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University of Nebraska - Lincoln
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity
Biblical subjects; erections; male arousal; printed states; Sebald Beham; sexual imagery
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Full-Text Articles in Art and Design
Taste, Lust, And The Male Body: Sexual Representations In Early Sixteenth-Century Northern Europe, Alison Stewart
Taste, Lust, And The Male Body: Sexual Representations In Early Sixteenth-Century Northern Europe, Alison Stewart
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity
During the second quarter of the sixteenth century, Sebald Beham (1500‒1550) engraved a number of small prints with biblically related titles, Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife and Death and the Lascivious Couple. These prints, tiny enough to be held in the palm of one’s hand, show the male sexually aroused. First printed in Nuremberg and later in his new home of Frankfurt am Main, these sexual or erotic prints were popular enough to be copied by contemporaries and by Beham himself. This essay argues that Beham’s prints and their copies are part of a broader interest and taste for erotic imagery …