An up-close look at the codpiece.
Michael Glover
The codpiece of Don
Grazia de Medici (1562) reconstructed by Anne-Marie Norton, with embellishments
derived from the codpiece of Cosimo Medici (1574) (image courtesy the artist)
LONDON — In these plaguey days, how eager should we be to examine
the remains of a 16th-century codpiece firsthand?
Furthermore, how much full-strength, anti-bacterial hand-wash would
we need to slather and squander in the panic-stricken, immediate aftermath of
any serious, one-on-one act of visual-cum-tactile scrutiny?
Would there be fetid remnants of some ill-definable ancient
pungency still remotely alive in the air? A certain suspiciously greasy
slitheriness about the surface of the once costly fabric of the thing, now
badly faded?
These questions hang mock-menacingly in the fresh
south London air that I am still so fortunate (fingers crossed) to be
breathing. Luckily, I have been spared all this potential misery, thanks to a
deft seamstress and former ballerina called Anne-Marie Norton…
According to Anne-Marie, the ‘remains’ of a
codpiece known to have been worn by Don Grazia de Medici in 1562 are preserved
at the Pitti Palace in Florence. She learnt of this while delving into the
history of the making of codpieces at my request.
Why ask her in the first place? I hear you snickering,
voyeuristically.
Titian, “Emperor
Charles V with a Dog” (1533), oil on canvas, 194 x 112.7 cm; Museo Nacional del
Prado, Madrid (image courtesy David Zwirner Books)
Last autumn I published Thrust (David Zwirner Books, 2019), a
little treatise that attempts to be, as the subtitle states, “A Spasmodic
Pictorial History of the Codpiece in Art.”
The codpiece, a gross object of fleeting allure, went down almost
as fast as it came up — living and dying as a thing of high fashion and
indispensable male accoutrement in the 16th century — and for only about 50
years of that century, at that.
In the book, I discuss paintings by the likes of Titian, Moroni,
Coello, Parmigianino, Giorgione, and others who recorded these great priapic
occasions, when men of the church, aristocrats, kings, and emperors galore
strapped them on as never before (or since) in a veritable orgy of tremendously
eye-catching uprearingness.
What I did not do in that book, however, was to say much about the
actual making of the codpiece, its materiality you might say, if were you
endeavoring to earn a meager living as a culturally high-toned lecturer in fine
art and fashion.
To be perfectly honest, I had not up to that
point dandled or fondled a Renaissance codpiece in my very own hands. I had not
even considered overmuch its actual fabrication — exactly how it was made and
from what, and what it really looked like at the back…
I still have not.
In fact, thanks to dear Anne-Marie, I have
gone one better by far. Having done on my behalf the heavy-lifting that careful
research always demands, she was able to find useful pointers in a pattern book
of our own time, Janet Arnold’s Patterns of Fashion: The Cut and Construction
of Clothes for Men and Women, c.1560-1620 (Macmillan, 1985), which deals with
the exactness of things way back when.
And then, faster even than Jumping Jack Flash himself, she made me
one. An exact likeness! And so I now possess my very own faux-authentic
Renaissance codpiece, made to the exact pattern of the one worn by that Medici
whose name I have just cited (with a few extra bits of decorative embellishment
boldly snatched from the codpiece of yet another Medici called Cosimo I, and
worn just a little later, in 1574.)
So how did it work exactly?
First, she asked me for my measurements. (She knew that I wanted to
show it off at a lecture). I sidestepped that nasty little bolt of
unanticipated impertinence by giving her the measurements of my waistband. Was
I being obtuse and unhelpful?
Not at all! Waistband measurements are very useful because you tie
the thing on at the waist, where it hangs down (yet always pridefully, as the
Honorable Member demands), at the height of every raised expectation.
On a now-distant day before the lockdown, Anne-Marie presented me
with this delight of an eye-feast, in a tall and rather elegant black box, on
the steps of a dancing academy in Covent Garden called Pineapple, which is
three leaps and a single smart lunge away from the Royal Opera House. The
codpiece was modestly nestled, nose down, as if it might have gently
crash-landed, in white tissue paper.
When I lifted the lid, to the consternation of the many gathered
around (who had been tipped off about the time and place of its imminent
appearance), I felt a little like a waggish, thin-mustachioed, pier-end
prestidigitator. But a codpiece, even when inert in a box, is a thousand times
the cultural superior of a mere rabbit.
And yet, viewed from behind, you notice that there is no point of
entry. It is flat-backed, sealed off. No nosing
allowed then. The codpiece revealed its function not as a hubristic spectacle,
but as mere decoration!
Did the member itself ever cower at the rear,
one wonders, fearful that the codpiece may have made a promise that actual
anatomy might not deliver? Never! Never! There was always too much at stake.
What was it made from then? Covered in
gorgeous red-dyed damask, it was stabilized (like any fresh-primed time bomb of
roaring lustfulness) with cotton ticking, and tightly stuffed (you have to pack
it as hard as you can because it needs to maintain its solid-looking and
-feeling shapeliness for hours, months, years) with an organic fabric called
kapok.
Kapok! What an oddly jaunty little word that
is. Kapok is the stuff with which children’s toys are stuffed. These materials
are not authentic to the time, of course. (This we would have recognized well
enough, I have no doubt, as soon as we hear the word “children” uttered. There
were no children in the 16th century. There were only miniature adults, and
they were always dressed as such.)
Way back when, the codpiece would have been
stuffed with horsehair or bombast (a kind of cotton wadding). Its outside might
have been made of leather. An animal bone could have been inserted to ensure the
maintenance of shapeliness. Needs must.
The point was this: it must never flag in its
attentions. Never.
Thrust: A Spasmodic Pictorial History of the
Codpiece in Art (2019) by Michael Glover is published by David Zwirner Books.
https://hyperallergic.com/556381/thrust-a-spasmodic-pictorial-history-of-the-codpiece-in-art/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=WE041820&utm_content=WE041820+CID_4f29c6637f6178a31788d7e5c25467d4&utm_source=HyperallergicNewsletter
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