Erotic art has no single meaning, because the same kind of picture has been a charm, a joke, a product and a crime, depending on who was looking. The clearest example is the fresco of Priapus in the House of the Vettii at Pompeii, a god weighing his enormous phallus against a bag of money in the entrance where every visitor had to pass.
The Romans who walked past him saw a protector and a pun. They believed Priapus guarded a house's riches, and the classicist Mary Beard, in her 2008 book on Pompeii, says the scales conceal an erudite pun on the words penis and pendere, which means "to weigh." Nothing about the scene was meant to be kept from guests.
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Nobody in Pompeii hid him. The people who dug up the city did. In 1819 the heir to the throne of Naples, the future King Francis I, visited the museum's display of finds with his wife and young daughter. The explicit pieces embarrassed him so much that he proposed shutting every one of them away in a single room.
That room, formally set up in 1821, admitted only people of mature age and respected morals. It was reopened and closed again several times over nearly a hundred years, stood briefly open at the end of the 1960s, and welcomed the general public only in 2000.
The Romans who painted these pictures left them in the open, and the century that found them needed a lock. Every period since has answered the same question in its own way: who may see this, and what happens to the person who made it?
Who put a god like Priapus in the front hall?
Probably two men who had started life as slaves…
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