The painting “Amor vincit Omnia” by Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi) was his most famous painting in his lifetime. It inspired poetry [10] and was the jewel of the collection of its owner, Vincenzo Giustiniani [11] . It shows a boy, aged 11 or 12, and the secret of its appeal is obvious, the sheer vitality and joy of its depiction (Figure 1(a)). This is not a sterile Graeco-Roman ideal figure. It is the boy next door, enjoying himself. The implicit eroticism that has upset later generations―Kenneth Clark described the picture as “repulsive” [12] ― was of no concern at the time. More important was the allegorical significance of the composition, including the eagle wings, the crest of the Giustiniani family [13] .

We know who the boy was―Cecco di Caravaggio, otherwise Francesco Boneri, Caravaggio’s apprentice and alleged lover, later a painter in his own right. He appeared in many of Caravaggio’s paintings. We also know the owner of the wings, the painter Orazio Gentileschi, who lent them for the occasion [10] .

The painting is so far from the classical ideal that we would be inclined to expect it to be realistic. The boy is quite well endowed for his age, with a full foreskin bunching in front of a large glans penis. Maybe Caravaggio exaggerated this a bit for effect? Maybe not, if you look at von Gloeden. Figure 1(b) shows a boy, from a group of 3, who appears to be aged about 10. There are several pictures of these boys, sometimes 3 sometimes 4, at the same location and time. In some the young boy is playing a rustic flute. He is at least as well-endowed as Cecco, and has a very similar penis and prepuce, not to mention similar curly hair. Both would probably be placed at Tanner stage 2 [14] (see Appendix).

The Isaac of Andrea del Sarto (Figure 1(c)) could not be in greater contrast. Physically, he is well developed and must be at least 11 years old, but his penis is tiny, probably still Tanner stage 1 [14] . He is not, of course, shown as circumcised, even though he, if anyone, should be, as the first Jewish boy born after Abraham’s adoption of the covenant of circumcision. The shrunken penis may be part of the artist’s way of depicting how terrified the boy was, a message which comes across very strongly. Nevertheless, we have all known boys―late developers―who looked like this. So did von Gloeden, as we see in Figure 1(d).

Caravaggio’s young Jesus (from Virgin and Child with St Anne) shows a much younger boy, whose blonde hair is surely almost as incongruous as his uncircumcised penis (Figure 2(a)). That penis has a foreskin which tapers rather than bunches, and again von Gloeden captured a similar one (Figure 2(b)).

This brings us to another legendary work, Donatello’s David of c.1440 (Figure 3). This was one of the first large male nude statues of the Renaissance, and also reputedly the first self-supporting solo bronze statue cast since antiquity. The biblical David was a young boy, and Donatello’s androgynous figure is much truer to that image than is Michelangelo’s more famous marble statue. It shows a boy of 13 or 14, on the cusp of puberty, but as yet with no pubic hair. His penis is still small, but the foreskin is short, and does not seem to quite cover the glans. There is certainly no excess foreskin. His penis is probably at Tanner stage 3, or even 4. The Tanner stages of pubic hair and penile development were never intended to be regarded as occurring in lockstep; a large proportion of boys reach stage 4 without pubic hair [14] , though one could also suspect that Donatello omitted pubic hair to allow himself the freedom to depict the boy realistically. Similar prepuces can be seen on some of von Gloeden’s adolescents (below). It is quite unlike the stylised penis of antiquity, and is the only case known to the author of a penis being depicted without a bunch of skin in front of the glans.

What this brief survey has shown is that in representing boys up to Tanner stages 3 or 4 there is no evidence of any attempt to present a stereotyped view of the male organ. The painters and sculptors of the Italian renaissance, over a period of some 200 years, represented the boys as they were. And they were very similar to the boys who were found in the Italian countryside 300 years later.

The David of Michelangelo Buonarotti shows an adolescent of 16 or 17 years old [15] . He is completely naked, as the Bible describes, without the hat and boots that Donatello gave him. But he is no longer a boy―more a youth in his prime. He has a neat, if stylized, bush of pubic hair. His penis, however (Figure 4(b)) has the juve- nile look of antiquity, with a long-bunched-up foreskin. Michelangelo was a prolific portrayer of the male nude, and we see the exact same juvenile penis everywhere―in Day where we are looking at a middle-aged adult [15] , in Victory (The Victor and the Vanquished) [15] , where it is flipped to the side by the violence of the action

and in the Risen Christ (in the only extant photograph with the added draperies removed [15] ). We see it in paint, too, in the Creation of Adam and other Sistine Chapel paintings. But this was not just a foible of Michangelo’s, it was universal. See, for example, Benvenuto Cellini’s Perseus, made some 40 years after David (Figure 4(a))―a muscular, fit man with a distinctly small penis and what looks like a phimotic prepuce. Or, in paint, there is Perugino’s Apollo and Marsyas―wherever you see an adult penis in Italian art from 1440 to 1640, there is (almost) always just one penis you will see.

