Fig Leaf: The Biggest Cover-Up in History

This programme contains scenes of a sexual nature.

The fig leaf...

The plant that Adam and Eve covered themselves with after the fall.

From the fronds on antique gods...

..to the carvings on Medieval cathedrals

and the heroic nudes of Victorian Britain.

The fig leaf is one of the great enduring motifs

of Western sculpture.

I am agog. I'm marvelling.

In it long fruition, it's evolved into different shapes and sizes.

Can I just clarify one small point -

a fig leaf isn't always a fig leaf.

It can also be a drape, a gauze, a girdle, a corset,

a skirt or, how about, a mighty python?

The fig leaf is whatever hides the unmentionable in sculpture.

It's a cover up,

but that's not all.

What's behind the fig leaf?

Well, it's a piece of censorship, intended to divert the eye

and the mind from man's bestial bits and pieces.

Although, paradoxically,

it's often had the opposite effect - of being titillating.

But you know what? The more you study the fig leaf,

as it's flourished and shrivelled on sculpture,

it has actually been telling us everything we needed to know

about our changing and conflicting attitudes to religion,

to morality and to sex.

I'm in a world that predates the fig leaf...

..a world of sensuality and naked beauty.

This is the Cast Gallery of Cambridge University...

..packed with statues designed over 2,000 years ago.

Well, you could almost be in ancient Greece,

except if you were, you'd be dazzled by these statues.

They were painted then and they had a vividness, a naturalness,

that today we associate with, say, the waxworks of Madam Tussauds,

rather than with pale marbles.

It was a time when the human body wasn't a thing of shame or disgust.

It was celebrated in all its glory.

Although the statues were starkers,

they weren't intended as objects of desire.

Many works were modelled on naked athletes.

These sculptures were telling a story

about the people they were based on.

They were vehicles, they were a way

of transmitting a message in the public sphere.

Sort of Ancient Greek government information films,

rendered in marble.

Key to this message was the small penis,

a sign of restraint and control.

This was the only time in history when having a small one

was something to be proud of.

According to classicist Caroline Vout,

it helps add up to the perfect man.

In a sense,

it's the, sort of, ultimate 5th-Century BC body.

So this is your classical pin-up.

So it's got wonderfully exaggerated muscle tone.

-He's pretty buff.

-He is pretty buff and he's buff in a way

that's actually, sort of, anatomically impossible.

I've certainly never seen a man that looks like that, myself. Erm...

And in Athens in the 5th century, these things are everywhere

and having a buff body like this means that you are a good

Greek citizen and it actually says something about your virtue

and it's very much linked to your brain. I think showing these bodies

naked like this means that they are, kind of, putting masculinity

on the table and saying, "This is what we're about as a race."

As far as the Ancient Greeks were concerned,

there was nothing they liked better than the splendour

of an unadorned, unadulterated nude.

But something was about to happen that would bring those values

and, indeed, many of the sculptures concerned, crashing down to earth...

Christianity.

From the first century AD onwards,

this new religion put down roots throughout Europe.

Its doctrine was embedded in the pages of the Bible.

The very first book of the Old Testament leaves no doubt

about the Christian view of the bare body and its weaknesses.

As soon as Adam and Eve eat from the Tree of Knowledge,

they're punished.

They become ashamed of their nakedness.

From Genesis, chapter three, verse seven,

"And the eyes of them both were opened,

"and they knew that they were naked.

"And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons."

I can't think of another verse in the Bible

that's had a more profound impact on the way we think of ourselves,

our bodies and on art.

And at the beginning of the 13th century,

here at Notre Dame Cathedral, in the heart of Paris,

this idea was etched into stone.

The last thing you see as you leave Notre Dame

is that climactic moment in the Garden of Eden.

Here we see the serpent, disguised in female form,

writhing around the Tree of Knowledge.

Eve already has the fruit from the tree and she's sharing it with Adam.

But the striking thing is they're aware of their nudity

and we know that because they're covered up.

The Medieval Church said, "Nudity was wrong."

The fig leaf would become absolutely synonymous with original sin.

This is like a Medieval piece of street furniture, saying,

"Thou shalt not get thy kit off."

In the light of Christianity, everything about nudity

and sexuality was suspect.

