I recently noticed that a few houses down from me, a neighbor had added a human male statue next to their mailbox. I think one of the dumber ideas that humans came up with around 1530 was to add a fig leaf to ancient and Renaissance sculpture to cut down on nudity in art. Even before that, when the Roman Empire converted to Christianity, heroic nudity disappeared from Roman art and in the middle ages only the damned were usually shown nude. Note- I'm paraphrasing from wikipedia which I used to refresh my aging memory on this subject. How humans can be so silly about the human form is beyond me. I think my neighbors use of a nude with the fig leaf is a joke and lets face it this is a cheap plaster garden copy not an original or even a good reproduction of a work of art. Even so, I have the impulse to go down with a chisel and remove the fig leaf, sort of the opposite of the trend of adding fig leafs that went on in the 1500s. However, I bet money that if I removed the fig leaf I wouldn't find an anatomical correct human male underneath. I do like the hand painted flowers on the mailbox and I'm pretty sure they include pistils and stamens. For that matter I think the fig leaf guy is fairly hilarious once I fall off my soap box.
