The Horn of Abundance
Michael Glover, Thrust: A Spasmodic Pictorial History of the Codpiece in Art
David Zwirner Books, 94pp, £8.95, ISBN 9781664230244
reviewed by Anna Parker
Of all fashion trends, the codpiece is one of the most bizarre. From the 1540s to the end of the century, men in Renaissance Europe put their genitals in a prominent, heavily embellished pouch which stuck out proudly from their breeches. The world ‘cod’ means scrotum, which originated from the Anglo-Saxon for a small bag. Unsurprisingly, writers much enjoyed riffing off the meanings of the ‘cod’, which was repurposed as slang for a clergyman or for a large sum of money. As a visual prop, however, the codpiece stood for much more. A large codpiece represented fertility, unsubtle sexual allure and showed off the wearer’s fighting power. Anyone who was anyone (which, in Renaissance culture, was a point you could prove by getting your portrait done) was sure to sport one.
For something so culturally loaded, the codpiece was quite practical in origin. The Renaissance saw significant changes to the cut and construction of clothing, which became much tighter and more tailored than it had been in the medieval period. At the same time, accessories, the small touches like bags, hats, kerchiefs, buttons and ribbons that could easily and cheaply transform an outfit, were increasing available for those with money to spare. This displayed the body in novel ways, prompting a new order of sexual desire. Today, the six-pack is the most obvious example of a fetishised male body part (imagine, for example, the frenzied female audiences screaming for the ripped male strippers in Magic Mike). In the Renaissance, it was different. The long, athletic and slenderly-muscled leg was considered the sexiest part of the male body. In order to reveal as much of the stockinged male thigh as possible, the codpiece was invented. It was a Wonderbra for the cock: it protected the penis, lifted it out of the way, and in the process, created an appealing phallic feature in itself.
In Thrust, Michael Glover takes the reader on a journey in search of the codpiece through Renaissance art history in full colour (a privilege rarely afforded to academic books on the same subject). It is a slim volume with an Instagram-worthy acid yellow cover, lightly written and very easily flicked through in a single sitting. Glover takes a series of paintings, mostly portraits, by celebrity names like Holbein, Titian and Bruegel the Elder, skilfully describing the mood of each, and, in his focus on the codpiece, offering a fresh perspective on these canonical pieces. For example, discussing Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Wedding Dance (1566), Glover points out the offensively bright codpieces of the disorderly, spinning male dancers, which, in profile, have an elephantine heft. The images are broken with short quotations from contemporary writers, including – of course – Shakespeare, as well as the French essayist Michel de Montaigne and the infamously bawdy French monk François Rabelais. In classic form, Rabelais likened the codpiece to a ‘horn of abundance . . . gallant, succulent, droppy, sappy, pithy, lively, always flourishing, always flourishing, always fructifying, full of juice, full of flower, full of fruit, and all manner of delight’.
As Glover talks the reader through each portrait, he shows off his skill in ekphrasis, describing how this ‘horn of abundance’ shaped the individual self-representation of the sitter. This structure does, by nature, create a degree of repetition throughout the book. This repetition serves the purpose of proving just how powerful and ubiquitous this object was for 16th-century identity. Yet it also stretches the power of metaphor. There are only so many times that you can hear that the codpieced penis is like a coiled snake. There is also the difficulty that portraits – which were carefully posed, painted in stages that followed particular artistic convention, and subject to alteration – do not offer the most reliable guide to how clothes were worn. A sitter in a Renaissance portrait would choose their very best for the occasion, or they might even borrow sets of clothing from the artist’s workshop, a practice not unlike the props available in photography studios for middle-class families who have themselves captured rolling around, healthy hair and white teeth, against a white background.
This technical criticism, however, outs me out as a boring academic, and slightly misses the point of the book. What is much more exciting about the codpiece is how, as a relatively short-lived fashion trend, it holds enormous power over the historical imagination, taking on a life of its own. The first image in Thrust is not by a genius Renaissance painter, but a photograph of Rowan Atkinson, sword aloft, as Prince Edmund in Blackadder. In the series, Edmund dons a sizeable codpiece, which he nicknames the ‘Black Russian’ for its power to ‘terrify the clergy’. I have long been an enormous fan of the costumes in Blackadder, which very effectively identified the most obvious, cartoon-like elements of period dress, and reproduced them very cheaply, often in anachronistic materials with a degree of punk. The codpiece, recreated for TV, retains the power to ‘terrify’. Reportedly, costume designers for the BBC’s adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall reduced the codpieces to half the size that they should have been, in order to protect the delicate sensibilities of American audiences.