This is Saint Augustine, one of the fathers of the church.

He preached that, since eating the forbidden fruit,

man had lost control of his genitals

and that an erection was a sign of disobedience.

Suddenly, those exquisite nude statues,

left over from the days of Ancient Greece and Rome

were a source of embarrassment.

The solution? Give 'em the chop!

The clergy, in general,

felt like hiding the genitals, because sex is supposed to be dirty,

unless you are having sex in order to procreate,

which is its only purpose, according to the clergy.

And here you're on the church the first church of

the Diocese of Paris.

It's the church of the capital, of French kings.

You can't show genitals on this facade.

So the poor old fig leaf, the poor old fig tree, never hurt anybody?

-No.

-But it's come to be this symbol of shame, of sin, hasn't it?

In a way, yes, because it's almost always used to hide Adam and Eve -

-their genitals, especially.

-And what do you think about that?

Do you think it suited artisans and craftsmen

that they didn't have to show this difficult, embarrassing part

of the body, they just put a fig leaf on?

-Or was it all about the religious control?

-I guess you can say both.

Religion tried to control, I mean, sex drives and people and so on.

I guess they missed their aim, as usual.

And when you put a fig leaf on this particular part of one's anatomy,

you attract attention to it, more than anything else.

So, it's a double-edged sword.

But just one other thing,

why the fig leaf and not the birch, the beech,

the chestnut, or even the mighty oak leaf?

Well, scholars believe that the Garden of Eden was probably set

in modern-day Iran, where the fig grows abundantly.

And now I look at the old leaf,

it does have a certain meat and two vegginess about it, doesn't it?

One of these chaps would do the job for most of us!

The Middle Ages saw a great unfurling of the fig leaf,

but there was still one way, one wrinkle in church doctrine,

that allowed sculptors to get away with the odd naked body.

Dominating the town of Orvieto in Italy

is its 14th-century cathedral.

The glittering facade is one of the great masterpieces of the age.

It was designed by the architect and sculptor, Maitani.

The reliefs on the front wall show scenes from the Bible.

One of the most prominent is this one, of The Last Judgement.

And it's writhing with nudity.

This was acceptable, because it sent the right message.

What it was telling you was the wages of sin are death

and not only death, but death with no clothes on.

You've got to admire the sheer propagandising force

of this tableaux here.

It was a kind of Medieval screensaver,

in your face the whole time,

and what it was telling you was,

"If you are virtuous, if you observe the sacraments

"of Mother Church, you might just avoid a fate like this."

Not only that, you could fee a little bit smug about your less

virtuous neighbours. They were going to end up squirming in agony.

And what was worse, perhaps, in some ways, in indignity,

stark, you know what, naked.

While I'm here, I can't resist going inside

to see the cathedral's other great treasure.

And it's one of the most powerful depictions

of the sinfulness of nudity in all Western art.

Lucas Signorelli's 15th-century tour de force

shows the dammed cast into hell and received by demons.

On a blazingly hot day here in Orvieto,

you can practically smell the sulphur coming off this wall.

You can see the slightly green, sulphurous devils

in amongst those lost, poor souls,

grappling with them, binding them, tying them up,

cutting their throats and carrying them off.

For a thousand years, the Church and artists had an understanding.

The nude could be shown on one condition -

that nakedness was seen as sinful, ugly, evil.

But then, one sculptor broke the rules.

On the 14 May, 1504, over five long days,

40 men struggled through the streets of Florence.

They were moving a giant five-metre stone statue.

The workmen brought their massive payload

through these narrow streets of Florence.

It was so big, in fact, that, in places,

the streets had to be widened...

and whole archways torn down.

A great multitude gathered to see the work,

but their gasps of admiration soon turned to ones of horror

and they began pelting the statue with rocks.

Small wonder. Not only was he a giant,

he was butt naked.

And not in the right way.

The artist, Michelangelo, had cast the fig leaf aside

and proclaimed the naked body a thing of wonder and beauty.

In a world where everyone went to church

and abided by the holy scriptures, a giant celebratory nude

in the most public place in Florence was verging on blasphemy.

Michelangelo's David was shocking.

Of course, there's a character in the Old Testament called David,

but he didn't look much like this fella.

