Erotic Art in The Suburban Baths
See also: Erotic art in Pompeii and Herculaneum For more details on this topic, see Sexuality in ancient Rome.The erotic wall paintings in the Suburban Baths are the only set of such art found in a public Roman bath house. Explicit sex scenes (such as group sex and oral sex) are depicted in these paintings that can not be easily found in collections of erotic Roman art. The paintings are located in the apodyterium and each scene is located above a numbered box. These boxes are thought to function as lockers in which bathers put their clothes. It is speculated that the paintings possibly served as way for the bathers to remember the location of their box (in lieu with the numerical numbering). The presence of these paintings in a public bath house shared by men and women gives some insight into Roman culture and suggests that people would not have found this offensive.
Read more about this topic: Suburban Baths (Pompeii)
Famous quotes containing the words erotic, art, suburban and/or baths:
“I’ve always felt that English women had to be approached in a sisterly manner, rather than an erotic manner.”
—Anthony Burgess (b. 1917)
“Among the laws controlling human societies there is one more precise and clearer, it seems to me, than all the others. If men are to remain civilized or to become civilized, the art of association must develop and improve among them at the same speed as equality of conditions spreads.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)
“When I consider the clouds stretched in stupendous masses across the sky, frowning with darkness or glowing with downy light, or gilded with the rays of the setting sun, like the battlements of a city in the heavens, their grandeur appears thrown away on the meanness of my employment; the drapery is altogether too rich for such poor acting. I am hardly worthy to be a suburban dweller outside those walls.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“After the baths and bowel-work, he was dead.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)