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Legends Sculpture

Did the Great Castration of Pius IX really happen?

There is a story that Pope Pius IX thought the male sculptures in the Vatican were inflammatory to the religious, and went around chopping off...undesirable...parts and ordered them scratched out in paintings. To cover up the damage, his successor put fig leaves on the statues and paintings. Is this true? Or is it an urban legend?

Yes, true. The Catholic Church has long been against any showing of the female or male body "immodestly". In the eruption of Counter Reformation fanaticism following the Renaissance, the edict of the Council of Trent forbade the depiction of genitals, buttocks and breasts in church art.
In 1557, the fig leaves were instituted by the bull of Pope Paul IV. Most of the fig leaves that we see were put in place on the personal initiative of Pope Innocent X (1644-1655) who, for reasons of his own, preferred metal leaves to the plaster ones. This Pope, to his credit, spared most of the art in the Vatican. By 1857, Pope Pius IX discovered that these few remaining statues constituted grave threat to the faithful and destroyed most of them; the fig leaves were promptly added by his successor to stop the iconoclasm. All in all, the campaign raged for 450 years and resulted in the destruction of Catholic visual art.
Strange but true.

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