Yes, you can make out, over his shoulder, the slingshot he used

to fell the mighty Goliath, but where's Goliath's severed head?

And by the way, where does it say in the Bible that David was naked?

Try to move back to 1504, when people saw this for the first time.

It was absolutely revolutionary.

Virtually every single David, before during or after Michelangelo's time,

was clothed, which is what the story indicates.

Michelangelo doesn't follow the story

and that's the importance of the work.

So Michelangelo asked himself a question,

"How do I show the most virtuous man?"

And his answer was to say,

"I'll show his inner beauty through his outer beauty."

So what we see here is an embodiment of the Renaissance,

it's a rebirth of the ancient nude,

in a Christian context.

Michelangelo wanted to recreate the classical statues,

down to the tiniest detail.

And speaking of tiny...

Michelangelo shows David with a small penis, why?

People ask about that. I think the answer is simple -

he was looking at ancient statues. In comparison to ancient statues,

the size of his genitalia is perfectly normal.

The pubic hair, it's a little embarrassing to some people,

but if you take a look at it,

you see that there are three perfectly formed curls,

that form a triangle. We know that's not the way pubic hair looked.

He's not trying to show reality.

He's trying to create a new ideal of male beauty,

in order to show the inner virtue of this hero.

But the Florentines didn't see inner virtue,

they only saw the outer appendage.

The offending member was covered up by not one fig leaf,

but by a skirt of 28 - count them - copper leaves.

But David isn't the end of Michelangelo's role

in the story of the fig leaf.

Michelangelo was passionate about showing the naked male body

in all its glory and with rendering it in stone.

Was it about art, or sex?

Rumours circulated about his preference for younger men

and that was just the start of the scandal.

Michelangelo was obsessed with human anatomy, with dissection,

with cutting people, perhaps to an unhealthy and unlawful degree.

You know that Johnny Cash song,

"I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die."

Well, it's even been said of Michelangelo

that he had a model crucified,

merely to observe the poor devil's death agonies.

But Michelangelo didn't seem to care.

His most provocative artworks were yet to come.

# But I shot a man in Reno

# Just to watch him die

# When I hear that whistle blowin'

# I hang my head and cry... #

I'm following in Michelangelo's footsteps, to Rome,

where he went to work in 1508.

The invitation came from the very top of the Catholic Church,

the Vatican, from Pope Julius II himself.

He asked Michelangelo to create a work

for the inner sanctum of St Peter's...

..The Sistine Chapel.

It would go on to become perhaps his most famous painting.

Even here in the bosom of the religious establishment,

Michelangelo dared to show Adam without his customary fig leaf.

And he didn't stop here.

Look at this statue for the tomb of Pope Julius II.

Let's face it, it's a bit sexy for the interior of a church.

Some of the clergy certainly thought so.

An archbishop, called Ambrosius Catharinus,

spoke for his brother priests, when he said,

"The most disgusting aspect of this age,

"is that one comes across pictures of gross indecency

"in the greatest churches and chapels,

"with the effect of arousing not devotion

"but every lust of the corrupt flesh."

Over the next three decades,

Michelangelo continued to cross the line.

The murmurs of protest grew to a clamour.

The Vatican was appalled by the flagrant nudity of his art

and by the fashion it was setting.

Time to call in the Leaf Police.

I'm not joking. There really was a special operation mounted

to clothe naked art.

It would become known as the Fig Leaf Campaign.

In December 1563, just weeks before the death of Michelangelo,

an official papal decree was issued.

It forbade the depiction of all "lasciviousness" in Church art.

For Michelangelo's work, the affect was devastating.

One sculpture in particular

would suffer the hammer blow of censorship.

I'm going to see one of the most controversial statues

Michelangelo ever created.

It's a nude, but more provocatively even than that, it's a nude Christ

and he was rendered "con tutti atributi", as the Italians say.

"With all his attributes."

I'm meeting Padre Baliccu,

Father of the Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva.

Bongiorno et benvenuto. Bene.

-This is the Michelangelo?

-Si, si, si, si.

Michelangelo's statue is called Christ The Redeemer.

After the Fig Leaf Campaign,

a bronze girdle was placed over it and can never be removed.

Do you think Michelangelo was right to produce this sculpture,

showing the atributi? Was that right?

