Image Details

Alinari/Art Resource, NY

The situation was reversed in the Greco-Roman world, with male deities depicted in explicit nakedness and female deities shown modestly unclothed. This image, from a mid-first-century A.D. fresco in Pompeii’s House of the Vettii, shows the fertility god Priapus proudly weighing his member, his exaggerated sexual organ representing the apotropaic power of nakedness. The son of Dionysus and Aphrodite, Priapus was often depicted in statues in Roman gardens.