Rude Statues

A ferocious controversy was sparked in Italy by the recent official visit of Hassan Rouhani, the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The matter was not that Italy had just entered a business partnership with a country where gay men and women are executed; but the fact that Italian officials had hidden some sculptures that Mr. Rouhani would have passed on his way to the negotiation room, fearing their nudity might offend him. The statues – which include the adolescent Eros stringing his bow, and the delicately bashful, elaborately coiffed Venere Capitolina – were clumsily masked with plasterboard sheets, the tops of their head popping out of the lopsided white boxes that lined the marble corridors in the Capitoline Museum in Rome.

Left- and right-wing alike joined the outrage at what was seen as an unadmissible moral compromise. Free-speech advocates and gay-rights activists sided, in their defense of artistic freedom, with racists who saw the controversy as a proof of an alleged cultural superioriy; traditionalist xenophobes marched in to defend Italy’s right to proudly display its national heritage, which in this case consisted in millennia-old depictions of genitalia.

Of course, an official audit revealed that nobody was to blame. Prime Minister Matteo Renzi declared that he wasn’t aware of the boxing of nudes. Mr. Rouhani stated he hadn’t asked for it but it had made him feel respected and welcome. Ilva Sapora, the Chief of Protocol, will resign, but she specified that she was about to retire anyway. Member of Parliament Ernesto Carbone declared to the press that for 20 billion Euros in business deals he ‘would have done much more’.

This is not a first. When Berlusconi was Prime Minister, he commissioned a replica Tiepolo to hang in an official Italian government building, asking the artist to cover the main figure’s exposed nipple and navel. The title to the original was Truth unveiled by time.