The Taxonomic Effect
By Naomi Salaman
Introduction
After her visit to Rome in 1996, Hermione Wiltshire
told
me about her work on I Modi , a story
and publishing scandal from the Renaissance, and that some remains of
the prints were to be found at the British Museum. I went to the Department
of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, to look for them, spoke
to the staff and searched the catalogues. No one knew what I was talking
about. Eventually, the head of the Italian section relieved our search;
we would not find trace of the work in the catalogue. The file I was
looking for was kept locked in the keeper’s office, and the only way
to see it was by permission of the Head Keeper. When I did get access
to the Modi file, what caught my attention as I sifted
through letters and photocopies was the idea of where this material was housed; and it the idea of this locked space
that the following pages and images consider.
Hermione Wiltshire and I worked together on a project,
Nothing is Hidden, I was commissioned by the Yorkshire Sculpture Park
to write a contextual essay to accompany Wiltshire’s work, called I
Modi, and together we travelled to Italy to the original ‘Secret Museum’
to document the places where indecent material has been kept within
the public museum. This work was shown in an exhibition, in Nottingham,
at the Djanogli Gallery in 1999.
The practice of secreting away sexually explicit
material in public museums has an interesting history as told by Walter
Kendrick in The Secret Museum1 .For our purposes the story begins in the middle of the eighteenth
century with the discovery of the ancient cities of Herculaneum and
Pompeii which had lain buried under ash and lava following the eruption
of Vesuvius in 79AD. Two flourishing Roman towns came to a dramatic
and sudden end, petrified in the flow of molten rock and hot ash, everything
left in place. Antiquarians of the eighteenth and nineteenth century
could not believe their good fortune in gaining access to everyday life
at all social levels in Roman times. However not everything they found
there could be assimilated easily into a lofty picture of the classical
world. In fact the abundant sexual proclivities of the Ancients seemed
to jump out at them from every street corner, courtyard, inside wall,
floor and ceiling. Something had to be done about it.
Naples 1752 -1866
Indecent objects were turning up regularly as the
excavations proceeded at Herculaneum and then Pompeii - frescoes, mosaics,
sculptures, trinkets and everyday domestic utensils, all bearing images
and icons that distressed eighteenth-century sensibility. The most notorious discovery at Herculaneum came to light in 1752.
It was a small marble statue of Pan making love to a she-goat. When
the Bourbon King, Charles of the Two Sicilies got to hear of it, he
banished the offending object to a locked room at his palace at Portici
, with instructions that no one was to see it.
It is a fine work, full
of a soft romance adding a sad and impossible luxury to a serene coupling.
The animal and god embrace, they are intimate and their expressions
wistful, beyond the rushed appetite of sexual desire, closer to some
kind of pleasurable reunion. The fleeting passage of the flesh has been
modelled here as a permanent sanctuary. There is no struggle taking
place, no force or coercion. The goat is lying in a pose no goat would
ever take and Pan, that demonic mix of human and animal, is mating with
her in a decidedly human manner. How unlikely, this loving couple. The
piece displays a level of sophisticated comedy we are unfamiliar with;
it is serious and funny- it is an unnatural and hilarious scene that
has been thoroughly thought through in marble; worked on with great
attention to figurative detail.
Copy of Pan and Goat, in teracotta
by Joseph Nollekens c.1760, Museum Secretum, British Museum
Photo; Naomi
Salaman March 2000
A problem arising from the interest in classical
ruins and remains, was what to do with the indecent material. In addition
to finding indelicate objects in every part of Roman city space, excavators
found an uncomfortable amount of lascivious depictions in domestic environments.
Not all finds were treated to a special room at the palace like Pan
and the goat; many were simply reburied, or had their genitals hacked
off or defaced, they were stolen or just conveniently lost. 2
‘... all
agreed that the ancient system of organising images - which amounted
it seemed, to no system at all - would never do in a later age. What
was required was a new taxonomy: if Pompeii’s priceless obscenities
were to be properly managed, they would have to be systematically named
and placed. The name chosen for them was “pornography,” and they were
housed in the Secret Museum.’3
It was Giuseppe Fiorelli who prepared and published
the first museum catalogue of items from antiquity in the Naples collection
of what he termed La Raccolta
Pornografica. This was not the first published account of the indecent
finds, catalogues had been published for the Royal Bourbon Family since
the middle of the eighteenth century, and various of these had made
partial reference to the more difficult finds. Fiorelli’s catalogue
was different, it was produced by the museum, it was in Italian, and
it was not a guide, as such. La Raccolta Pornografica, was
a simple, un-illustrated inventory of about twenty pages; with just
a short description and a number for each object. Fiorelli had been
working on the catalogue some years after being reinstated as head of
the museum when Garibaldi took power in 1860. During the 1840’s Fiorelli lost his job at Pompeii and had found himself in jail on
account off his Nationalist sympathies.