At first, Christ's lower body

had been simply obscured by a fabric skirt,

but the bronze girdle was needed

after the statue became a victim of vandalism.

The backlash against Michelangelo's brazen displays of nudity

severely dented his work, that's putting it mildly,

and his reputation.

Now, goodness knows, there are precious few

nailed-on honest-to-God geniuses in this world,

but you'd have thought Michelangelo qualified as one of them.

At this time, though, he was slandered as,

"l'inventor delle porcherie" - the inventor of pork things.

Perhaps the greatest man ever to hold a chisel,

written off as the maker of pork scratchings.

Hello. Thank you.

Let's go.

The Fig Leaf Campaign continued to cast its shadow over Western art.

But in the 17th century, one sculptor

found a way to turn censorship into a new form of sensuality.

His name was Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

Some of his best-known works are here in the Borghese Gallery.

One of them is Bernini's very own version of David.

I can't help thinking that he chose the subject

as a deliberate response to Michelangelo.

Where Michelangelo's David is nude,

Bernini cleverly kept the ticklish bits under wraps,

but in a way that's all the more provocative.

If you know your Old Testament, or even if you don't,

you wouldn't have any difficulty recognising this David.

The whole centrepiece, the whole thrust of the action,

the tension of him about to release that thunderbolt,

that brick that's going to knock down and kill Goliath.

The eyes drawn to that taut slingshot and all the other details

are accurate, as we read them in the Bible.

The clothes that he fought in, a simple sheepskin,

but notice how Bernini has arranged it, has draped it.

There's just a glimpse of what would hitherto have been obscured

by a regular fig leaf.

Bernini knew that the more you cover things up,

the more you want to know what's underneath.

With his slipping drape affect,

he'd come up with an ingenious and eroticised twist on the fig leaf.

And, in the process, he'd revitalised Western sculpture.

Anna Coliva is the curator of the museum.

How can you explain your view that it's more sensual,

more erotic, even though you can't see the crucial bits of the anatomy?

Bernini did more than eroticise sculpture,

he eroticised Rome itself.

The streets and squares of the city are still full of his work.

This is the Fountain of the Four Rivers, in Piazza Navona.

By using his trademark peek-a-boo effect,

Bernini kept on the right side of decency.

Only just!

As enchanting as it is, this square is also home to touts,

hustlers, and escapologists,

and it's no slight on the mighty Bernini

that he fits in here rather well. After all, what are those

artful folds of fabric just over the crotch,

those wisps of clothing,

if not fool-the-eye devices?

He got away with murder.

As the sun went down on the 17th century,

the marble manhoods, teasingly hinted at by Bernini,

remained in the shadows.

But something was about to happen

that would make sculptors think again.

Taxi!

In the 18th century, the new science of archaeology was all the rage.

Suddenly, all of Europe was fascinated

by its pre-Christian past

and it was being dug up right here, in and around Rome.

It made the eternal city the highlight of the Grand Tour,

that educational rite of passage for young British men of means.

They came in search of spectacular archaeological finds

and the statues they discovered were all naked.

A funny thing happened on the way to the forum -

nudity became OK again,

and there was nothing finer

than admiring a recently dug up Roman marble.

Apart perhaps from having it shipped off to your own living room.

The American novelist Henry James, who visited here a lot,

caught the mood of wonder and exoticism when he wrote,

"These relics were coming up

"like long-lost divers from the sea of time."

The rediscovery of the Classical World

inspired an artistic revolution with the nude taking centre stage.

But those living on one cold, rainy island

in the middle of the North Sea - they were in for a shock!

Britain at the start of the 19th century -

a nation in the grip of an identity crisis.

With the largest empire in the world,

it saw itself as the natural heir to Rome

and inheritor of the Classical Tradition.

But it was also a nation, which had long prided itself

on Christian morality and stiff-upper-lip propriety.

These two strands of the British character came head-to-head

here in Hyde Park, in London.

I'm going to see the first public nude in Britain since antiquity.

When it appeared in the summer of 1822,

this beast was the biggest bronzed sculpture anyone had ever seen

and I tell you something else that was big about it,

the huge row over public decency that it provoked.

It's a strapping youth in the guise of Greek warrior Achilles.

It was created in honour of Britain's great war hero,

the victor of Waterloo.

