The Sinner's Grand Tour

by Tony Perrottet

  I felt like a minor head of state. Two more Swiss Guards, now carrying halberds, escorted me to an office with a wooden counter, like a hotel reception desk. An elderly attendant hurriedly put on his blazer, then opened the ceremonial waiting room.

  I was too excited to sit. I went over my spiel on “the influence of pagan imagery on Renaissance art,” fully expecting to be cross-examined.

  The door swept open and in walked a cleric in a black cassock, looking a little harried.

  “Monsignor Miles?” I guessed.

  “No, no, they collared an American to look after you.…”

  My guide from the Secretariat introduced himself in a broad Midwestern accent—Monsignor Wells, originally from Tulsa, Oklahoma.

  “Real sorry about the mix-up on times today,” he said. “We had an Italian minister coming to meet the pope here this afternoon, so there was a scheduling conflict. But the minister was delayed, so hopefully we can get you in and out in a few minutes.”

  We stepped first into Cardinal Bibbiena’s original bedroom. It had been renovated into a sanitized meeting chamber with cream walls and no decor other than a pair of throne-line chairs and vases of fresh flowers. In the far corner was a narrow wooden door. Standing before it with the key, the monsignor seemed perplexed.

  “We open the Stufetta up very rarely,” he said. “Almost never.”

  For a terrifying second, I thought he’d change his mind. Then he opened the door.

  I climbed a couple of shallow steps into a bright, vaulted chamber, about eight feet by eight, and fifteen feet high, spun around and craned my neck to look up. The proportions were just as odd as legend held. And Raphael had concocted a whirlwind of fantasy: the bathroom was spinning with delectable erotic scenes. The walls and ceiling were covered with fifteen-inch fresco panels with small, naked deities prancing their way through a five-hundred-year-old graphic novel. Some panels were definitely the worse for wear, with gaps that had been repaired with cement; a couple were missing completely. But you could still make out the gods and goddesses at play, and my eyes darted from one image to the next trying to take it all in at once. The Vatican had helpfully provided an armchair for comfortable contemplation of the artworks. So I lounged and slowly took it all in, while the monsignor stood in a corner, waiting patiently.

  In 1516, this room was on the cutting edge of interior design. The very idea of a separate bathroom was chic, inspired by a recently discovered volume by the ancient Roman engineer Vitruvius. (This was a bathroom, not a toilet. Hygienic facilities were still rudimentary in the Renaissance. It’s possible that Bibbiena had obtained a wooden cabinet as a toilet, but these were still considered experimental devices.) The cardinal’s brass bath, from which he could admire Raphael’s handiwork, had been removed, but down at knee level was the original silver water faucet, crafted in the mask of a grinning satyr. Three of the walls had niches decorated with real cockleshells, where statuettes once stood. Light was flooding in through a small glass window, slightly ajar.

  Some modern scholars have suggested that Raphael’s images weren’t meant to be erotic in our modern sense, but Neo-platonic allegories (“… for surely the Cardinal did not intend his bathroom to be a celebration of carnal love,” reasons one). The argument is a little hard to credit, looking at the depictions of Venus. One panel shows a pleasing view of her posterior as she daintily steps into her foam-fringed shell. In another, she lounges between Adonis’s knees as he caresses her breast. She swims in sensual abandon or sits on a luxurious bed, admiring herself in a mirror. We know from an engraving that one frame, sadly missing, had Venus suggestively raising her leg to extract a thorn from her foot. Another had Vulcan attempting to rape Minerva.

  While some of the frescoes are lovingly executed, others appear clumsy. One, of Cupid sitting on a raft tied to giant snails, is truly surreal. These are usually attributed by scholars to Raphael’s assistants.

  Monsignor Wells was still waiting in silence. I voiced a couple of hesitant remarks, trying to sound learned, but he just shrugged: “I don’t know a thing about it.” Inwardly, I let out a sigh of relief. My spiel wasn’t necessary. Instead, we chatted about the prairies. I had once been to Oklahoma for a story on the Old West.

  I tried not to scan too obviously for the most notorious image in the Stufetta, of the god Pan with a monstrous erection. And yes, there it was, at waist-level by the window. It was a little embarrassing, but I had to ask the Monsignor to step aside so I could get a better look. I put on my most serious face as I inspected the horny half-goat deity, spying on the full-breasted nymph Syrinx as she washed her hair in the river.