After the unification of Italy in 1860, the Royal Museum was
nationalised by Garibaldi and Fiorelli was reinstated. He was a new
kind of archeologist, methodical and scientific, and he was determined
to set the record straight. In the introduction to the catalogue he
gives a brief history of the restricted collection as a political issue,
culminating in its liberation with Garibaldi.
Fiorelli describes the decades before the revolution, as years
of religious hypocrisy in which the reserved collection had been suppressed
to the point of locking all the material away together with a number
of Renaissance paintings thought too suggestive, and a group of statues
of Venus. The door bricked over. 4
Cupboards containing
La Raccolta Pornografica, Museo Nazionale, Napoli. Photo; Naomi Salaman, Hermione Wiltshire,
April 1999
Fiorelli, it turns out, had not studied Greek5, and the assignation of this
term pornografico ostensibly from the Greek for ‘whore’ and
‘writing’ was a gesture towards the modern science of classification; it was not a word with a contemporary meaning.
‘Pornographic’ was not a description
of the contents of the secret collection but rather a nomination, plucked
from the store house of a dead classical language in the way Greek and
Latin names were used traditionally in classification. The word might
have had connotations of Ancient
society where whores overlapped a notion of the sacred. At the same
time the metalanguage of classification makes space for a new category.
The meaning of this term pornographic is still unclear except that
these were objects from the distant past which embarrassed the present.
We can look at this new taxonomy as a manifestation
of revolutionary dignity bestowed on a collection of suppressed and
endangered objects. Here new methods of classification and the developing
science of archaeology were beginning to deal with an inheritance of
suppression, fear and shame. And in this way museology delivers a radical
mode of preservation.
The possibility of a scientific, neutral approach
to this sexualised material which had so recently been locked up, was
a liberation in parallel to the larger political one going on in Italy
at that time. The once criminal secret associations of nationalist sympathisers
from the 1820’s to the1850s, were now forming the basis of a modern
secular government. The new
taxonomy ‘pornografico‘ gives a space to the previously hidden and unsayable.
The new structure operates symbolically as the invention of fairness,
the potential of justice. The dead language of Greek is used to make
a new category which breaks open the sealed space where sexuality and
freedom lie perishing, unrepresented.
At the same time there are nagging doubts. If these
objects had indeed been liberated in this way, why were they still housed
together, and why, even after the revolution, was the collection closed
to all but the learned or privileged few. Why were women not admitted?
This new taxonomy did offer protection, but it
did not solve the riddle of what this material amounted to or meant.
And as to its internal organisation, what linked the objects together, this was still far from scientific. There was not just Roman erotica here, but
a wide variety of ancient representations; images, statues and landmarks
of Priapus; paintings of sexual comedy; amulets or fascini to ward off
the evil eye; religious and mystical scenes; representations which refer
to the body, but call on a wide range of cultural and ritual
meaning. So what were they all doing under the same name? What were the key characteristics of these
objects that could persuade us that they belonged to the same category?
What was this material which would have been destroyed, which has a
two thousand year history of being obliterated? What was it that was
rescued, catalogued and hidden, which must not be seen by women?
In 1982, Catherine Johns wrote Sex or Symbol, about the Museum Secretum at the British Museum, in London, which like the Raccolta Pornografica in Naples
was also formalised in the 1860’s 6
. Johns is an archaeologist
who works at the British Museum and
her intention here was to contextualise the formation of the secret
museum in terms of late eighteenth-century traditions of manners and
decency, and to consider how this became, by the mid to late nineteenth-century
a pseudo form of museum classification, held in place by attitudes to
sexuality and propriety. Her essay is a polemic against the anti-intellectual
practice of secreting away sexual objects, to point out the error of
judgment that the secret museum amounts to; how institutional embarrassment
gets in the way of archeological knowledge.
Her basic argument is used by Kendrick some years later as a
model to analyse the meaning of pornography in the modern era, and indeed
it forms the basic bones of the research for this current paper.
