Despite extolling the virtues of chastity, sex, and the Renaissance Catholic Church were always profoundly intertwined. Popes regularly kept mistresses and fathered children, while the best Renaissance artists decorated the walls of their ecclesiastical palaces with voluptuous classical nudes. These salubrious works of art were never intended for public consumption but the eyes of potentates and princes alone. However, this all changed in 1524, when some of this private art slipped from the walls of the Vatican into the pages of a book.
Marcantonio Raimondi, a master engraver, created prints of sketches from a prominent room in the papal palace made by the artist, Giulio Romano. The drawings showed sixteen couples from classical history and myth in a variety of sexual positions. Raimondi published his pictures in what came to be regarded as the world’s first mass-produced work of pornography: I Modi or ‘The Ways.’ The pictures were joined in a second edition by the saucy sonnets of satirical poet Pietro Aretino. I Modi’s popularity and content so outraged the Vatican that it destroyed all copies of the book and vilified and imprisoned its authors. So what made I Modi so sought after- and scandalous?
Giulio Romano and the Sala di Costantino
I Modi began its life as a series of illicit sketches on the walls of the Sala di Constantino, a room in the papal apartments of the apostolic palace in the Vatican. The drawings belonged to Giulio Romano, a pupil of Raphael and one of his two principal heirs. In 1508/9, Pope Julius II commissioned Raphael to redecorate the Sala and three other rooms as papal apartments. By the time of Raphael’s death in 1520, only the Sala remained. So it fell to Romano, as his master’s artistic executor, to complete the commission according to Raphael’s sketches.
The Sala was a room for receptions and ceremonials, so Raphael had designed its new decorative scheme accordingly. It was a room which celebrated the triumph of Christianity over paganism, with scenes from the life of the emperor Constantine. Constantine’s vision of the Cross, his consequent victory in battle and his baptism were all depicted. Raphael had even been careful to give Pope Miltiades, who baptized the emperor, the face of the then pope, Clement VII.
Romano duly completed the principle scheme according to his mentor’s sketches. However, before Romano added the final colors, he made a few drawings of his own. The story goes that, in a fit of pique at the Pope after the pontiff was late paying him, Romano downed tools and used the time to sketch out a few preliminary drawings of his own of the wall of the Sala. These doodles consisted of sixteen classical couples enjoying sex in a variety of positions.
It is more likely that these designs were made in a moment of inspiration rather than because of a sulk. For Romano was already planning life after his obligations to Raphael were complete. In 1524, he completed the Sala and left Rome for good. Romano moved on to Mantua, where he built a new life as an artist and architect in his own right. One of his first commissions was a new pleasure palace for Federico II Gonzaga, Marques of Mantua: the Palazzo del Te. It was here, in 1526, in the Palazzo’s Sala di Psyche, that Romano began to bring to life the sketches he had started in the Vatican.
The Sala di Psyche was a substantial banqueting room, decorated with scenes from Apuleius’s “The Golden Ass” Many of the paintings also included intimate scenes between couples such as Cupid and Psyche, Venus and Mars, and Zeus and Olympias- straight from the Vatican sketches. Even if he had seen these initial sketches on the Sala di Constantino, and recognized their reproduction in the Palazzo, Pope Clement VII was unlikely to have been offended. After all, they were in private hands? However, someone else had access to Romano’s sketches, and he was about to make these private couplings very public indeed.