British Museum's secret Cupboard 55
Richard Morrison takes a peep inside the British Museum's secret Cupboard 55. "Imagine a kind of dirty-mac edition of The Antiques Roadshow, furtively conducted around a dusty cupboard in a dimly lit corridor at the back of the most famous museum in the world. . . . It used to be the British Museum's equivalent of the newsagent's top shelf: the place where it stored objects considered far too shocking for the hoi polloi. Here the cognoscenti could examine fragments of ceramic penises ('votive offerings in the 17th century,' explains Hamilton), and even a highly detailed set of 16th-century Italian drawings simply known as I Modi ('the positions' — I think you can guess what they show). How these things got into the BM's secret cabinet is a story that tells us a great deal about attitudes to sex — ours, the ancient world's, and in particular the Victorians'." (Link snagged from World Sex News.)