The art historian Marilyn Lavin has discovered a few cases where men are given better-sized organs [16] , though still with all-enveloping foreskins, but in every case they depict sinners being punished. Possibly the full-sized penis was intended to indicate libidinousness, or perhaps the artists felt less constrained by convention when portraying sinners―Lavin does not pursue this question. More startling is her claim that in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel painting “The Drunkenness of Noah” (Figure 1 of her paper) one of the sons of Noah is shown to be circumcised. If true, this would be extraordinary, since Noah and his sons long predate the Jewish covenant of circumcision. Lavin explains this by identifying the figure as Shem, biblically the patriarch of the Semitic (circumcised) peoples, so this becomes an allegorical allusion. However, the figure in question is the only one of Noah’s sons without pubic hair, which means he must be the youngest, Ham, not Shem, and the penis ends with the nozzle of a foreskin, not the bare meatus of a circumcised organ. The shape of the glans is revealed through the foreskin, just as it is in Caravaggio’s Amor (Figure 1(a)). By depicting Ham without pubic hair Michelangelo gave himself the liberty to paint him as a boy, that is realistically, rather than following the adult convention. Noah, Shem and Japheth all have the classical small, covered member.

Could these diminutive, hooded, penises reflect the reality of the artists’ models? It seems implausible―we are accustomed to adult penises in which the glans penis is not fully covered [6] . Chartham [17] reported a survey of 2500 uncircumcised men in which only 45% had had the glans covered in the flaccid state, 32% had the glans half-covered, and 23% had a fully exposed glans. In another survey of his own [17] of 100 uncircumcised men, only 27 had foreskins which were capable of covering the glans, and 18 of them wore it permanently retracted, so only 9% presented with a covered glans, though 27% could have covered it at the artist’s request. A study of young British soldiers [18] showed that 58% of uncircumcised men had a foreskin the author regarded as “normal”―i.e. not fully covering the glans. However, these figures refer to mid 20th century UK, where many men were circumcised, and cultural norms were very different from ancient Rome. How much they differed from renaissance Italy is the important question.

Von Gloeden’s models were living in a countryside and lifestyle unchanged from the Italy of previous centuries. The railway had just arrived at Taormina, and played a part in its development as a tourist destination for wealthy foreigners―largely driven by the fame of von Gloeden’s photographs―but had no relevance at that time to the local way of life. Two of von Gloeden’s models, an adolescent and an adult are, clearly, circumcised and therefore excluded from the comparison. The adult is obviously North African, and the teenager may also be a Muslim from across the Mediterranean. Von Gloeden frequently visited Egypt, and often wore Egyptian dress, but it is also possible that he might have arranged a circumcision for a boy with phimosis. Circumcision was already routine in the USA at this date [6] . A representative gallery of uncircumcised adolescents and young adults is shown in Figure 5. Almost all are much more handsomely endowed than the Renaissance figures. Two, an adult (Figure 5(a)) and an adolescentat Tanner stage 4 or 5, (Figure 5(c). left figure) have the glans penis fully exposed. Three have it partly exposed―the youngest, a very early teenager at Tanner stage 3 (Figure 5(b)), has almost half the glans uncovered, an older youth at Tanner stage 4 (Figure 5(c), right figure) has rather more exposed. Another youth, at Tanner stage 3 in his early teens, has a prepuce which nearly covers the glans (Figure 5(d)), like Donatello’s David. Only one young man has a covered glans (Figure 5(e)) and even that bears no resemblance to the classic ideal, the prepuce being lax and not protruding in front of the glans. Looking at von Gloeden’s output overall, no more that 20% of males at Tanner scale 3 or above have a fully covered glans. This corresponds reasonably closely to Chartham’s [17] and Osmond’s [18] results, and not at all to the classical ideal.

If the correspondence between von Gloeden’s younger boys and their Renaissance counterparts had not been so close, one might try to find other explanations, but in reality we have to accept that the models employed by Renaissance painters and sculptors probably looked in life very much like those photographed by von Gloeden, with large penises and prepuces which in most cases did not fully cover the glans penis. In portraying young boys the artists could be realistic, but once they showed post-pubertal subjects they felt bound by the Graeco- Roman ideal. They saw a large penis with much of the glans exposed, but drew or carved a small, covered organ with an extensive, constricted prepuce.

How does this relate to contemporary urology? The answer is that these statues and paintings have led many people to believe that artistic depictions of human genitalia reflect reality. Up until the 20th century females were portrayed without pubic hair. The story of how John Ruskin was unable to consummate his marriage when he encountered his wife’s pubic hair is well known. A letter to his father shows that even then he could not disbelieve to classical ideal, and thought that his wife (Effie Gray) was a freak! The reply is not preserved but one imagines that Ruskin’s father, who was a man of the world, put his son straight on this, since Ruskin did not marry again after the annulment of his marriage to Effie. (Effie subsequently married the artist Sir John Everett Millais and bore him 8 children).

The equally unrealistic depiction of male genitalia seems to have played a major part in modern-day campaigns against circumcision. Most of these campaigners are men circumcised in infancy, or the female partners of such men, who simply have no idea of what an actual, adult, uncircumcised penis looks like. Their propaganda typically takes it as a given that a foreskin is only retracted during intromission whereas in fact the adult glans is most often not fully covered, and is totally bared on erection. Had Christian art portrayed men realistically (and indeed portrayed biblical figures as circumcised) the whole debate would probably not exist.