9.The 16 Pleasures by Marcantonio Raimondi was so sexually scandalous that the Pope tried to destroy all the copies, though whether he succeeded or not is up for debate
The world’s first collection of pornography wasn’t so much lost or stolen as confiscated. Marcantonio Raimondi’s series of erotic engravings both titillated and scandalized polite society at the peak of the Renaissance. In fact, it shocked the Catholic Church so much that they tried to buy up all the copies of the first edition of the work and have them all destroyed. Whether the Church succeeded in its puritanical mission, or whether one or more copies of the original survived the puritanical purge and are still out there, remains a source of considerable scholarly debate to this day.
The artwork, entitled The Sixteen Pleasures, or sometimes referred to as I Modi (The Ways) was actually a series of engravings created by Raimondi and then released in 1524. All of the elaborate engravings depicted different sexual acts and positions. Significantly, while other artists had made similar erotic works for private viewing, Raimondi intended his to be seen by the public. When Pope Clement VII learned of this, he was incensed. Wielding his Papal authority, he ordered his soldiers to locate and then destroy every set of the engravings. According to most accounts, they succeeded, and the Pope even had the artist briefly imprisoned.
But that doesn’t mean that the puritans had the last word. Within a few years, a second edition had been published. This time, the engravings were accompanied by erotic poems. What’s more, Raimondi’s legacy lived on. In the 17th century, enterprising printers at Oxford University in England made copies of their own, bringing The Sixteen Pleasures to a new generation. These examples still survive today. However, the hunt for the original 1524 artworks goes on.