the Grand Canal.

In fact, I'm standing on the Rialto Bridge, and I'm not even sure I'm looking at the right one.

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 -- An Early 'Joy of Sex' -- (Chap. IV, Pt. 5)

Like Aretino's language (which confirms something I've long suspected about aficionados of anal sex), what's most striking about the countless recreations of the Sixteen Positions is how modern they are: Romano and his imitators didn't gussy up the couples as gods and goddesses.

For that matter, the Vatican's God was completely out of the picture: whether it was man or woman on top (or an acrobatic variation on the theme), the couples were simply two people who were, in late-twentieth-century slang, getting it on (as well as off, up, in and out).

Another variation on Aretino's Postures or I Modi

As a matter of fact, the Positions look like an early Joy of Sex, complete with saucy jokes and a beardy bloke.

As someone who grew up in the latter's aftermath, I can attest to a time when kids used to sneak peeks at their parents' copies (or, um, friends' parents' copies) to try to work out the mechanics of intercourse.

Now, of course, anyone with a web connection can find a zillion ways of doing 'it' thanks to the miracle of IT.

But Aretino's Positions predated the discovery of Pompeii and appeared long before the likes of The Kama Sutra were widely circulated in the West.

Besides their obvious pornographic appeal, their collateral attraction was that they served as a de facto sex manual, popularizing Positions that most people hadn't the time or energy to come up with themselves.

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 -- Compromising Positions -- (Chap. IV, Pt. 3)

The fact that both Columbus and Fallopius published their 'discoveries' in Venice was no coincidence.

As a standalone rival to Rome and the center of the richest, most stable empire in Italy (if not the world), the city built on the water was an oasis for rebels and troublemakers during the Renaissance.

Alongside many legitimate advances in art and learning, this official tolerance inevitably bred bastard offspring. 

Whereas Venetian maestros like Titian and Tintoretto painted the first modern eroticized nudes—naked women stroking themselves and scenes of 'heroic rape'—lesser artists cranked out smut on their newfangled printing presses.

Glamorized violence:
The Rape of the Sabines
as reimagined during the Renaissance

By the sixteenth century, the Most Serene City, the nexus where East met West, had become the first mass-media porn capital and Europe's center of illicit sex.

Venice's reputation as a safe haven for hellions made it a natural home for Pietro Aretino.

Born the same year that Columbus stumbled into the Americas, Aretino was a satirist who made his fortune by mocking the great and not-so-good.

A suck-up par excellence, a hypocrite for hire and possibly the first modern journalist, 'the Divine Aretino' managed to transform himself into a sixteenth-century celebrity, styling himself the Scourge of Princes. One biographer sums him up as a 'man who lived on libel and blackmail and respected nothing but art.'

But even that was subject to negotiation.

COMPROMISING POSITIONS

When critics in the Vatican were lambasting Michelangelo for the nudity in his Last Judgment, Aretino sided with the philistines who demanded that the naked images in the Sistine Chapel be loinclothed.

Barely two decades earlier, the writer had had his own clash with papal authority in an incident that created erotica as we know it today.

The trouble seems to have begun with an act of Vatican graffiti by a protégé of the Renaissance master, Raphael.

One of the more colorful versions of the story claims that Giulio Romano was so miffed that the Pope was late in paying him that he decorated the Hall of Constantine—a celebration of Christianity conquering paganism—with sixteen scenes of fornicating couples.

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? 

The History of Sex: Pompeii -- Greeks vs. Romans (Chap. I, Pt. 6)

The Romans liked to blame prostitution—and homosexuality—on the Greeks, who had in fact created the first system of secular whorehouses in the sixth century BC (temple prostitution goes back to the Babylonians).

As with so many other Western institutions, though, historians reckon that large-scale organized prostitution began in Rome.

Whereas the Greeks had dreamt up a poetic euphemism to describe the better class of prostitute—hetaira (a 'companion' or 'lady friend')—the Romans had a strictly utilitarian term for hookers: meretrix—an 'earner' who made money from her body.