When I met up with her last year I was surprised
to meet someone who was completely disinterested in the Museum Secretum. In her view the secret museum was a product from
an earlier age, but not an age earlier enough to be of any interest
to her as an archeologist! As far as she was concerned the Museum Secretum should be done away with and forgotten about except,
perhaps, as a footnote in the history of the Museum’s collections and
as an addition to the already well documented phenomenon of Victorian
sexuality. For her, a continued interest in it was evidence of prurience;
a dwelling on Victorian attitudes that are no longer current nor relevant.
Items of value are now all back in their respective departments; they
may not always be on show, but are available to the public should they
be interested.
For Johns, the only reason the Museum Secretum
has not totally vanished is because it is not a priority and resources
are scarce. If material is preserved, recorded and catalogued in a way
museum staff can access it, then it does not really matter, in her opinion,
what the catalogue system in called. It is just a name. There are no
pressing reasons to eliminate a classification simply because it used
to mean something and no longer does. Because all it need do, to continue
to function, is to be distinguishable from other classifications.
If we follow Johns’s argument we end up with a
historical understanding of the formation of the Museum Secretum, and the rest of her book offers us a better grasp
of the distinctions rather than the similarities between materials once
housed in the collection. However, the historical situation surrounding
the construction of the Museum Secretum in London is entirely different
to the history of La Raccolta
Pornografica in Naples, even though they were formalised at about
the same moment and they contained a similar range of materials, (even
if the collection in London has more copies of objects seen in Naples;
diaries and notebooks of travellers). If we accept that the taxonomy
of nineteenth-century secret museums speak an unscientific language
of association rather rational connection we will see that these restricted
spaces in modern museums are not simply a function or product of historical
conditions, but are more a kind of defence against something less specific.
These archives within archives are the kind of space where you can hide
not just worrying or difficult objects but also the chains of signification
to which they are attached. The space is full of unthought-out anxiety
about what makes looking at, wanting to look at, or even having seen,
some objects unacceptable. While history, context and culture will play
a role in determining the kinds of objects that are hidden, the act
of hiding away is not to be understood via the science of obscenity or the history of
religion or morality but rather through the science of signs.
To keep something hidden is to keep it safe, to
preserve it, whilst behaving as if it is not there. To deny it and maintain
it - a kind of living contradiction.
The secret museums function in this way; objects are preserved
and valued but kept out of sight. In
this description keeping something hidden shares a common mechanism
and topology with the Freudian concept of repression and the space of
the unconscious. Repression is a primary process - a psychic activity
of basic significance to mental functioning. Consciousness is enabled
by repressing the wishes of the id; repression preserves and covers up shameful and improper thoughts.
Perhaps the analogy between the secret museum, and the content
of the unconscious seems to be a neat fit, with the abundant sexuality
of the classical world being locked away in exchange for the cultural
esteem and educational benefits of great learning offered to us by the
expurgated remains of the Ancients. This could be seen as a simple sublimation
- high cultural aspiration at the cost of sexual repression, or civility.
There are similarities to be listed between the
way the museum develops a system of public display whilst veiling the
shameful and the indecent, and the way that social and family training
teaches acceptable behaviour in the form of manners. It is striking
that for both the modern museum and the modern family, manners consist
of hiding representations of shameful bodily functions and sexual activity.
Both the museum curator and the potty trainer are only doing their job,
whilst acting as they see fit. What may seem like obstructive censorship
to the researcher or child, can be felt as necessary by the keeper or
parent, not exactly because they believe in what they are doing, but
more that they feel they must pass on a framework which does not include
the obscene, or the shameful. This responsibility falls to these guardian/administrators;
they are being acted upon by their own anxieties about the limits of
proper behaviour. When this social expectation is internalised as a
symbolic division it seems natural and right to hide some things; by
hiding shameful things we can function in public, in society. These
procedures, manners and rules about what can and what cannot be shown,
effect a kind of social hurdle - if you can comply cleanly and neatly
then you can pass on to the next stage. If you resist, or complain it
will be noted, you may be marked out as a problem, and find your future
path blocked. An understanding of manners seems central
to the function of the secret museum. Manners are a code of behaviour,
a way to show respect and good education. And yet the precise form of
etiquette demanded is always more than simple common sense, it is also
a sign, a combination of some act and some meaning ascribed to that
act, like bowing, kissing or handshaking.
The act is held in place by convention and association. Similarly
in the secret museum we have a group of articles held in place by association
- by convention. The secret museum contains the ancient artifacts
but it really hides the metanymical part-thoughts that they carry with
them.
