“Why do all old statues have such small penises?”

love the blog!! Wondering why is it that countries use specific colours? Was is that they could make other colours with their resources or maybe they just don’t know what the colour blue or green is where you can’t see the ocean or forests

Wonder if any amount of the “small” perception comes from circumcised (male) observers? With foreskin, a flaccid penis retracts most of the way into the body–resting on the scrotum forming a silhouette reminiscent of a fig. Circumcised penises, however, often do not retract as much (or at all) when flaccid and–aside from the angle to the body–appear relatively similar to when erect. Circumcision is prevalent in the US, but all of the “old statues” appear to have foreskins.

Also stone is cold! 🙂 … All good points, but also archeologists and curators self selected items that could be shown or partially covered in museum collections. But the ‘grotesque’ point above is the best. Pompeii has many ‘grotesque’ images and the flying penis was a common fertility statue at one time. I think the classic images of David and their inspiration (the ancient Laocoon) are striving for balance, subtly and a move away from base instincts toward a more lofty aspiration. There is a maturity here that is silly misunderstood today. Too much enmphasis and the viewer misses the bigger picture, too little and that itself becomes a question. I think they wanted balance but without prissiness and prudishness….it’s a sex organ, we have them, move on.

As a tall woman I can see why they would see it this way around. Men I’ve been with who are big react differently to me than other men because they’re used to holding back with other women. They find their size is a hindrance usually. Smaller men fit most women better and don’t get held back by their size during sex.

So what about the story that penises were sculpted larger (it was still a sign of virility) but in the Victorian era, many were sculpted down? Is that a myth?

You allude to but leave out one of other main factors influencing the aesthetics which is actually the main point of the Dover work you reference: the fact that the ideal male beauty was that of a young boy. The Greek homosexuality that Dover details in his book on the subject is centered around pederasty and the tradition of Greek men to have boy lovers from the upper classes who they were obligated to school, support, and romance. The art they created commemorating and referencing this tradition reflected this ideal of young, male beauty. Germaine Greer goes into great detail about this in her book on the subject and how that romantic tradition and aesthetic convention influenced art into today. As for David, again he was intended to be an adolescent, not an adult (as the model for the statue would have been, as well). That’s why his hands and feet were made disproportionately large, to convey that adolescent gangliness and hint at the growth spurt that often starts in the limbs.

Regardless of why ancient depictions of penises were small, I think the more important point is that we need more discussion and photos on the subject. Ha! This has to be more important than index funds.

Priapus, of course, is the name from which we get the medical condition “Priapism,” that 4-hour erectile condition that the drug ads warn us is so dangerous (and of course it can be.) And that statue with the large penis reminds one of the fertility festivals in which statutes like this were paraded around the streets in the ancient world as symbols of a good upcoming harvest. So to speak. Great article. I got a rise out of it.

Reblogged this on The Invisible Trans*.

And there made out of cold stone which won’t help

Perhaps the ancient association between having a large penis and being an obnoxious jerk survives in vulgar slang, as when we call somebody a “prick” in English or a “putz” in Yiddish.

As indicated in the comments, the primary reason that the penis of Michelangelo’s David is relatively small for a healthy man of 17 feet in height is that it was commissioned and executed to adorn a niche of the Cathedral (Santa Maria del Fiore). The Laocoon Group sculpture significantly influenced Michelangelo later work, but it wasn’t unearthed until at least two years after Michelangelo finished his David, so it had no influence there. As a secondary reason, second to the fact that it was produced as religious art, my own theory is that the genitals of this David reflect those of the young quarryman, whose name is now lost to history, who modeled for Michelangelo in the production of this work.

A third reason, aside from the obvious influence of ancient sculpture, is that Michelangelo had certainly seen Donatello’s bronze David, which stood in the courtyard of the Palazzo Medici at the time, having been cast about 50 years earlier. That was the first fully nude sculpture produced since antiquity, and it caused quite a stir among artists as well as others who viewed it. Although Michelangelo departed from every other detail offered by Donatello’s interpretation (other than that the figures are at rest and not in motion), the delicately small penis of Donatello’s David may have influenced Michelangelo.

There’s a reason not mentioned in your posting or the earlier comments that the Greeks prized the look of a small tapered penis, but it had to do with a series of misunderstanding that the Greeks had about biology and fertilization. That may be the ultimate origin of this. Small penises were believed to offer the shortest distance for semen to travel to the point of fertilization, and men with the smallest organs were therefore more fertile.

You indicate that the “ancient Romans might have been more positive toward large penises…”; however, that is certainly the case. The Romans did copy not just the style of Greek art, arguably the best of which had been produced a few hundred years before Rome’s conquest of Greece, but they continued to have Attic artists copy the statues themselves in large numbers for shipment west, often changing only minor details such as hairstyles. As far as the penis size preferences of ancient Romans, they’re clearly close to those of the US and much of Western Europe today. The Romans covered the interiors of their homes and businesses with paintings of nude scenes and carved phalluses (such as the handles of oil lamps), much in the way we might today hang pictures of fruit or flowers, or keep a bowl of plastic fruit on a table.

With Roman bath culture and people of all classes spending hours per day at the baths, in some places and at some times with men and women together nude in groups of hundreds, regular everyday people left behind a great deal of graffiti carved and inked in to the walls, and they definitely prized larger penises. In Greece, women and men were strictly separated in the baths, and that was not the case at all during the Roman period, or much of it anyway.

Roman women not only had access to knowledge of how potential lovers or prospective arranged-marriage partners were endowed (they could visit the baths for themselves or send a servant to report back), but they had substantial agency and authority that the women of ancient Greece did not. The women of ancient Greece had almost no standing in society and no ability to conduct their affairs independent of men, regardless of social class. A marriage to arranged to a man with an “ideal” Greek penis was to be accepted. Free and noble Roman women didn’t have full say in marriage arrangements, nor a dating culture like today’s, but they had far more ways of exercising a preference, including for a sexual partner’s penis size.

Informative, interesting and concise. Thanks.

Well, this was an interesting piece of information. It makes a lot of sense when you think about it. It seems the Ancient Greeks were about downplaying the ”animalistic side” of mankind at times.

I’m not sure if this was mentioned but I noticed that the penis on David was symmetrical. The rest was not. Apart from the hand that was symbolic of Gods hand, the rest of the body was realistic. Was there a symbolicness to the penis, meaning the man at one time was perfect?
I dont know.. suggestions?

Thanks for the professional atitude of any Art History questions!

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Great entry!
I have noticed that in contrast, Japanese art ukiyo-e “shunga” exaggerates the size of genitalia. While these are much recent artworks (a couple hundred years back in time the most), would you be Able to explain the contrast with the above?