Censored art is the story of nudes that were covered after the fact, and its emblem is the fig leaf: painted drapery, plaster leaves and hidden canvases added by churchmen, museums and private owners, almost never by the artist who made the work. The clearest case is Michelangelo's Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, where loincloths were painted over the nudes after he was gone.
The people who ordered a covering were churchmen, courtiers and collectors, and the covers they chose ranged from fresh paint to a loose plaster leaf. Some were made to stay for good, and some were made to come off.
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The covering was not the first reaction to the Last Judgment, and not the loudest. Inside the Vatican, the pope's master of ceremonies, Biagio da Cesena, called the fresco a very disgraceful thing to have made in so honorable a place. Michelangelo's answer, as Vasari tells it, was to paint the man into hell as Minos, the judge of the underworld, with a pair of donkey's ears.
The nudes stayed bare for a while after that, and the loincloths came only once the painter was gone. What followed in the next centuries set a pattern: the people with the power to cover a picture were almost never the people who had made it, and the covering did not always do what they intended.
Who painted over Michelangelo's nudes?
Daniele da Volterra, a pupil of Michelangelo, did the work, and the nickname it earned him was Il Braghettone, the breeches maker…
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