The Encyclopedia of Erotica
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This book disregards conventional thinking and presents 800 reproductions that illustrate erotic art from Ancient Greece down to the present era in both Europe and Asia: when reproduction is not seen as an end in itself. With no hesitation nor inhibition, the author explains why erotic art is a key factor of societal development.
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The Encyclopedia of Erotica - Hans-Jürgen Döpp
Erotic art or pornography?
How might one define erotic art? This much is certain, the depiction of a sexual activity alone does not raise a work to the nobility of erotic art. To identify erotic art only within its content would reduce it to one dimension, just as it is not possible to distinguish artistic and pornographic depictions only by describing their immoral content.
The view that erotic works are created solely for sexual arousal and so cannot be art is also erroneous. The creative imagination involved in erotic art does not necessarily distinguish it from pornography, which is also a product of the fantasy. Erotic art has to be more than just a depiction of sexual reality, or who would buy it? Gunter Schmidt states that pornography is constructed like sexual fantasy and daydreams, just as unreal, megalomaniacal, magical, illogical, and just as stereotypical.
In any case, those making a choice between art and pornography may have already decided against the first. Pornography is a moralizing defamatory term. What is art to one person is the devil’s handiwork to another. The mixing of aesthetic with ethical-moralistic questions dooms every clarification process right from the start.
In the original Greek, pornography means prostitute writings, that is, text with sexual content, in which case it would be possible to approach pornography in a freethinking manner and equate the content of erotic art with that of pornography. This re-evaluation would amount to a rehabilitation of the term. The extent to which the distinction between art and pornography depends on contemporary attitudes is illustrated, for example, by the painting over of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel during the Renaissance, when nudity was not considered indecent. The patron of this work of art, Pope Clemens VII, saw nothing immoral in its execution.
His successor, Paul IV, however, ordered an artist to provide the Last Judgment with trousers! Another example is the handling of the excavated frescos of Pompeii, which were inaccessible to the public until recently. In 1819, the Gallery of Obscenities was established in the Palazzo degli Studio, which was chosen as the national museum.
Only people of mature age and high moral standards had access to the locked room. The collection changed its name to the Gallery of Locked Objects in 1823. Again, only those with a regular Royal Permits were permitted access to view the exhibited works. The reactionary wave after the unrest in 1848 also affected the erotic collection of the museum. In 1849, the doors of the Gallery of Locked Objects closed forever. The collection was transferred to a still further removed section of