Fig Leaf, Pudica, Nudity, and other Revealing Concealments

This paper deals with a sampling of well-known so-to-say “clothings” of genitalia and with the persistence and transformation of their meanings and images in representation. The mechanisms of their use recall comparable dialectic principles of inertia, resistance, and sublimation explored by seminal thinkers like Freud, Newton, and their ideological forebears preserved in the epistemological syncretisms of pagan alchemy. I draw from three antiquarian devices, with which I partly deal elsewhere, for identifying male and female powers: the fig leaf, pudica pose, and aestheticizing nudity.

The notorious modern fig leaves clothing ancient male sculptures still elicit titterings and wonder among students, only partly relieved when they learn that their forms repeat, in simplified contours, precisely those of the phallus, testicles, and pubes, which they ostensibly replace or conceal. Moreover, the sweet, fleshy, and seductive fruit of those leaves (in fact a scrotal and inverted womb-like flower filled with seeds) has been an age-old symbol of genital fertility and, as we know, its name, fig or ficchi, in Mediterranean and Shakespearian slang, signifies copulation, a conjoining of the sexes. So what the Vatican (like other) curators after the time of Clement XIII and Winckelmann would have censored (with the leaves of shame sewn together by Adam and Eve) reemerges on a sub rosa level, magnified and intensified in a subliminal language—processes psychologists now call transference, displacement, and sublimation. In this vein of image formation, it should be no surprise that a similar five-pronged silhouette emerged as a clear Gestalt for the male genitalia in late Archaic and Classical Greece,