But other than this subtlest of clues, there is little to indicate that we are a species reliant upon sexual reproduction, which seems a significant omission considering that this phenomenon remains one of the deepest oddities about life on earth. The two figures stand slightly apart rather than holding hands as initially conceived, so that they are not misconstrued as a single hermaphroditic organism. We’re from Orange County.” As Sagan wrote: “The man’s right hand is raised in what I once read in an anthropology book is a ‘universal’ sign of good will-although any literal universality is of course unlikely.”īut the most heated debate swirled around the nakedness of the humans and their visible or invisible sex organs. In fact, so provincial do the couple seem, the man waving in greeting, the woman standing demurely at his side, that a satirical magazine in Berkeley ran the image with the caption: “Hello. But any fashion-conscious alien would immediately note that their hairstyles alone pinpoint them in the late 20th century and imply a Caucasian ethnicity. The figures are supposed to have “panracial” features, to use Sagan’s word, though Salzman based them on Greek ideals and the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. But Sagan’s artist wife, Linda Salzman, suggested that the graphic should also show a man and a woman. At first, only scientific diagrams indicating our location in the universe and one or two other things that we have discovered about it were to be included. The idea that the spacecraft-the first human-made object intended to leave the solar system-should carry some sort of message about the creatures that sent it was enthusiastically taken up by the space scientist and television personality Carl Sagan. Even the cast of Michelangelo’s David in the Victoria and Albert Museum sports this extra adornment. See, one lady tells the duke himself, “what we ladies can raise when we wish to put a man in mind of what he has done & we hope will do again when call’d for!” And inevitably, a small child points to the leaf: “What is that mama.” Immune to such ridicule, the Victorians retrofitted fig leaves to many statues. “I understand it is intended to represent His Grace after bathing in the Serpentine,” another opines. “My eyes what a size!!” one lady squeals, while another at last locates the salient detail with the aid of a telescope. His cartoon of the unveiling shows ladies clustered round the statue, which was paid for by a subscription of British women and “erected in Hide Park,” as the caption explains in a barrage of puns.
The caricaturist George Cruikshank was not slow to see the potential.
The artist had taken the precaution of including a fig leaf, but the leaf-and presumably also any genitals that it hid-was comically small. The sculptor Richard Westmacott created a dynamic bronze figure of Achilles so large that it could not be transported into Hyde Park, where it was to be stationed, without knocking down a wall. The first nude statue to be put on public display in London since Roman times was the monument raised to the Duke of Wellington not long after his victory over Napoleon’s armies at Waterloo. Unless the point was to celebrate fertility, as with the conspicuously erect penis of Priapus, the Greek god so eagerly adopted by the Romans, a sculpted penis of normal size, even a flaccid one, was thought vulgar and a distraction from the achievements that it was the business of the statue to celebrate. The artist would carve the genitals on such statues to be somewhat less than life size. In a monument to a civic dignitary, a philosopher, or a general, a well-toned body was the sculptor’s means of indicating their good citizenship. The human figure was often modelled on the bodies of athletes, who performed their exertions naked. The artistic fig leaf became all but mandatory when in 1563 the Roman Catholic Council of Trent ruled that “all lasciviousness be avoided” in religious images “in such wise that figures shall not be painted or adorned with a beauty exciting to lust.” Up until that date, in classical statues and in the Renaissance art inspired by them, false modesty had taken a different form.
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