While Glover does not give much space to this, Renaissance fashions regularly reappear in the fashion world. The current iteration of this phenomenon is the pearl-studded, plumped-up black velvet headband, which, for all of the headband’s preppy Blair Waldorf associations, summons up the six-fingered, bad-girl energy of Anne Boleyn, who seduced her way from king’s mistress to queen. The codpiece has been recently sent down the catwalk by Gucci, Alessandro Michele and Thom Browne, where it has been easily incorporated alongside leather fetish wear or sailor’s outfits. Beyond bodice ripper-loving Mums or BDSM communities, broader interest in the codpiece appears to rise at moments of crisis. Thrust highlights one of these occasions. Glover discusses Maurice Leloir’s costume book, Dictionnaire du costume, which included a study of codpiece styles. Published in 1940, these images are a way of exploring French identity, then at threat under Nazi occupation. The representation of this object, associated with martial power and virile, physical prowess would have held particular emotional potency as a nation faced the possibility of its fall.
The connection between the codpiece and power, or the lack of it, is a crucial one. The story of the codpiece is one of how clothing is integral to patriarchal authority. Although things are changing, studies of fashion often focus on women’s bodies and purchases, rather than on men. Clothing is regularly presented as a woman’s pursuit, ignoring the fact that to be uninterested in dress, as men more often claim to be, is a cultural code and a statement in itself. Thrust corrects that fantasy. Glover shows us that Renaissance political power was fundamentally bodily. He discusses how Henry VIII had himself depicted as monumental, weighty, ‘like a bastion, or a great weathered oak’. Eroticism and virility, represented through the codpiece, were integral to Henry’s cool, metre-wide mastery. Reportedly, viewers of Hans Holbein the Younger’s wall painting of Henry VII and Henry VIII, completed in Whitehall Palace c. 1536-7, were left ‘abashed’. Perhaps the sight of Henry VIII’s enormous codpiece created a sense of inadequacy in Renaissance viewers, just as a middle-aged Dad confronted with a billboard of David Beckham’s well-filled boxers in the iconic 00s Armani underwear ad might go away more aware of the shortcomings of his own body.
This book is a critical ode to male vanity, in which the codpiece craze is an example of just how hard Renaissance men tried to show off through ‘untiring self-puffery’. As with the ‘abashed’ Tudor visitors to Whitehall Palace or, centuries later, the 1940 French costume book, Thrust recognises that the codpiece expresses insecurity as well as pride in the phallus. As a flamboyant, unsubtle display, it is an effort to gain power and status, rather than the possession of it. To hold power is precarious. It requires constant creation, re-creation and defence. Thrust is a light-hearted take on this phenomenon, exploring the connection between male vanity, eroticism and the visual props of patriarchal power. It is willing to poke fun at this, in the process revealing the crippling, bodily anxieties that – while never undermining the system – are ever-present in the history of masculinity.
For something so culturally loaded, the codpiece was quite practical in origin. The Renaissance saw significant changes to the cut and construction of clothing, which became much tighter and more tailored than it had been in the medieval period. At the same time, accessories, the small touches like bags, hats, kerchiefs, buttons and ribbons that could easily and cheaply transform an outfit, were increasing available for those with money to spare. This displayed the body in novel ways, prompting a new order of sexual desire. Today, the six-pack is the most obvious example of a fetishised male body part (imagine, for example, the frenzied female audiences screaming for the ripped male strippers in Magic Mike). In the Renaissance, it was different. The long, athletic and slenderly-muscled leg was considered the sexiest part of the male body. In order to reveal as much of the stockinged male thigh as possible, the codpiece was invented. It was a Wonderbra for the cock: it protected the penis, lifted it out of the way, and in the process, created an appealing phallic feature in itself.
In Thrust, Michael Glover takes the reader on a journey in search of the codpiece through Renaissance art history in full colour (a privilege rarely afforded to academic books on the same subject). It is a slim volume with an Instagram-worthy acid yellow cover, lightly written and very easily flicked through in a single sitting. Glover takes a series of paintings, mostly portraits, by celebrity names like Holbein, Titian and Bruegel the Elder, skilfully describing the mood of each, and, in his focus on the codpiece, offering a fresh perspective on these canonical pieces. For example, discussing Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Wedding Dance (1566), Glover points out the offensively bright codpieces of the disorderly, spinning male dancers, which, in profile, have an elephantine heft. The images are broken with short quotations from contemporary writers, including – of course – Shakespeare, as well as the French essayist Michel de Montaigne and the infamously bawdy French monk François Rabelais. In classic form, Rabelais likened the codpiece to a ‘horn of abundance . . . gallant, succulent, droppy, sappy, pithy, lively, always flourishing, always flourishing, always fructifying, full of juice, full of flower, full of fruit, and all manner of delight’.
