Thursday, March 23, 2023

Old Enough To Remember...

Then AG John Ashcroft ordering the statue of Justice that stood behind his DOJ podium be draped because the female figure was topless.

There is, indeed, nothing new under the sun.  And art imitates art imitates life:
Maybe it just needs a figleaf:

However, the difficulty in claiming that Matt Groening and his writers "predicted" the censorship of Michelangelo's "David" lies in the fact that campaigns to cover up nude works of art in general, and "David" in particular, have existed for centuries. The prevalence of fig leafs on classical statues is testament to that, as Alexxa Gotthardt wrote for the website Artsy in 2018:

Take Michelangelo's famous sculpture "David" (1501–04), a muscular, starkly naked depiction of its namesake biblical hero. The work scandalized the artist’s fellow Florentines and the Catholic clergy when unveiled in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria in 1504. Soon after, the figure’s sculpted phallus was girdled with a garland of bronze fig leaves by authorities.

60 years later, just months before Michelangelo’s death, the Catholic Church issued an edict demanding that “figures shall not be painted or adorned with a beauty exciting … lust.” The clergy began a crusade to camouflage the pensises and pubic hair visible in artworks across Italy. Their coverups of choice? Loincloths, foliage, and — most often — fig leaves. It has became known as the “Fig Leaf Campaign,” one of history’s most significant acts of art censorship.

A more recent example, described by the website of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, came in the mid-1800s, when the Grand Duke of Tuscany presented Queen Victoria with a 6-meter-high cast of the original statue:

"The story goes that on her first encounter with the cast of 'David' at the Museum, Queen Victoria was so shocked by the nudity that a proportionally accurate fig leaf was commissioned. It was then kept in readiness for any royal visits, when it was hung on the figure using two strategically placed hooks."

There is indeed nothing new under the sun. 

No comments:

Post a Comment