|
|
[ Home Page | Message Boards | News | Archive | Ask Cecil | Books | Buy Stuff | FAQs, etc. ]
26-Mar-1982
Dear Cecil:
Is it true that the Vatican has the world's most extensive
collection of erotica and pornography locked away where no one who
can appreciate it can see it? --M.B., Baltimore
Dear M.:
I haven't had a chance to check this out personally, M., having been detained
with Grafenberg spot research. But having spoken with parties who know, I can
tell you that if it's a truly monster porn collection you want, you don't need
to leave the U.S.A.
Years ago a couple
researchers from the Kinsey Institute in Bloomington, Indiana, made
an attempt to inspect the Vatican's collections, but church
officials refused to permit it. Subsequently, however, it was
learned that the Vatican had arranged to have its holdings
microfilmed during World War II, when it was feared Rome would be
bombed. The film is now stored at St. Louis University in Missouri. The
Kinsey folks looked through all the material and found a few mildly
erotic art items, but virtually nothing since the Renaissance. From
this they concluded that stories about the Vatican's 100,000 books
of porn are naught but a myth.
Not everyone buys this, of course. The more conspiracy-minded among
us argue that the Vatican wouldn't be dumb enough to microfilm the
smut section. One of my correspondents claims the Vatican library
has (or had, anyway) thousands of erotic volumes, most of them file
copies of works that appeared on the Catholic Church's well-known
Index of Prohibited Books. This fellow says he spent time in a
World War II concentration camp with a Vatican librarian, who gave
him a tour of the library in 1945. He says many of the books,
"mainly the illustrated volumes," have since disappeared.
Well, maybe. Most researchers, however, doubt that the Vatican has
or ever had much genuine smut on the shelves. Gershon Legman, a
prominent student of erotica who helped compile a bibliography of
porn for Alfred Kinsey, says the Vatican "has no really erotic
books," although there are some fairly tame volumes from the
classical era. For instance, a copy of Ovid's The Art of Love is
filed with Latin poetry, and Aristophanes' Lysistrata is with Greek
drama.
The Vatican also has some erotic specimens among its art holdings,
including, among other things, some drawings by Michelangelo
featuring various phallic fantasies. In addition there is a famous
collection of erotic frescoes designed by Raphael in 1516 and
executed by his students in the bathroom of a certain Cardinal
Bibbiena. The frescoes, which are badly deteriorated today, consist
of scenes involving Venus and Cupid, Cupid and Psyche, and Vulcan
and Pallas, and one would be hard put to describe them as even
mildly titillating.
That's not to say hard-core porn is unknown in Rome. A
student of Raphael's by the name of Guilio Romano produced some
explicit erotic art, in particular a series of 20 drawings of various parties
having intercourse and such that even by modern standards would be considered
pretty out there. These were turned over to an
engraver and printed up in book form. Pope Clement VII was outraged
and had the engraver heaved into prison, but copies of the book
continued to circulate clandestinely in Europe for centuries.
Whether the Vatican has a copy today I dunno, but they ought to--most good university art collections do.
As for the Index of Prohibited Books (which, by the way, was
discontinued in 1966), I've taken a look at it, and you could
probably come up with a racier bunch of titles in your average Walgreen's. About 1,500 books and/or authors are listed; of the
small percentage alleged to be "obscene" (obscenity was just one of
12 categories of forbidden works, the remainder having to do with
heresies and the like), many were written by such famous authors as
Honore de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas (both father and son), Emile
Zola, Anatole France, and Victor Hugo. None of the erotic
"classics" (e.g., Fanny Hill, the works of de Sade) were listed,
maybe because the Vatican figured they were of such limited
circulation they weren't worth worrying about.
In short, I think the legendary Vatican pornography collection is
a crock. Most of the stories you hear about it are undoubtedly part
of the folklore that surrounds any large, old, secretive
institution (the Masons are another case in point).
However, there are some truly awesome smut depots out there, if
you're into that kind of thing. The municipal museum of Naples, for
instance, is said to have an amazing collection erotic artifacts,
most of them classical in origin--fornicating satyrs and so forth.
The British Museum in London has a famous "Private Case" collection
of erotica bequeathed to it by eccentric Victorians that at one
time was said to number 20,000 volumes, although theft, vandalism
and other causes have reduced it to somewhere between 1,800 and
5,000 volumes, depending on who's counting. In Paris the
Bibliotheque Nationale's famous L'Enfer ("hell") collection
contains 4-5,000 volumes.
Initially I thought the largest collection of all was held by the Kinsey
Institute (formally known as the Kinsey Institute for Research in
Sex, Gender, and Reproduction) on the campus of Indiana University
at Bloomington. When I checked there were 12,000 books, 50,000 photographs, 25,000
pieces of flat art, 3,700 films, and 1,300 art objects, such as
figurines. Subsequently I learned that an even larger collection was owned by
the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco, which
as of the early 90s had 289,000 films and 100,000 videos. The Kinsey archive
spans the ages, but it's safe to say the vast majority of items in these
collections is of recent origin. The fact is that color photography, the high-speed
offset press, and, more recently, the videocassette have resulted
in a profusion of erotica that makes the porn collections of Europe
seem positively quaint.
--CECIL ADAMS
The Straight Dope / Questions or
comments for Cecil Adams to: cecil@chicagoreader.com
Comments regarding this website to: webmaster@straightdope.com
For advertising information, see the Chicago
Reader Online Rate Sheet
© 1996-2002 Chicago Reader, Inc. All rights reserved.
No material contained in this site may be republished or reposted without express written
permission.
The Straight Dope is a registered trademark of Chicago
Reader, Inc.