I’m still in Italy, enjoying the wonderful sights of Umbria. There will be many more reflections on this trip, I expect, but for now, one that delighted me, and I hope will you…
Quite a few years ago, I started looking at the private parts of statues of animals. I don’t dwell on them or anything. It isn’t weird. Not really.
I just happened to notice one day, two statues of nineteenth-century generals on horses, and that one of the horses was very prominently male and that the other was not. Isn’t that interesting, thought some part of my brain. Was it because each of them had a favourite horse? Was it some assertion of masculinity? Was it just one of those things?
So, I started keeping an eye out.
It has become a running joke with my partner and the results have been broadly unsurprising. The vast majority of statues of men on horses are specifically men on stallions.
But what about other animals?
I’m speaking here just of Europe/the Mediterranean, but here goes with some generalisations I now feel confident making.
Bulls: pretty obviously bulls, but… bovid ungulates (to get technical for a moment) are pretty significantly sexually dimorphic (males look quite different from females), so the genitalia are often not a particular focus. Huge shoulders and horns are frequently enough to make bulls bull-like.
By contrast, cows are often female by virtue of not being bulls. Sometimes they have udders, but often they don’t.
Dogs: more of a mixed bag. It seems to depend on how naturalistic the sculpture is, and obviously, what position the dog is in. There is definitely the sculptural possibility for the generic dog, especially in relief images, and dogs are often depicted on laps or cushions or lying at the feet of effigies.
Cats: less frequently sculpted, presumably because the elegance of cats can never be captured by mere human ingenuity, but when they do show up, they tend to be sexless, which may, of course, be because the genitalia of cats, except from some particular angles, are not all that prominent.
Exotica (things like rhinoceroses and giraffes) and miscellaneous: These tend to vary depending on whether the aim of the statue is to be very naturalistic, at which point, the bits tend to be what the bits are, or whether they are more stylised. Often, in the latter case, or when animals are in specific poses, no genitalia are visible.
But, when it comes to the exotica, there is, it turns out, an exception:
Lions…
Lions hold a specific place in European art. Since at least the Bronze Age, they have been either uncommon or extinct in Europe/Mediterranean West Asia, but have played a very visible role in sculpture and statuary.
They are associated with kingship, power and strength, and have featured as guardians of doorways, supports for thrones, in the Middle Ages, heraldic emblems, and companion animals in funerary monuments, as well as simply free-standing and relief sculptures.
As a result, for centuries, if not millennia, many people who had never seen a living lion sculpted them, leading to some slightly odd results.
One of the places it has been a real treat to visit on my current trip to Italy has been Ravello. It is a small settlement on the Amalfi coast which began life in the fifth century. It was wealthy in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, and features from these centuries both a duomo (cathedral) and the ruins of a palace.
As far as I can see, though, Ravello is most famous today, for being where Wagner and Nietzsche once got into a fight. It looks like a lovely place for a nice coffee sitting in the sun.
I didn’t do that, however, as I was visiting the duomo and its museum. When I was there, it was virtually empty. After some of the bustle of Amalfi, this was a bit of a relief and I enjoyed looking at details.
These included:
This pulpit, held up by columns, held up by lions, is considered one of the sights to see in Ravello on what websites I can find, and was designed in 1272 by Nicolò di Bartolomeo. For several reasons, however, it looks very much as if the lions have a longer story than this.
First, they a little more worn than the pristine finish of the pulpit.
Second, there is nothing else like them around the church. I would have thought, if a set of six lions were being carved for the duomo, one might expect the theme to be picked up and reused elsewhere.
Third, re-using older sculpture was extremely common across the Italian peninsula in the Middle Ages.
Fourth, I happened to look underneath, as has become my wont, and what a surprise that was!
These are not six lions, but three pairs of lions, three male and three female. Today, they are arranged in a way that suggests that nobody in 1272 cared much which was male or female, but whoever created them evidently cared a lot. Presumably, they were originally intended to be arranged in orderly pairs, with all the males on one side and the females on the other, or in a line, alternating male and female.
So, they are likely from somewhere else and from earlier than the pulpit. It is difficult to know how much earlier, but stylistically, they look medieval rather than ancient Roman. What more can be done with this observation of finer details?
Actually, quite a bit.
Compared with other animals, lions in sculpture are frequently not sexed, at least not via the inclusion of genitalia. It isn’t really necessary, since lions are sexually dimorphic, and the most obvious sign of a male lion is his mane.
But all of these lions have manes!
So, what is going on?
Nobody carving these lions had probably ever seen a lion, let alone two lions of different sexes.
Clearly, they understood a mane to be the diagnostic feature of a lion, not a male lion.
Since we don’t know the original context of these statues, it is hard to say why it might have been particularly significant for there to be three pairs of male and female lions, but clearly it was.
That meant that femaleness as well as maleness needed to be specifically indicated. So, how to convey that?
Apparently, the artist’s answer was to borrow from other animals. The male genitalia are not especially feline - too much structured under-hang that is usually concealed by skin stretched between the thigh and the abdomen, and not enough testicle beneath the tail base, in case you’ve never checked - but they do pretty closely resemble the actual structure and the conventional sculptural representation of male genitalia on both horses and dogs, which as discussed above, were pretty commonplace.
When it came to femaleness, the artist had a different inspiration. Presumably, they would have known that cats do not exhibit enlarged mammaries except when nursing (or, as somebody I was talking to charmingly put it, cats don’t get dugs like dogs get dugs). However, realism was not the aim here. Visible femaleness was, and without the knowledge that lionesses had no manes, or possibly some worry that other people might not recognise lions without manes, something else was needed.
Handily, there was a representation readily available of quadruped, mammalian femaleness that the sculptor had seen: the she-wolf nursing Romulus and Remus.
So, now they stand, in the duomo of Ravello, a delightful little discovery if you go into the quiet church, but presumably having meant something very different once. Guessing what is tricky, especially since I have not seen a three-pair male and female representation of animals, like these lions, anywhere else. I will, of course, now be on the lookout.
Because, apart from some musings on what makes things people have never seen in real life recognisable to them in art (wings on angels, for example, manes on lions, attributes on saints), this is a reflection on the fact that noticing things is almost always more rewarding than not.
I didn’t have a goal when I started checking under statues. There wasn’t a plan or a project. (I probably hope there never is a project!) But there was great delight when I suddenly realised that here was a case when it really did mean something. It gave me a momentary window into processes, practices and ways of picturing the world, across centuries.
So, whatever it is that you notice, persist! Who cares if it is odd or doesn’t seem to have any purpose? Who cares if it doesn’t seem ‘serious’ or appropriately connoisseurial? Whatever catches your attention, whatever makes you look twice or pay a little more attention is worthwhile and may bear fruit in the most unexpected ways.