ABSTRACT
The association brings to mind the erotic art used to inspire clients in the paintings and statues found in Pompeii, and these were among the first objects to be hidden from public view in the nineteenth century. Late twentieth-century scholars have been rediscovering the freedoms craftsmen and donors had in representing partial or full nudity, genital sex, erotic embraces, and veiled erotic signs. According to that paradigm, form rather than content is iconographic, yet it claimed the pleasure of viewing to be purely aesthetic rather than erotic. Representations of naked bodies can be sacred or secular, raising the question whether an erotic response would have been equally appropriate to each context. Erotic images were often for private viewing, as in the margins of manuscripts, or on the carved seats that supported clerical rumps in the choir, but they also occur on monuments that were open to the public.
