Contents - Musée Maillol

4. « Love on the walls »
by Antonio Varone, Excavations Director at Pompeii
In the middle of the 18 th century the excavations started on the Pompeii site. As the work
advanced, an entire town was returning to the light of day, with its streets, monuments and
houses – and, inside these, furniture, paintings and splendid mosaics. Besides material
things, they were rediscovering the organisation and cultural way of life of a whole society.
Imagine the surprise of the archeologists of the time at the discovery of numerous outsized
phalluses, some even that had wings or animal features! They were all over the place: along
the streets, on walls and floors, as well as outside certain shops. The were sculpted in lowrelief
or in the round but they were found in paintings too, where seemingly at every street
corner visitors to the ruins were stunned by the sight of men endowed with gigantic,
monstrous penises.
Then when houses were uncovered with painted frescoes showing erotic scenes in crude
realism, Pompeii was immediately judged to be a town of perversion and luxury from a moral
point of view, a new Sodom which must have deserved its divine punishment. These moral
judgments meant that Pompeii artifacts showing erotic acts, or with even with a hint of the
erotic about them, were very soon dispatched to the “secret cabinet” in the Naples Museum.
Thus they tried to bury this far too explicit reality in an inaccessible place where it wouldn’t
cause offence. At the same time the places where this kind of object and image had
remained in situ were closed to the public almost until the present day. What was even more
shocking than the images themselves was the explicit way in which they were in full view of
everyone.
If we want to have a full understanding of this phenomenon, first we have to place the town
of Pompeii in its historical context. There was nothing unusual about it; it was a very ordinary
town in the Roman world, close enough to Rome in this first century AD to be completely
integrated in its social fabric. We also have to try to get rid of our preconceptions, the result
of f 2,000 years of change in thought and religion. These are what influence our approach to
the matter, both morally and socially, to a greater or lesser extent .
We have to recognise that in a society that knew neither doubt nor sin nor prudishness nor
the malice typical of out time, sex was experienced with much greater simplicity. Of course
this spontaneity often showed itself in a crude way and eroticism looked completely different
from what we are used to today.
The Roman world didn’t need circumlocution or veils, physical or mental, to cover up human
nudity. The rules about sex were mainly concerned with purely social aspects, not morality.
They eagerly but apparently innocently pursued practices that today are considered as
perversions, without ever thinking of them as such. The very concept of obscenity didn’t
exist, no more than that of morbidity, even for acts and habits that unanimously offend our
current sensitivities as being unacceptable violations.
Above all, sex for the Romans was a positive phenomenon, a source of joy and life, a thing
of magic. It even had a religious aspect that linked it to human destiny. The “physical” was
the goddess of reproducing life whom the people of Pompeii worshipped as their protectress
during the Samnite period. In the Roman era she quite naturally became identified with the
goddess of love, Venus.
That’s why the phallus was shown on the tombs of men and the uterus on those of women,
to show respectively the genius and the luno of the dead, this supernatural germinating force
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