Buzz
If you take a deep dive into classical sculpture, you may eventually find yourself pondering questions that might be more fitting for a middle school health class than an art history lecture. For example: Is it just me, or do these sculptures all seem a bit... underwhelming?
You’re not the only one who’s questioned the size of ancient depictions of men. Even Saturday Night Live addressed the topic in a recent musical sketch on Rome. Even if we assume most statues depict flaccid penises, why didn’t classical sculptors choose to portray their subjects with larger features? Surely, just like in locker room banter, exaggeration would have been part of the artistic process.
It turns out that much has evolved over the millennia, including our perceptions of penis size. Ellen Oredsson, from the blog How to Talk About Art History, clarifies in one of her posts that 'cultural ideals of male beauty were vastly different back then. Today, larger penises are considered desirable and masculine, but in the past, evidence suggests that smaller penises were actually seen as more attractive.'
Ingrid Berthon-Moine, the photographer who captured intimate close-ups of the testicles of Greek statues for her 2013 series Marbles, echoed this idea in an interview with Hyperallergic. She explained, 'Ancient Greece was a deeply masculinist culture. They preferred 'small and taut' genitalia over large sexual organs as a demonstration of male self-discipline in sexual matters.' In Aristophanes’s play The Clouds, one character describes the ideal male form as possessing 'a good chest, a clear complexion, broad shoulders, a moderate tongue, sturdy buttocks, and a small, refined penis.'
However, it was important to show some skin. Art historian Anna Tahinci wrote in a 2008 article for Sculpture Review that nudity was regarded as the 'perfect form' to represent the human body in sculpture during both ancient Greece and Rome. 'As a result, nudity in sculpture came to symbolize innocence and purity,' she stated.
Frederick M. Hodges, a scholar specializing in circumcision, observed in a 2001 medical history journal article that 'the Greeks preferred a longer foreskin relative to the entire length of the penis, and a smaller penis overall compared to a larger one.' He noted that an extended foreskin was considered both more attractive and more modest than an exposed penis, as the Greeks viewed circumcision as barbaric and linked it to enslaved people. According to Hodges, an erect, bare penis would have been considered dishonorable, and thus, male genitals in most art were depicted as 'unretracted, teat-like, and neatly tapered.'
Another scholar noted that while Greek men were depicted with modest genitals in public art, they often displayed 'boldly protruding phalluses in private,' especially in erotic vase paintings. In his 1995 article 'The Unheroic Penis: Otherness Exposed,' Timothy McNiven explained that this dual representation gave men in art 'the best of both worlds.'
Whether large or small, the size of a statue’s genitals reflects the cultural values of the time in which it was created.