  Pan wasn’t all there. Someone had specifically etched away his erect phallus and testicles, leaving a solid white shape—an accurate portrayal, even still.

  “I don’t suppose you know when …?” I began.

  “Don’t know a thing about it.”

  Pan’s manhood had evidently been intact in 1931 when the French art expert Emmanuel Rodocanachi wrote about the Stufetta; in fact, it was one of the few things you could see in the poor quality black-and-whites taken for his book on Leo X’s papacy. The damage may actually have been done by a disgusted Vatican official. More likely it occurred during one of the modern restorations, 1942 or 1972—presumably the former.

  Artist’s copy of a Renaissance engraving by one of Raphael’s students, Marcantonio Raimondi, from the Stufetta. The draping over the nymph’s thighs was discreetly added. Today, one key area of the satyrs anatomy has been damaged. (© Lesley Thelander)

  Lovers of Vatican conspiracy theories would find rich material surrounding the Stufetta. Both Raphael and Cardinal Bibbiena died shortly after its completion, within a few months of one another, in 1520, under unusual circumstances. Raphael was only thirty-seven, and according to the only contemporary account we have, by the art-world insider Giorgio Vasari, he expired from too much sex. The artist’s sensual appetites had always been “immoderate,” Vasari wrote, and on this fatal occasion he indulged “with even more immoderation than usual.” After an all-night orgy, Raphael came down with a fever, then made the mistake of letting doctors treat him. After two weeks, he was dead. Cardinal Bibbiena died about six months later, at the age of fifty, amid persistent rumors that he was poisoned. Sadly, history is silent on his sexual proclivities.

  Their deaths did not end the tradition of subversive art at the Vatican. Two of Raphael’s most brilliant pupils, Giulio Romano and Marcantonio Raimondi, reproduced some engraved copies of the images. They also kept painting more traditional religious imagery in other parts of the palace. But in 1523, Romano became so enraged about late payments for his murals in the Hall of Constantine that he drew obscene images on the walls instead—the notorious I Modi, or The Postures. They depicted sixteen vigorous sexual positions, with known Roman courtesans as the female characters. These were then engraved by Raimondi, and copies were distributed in a select edition around Rome, causing a sensation. Their underground popularity grew in 1525, when the scurrilous author Pietro Aretino also wrote sonnets to accompany them. Scandalously, he had many of the more provocative sections of the poetry narrated by the women.

  This became too much for the new pope, Clement VII. He had Raimondi thrown in prison and would have done the same to Romano had he not fled Rome for Mantua. Papal officers hunted down and destroyed the copper engraving plates and almost every copy of I Modi. (It appears that any of their images related to the Stufetta were also caught in the swoop.) As Vasari notes, examples were found “in those places one would have least expected”—presumably among the Vatican cardinals themselves.

  Aretino’s dirty sonnets have been passed down through the generations. But tragically, not a single intact copy of Raimondi’s engravings has survived. Only nine fragments, mostly of faces removed from their sexual context, were saved in the nineteenth century, ending up—of course—in the Secretum of the British Museum. (They are now in the Department of Prints and Drawings; an engraving inspire
d by the Stufetta is in Paris’s Bibliothèque Nationale). But all was not lost. In 1928, the son of the famous Italian tenor Toscanini discovered a copy of a pirate edition of I Modi, made in Venice in 1527 by an anonymous printer, including slightly blurred woodcuts of the original artworks. Although the detail is not as fine as in the Raimondi engravings, the woodcuts do convey the strength of the originals. He brought the book with him to the United States, where it ended up in the hands of an anonymous American collector. Finally, in the 1980s, a copy was published by academic presses in Italy and United States as I Modi: the Sixteen Positions.

  Today, thousands of tourists plod daily through the Hall of Constantine in the Vatican Museums, admiring the spiritually uplifting portrayal of the emperor’s conversion to Christianity. Scholars have yet to perform infrared scans to see whether Romano’s paintings still lurk beneath.

  The monsignor was beginning to look edgy. Maybe the Pope was about to arrive, and he didn’t want to be caught exiting the bathroom with me.

