BEHIND THE FIG LEAF—A STORY OF SIN, CENSORSHIP, AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

By Alexxa Gotthardt

Charles Meynier, Statue of Mercury in a Landscape. Musée de la Révolution française. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Consider the fig leaf: a little piece of foliage that’s shielded the genitals of famous biblical figures and nude sculptures for centuries. It’s a plant that’s become synonymous with sin, sex, and censorship. And in large part, we have art history—and the artists determined to portray nudity even when it was considered taboo—to thank for that.

Take Michelangelo’s famous sculpture David (1501–04), a muscular, starkly naked depiction of its namesake biblical hero. The work scandalized the artist’s fellow Florentines and the Catholic clergy when unveiled in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria in 1504. Soon after, the figure’s sculpted phallus was girdled with a garland of bronze fig leaves by authorities.

 Tullio Lombardo, Adam, ca. 1490–95. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

60 years later, just months before Michelangelo’s death, the Catholic Church issued an edict demanding that “figures shall not be painted or adorned with a beauty exciting…lust.” The clergy began a crusade to camouflage the pensises and pubic hair visible in artworks across Italy. Their coverups of choice? Loincloths, foliage, and—most often—fig leaves. It has became known as the “Fig Leaf Campaign,” one of history’s most significant acts of art censorship.

But the fig leaf’s role in art history doesn’t begin with Michelangelo. The plant’s cultural significance can be clearly traced back to the tale of Adam and Eve. The duo, shamed by their nudity after eating from the tree of knowledge, “sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons,” as chronicled in the Book of Genesis. Early artistic depictions of the purported events show the once-nude figures sheathed in leaves that obscure their genitals, subtly representing original sin and a fall from grace.

This story—which became integral to Christianity’s teachings—communicated to the religion’s flock that nudity was shameful. By the medieval era, art commissioned by the Catholic Church mostly represented nudity as a sin; it was used to depict people who’d been sent to hell.

But that began to change in the 1400s, when Italian artists—thanks to a mounting interest in antiquities and excavation—rediscovered classical Roman and Greek art. Those ancient marble sculptures were forged in a time when the chiseled nude body represented honor and virtue, as opposed to immorality and vice.

This idea inspired artists like Donatello, who started making work that honored the nude body in all its glory. This was a novel idea in his hometown of Florence, where the Catholic Church wielded vast power. His bronze rendition of David (circa 1440) has been cited by scholars as the first known sculpture depicting a completely naked figure since antiquity.

Some of his artist-successors followed suit—namely, Michelangelo. Even after receiving criticism for his own version of David (rendered at a much larger scale and with more pronounced physical attributes than Donatello’s) in the early 1500s, he continued to incorporate nudity into his work.

But as Michelangelo’s artistic career developed, the Catholic Church’s crackdown on “lasciviousness” of all kinds also intensified. This had everything to do with accusations of corruption against the church being made by the Protestant Reformation and its leader Martin Luther. Fearful of losing its flock, the Vatican began ordering reforms across the church—including censorship of nudity in art. 

Michelangelo Buonarroti

Creation of Adam, Sistine Chapel ceiling, 1511-1512

Sistine Chapel, Vatican

Even so, Michelangelo received an abundance of commissions from Popes and other powerful clergymen during his life, most notably the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. But sometimes, the Vatican called him out for crossing the line of decency. In the 1540s, some 40 years after his fiasco with David, he pushed his luck yet again—this time, for a wall fresco in the Sistine Chapel depicting the Last Judgement…………………

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