What have hiding and sexuality got in common -
why are they such a perfect fit? This parallel of the secret museum
and the unconscious does not make them analogous, even though they are
both to a certain extent hidden. Rather you could say that what enables
the museum keeper to separate out the ‘indecent’ from the ‘decent’ object
is not quite the same expertise as that which enables them to detect
a good fake from an original. The museum keeper is always already subject
to the repression of their own sexuality. Even a learned professional
is still prone, perhaps especially in their own field, to tacit duplicity. In this way the secret museum is a kind of
Freudian comedy - the keeper must suppress some aspects of ancient civilisation
in the name of preserving civilised society. In so doing the keeper
cannot help but pervert his/her own field of enquiry. As such, the tradition
of the secret museum is important in the history of the logic of classification
in that it reproduces the space and power of association whilst at the
same time suppressing it. In the secret museum, the taxonomic effect
obscures the difference between the objects; the space is there to house
their associations, to house the chain of associations about that which
is not proper. But of course we know that already; part of
our curiosity is to see that which is hidden or covered up. It is in
some ways no surprise that as long as there has been a restricted collection
or a secret museum, there has been a huge popular interest in it.
The
Department of Prints and Drawings,
British Museum 1999
In the
Sheepshank Cabinet in the keeper’s office of the Department of Prints
and Drawings at the British
Museum, there is a large red leather folio kept on I
Modi . The department hold some very rare fragments of sixteenth-century
Italian prints thought to be copies after the Raimondi copies of the
famous Giuglio Romano drawings. Recently
these fragments have been deregulated - out of the red file in the secret
cabinet and into the general collection.7 They are now entered in the public catalogue
after more than a hundred years of museum custody in an unclassified,
off-limits zone. What remains
in the I Modi file
in the Sheepshank cabinet is a mix of correspondence about the prints,
various copies and photocopies and a nineteenth-century set of the works
by Count Waldeck.
Count Waldeck is not a well known artist in his
own right, so his prints are not catalogued under his name. His copies
are thought to be inferior; badly drawn and not very close to the original
prints. They would be a muddying, less than edifying addition to the
work of Romano or Raimondi. The
only function these prints had, and the only reason they were bought
by such a discriminating department, is as documents relating to the
scandal of erotic print production - a story beginning in Renaissance
Rome. What remains in
the I Modi file,
that which cannot easily be added to Romano’s file in the public collection,
presents a problem - it is not that this material is obscene, but rather
that it accumulated because the intrigue had a file; an institutional
space. Once the original print
fragments have been entered in the public catalogue, this supplementary
information is homeless. As
Anthony Griffiths, the present keeper says of the contents of the Sheepshank
cabinet, ‘there is nothing I would like to do more than get it all back
in the collection: my only problem is one of space and time. I can myself
see no point whatever in keeping this material secluded. But you must
remember that part of the history is a history of taxonomy, and it is
not always obvious where material of this kind should be put. 8
This sentiment is now held by many curators and
keepers; the days of the secret museum are over and the material can
be deregulated. The change in attitude is completely understandable
and in many ways only oddly modern in that it is strangely overdue .
Why is the secret museum now to be thought of as a redundant space?
9 It is as if the desire of
the modern keeper is as much about casting off a difficult inheritance,
a burden of dubious rationality, as it is about updating the catalogue,
and revising the index. When something has been, but is no longer, it
could be thought of as history, but how can a catalogue system include
reference to its own irrational past? Here is the catalogue and its
underside; that which is known about but kept out of the catalogue,
that which has no place. The interesting problem for us here is precisely
that which burdens the modern system of classification, exactly that
which is, or becomes left out because it is not easy to see where it
would fit.
While I was going through the material on I Modi
in the reserved file at the British Museum, I came across a summary
of the story gleaned from the letters of Walter Toscanini; a twentieth
century collector. It was this short resume that caught my attention:
‘In Rome in 1523,Giulio Romano made a series of
drawings on the walls of the
Sala di Constantino in the Vatican. It is supposed that he was angry at
Pope Clement VII’s failure to pay him promptly
for his labours as Raphael’s
successor and the drawings caused a great scandal
because they depicted
explicit scenes of sexual intercourse in a variety
of positions. Giulio Romano
fled Rome for Mantua, but Marc Antonio Raimondi engraved the sixteen
drawings and remained in Rome. Raimondi
was imprisoned by Clement VII and no impressions of his plates are known
to survive although a few fragments of
late copies, consisting of heads and torsos only are preserved
in the British Library.