  “Do you want to see the Loggetta?” he asked, to move me along.

  Above: Fragments of Marcantonio Raimondi’s original engravings of I Modi survived in the Secretum of the British Museum.

  Below: A copy of an original made in the 18th century by Frédéric Maximilien de Waldeck, an artist who claimed to have found a version in a convent in Mexico, now lost. Parts of the image do match. (Both © Trustees of the British Museum)

  I looked at him blankly.

  “You know, Raphael’s Loggetta—it’s pretty famous.”

  I nodded distractedly, but I was thinking of the Stufetta.

  Later, as I returned to the elevator, I was so euphoric I barely noticed the bank of dark clouds gathering over Rome. By the time I was outside, the sky was black and thunder beginning to roll. I walked quickly down Mussolini’s Via della Conciliazione, past the Press Office where my Vatican journey had begun, as raindrops the size of golf balls came hurtling down and a gale began to overturn café tables, sweeping umbrellas into the air. It was like something out of The Exorcist. I dashed into a café, took a window seat, and ordered a celebratory prosecco while I waited the storm out.

  Swiss Guards outside the Inquisition Archives in Vatican City.

  As the waiter approached me, he lurched and the glass fell, shattering into a thousand pieces.

  “What happened?” the maitre d’ demanded.

  “I don’t know,” the waiter said, shaken.

  Just to be on the safe side, I crossed myself and asked divine forgiveness for my impious investigations. Once a failed altar boy, always a failed altar boy.

  Chapter Eight

  RETURN OF THE PAGANS

  The Once and Future Paradise of Capri

  The broiling weeks in Rome had taken their toll on all of us. Enough Catholic madness and urban angst! Even the Romans had evacuated the city. I began to feel a guilty twinge that we still hadn’t dipped a toe in the Mediterranean. It was time to do as travelers have done for the last three centuries and head to the southern Italian coast.

  A sojourn to the island of Sirens was just what the doctor ordered.

  From the sea, Capri looks like a place where the Gods would holiday, a fortress of titanic cliffs and rocky spires that rise like fangs from the blue Bay of Naples. The island may be less than four miles long and two wide but, for me, it loomed large in every sense. Its tradition of debauchery, established two thousand years ago and celebrated in art, literature, and song has reemerged again and again to inspire the reprobates of history.

  The pattern was set in antiquity, when Capri became the ultimate escape for rich Romans from everyday cares. They traveled to the island to swim in its magical grottos, philosophize on the beaches, and seduce the comely locals, who were descended from Greek colonists. Many centuries later, the first excavations across the bay at Pompeii and Herculaneum in the 1750s reawoke Europeans to the erotic freedoms of the ancients. The two Roman towns buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79 were brimming with exuberantly carnal artworks that thrilled the most jaded connoisseurs. By the late eighteenth century, the nearby city of Naples was a goal for every educated traveler, and a visit to Capri a high point of every Grand Tour. In fact, looking back over the last 250 years, it seems that every sexual libertarian in the West made his or her way to its shores, where paganism soundly trumped austere Christian morality and inhibitions wilted under the warm southern sun. The islanders’ casual attitude to sex was legendary: It was whispered that the most shocking proposals were greeted with a shrug. Living among the ruins of lost empires, perhaps they took an ironic view of human ambition and lived for the moment. Of course, foreigners had long remarked on southern Italian hospitality. As early as 1632, French traveler Jean-Jacques Bouchard referred to their favors as la courtoisie, “the courtesy”—as in, “The ladies are very beautiful and so are the boys and they both gladly perform the courtesy.” It was as if the soil itself were irrigated with sin. The brilliant light, the crystalline water, the languid heat, all cried out, carpe diem.