Likewise, prostitution was a necessity to keep men from destroying the cornerstone of Roman civilization: the family.

'Cato the Censor expressly advised young men to go to prostitutes so that they would not steal other men's wives,' Varone says.

And whereas adulterous women and their lovers could be killed on the spot, there was no penalty for husbands who whored around.

An expert on prostitution in ancient Rome, Professor Thomas McGinn, notes that hookers were required to register with local authorities—not for health checks, but to keep them quarantined from honorable women. It wasn't until the reign of Caligula in 40 AD that the state effectively legitimized prostitution by imposing a tax on it.

In his quest to remake the Empire in his own morally debased image, the emperor opened a brothel in the heart of Rome on the Palatine—supposedly the very hill where Romulus and Remus had been suckled by a lupa.

Estimates of the number of brothels in Pompeii range from just a handful to as many as 46, though small-scale prostitution was on offer all over: in the bordellos, the public baths and the kerbside 'cribs' used by streetwalkers—as evidenced by the boastful graffiti found in one inn:

FVTVI COPONVM HIC 

or 

I FUCKED THE HOSTESS HERE

The History of Sex: Pompeii -- 'Roman Society was Based on Rape' -- (Chap. I, Pt. 5)

'The notion of the obscene as we use the term today did not exist,' Dr. Varone says.

Phalluses were probably just signs of good luck, and many 'dirty' pictures—such as a pygmy orgy on the banks of the Nile—were meant to make people laugh (in this case, at the debauchees' deformities).

The Romans weren't so bothered about what you did as whom you did it with.

Most importantly, though, they made this laissez-faire approach to sex work by restricting sexual freedom to the elite.

Rome's citizens loved to swing, but most people weren't invited to the party—unless they were the party, that is: the majority of passive partners in sex scenes at Pompeii were slaves or prostitutes.

For freeborn Romans, sexual rules were all about penetration: to screw was good, but to get screwed was bad—that's what they did to the rest of the world, particularly the Greeks. 'Even oral sex to give pleasure to a woman was frowned upon because it wasn't dignified for a Roman citizen.'

'Roman society was based on rape,' Dr. Varone continues. 'For example, if I'm a master and you're my slave, and I want you to give me your ass—play the passive role—you have to. It's your duty. And I can do it whenever I want. If, during the course of your lifetime you're freed, and I ask you to give me your ass, it's a good idea if you do it.'

If the idea of rape as the basis for civilization sounds exaggerated, consider the founding legends of Rome.

The king of the Latins, Romulus (who'd been suckled as a child by a wolf-bitch, or lupa) invited the neighbouring tribe to a religious celebration.

In the middle of the feast, the Latins scared off the men and raped their women.

This forced interbreeding—the Rape of the Sabines—gave birth to the Romans, who viewed their ancestors' betrayal as a simple practicality due to a lack of women.

A couple of centuries later, another rape gave birth to the Republic.

The king's son violated a noblewoman, who then committed suicide.

The subsequent infighting over the dead woman's honor led to the collapse of the monarchy.

The Rape of Lucretia, as imagined by Titian during the Renaissance

For women, the Rape of Lucretia highlighted a Roman rule of female sexuality that persists to this day in Latin culture: women were destined to be either wives—matronae—or whores.

And once a Roman lost his or her honor, it might be avenged, but it could never be fully restored.

The History of Sex: Pompeii -- The Secret Cabinet of Obscenity -- (Chap. I, Pt. 4)

Embarrassed by the past, the kings of Naples did what came naturally: they locked away the more extreme evidence of rumpy-pumpy at Pompeii.

The 'Cabinet of Obscene Objects' in the museum of Naples was restricted to those 'of mature age and proven morality' who had to apply for a visitor's permit.

The 'Secret Cabinet' remained closed to the public until the cusp of the twenty-first century, when—in a sign of the times—it was permanently opened to the masses (excluding minors) in 2000 as a suite of tastefully decorated rooms.

