Before the Renaissance, a man’s identity was predicated on his ability to have children, ideally lots of them. Even if the phenomenon was solely a crisis of machismo, isn’t there more to learn about it from the art history at the heart of his study?įisher has proposed that the codpiece embodies duelling visions of masculinity. The epitome of embellished manhood, it contributed, he writes, “to a fabricated, fictionalized version of the male body.” Be that as it may, a generation of men lived and died in these things-owned them, stored them, sat pridefully for portraits in them. And yet, and yet, we still wonder about it.” True, but throughout “Thrust,” Glover treats the codpiece more as an object of ridicule than of curiosity. “It was as normal to wear a codpiece,” he writes, “as it is to wear, say, a padded bra in our own day. Too often, though, Glover reaches for that overripe fruit, as when he writes, “It seems you just can’t keep a good codpiece down.” When he exclaims that “only a mere letter” separates the French word for codpiece, braguette, from baguette-“that faux cod-phallus, crispy and hard on the surface yet so yielding at its center”-he seems guilty of the same “self-puffery” he mocks. “Portrait of Alessandro Farnese,” by Alonso Sánchez Coello (1531). A kind of circumferential arms race led to boxy, generously portioned tubes that simpered from the waistlines of princes and peons alike. In Italy and Spain, and soon across Europe, padding and stays came into vogue. The codpiece, in its early form, was a baggy cloth gusset laced to the stockings, but, in the course of the next century, rising on a tide of ostentation, it bulged and distended.
For the men of the fifteenth century, conditions for phallic peacocking were optimal: theirs was an age without pants, when only snug stockings and long gowns hid their “privy Members and Buttockes.” By 1450, doublets had become immodestly short. With time, codpieces transcended their functional origins, much as the surgical mask has yielded to the cloth Baby Yoda one. Plus, Renaissance men carried a lot of junk on their belts-this was the era that gave us the “swashbuckler,” after all-and a bit of padding around the crotch would help insulate them “from bumps and friction.” Treating the French pox, as it was known, called for “a whole galaxy of herbs, minerals, syrups, and decoctions,” Vicary writes, applied directly in “a variety of messy unguents and poultices.” If you wanted to protect your fancy wardrobe from stains, the reasoning goes, you would do well to isolate the whole package in an oversized box. of their day, born as a means of containing a disease-in this case syphilis, which was then sweeping through Europe. The historian Grace Vicary has argued that codpieces were, in a sense, the P.P.E. Good questions, both, but any study of the codpiece begins with simpler ones: Why did it exist at all, and why did men elect to wear it? Theories abound. “Do you know of any other monarch who is as wide as he is long?” “Has heaven ever before conjured so broad a pair of shoulders?” Glover writes, of Henry’s portrait. He and his appendage feature prominently in “ Thrust: A Spasmodic Pictorial History of the Codpiece in Art,” by the English critic Michael Glover. And who could blame them? Sure, Henry sired notoriously few healthy children, but, in a famous portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger, he exudes the lusty mystery of a wellborn stud, his codpiece swollen with the stuff of life. A suit of the king’s armor, boasting a bulbous codpiece weighing more than two and a half pounds, is still on display at the Tower women used to stick pins in its sumptuous red-velvet lining to ward off barrenness.
Henry VIII remains the poster boy for codpieces, those profane protuberances which drew eyes crotchward in the sixteenth century.
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Royally robed, sceptre in hand, the likeness befitted Henry’s reputation for extravagance, right down to its lascivious secret mechanism: “If you press a spot on the floor with your feet,” one observer wrote, “you will see something surprising with regard to this figure, but I will not say more.” I will: it was the king’s codpiece, sallying forth in full regalia. Early in the eighteenth century, visitors to the Tower of London could gaze upon a painted wooden statue of Henry VIII, the English king who’d died some two hundred years before.
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