  The first traveling scholars were fascinated by stories of Emperor Tiberius, the patron sinner of Capri, who retired to the island in A.D. 27 at the age of sixty-nine and had a dozen villas constructed around its perimeter. His eleven-year stay there was immortalized by the gossipy Roman author Suetonius, who wrote that Tiberius indulged in perverted bacchanals with spintriae, “experts in unnatural acts.” According to the memorable account in Lives of the Caesars, one Tiberian favorite was to have boys dress up as fish and “tease him with their licks and nibbles” as he swam in his favorite grotto. In recent years, historians have discounted this depiction as a hatchet-job by Suetonius, a resentful patrician who was writing eighty years after Tiberius’s death and had been dismissed from his position by Emperor Hadrian. In this revisionist view, Tiberius was actually a recluse who preferred stargazing from his observatory to ravaging adolescents. Since historians have documented far more extreme imperial behavior, the stories about Tiberius may have had an element of truth, but the reality will never really be known. True or not, the “Orgy of Capri” guaranteed its tourist industry, luring streams of Latin prose lovers to clamber up to Tiberius’s hilltop palace, the Villa of Jupiter, Suetonius in hand.

  The Hotel Caesar Augustus commemorates Roman rule in Capri.

  Capri’s golden age really began in the nineteenth century, as it garnered an international colony of freethinkers and artists, including what may be Europe’s first openly gay community. The ghostly hand of Tiberius was at play again when Capri’s most striking natural wonder, La Grotta Azzurra, or Blue Grotto, was discovered in 1826. A young German writer named August Kopisch had heard rumors of a haunted sea cave in the island’s northwest, and he convinced some local boatmen to take him there. Swimming alone through the narrow entrance, Kopisch was astonished to find the water below him glowing “like the light of a blue flame”; the brilliant sunlight reflected through an underwater opening in the cave made him feel he was floating in “an unfathomable blue sky.” Further inspection revealed a rocky platform at the back of the grotto, with a man-made opening. Islanders told him that this had once been the entrance to a secret tunnel extending directly upward to another of Tiberius’s palaces, the Villa Damecuta, although the passage had since collapsed. Surely, Kopisch reasoned, this had to be where the crusty old emperor had swum with his bevy of little “fish”? (In 1964, marine archeologists did in fact dredge up three ancient statues from the grotto floor, one of the sea god, Neptune, and two of his son Triton, proving the cave had been a Nymphaeum, a Roman shrine to the water gods, and almost certainly used by Tiberius in some of his private moments. A 2009 survey of the five-hundred-foot-deep cave found seven statue bases, raising the possibility that the other four may be found. No trace of a tunnel has been found, however.)

  Kopisch’s bestselling account, The Discovery of the Blue Grotto on the Isle of Capri, turned the trickle of rebellious visitors into a flood. Expats and artists converged from around E
urope to escape the shackles of Victorian society, turning the island into the seaside alter ego of belle époque Paris. For those with ready cash, Capri was a close approximation of paradise. One could rent elegant villas, dine under the vine-covered pergolas, and argue about art and love over the light Caprese wine. Famous authors, such as Conrad, James, Turgenev, and Nietzsche, rubbed shoulders with exiled revolutionaries. Queen Victoria of Sweden came here to conduct a secret affair with the doctor Axel Munthe, who built a magnificent terraced mansion in Upper Capri inspired by his own classical visions. The libertine eccentrics included the irascible former Confederate colonel named John Cay H. Mackowen, who lived in a grand crimson mansion full of antiquities and an array of local mistresses, and the German painter Karl Diefenbach, who wandered the cobbled streets of Capri Town wearing a long white toga and sandals and gave “tormented” soapbox sermons in favor of free love and nudity in the piazza.

  After the Oscar Wilde trial in 1895, the British began to predominate on Capri. Homosexuals had long been attracted to the permissive island, but many more fled London permanently when Wilde was sentenced to two years of hard labor under new laws banning “acts of gross indecency” between males. (The law had originally included relations between women, but Queen Victoria had deleted the provision, saying that the concept was patently absurd.) After his release from prison, Wilde himself arrived with his young lover, “Bosie,” and laid a symbolic wreath at Tiberius’s Villa of Jupiter. The writer Norman Douglas became the dean of the gay community and was known to frolic around the island’s gardens with vine leaves in his hair. Decadent French poets and German art photographers came to pay homage to the pagan spirit. Capri is still fondly remembered as a progressive enclave, where nobody asked and nobody told. Even in the 1960s, filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard chose Capri as a setting for chic and sexy thrillers, its fantastic mansions a fitting backdrop to dramas of sexual liberation.