In spite of my fervent efforts to improve the moral tone of this site, the most popular category by far on Atomic Deathray is Genitalia In The News. The situation is becoming intolerable. If you gutter-minded low-lifes would simply stop reading my posts about misbehaving penises, vaginas and such then maybe I’d stop writing and publishing them on the internet, where they contribute to the further degradation of our society.
I have received a few inquiries as to the icon I use to represent Genitalia In The News. Well gather round, children, and let the Sporadic Curmudgeon tell you all a little story about “David’s Fig Leaf.” (Or you can go to the far-more authoritative and far-less smart-assity page on the subject at the Victoria & Albert Museum.)
Once upon a time, my friends, there lived a wonderful sculptor named Michaelangelo, who was either gay or bisexual, they haven’t quite decided yet. One day Michaelangelo entered a sculpture contest, to see who could create the best statue of David from the “David and Goliath” story in the Old Testament. Strangely enough, in that version Goliath is not a talking dog.
The problem was with the existing statue of David, done in bronze by some guy named Donatello. It’s the swishiest, gayest thing imaginable; some little sixteen-year-old twink lounging seductively with one foot up on Goliath’s severed head and his belly thrust forward as an invitation to God-knows-what. I’m surprised it’s not NAMBLA’s logo. They were probably offended by the severed head.
Anyway, the mincing little statue made too many people uncomfortable and they needed something to put in the square and they had this big block of marble laying around anyway, so a contest it is. And lo, Michaelangelo, the gay or possibly bisexual sculptor, won the contest
because his design was obviously the best.
But there’s a funny thing that happens between sketch and finished work, where the art sort of takes something from the artist that wasn’t there in the sketch. Fragments of the artist’s passions come through in the work, and in the case of the David those passions came through loud and clear.
Michaelangelo had not removed the gayness from the David, he’d just improved it. He had carved a seventeen-foot-tall monument to the glory of male beauty.
On the one side, you’ve got Donatello’s sad and pathetic little proto-drag queen, and on the other you’ve got a proud, incredibly hot young man with strong capable hands and movie-star looks. Grade-A Triple-Prime Beefcake in 3D.
Oh, and one other thing. He was stark naked. Feelin’ the breeze. And when the David was placed on the plinth designed for it, there was no possible way to admire the statue without staring full-on at his ass or his penis.
There was a lot of talk at the time of squirreling it away in a portico somewhere so nobody could see it, but cooler heads prevailed and the David went up in Florence’s town square. Besides, they couldn’t really hide it because it was just so amazingly beautiful.
Once in a while the bluenoses won a minor skirmish, such as putting a girdle of copper fig leaves around his midsection, but that didn’t last much longer than Ashcroft’s anti-titty curtains did.
Centuries later, some high Italian muckity-muck decides to give Queen Victoria an unexpected gift: a full-scale cast of the David. When it finally arrived, and Vicky got a good close look at Davy’s meat and potatoes she almost soiled the royal undergarments. Turns out that Michaelangelo had spent a lot of time on the detail work. In one area in particular. An unusually realistic dick, in other words.
It was quickly decided that no woman anywhere should ever again be exposed to the vile obscenity of a penis. Oh, how could they bear to even glimpse the horrid things, much less touch them?
So an Italian sculpting firm was commissioned to create a huge schlong cover in the form of a three-foot-long plaster fig leaf. When ladies were scheduled to view the David, the fig leaf was attached to the statue with two small hooks. Afterwards the fig leaf was removed, and David flopped free once again.
Nowadays it’s not used, people having grown up a little bit in the last hundred years, but it’s still around. It’s kept in a special case on the back of the plinth, and in the late 1990s the fig leaf actually toured the US.
My Genitalia In The News icon is a modified image of that very fig leaf. Amazing, huh?
By the way, In researching this story I found out that not all fig leaves were literal fig leaves, and they also weren’t reserved for statuary. At the website of the Sandow Museum, dedicated to Eugen Sandow, founder of body building as we know it today (and all that implies), there’s a photograph of Mr. Sandow wearing a fig leaf. The site itself is quite a curiosity, if you don’t mind the turn-of-the-20th-century nudity and an occasional uncomfortable thought.
