My compliments to Public Broadcasting Services on showing the BBC series Museum Secrets. On August 15 I had the opportunity to watch the programme on the Vatican Museums during which professors Paul Gwynne and Daria Borghese dealt with nudity in works of art inside these museums.

In The Last Judgment, which adorns the Sistine Chapel, the private parts of some figures painted by Michelangelo were covered up. Also, the male organs of many statues “have gone missing”.

One of the experts argued that, like fingers, these parts are often protruding and hence very fragile. In this case they could have been hit without intending to remove them.

However, it is rumoured that the mutilation was intentional. It was said that Pope Pius V was offended with so much overexposure of flesh. He even forbade any more artistic nudity in the Vatican. It was also suggested that, as in the biblical story of Adam and Eve, male genitalia on statues should be covered with fig leaves (made of marble or bronze), which may still be seen today.

In the 18th century, Pope Clement XIII ordered workmen with hammers to go about the streets of Rome and remove genitals from male nude statues. I learned this from a manuscript of two Petrarchan sonnets of unknown authorship which I came across while conducting research in Italy. I have written a short paper on these two sonnets and on another on Clement XIII’s accession to the papacy in November 1758. The paper, entitled Sonnets dedicated to Pope Clement XIII, appears in a volume published as a 70th birthday tribute to Prof. Nicalao Saramandu, president of the linguistic association Atlas Linguarum Europae.

In the impertinent sonnets the author wonders why some people are seen going around the streets of Rome carrying hammers. Someone, he says, told him that Clement XIII “wants the statues to throw away the bird”. In other words, men were going round breaking off the penises of the male statues. He ridicules the decision and states that so many statues that had been commissioned for great sums of money now look like having suffered ‘il mal franzese’, the ‘French disease’ (syphilis).

In the second tercet (which forms the second half of the ending sestet in the Petrarchan sonnet) of the second sonnet, he recommends that if the Pope wants to find a remedy for the evil caused by lust in the country, he should order the castration of the cardinals!