D’Hancarville’s illustrations

For D’Hancarville’s Veneres et Priapi, uti observantur in gemmis antiquis go to the following posts, which include the full text in English and all the illustrations:

For D’Hancarville’s illustrations for Monumens de la vie privée des douze Césars (1780) by Pierre-François Hugues (b. 1719) go to:

D’Hancarville also produced the erotic Monumens du culte secret des dames romaines (1787).

XII Caesars has homoerotic overtones, Culte secret des dames, heteroerotic - at least that is what everyone says.

There is a little more information about d’Hancarville at the website Los Bellos Muchachos de Sodoma: Imágenes homosexuales del siglo XVIII.

Having scoured around a bit more on the web I came up with this book at Google books - Whitney Davis, ‘Homoerotic Art Collection from 1750 to 1920′ in Other Objects of Desire: Collectors and Collecting Queerly, edited by Camille and Rifkin, p85-

As I live in fear that links will die, here is a small transcription:

…we should especially notice Baron d’Hancarville (1719-1805). It was chiefly he, I think, who projected the tradition of phallic collection and complementary literary priapeia, rooted in the seventeenth century if not before, through Winckelmannian aesthetic idealization into the homosexualization I suggest emerged on its other side. Along with his official publication of the Hamilton collection, d’Hancarville also produced pornographic volumes illustrating imaginary collections - especially the Monumens de la vie privee des douze Cesars, which had a strong homosexual-sodomitical emphasis, and a companion volume depicting exclusively heterosexual lovemaking: Monumens du culte secret des dames romaines. The first of these was possibly published as early as 1771. In that year d’Hancarville published the two volumes of his Veneres uti observantur in gemmis antiquis, a lavish book - some copies have exquisite hand coloured illustrations - passing itself off as the writings of Elephantis, a courtesan of the age of Tiberius; the accompanying pornographic pictures could be taken as the ancient artworks said by the sources to have dipicted the sexual postures of Elephantis. In this work d’Hancarville’s satirizing riposte to classicizing aestheticism among antiquarians and Winckelmannians - the expected patrons and consumers of his own Antique Etrusques - was blunt. As he wrote in his fictive capacity as the editor of Elephantis,

My intention in publishing this book, is not in order to save from oblivion the writings of the above-mentioned Elephantis, being convinced that no body regrets such a loss; but as I am certain that the original stories, from which I had the designs taken, have been done by some excellent Greek artists, I thought, I should not displease the publick in reducing them to a form easy to be procured, and which could at the same time show how elegant was the noble simplicity of the antients, and how far they carried that point of perfection which none of the moderns have attained.

‘Noble simplicity’, we might suspect, alluded to well-known Winckelmannian obiter dicta on ancient art; the ‘elegance’ of that nobility nodded to the established self-protective and ironical tradition of describing erotica or pornography as ‘elegances’. Both the Monumens de la vie privee and du culte secret were available in several editions in the 1780s and copies can be found in virtually all the major erotic book and art collections from the from the 1790s to the 1890s. Replications ultimately inspired by them continued to appear throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Here is a useful compendium on Rome and the Caesars.

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