As Glover talks the reader through each portrait, he shows off his skill in ekphrasis, describing how this ‘horn of abundance’ shaped the individual self-representation of the sitter. This structure does, by nature, create a degree of repetition throughout the book. This repetition serves the purpose of proving just how powerful and ubiquitous this object was for 16th-century identity. Yet it also stretches the power of metaphor. There are only so many times that you can hear that the codpieced penis is like a coiled snake. There is also the difficulty that portraits – which were carefully posed, painted in stages that followed particular artistic convention, and subject to alteration – do not offer the most reliable guide to how clothes were worn. A sitter in a Renaissance portrait would choose their very best for the occasion, or they might even borrow sets of clothing from the artist’s workshop, a practice not unlike the props available in photography studios for middle-class families who have themselves captured rolling around, healthy hair and white teeth, against a white background.
This technical criticism, however, outs me out as a boring academic, and slightly misses the point of the book. What is much more exciting about the codpiece is how, as a relatively short-lived fashion trend, it holds enormous power over the historical imagination, taking on a life of its own. The first image in Thrust is not by a genius Renaissance painter, but a photograph of Rowan Atkinson, sword aloft, as Prince Edmund in Blackadder. In the series, Edmund dons a sizeable codpiece, which he nicknames the ‘Black Russian’ for its power to ‘terrify the clergy’. I have long been an enormous fan of the costumes in Blackadder, which very effectively identified the most obvious, cartoon-like elements of period dress, and reproduced them very cheaply, often in anachronistic materials with a degree of punk. The codpiece, recreated for TV, retains the power to ‘terrify’. Reportedly, costume designers for the BBC’s adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall reduced the codpieces to half the size that they should have been, in order to protect the delicate sensibilities of American audiences.
While Glover does not give much space to this, Renaissance fashions regularly reappear in the fashion world. The current iteration of this phenomenon is the pearl-studded, plumped-up black velvet headband, which, for all of the headband’s preppy Blair Waldorf associations, summons up the six-fingered, bad-girl energy of Anne Boleyn, who seduced her way from king’s mistress to queen. The codpiece has been recently sent down the catwalk by Gucci, Alessandro Michele and Thom Browne, where it has been easily incorporated alongside leather fetish wear or sailor’s outfits. Beyond bodice ripper-loving Mums or BDSM communities, broader interest in the codpiece appears to rise at moments of crisis. Thrust highlights one of these occasions. Glover discusses Maurice Leloir’s costume book, Dictionnaire du costume, which included a study of codpiece styles. Published in 1940, these images are a way of exploring French identity, then at threat under Nazi occupation. The representation of this object, associated with martial power and virile, physical prowess would have held particular emotional potency as a nation faced the possibility of its fall.
The connection between the codpiece and power, or the lack of it, is a crucial one. The story of the codpiece is one of how clothing is integral to patriarchal authority. Although things are changing, studies of fashion often focus on women’s bodies and purchases, rather than on men. Clothing is regularly presented as a woman’s pursuit, ignoring the fact that to be uninterested in dress, as men more often claim to be, is a cultural code and a statement in itself. Thrust corrects that fantasy. Glover shows us that Renaissance political power was fundamentally bodily. He discusses how Henry VIII had himself depicted as monumental, weighty, ‘like a bastion, or a great weathered oak’. Eroticism and virility, represented through the codpiece, were integral to Henry’s cool, metre-wide mastery. Reportedly, viewers of Hans Holbein the Younger’s wall painting of Henry VII and Henry VIII, completed in Whitehall Palace c. 1536-7, were left ‘abashed’. Perhaps the sight of Henry VIII’s enormous codpiece created a sense of inadequacy in Renaissance viewers, just as a middle-aged Dad confronted with a billboard of David Beckham’s well-filled boxers in the iconic 00s Armani underwear ad might go away more aware of the shortcomings of his own body.
This book is a critical ode to male vanity, in which the codpiece craze is an example of just how hard Renaissance men tried to show off through ‘untiring self-puffery’. As with the ‘abashed’ Tudor visitors to Whitehall Palace or, centuries later, the 1940 French costume book, Thrust recognises that the codpiece expresses insecurity as well as pride in the phallus. As a flamboyant, unsubtle display, it is an effort to gain power and status, rather than the possession of it. To hold power is precarious. It requires constant creation, re-creation and defence. Thrust is a light-hearted take on this phenomenon, exploring the connection between male vanity, eroticism and the visual props of patriarchal power. It is willing to poke fun at this, in the process revealing the crippling, bodily anxieties that – while never undermining the system – are ever-present in the history of masculinity.