Warren bought his first Greek vase at an auction he happened to attend in 1892. Thanks to the fortune his father made in paper manufacturing, Warren was a wealthy man. Instead, Warren longed for an ardent community of friends, modelled on Plato’s Symposiumand other ancient Greek writings about the benefits of love between men. Although it’s impossible to know for sure based on surviving evidence, David Sox, who wrote a biography of Warren, describes Warren as “homoerotic” rather than “homosexual”: feeling love for other men and appreciating their physical beauty, but not acting on this attraction. He considered his magnum opus to be the three-volume Defence of Uranian Love he wrote (although under a pseudonym). Warren never stopped advocating for his right to love men. Warren himself would have used the term “Uranian love,” a late 19th century term derived from the name of the Greek deity who personified the heavens, which signaled a belief that passionate but unconsummated love between men was of the highest order. I’m using the contemporary term “queer” here to indicate imagery that depicts or foreshadows sexual acts other than potentially procreative male-female penetration. Questions of sexual identity in antiquity are complex. Yet, other than Pan, not a trace of it now remains on display, despite the museum’s rich holdings of images of queer attraction, flirtation, and consummation. But Warren was right that visitors should see queer desire in the galleries. I don’t think every single erotic object Warren collected needs to be on display some, especially those involving always acrobatic satyrs, are fairly strange.
To see Pan, you must squeeze around the back. The paint was removed, but the current rearrangement of the display has positioned the vase so that the other side faces visitors. Before 1965, strategically applied paint erased Pan’s impressive erection. One of the collection’s most famous erotic scenes is still on view: a large bowl for mixing wine with a scene of the goat-headed god Pan chasing after a young shepherd. As she braces herself on a stool, letters spelling out “hold still!” spill out of her partner’s mouth. In the round space of the bottom of a wine cup painted by the artist Douris in around 480 BCE, a man penetrates a woman from behind.
If you visit today, you will still see plenty of ancient genitals, but, in a dramatic change to what had been true before, you will see only one depiction of genitals in use. Five of the galleries have been “freshly imagined,” and the others have seen at least a few changes. The classicist Emily Vermeule, writing in 1969, approvingly noted that “the delicacy of earlier generations has been replaced by a studier capacity to enjoy original works of art without intervention by extraneous ethical views.”īut it seems that delicacy has once again intervened in the museum’s galleries of the arts of ancient Greece and Rome, which reopened on Dec. It was not until 1965 that Warren’s donations finally went on proud, uncensored display. Most of these artifacts were locked away in storage for decades or, if put on display, neutered with paint.
A wealthy Bostonian and early gay rights advocate, Warren purchased these spicy drinking cups, wine jugs, and perfume flasks on behalf of the museum or donated them to it between 1885-1910, endowing the museum with one of the world’s finest collections of ancient erotica. In other words, I had precisely the experience that Edward Perry Warren wanted me to have. Discomfited but intrigued, I came a little closer to realizing what type of life it was that I wanted to lead. I saw acts and combinations I hadn’t thought were possible in the modern world, much less the ancient one. When I first visited Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, as a young and deeply closeted queer college student, I found myself wondering if the museum possessed ancient Greek vases decorated with anything other than sex scenes.