For the men of the fifteenth century, conditions for phallic peacocking were optimal: theirs was an age without pants, when only snug stockings and long gowns hid their “privy Members and Buttockes.” By 1450, doublets had become immodestly short. With time, codpieces transcended their functional origins, much as the surgical mask has yielded to the cloth Baby Yoda one. Plus, Renaissance men carried a lot of junk on their belts-this was the era that gave us the “swashbuckler,” after all-and a bit of padding around the crotch would help insulate them “from bumps and friction.” Treating the French pox, as it was known, called for “a whole galaxy of herbs, minerals, syrups, and decoctions,” Vicary writes, applied directly in “a variety of messy unguents and poultices.” If you wanted to protect your fancy wardrobe from stains, the reasoning goes, you would do well to isolate the whole package in an oversized box. of their day, born as a means of containing a disease-in this case syphilis, which was then sweeping through Europe. The historian Grace Vicary has argued that codpieces were, in a sense, the P.P.E. Good questions, both, but any study of the codpiece begins with simpler ones: Why did it exist at all, and why did men elect to wear it? Theories abound. “Do you know of any other monarch who is as wide as he is long?” “Has heaven ever before conjured so broad a pair of shoulders?” Glover writes, of Henry’s portrait. He and his appendage feature prominently in “ Thrust: A Spasmodic Pictorial History of the Codpiece in Art,” by the English critic Michael Glover. And who could blame them? Sure, Henry sired notoriously few healthy children, but, in a famous portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger, he exudes the lusty mystery of a wellborn stud, his codpiece swollen with the stuff of life. A suit of the king’s armor, boasting a bulbous codpiece weighing more than two and a half pounds, is still on display at the Tower women used to stick pins in its sumptuous red-velvet lining to ward off barrenness. Henry VIII remains the poster boy for codpieces, those profane protuberances which drew eyes crotchward in the sixteenth century. Royally robed, sceptre in hand, the likeness befitted Henry’s reputation for extravagance, right down to its lascivious secret mechanism: “If you press a spot on the floor with your feet,” one observer wrote, “you will see something surprising with regard to this figure, but I will not say more.” I will: it was the king’s codpiece, sallying forth in full regalia. Early in the eighteenth century, visitors to the Tower of London could gaze upon a painted wooden statue of Henry VIII, the English king who’d died some two hundred years before.
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