And here's the inscription -

"To Arthur, Duke of Wellington, and his brave companions in arms.

"This statue of Achilles, cast from cannon

"taken in the victory of Waterloo, is inscribed by their countrywomen."

Now the countrywomen were a patriotic committee of ladies,

perhaps an unlikely source for a statue like this,

particularly when you know that their leading light, Lady Spencer,

had been called the "most prudish of all the great English Ladies."

And yet it was this group of womenfolk who were saying

the statue should be nude.

They didn't get their way, though.

It was the men of the monument committee who had the final say.

One of them implored, "Every feeling of public decency and decorum

"renders it indisputably necessary

"that some covering should be applied."

And so, the fig leaf was attached,

and you might suppose that was the end of matter.

Oh, no it, wasn't. Not by a long chalk.

This tiny leaf that doesn't even hide the pubic hair

was hardly enough to save the statue from ridicule.

This print shows William Wilberforce

hiding Achilles' tackle with his hat.

Wilberforce was famous as a scourge of slavery

but evidently he didn't like everything to go free.

Leading satirist George Cruikshank

described the statue as "The ladies' fancy-man."

And had them queuing up to buy their leaves.

There was a tremendous fuss about this in all the papers

and I've got one or two of the choicer quotes here.

One woman wrote to Society for the Suppression of Vice,

complaining about "A naked and indecent figure

"now erecting in Hyde Park."

While another critic said, "We must join the majority of our countrymen

"in wishing that so unmeaning and disgusting a thing

"had not been the gift of the ladies of England."

One thing was clear -

the nude just wasn't welcome in the public spaces of Britain.

In 1857, the great doors of what would later become

the Victoria and Albert Museum

creaked open to the public for the first time.

In the same year, it enquired a new exhibit -

a gift for Queen Victoria that was going to raise an eyebrow or two.

Well, here he is. Our old friend David, again.

This time, I can see him up close and personal.

It could scarcely be more personal.

Now he's an almost exact replica, a cast of the more famous David

in Florence, except that this chap has his own very special accessory.

-Hello, Amy!

-Hi, Steven.

-How are you?

-Good to meet you.

-Very nice to meet you.

Is it true this fellow has some concrete lingerie?

-He does indeed.

-Could I possibly see it?

Yes, let's go the store and have a look.

If that's where it is, lead on!

I'm about to see what's rumoured to be the biggest fig leaf

in the history of sculpture.

This is real behind the scenes of the museum stuff.

-It is indeed!

-Do we need a special key here?

I'm going to put the light on.

Yeah, OK. Well, that will kill the romance

but we'll be able to see what we're looking at.

-It's like Fingal's Cave in here, isn't it?

-It is rather, isn't it?

-So there we are.

-It's a good size.

-It is a good size.

-It's correctly proportioned.

-Fantastic!

I can pop it on the table for you, for a closer look.

Don't let me put you off. This is an important moment.

-Is that heavy for you?

-It's not very heavy at all, actually,

Not anywhere near as heavy as one might expect.

I'll just take it over here.

I'm agog! I'm marvelling.

Now, clearly they couldn't get Michelangelo on the phone

and get him to produce something.

-This was done in London?

-Yes.

The firm of Domenico Brucciani and company produced

this particular object.

Now luckily the firm themselves had moulds of Michelangelo's David

so they could already...

They already had a basis on which to produce something that was going to

-be a nice...

-Snug fit.

-Snug fit - precisely!

And it's not until you see the underside that you can understand

how it was actually fixed to the sculpture.

But if we just carefully flip it round...

Oh, I see!

You can see how it was moulded and kind of carved out.

-You can see the tool marks here.

-Well, it's early

and we haven't known each other too long, Amy,

but I feel I must ask you to expand a little bit

about these indentations.

-Yes.

-What they were intended for, in layman's terms?

In layman's terms.

Well, these are the indentations of the sculpture's genitalia,

I suppose, and they would have fit quite snugly against that

but at the same time not causing any damage to the object itself.

Do you know whose idea that was?

-Does history tell us or not?

-Well, it doesn't,

and that's what's really fascinating because the way that the story goes,

it was the Queen herself that was shocked by this

and it was presumably upon her request.

But none of the documentation really supports that.