For my own grand tour of sex history, I've returned to Pompeii to speak with the resident expert on erotica—and the so-called House of the Christian Inscription.

EROTICA EXPERT

When he's not out excavating, Dr. Antonio Varone works at what sounds like one of the most impressive addresses in the world of archeology: Via di Villa dei Misteri—Villa of Mysteries Way.

In reality, the archeologists' offices sit next to the tourists' entrance, in identikit blocks that look like trailers from World War Two.

Dr. Varone squeezes in behind the cramped desk in his office, taking a break from digging at the House of the Chaste Lovers, which tellingly gets its name from the fact that the painted amanti on its walls are just kissing; nothing more.

As you might expect of a man who wrote the book on Eroticism in Pompeii, Dr. Varone has expressive hands animated by a picaresque sense of humor.

And today he's got an audience.

Not only me and the peanut gallery—his two old-boy assistants sitting behind me—but also two female visitors, adding a certain frisson to all the sex talk: Lena the Latin South African, who's taking photographs and asking impertinent questions (wondering aloud of the statues in Naples: 'Where are all their penises?') and my interpreter, Angela, an Italian-American who's lived most of her life in Naples and dates from around the same era as the Pompeianist himself.

In his book, Dr. Varone argues that much of the ancient artwork we view as erotic probably wasn't arousing for the Romans.

That's mainly because very few acts were off limits for them (though they did have hang-ups about sex with the lights on or their clothes off and didn't like inviting fellators to dinner: not least because the Romans greeted each other with a kiss on the lips).

The History of Sex: Pompeii -- The Fascinating Fascinum -- (Chap. I, Pt. 3)

The modern view of the ancients tends to be that they were sexually liberated in extremis, without any of the Judeo-Christian hang-ups that afflict Western society today:

If only we could be more like the Romans—goes a popular line of thought—The Coliseum and crucifixions were a bit much, but when it came to sex, they sure did know how to have a guilt-free good time.

And it's true: the Romans didn't see anything shameful (let alone sinful) about sex per se.

Pompeii proves they were masters of sex in all its manifestations: as an act of violence, pleasure, reproduction, power, luck, religion, necessity, luxury, entertainment—and even love.

Historians had long known about the debauchery of certain emperors and the ruling elite: the scurrilous accounts of Claudius' nymphomaniac wife, Messalina, moonlighting in a whorehouse in the capital, for instance, or Tiberius indulging in lurid acts on Capri, just across the bay from Pompeii, supposedly even using suckling babes for fellatio.

But Rome and Capri were imperial pleasure centers; Pompeii and Herculaneum were just provincial seaside resorts, popular with wealthy holidaymakers and sailors on shore leave, but at their heart thoroughly ordinary, mid-sized towns.

It was only when they were excavated in the mid-1700s that the world realized just how pervasive erotica was in everyday Roman life.

Hic Habitat Felicitas -- 'Here Dwells Happiness'
(Ancient Roman for 'God Bless This House')

The Romans had a special word for the talismanic male organ—fascinum—and their variations on the theme were certainly, well, fascinating.

The penis was omnipresent: disembodied members were painted on walls, cast in bronze, molded in terracotta and carved into the volcanic building stones of Pompeii, adorning amulets, shop signs, street corners and paving blocks.

Then there were the explicit scenes on everything from pendants to public walls: twosomes, threesomes, foursomes and more-somes indulging in sodomy, exhibitionism, voyeurism, gender-bending and bestiality.

The extent of this apparent perversion mortified the Romans' Catholic descendants and shocked the eighteenth-century empire-builders who idealized Rome's accomplishments.

Suddenly, aficionados of the Renaissance were confronted with not just a few isolated artefacts dug up around the Mediterranean and hidden away in the private collections of 'discerning gentlemen,' but two entire towns brimming with pornographic 'filth.'