Pietro Aretino, a contemporary and intimate of
both Giulio Romano and Raimondi, was
inspired to write a sonnet for each of the positions and it is said
that engravings of the sonnets and illustrations were published. Nothing
of this publication has survived and Aretino also fled Rome because
of his part in the scandal. From
his refuge in Venice he wrote letters to two friends which supplement
the history of the designs and the text. These letters make it clear
that by 9 November 1527 an edition had been put on sale in Venice which
contained the printed text of the sonnets accompanied by illustrations
after Giulio Romano’s designs. We assume that
these illustrations were in the form of woodcuts. There is no contemporary description of the volume.’ 10
It was the idea of an encounter between the work
of a defiant artist and an enraged Pope that interested me. Giulio Romano
was employed to decorate the great Constantine Chamber in the Vatican
with mythic images of the Virtues and instead he drew lessons in carnal
pleasure, straight from ancient Roman Spintriae.11
It is like the prisoner’s protest; shit all over the place. I have a
drama playing in my head of a group of papal aides rushing around trying
to stop the Pope from seeing what has been drawn all over Vatican. And
then when he does see, I imagine the most furious rage and fury erupting,
and his vowing to see the rascal punished most severely. What a perfect
feat! Obscenity painted in the centre of Christian Holiness. What perfect
timing! Just as the Catholic Church was challenged by Luther about its
corruption, double standards and hierarchical power structure.
The images of I Modi caused an outrage; artist and image routed by papal authority.
When they were published as illustrations for a book of sonnets by Aretino
the book was immediately placed on the index of banned books. The obliteration
of the I Modi originals and
their after life in reproduction - as woodcuts, as copy prints and drawings
made after the prints, which then also suffered censorship and destruction,
makes for a popular tradition of erotic books whose very prohibition
incited public interest. I Modi are famous for being famous. 12
As has been mentioned in a number of previous studies,
the strikingly modern aspect of the story of I Modi is that the reproduction of the images was suppressed on account
of their sexual content alone. It is the imminent presence of print
culture and the book form of arousing content which can be seen as the
beginning of a new generic form. So much so, that Paula Findlen describes
the images-texts and their censorship as inventing the era of modern
pornography.13
Whilst critiques of the story have pointed to its
modern dimensions, the political and social conditions of the time are
extremely different to ours, and it seems to me that the historical
context of the inquisition, charges of heresy, the challenge of Protestantism
the indistinguishable power of church and state and the very beginning
of print culture, are very unmodern
factors that bring with them something essential to the story. If we
think of the censorship of I Modi as modern then we loose the force, the strong arm of the story which
is about the dread of being caught and the fear of lack of mercy or
justice once you are in the hands of those in power. In fact, the story
of I Modi
is an example of how dangerous it was to be an identifiable author
or an artist at a time when your own work could be used as evidence
of the most serious crimes.14Perhaps
we could say that ‘modern’ and ‘pornographic’ really only begin to make
sense together when modern means that those in power no longer destroy
subversive material, but rather isolate it in a museum, a secret museum.
In light of recent research by Bette Talvacchia,
the summary of the I Modi
story by Toscanini seems incorrect, and Romano did not actually deface
the Vatican at all, but more likely gave the drawings to his copyist,
Marcantonio Raimondi as a parting gift on his way to new work in Mantua,
and that it was Raimondi, in his act of copying the drawings to copperplate
to make prints which caused the scandal. 15 So the story of the Pope discovering the sex
murals where he was expecting the Virtues is not historically accurate.
None the less the potential repression of the Catholic machine still
functions as a key factor. It
is almost as if in the writing of the history of these defiant drawings,
the place of the Vatican and the function of the pope is laid on top
to counter balance and make sense of the series of images.
Giulio wanted to be paid for work done and the Vatican financiers
were not forthcoming. This is the worst thing he (we) could think of
doing in the Vatican. Luther pinned his protest to the door of the
church at Wittenburg, Romano drew his protest in the Vatican.
The context of this Renaissance story is, distinctly,
not of our era - and it is perhaps this out-of-time quality, with its
mythic structure of conflict and injustice that produces the enduring
drama that we see time and again in cases of censorship. It is the same
story; the threat of a furious (moral) authority who can take away your
life, your voice, your liberty, your ability to point out hypocrisy.
This story of reprisal from a furious paternal and moral authority comes
from the ancient past but makes sense of our present. The reserved access
to sexually explicit material that we find as an historical legacy of
our modern museums makes sense of natural shame and our tendency to
link sexual activity with private space. To be discovered as sexual, with sexual material
or even with desire, is to risk annihilation from the primal father.