In fact, behind closed doors,

the Queen enjoyed these types of works of art.

She didn't faint or have a fit of the vapours?

No, not at all. In fact, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert

often exchanged gifts between them of paintings or sculptures

in which the nude figured quite significantly.

But when it came to her public image,

I think there was an expectation that

a degree of decency and morality

kind of surround her as a public figure.

It wasn't necessarily on her demand -

it was something that I think was perhaps imposed upon her.

We tend to think the Victorians preferred a nice cup of tea

rather than sex. Actually, that wasn't true in private.

But in public they had a global reputation to think of -

the British Empire.

So it was a case of "No sex, please. We're British!"

And the fig leaf worked as a brilliant screen

for keeping sexuality and nudity out of the public realm.

But not for much longer.

By the end of the 19th Century, Victorian values were under assault.

The French were coming.

This is the Paris studio of Auguste Rodin,

father of modern sculpture.

In works like The Thinker...

..The Gates Of Hell,

..and The Kiss...

..he created a new language for sculpture.

At the heart of his vision was a frank attitude to human sexuality.

And there was none franker than this.

Iris, Messenger Of The Gods

exhibited in 1898.

What was he thinking of, Rodin, when he created Iris?

Of course he was thinking of an offered woman, in a way, and...

-A what women?

-Offered, er...offered

-Legs.

-I see, yeah.

-Legs open.

-Mmm.

And how was that received?

For some people, it was unacceptable.

It was impossible, "I don't want to see that."

-"This is..."

-Too much.

-Yeah, it is a nightmare...

But for some people it was, it was great.

The fact that it has no head and no left arm, this was for Rodin,

this was very much connected with antique sculpture.

-In the state where they arrived to us...

-With bits missing?

-Yeah.

The right arm holding the foot

is a part of this very compact composition.

So, it is still here, but the others are not.

There not necessary so they're not here.

It's a different way of composing the female body.

I mean, we were more used to seeing nudes lying

with their legs together more.

This is a complete break from that, isn't it?

Yeah, this is much more dynamic.

He wanted it to stand in the air.

To me, it's just like a women jumping

and her sex, um, jumping to us, in a way.

Rodin was a breath of fresh air in the garden of sculpture.

Actually, make that a hurricane.

Suddenly, all the fig leaves shrivelled and fell off

and they weren't about to go back on again.

From now on, the human body in all its grizzly majesty was fair game.

From the moment Rodin let the cat out of the bag -

Some cat! Some bag! -

each generation has vied to outdo the previous one

in provocation and shock value.

These aren't the virtuous nudes of the ancient Greeks.

Sex in ever more-convoluted forms has been taking centre stage.

It seems to me, what's happened is that in today's art

the shock of the nude is more important than meaning or beauty.

Now I'm going to see a sculptor

with an extraordinary body of work, herself.

-Orlan? Steven, enchante.

-Enchante, nice to meet you.

-How are you?

-Excellent and you?

-Yes, I'm fine

'Since the '60s the artist, Orlan

'has been creating ever more-outrageous works.'

Here's one where she gives birth to a mannequin.

Another where she used her own pubic hair

and a nude body suit in a performance piece.

In this work, she made her body into a slot machine

and snogged people who paid up.

Am I right in thinking, Orlan, that this work provoked an outrage,

it was a scandal at the time?

SHE SPEAKS IN FRENCH

-French kiss?

-French kiss.

Do you think the fig leaf still has a purpose?

Still has a role or is it finished? Throw it away?

So you might think that's the end of the story.

Just going into a modern art exhibition these days

seem to prove Orlan's point.

But you don't get rid

of 2,000 years of artistic tradition that easily.

The fig leaf lingers on in unexpected places.

I'm at The White Cube Gallery in Hoxton, London

to see the latest sculptures by Marc Quinn.

In this show, he's chosen subjects who've had plastic surgery

to change or enhance their sexuality.

Thomas Beatie is a transgender man who's given birth to three babies.

Meanwhile Chelsea Charms is a breast entertainer,

who's said to have the largest ones in the world.

Do you think there's any need now any, any role for a fig leaf?

You mean for moral reasons?

For moral reasons or even artistic reasons.

Does it free the artist in some way, or is it only a constraint?

