The Restoration of Priapus
This image comes via The Art Newspaper:
They explain:
A Louvre art restorer came across a stimulating discovery while cleaning a 17th-century canvas by French artist Nicolas Poussin–a fully erect penis hidden by layers of paint. While working on Poussin’s huge canvas Hymenaios Disguised as a Woman During an Offering to Priapus (1634-38), Brazilian conservator Regina Pinto Moreira uncovered the fertility god’s, er, surprise package, which had been concealed by centuries of dirt and paint. Speaking to the São Paulo press, Moreira said she suspects conservative Catholic critics made a later artist cover up the offending member in the 18th century. “They hid the phallus of Priapus. It’s what we call adjustment for modesty, and it’s not uncommon.”
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There is a great marble statue of Priapus (at http://www.marc...e.htm if Bacchus allows the web address through moderation) available on the web. Also a good (bronze?) one can be seen (http://knol.goo...s.gif).
If I remember my art history correctly, Priapus’s father, Hermes, looking much like the above painting (http://www.koxk...1.jpg), was represented in statues which littered the countryside possibly as boundary markers, and that sometimes these stone statues would have tightly fitting wooden staffs driven (from behind) through the statue’s pelvic area, upon which maidens (in some age appropriate rite of passage) would ceremoniously open their hymens.
The ithyphallic appendages were usually made of wood because the citizenry would regularly break these phalli off to take them home a souvenirs, or whittle away a bit as a fertility keepsake. Periodically restoring the member to a respectable length, merely required tapping the other end of the pole with a mallet.
Some years ago I saw a travelling exhibit of relics recovered from lost Pompeii. There was a rather large contingent of priapic statues of various sorts. The most common was a man with a very large package weighing it with a scale. For so many to have survived they must of been as common as garden gnomes.
I also remember my mother-in-law’s question as we walked behind a life size nude statue of a somewhat ambiguous figure. She asked me if it was male or female. Then we went to the front and saw a johnson like a chariot axle. “Oh”, she said, and little more.