Clearly the non-literal presence of any such primal father is clear
to us as we descend into information oblivion via
the net and new technology. However we are still in some ways in his
grip, although his legacy is mainly psychic. Perhaps those museum keepers
who initiated the secret cabinet thought the safeguard was necessary,
not just because of the danger of embarrassing the gentlewomen. No this was just an excuse, a decoy. Perhaps
the secret museum was felt to be a necessary defence against something
far less tangible.
The space of the secret museum was always out moded,
out-of-time, always an irrational space within the new science of classification
and new plans for democracy. In
Italy when the secret museum was formalised, the colonial and religious
rulers had only just been removed, and tyranny was only just in the
past, and still a living memory. In England, at the British Museum meanwhile
the custom of placing objects and books out of the public’s reach was
formalised around very different conditions and was probably arrived
at as an attempt to stop public funding scandals and social purity campaigns
interfering with the collection.
When Hermione and I visited the Museo Nazionale
in Naples in June 1999 , we
found La Raccolta Pornografica as an empty room awaiting renovation. It was
empty and undergoing renovation in preparation for a grand public opening,
to make the collection open to all visitors. Somehow the empty room
confronted us with an aspect of our search that we had not expected,
although it seems so obvious now; that looking for that which is hidden
is simply endless. There perhaps is never a time when you arrive at
the secret room, and it is open, and you can see that which has been
hidden.
La Raccolta Pornografica,
Museo Nazionale, Napoli. Photo; Naomi Salaman,
Hermione Wiltshire, July 1999
In the background of every modern museum there
is a prehistory of undemocratic autocracy. This is highlighted by the
desperate attempt made by institutions now to appear non elitist and
accessible. The shadow side of this is the real history of the collections;
the objects and their provenance as well as the history of their acquisition.
The secret museum is about the place of the forgotten past, but not
simply in a historical sense. If bureaucracy has a meaning it is connected
with this, perhaps the buffer of bureaucracy that is the real secret
museum could be seen as some kind of imaginary preparation for the re-emergence
of prehistory, where the primal father might reek revenge on all the
keepers of antiquities. Certainly, we know that the symptoms of actual
political tyranny almost always consist of a demand for control over
access to information - cultural political and sexual and for an observance
of certain laws of sexual conduct.
In this way, the secret museum is an example of an anxious, creative
response to authoritarianism, whether imagined or actual. To argue that
the secret museum is simply old fashioned is to miss the way it describes
and makes space for the irrational fears that accompany the preservation
of fragments of an unknowable past.
notes
1 Walter Kendrick, The Secret
Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture University of California Press, 1987/1996
2 See John R Clarke, Looking
at Love Making (University of California Press 1998)
3 Walter Kendrick, Ibid page 11.
4 Giuseppe Fiorelli, introduction La Raccolta
Pornografica, Napoli 1866
5 Stefano De Caro, Appunti Autobiogrfici, Guiseppe Firoelli (Napoli : Franco di Mauro
Editore 1994).
6 Catherine Johns, Sex or Symbol,
Erotic IMages in Greece and Rome , British Museum Publications 1982
7 When I first went to the
department in 1996, shortly after Hermione had told me about the story,
the fragments were kept in the keepers office and most of the staff
were unaware of their presence. They were not registered in the catalogue,
so to get access you had to know they were there and ask to see them
specifically. When I returned to the department in January 1999, the
fragments had been deregulated and housed in the Giulio Romano file.
8 Anthony Griffiths, letter to the author, March 1999
9 There have been sporadic
attempts to deregulate the material in the museum, and these have almost
always targeted the form of the hidden category as well as the objects
contained by it. See P Kearney, date?; P. Webb, 1975; C Johns 1982; P. Fryer
,1963; Cross in Harris 1991
10 Transcribed section of
letter from Walter Toscanini , who
discovered a volume of woodcuts of I Modi in
1928. Department of Prints
and Drawings, British Museum
11 Bette Talvacchia, Taking Positions - on the Erotic in Renaissance
Culture Princeton University
Press 1999
12 see Walter Kendrick, Peter
Webb, Paula Findlen, Bette Talvacchia,
Lynne Lawner
13 Paula Findlen , Humanism,
Politics and Pornography in Renaissance Italy in The Invention
of Pornography, edited by Lynne Hunt, Zone Books NY 1993
14 Michel Foucault, What is an Author, 1969
15 Bette Talvacchia, 1999