I think it depends, doesn't it?

I mean, if you have a clothed figure,

it's... You don't have to deal with explicit sexuality.

If you have an unclothed figure, in some way you are dealing with it

and also you can have, like, for instance in this figure of Thomas.

-Yeah.

-He's wearing shorts.

And what's great, to me, about the shorts is the ambiguity.

That it somehow forces you to wonder what is under his shorts.

-Mmm.

-So, again, that's a fig leaf, in a sense,

working to create meaning in the work.

This is Buck Angel and Allanah Starr,

two transsexual porn stars.

Buck here was born a woman...

..Allanah was born a man.

There's a sense of Adam and Eve here.

-Yeah, yeah.

-Or an allusion to that.

And they're very upfront and unashamed.

Yeah, well, isn't that the idea of Adam and Eve?

Before the fall.

Before the fall, there's kind of innocence and...

-Indeed. No fig leaf here.

-If you put a fig leaf on,

it would be a different sculpture.

-What would it be then?

-It would be a normal couple.

You wouldn't understand the sculpture.

Some of today's artists might like us to believe

we're beyond taboo and that you can take or leave the fig leaf.

But step away for the confines of the modern art market

and the same old rules apply.

There are still "no show" areas in public sculpture.

This is a statue of the ancient Greek god Priapus,

god of fertility and it's in Pimlico, London.

In ancient times, he was symbolised by a penis.

Hence the word priapic, meaning phallic.

So here's Priapus and in places you can see that old Priapus

has got it going on, he's got some moves.

In his hair, bunches of grapes,

in one hand, a little bell,

summoning people, men particularly, to the Bacchanalian revel.

But in the other hand, a pair of shears.

Now speaking as a man, I don't find that particularly priapic.

But I don't know, if he's supposed to be the god of sex,

there's something missing here that I can't quite put my finger on.

There should be an erect penis right here.

So where is it?

I've come to find out from the sculptor Sandy Stoddart

who has the plaster cast original in his studio in Paisley.

Hello, Sandy, how are you?

-Hello, Steven. Are you well?

-Yes.

-Good.

-Now, I've seen your Priapus in Pimlico.

-Yeah.

-And I'm engrossed.

'Sandy did make a phallus for the statue,

'but he's kept it hidden from view for fear of prosecution.'

So you solved the problem by rendering Priapus complete

-and then, as it were, separating...

-Yeah.

Was that because of the law, basically?

Well, of course, you see if you put a thing like this up,

you've got no end of contumely will fall on your head.

There'd be outrage and general furore.

I think it might be time

to grapple with the elephant in the room, what do you think?

Gosh, it's got a decidedly Hindu quality about it, hasn't it?

-That's one way of putting it.

-And it plugs on, you see,

to the two dragonflies here.

We cannot, in a world today, erect an entire image of the god.

Because, you know how we live in such a puritanical,

strangely puritanical world nowadays?

Yet it is overflowing with a hyper sexuality

in the most inappropriate of places.

We are allowed to walk down the high street of any town

with the letters "FCUK" written on our chest.

We can have 20ft-high-advertisements of women in underwear,

you know, or men in their underwear.

In other words it seems to me that there's an uber indecency everywhere

and yet in the context of this,

a little image of the god must remain neutralised.

-Could you have done a Priapus...

-With a fig leaf?

-..with a fig leaf?

In a way this is what this is, you see.

It has been, as it were, removed.

The times are incapable of dealing with this.

What do you feel, how do you reflect on this work now?

This is how it should be?

One of these days, I'll go down by train to London

and overnight slot it on

and then run for the border.

In a time when we think we're all free and easy

in our attitudes to sex, it seems to me that we're not.

We're more easily shocked than we care to admit.

And just like in the past, there are still rules and regulations

about what you can...

..and what you can't show.

All of which brings us back to our old friend, the fig leaf.

For hundreds of years,

it was a crude but effective form of censorship.

But contrary-wise, it also provoked artists

to new heights of creativity.

Sex was there, sure, but not dominant.

The problem with modern art is it's too upfront.

It's in your face, it leaves nothing to the imagination.

How do we go about restoring the gaze to where it should be,

on the beauty and the meaning of art?

What leaves something to the imagination?

Fig leaves.

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