The Codpiece in Art and Fashion

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. 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.

Henry VIII remains the poster boy for codpieces, those profane protuberances that drew eyes crotchward in the sixteenth century. 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. 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. He and his appendage feature prominently in “Thrust: A Spasmodic Pictorial History of the Codpiece in Art,” by the English critic Michael Glover. “Has heaven ever before conjured so broad a pair of shoulders?” Glover writes, of Henry’s portrait. “Do you know of any other monarch who is as wide as he is long?”

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. The historian Grace Vicary has argued that codpieces were, in a sense, the P.P.E. of their day, born as a means of containing a disease—in this case syphilis, which was then sweeping through Europe. 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. 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.”

With time, codpieces transcended their functional origins, much as the surgical mask has yielded to the cloth Baby Yoda one. 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. The codpiece, in its early form, was a baggy cloth gusset laced to the stockings, but, in the course of the next century, rising on a tide of ostentation, it bulged and distended. In Italy and Spain, and soon across Europe, padding and stays came into vogue. A kind of circumferential arms race led to boxy, generously portioned tubes that simpered from the waistlines of princes and peons alike.

Thus the codpiece, designed for discretion, became instead a rigid contrivance. Historians have compared it to “a permanent erection,” noting that it was “so voluminous it could serve as a pocket.” And indeed it did, offering convenient storage for one’s hankie or a stray orange, in addition to “ballads, bottles, napkins, pistols, hair, and even a looking glass,” as the scholar Will Fisher has written. With great size comes great decorative responsibility, and men of means rose to the occasion. They brocaded, damasked, bejewelled, embroidered, tasseled, tinseled, and otherwise ornamented their codpieces until they became like walking Christmas trees. Puberty was no prerequisite: boys as young as seven could engorge themselves with silk and satin. On the battlefield, a codpiece signalled martial swagger; in the royal court, procreative swagger; and, everywhere else, swagger at large.

And yet none of this presses on the question of motive. Glover looks for clues in the litany of codpieces jutting from Renaissance paintings, leading a perceptive tour of the nether regions. If nothing else, he’s an inspired describer of groins in their finery. Of Alonso Sánchez Coello’s “Portrait of Alessandro Farnese,” he notices that the young noble’s codpiece mimics “the puffing out of his breeches, which sag from his elegant pinched-in waist like two gently slumping puddings.” Surveying Titian’s “Emperor Charles V with a Dog,” Glover probes the hound’s “questing muzzle,” which veers “sniffing-close” to its master’s codpiece in what can only be “an allusion to the emperor’s virility.” And in Luca Signorelli’s unruly fresco “The End of the World,” Glover sees, amid the “writhing, gesticulating soldiers,” “overripe fruit hanging from the bough of the groin, poised and displayed for quick picking.”

Too often, though, Glover reaches for that overripe fruit, as when he writes, “It seems you just can’t keep a good codpiece down.” When he exclaims that “only a mere letter” separates the French word for codpiece, braguette, from baguette—“that faux cod-phallus, crispy and hard on the surface yet so yielding at its center”—he seems guilty of the same “self-puffery” he mocks. “It was as normal to wear a codpiece,” he writes, “as it is to wear, say, a padded bra in our own day. And yet, and yet, we still wonder about it.” True, but throughout “Thrust,” Glover treats the codpiece more as an object of ridicule than of curiosity. The epitome of embellished manhood, it contributed, he writes, “to a fabricated, fictionalized version of the male body.” Be that as it may, a generation of men lived and died in these things—owned them, stored them, sat pridefully for portraits in them. Even if the phenomenon was solely a crisis of machismo, isn’t there more to learn about it from the art history at the heart of his study?

Fisher has proposed that the codpiece embodies duelling visions of masculinity. Before the Renaissance, a man’s identity was predicated on his ability to have children, ideally lots of them. The codpiece had one stockinged foot in that world—“cod” was slang for the scrotum, not the penis—and the other in a racy alternative that valued “sexual conquest” more than reproduction. Seen in this light, codpiece-wearing men were essentially performing their performance anxiety; Marjorie Garber has called the codpiece “the thinking man’s (or woman’s) bauble, the ultimate detachable part.”

Whatever the case, by the close of the sixteenth century, the codpiece had become a canker-blossom on the male form, and it declined as suddenly as it had ascended. As early as the fifteen-eighties, Michel de Montaigne had written off the accessory as “empty and useless,” puzzling, “What was the meaning of that ridiculous part of the breeches worn by our fathers?” Fashion took a decidedly feminine direction; soon ruffs adorned necks and upperstocks plumped from midriffs. Some mourned the senescence of tumescence. Barton Holyday longed for the days of “that Cod-piece-ago, when the innocency of men did not blush to shew all that Nature gaue them.” (He seems to have elided the fact that codpieces were mostly empty space.) Since their peak, they’ve popped up only in passing. In the nineteen-sixties, Eldridge Cleaver, a leader of the Black Panther Party, used the profits from his prison memoir to design a pair of pants with a large, “sock-like codpiece” built in. “We’ve been castrated in clothing,” Cleaver told the press, “and my pants open up new vistas. I’m against penis binding.” He’s not alone: in the past year, codpieces have appeared on the runway from Thom Browne and Gucci, the latter available in leather.

If a revival is coming—if our thirst for personal protective equipment cannot be slaked with masks, gloves, and shields alone—we would do well to learn from our forebears. To my eye, the finest painting featured in “Thrust” is Brueghel the Elder’s “The Wedding Dance,” from 1566, in which a jumble of tipsy peasants make merry at a homespun reception. Foregrounded, of course, are what Glover aptly calls “no-holds-barred codpieces,” worn by commoners “thoroughly unashamed of themselves . . . exulting in the sheer beastliness of men.” He’s right: the codpiece has never looked more natural. Even if Brueghel intended to warn against bawdiness, he captured the fashion as a way of life rather than as a flagrant absurdity. These men are being, not seeming. Did any of them ever glimpse his crotch and worry, even for a fraction of a second, that he looked ridiculous? Did he fear that history would judge him harshly? As he ran the last lace through its eyelet, did he think anything at all? These and other facts are forever hidden from us, tucked away in the proud codpiece of the past.

A Brief History of the Codpiece, the Personal Protection for Renaissance Equipment

By Dan Piepenbring. The New Yorker , May 23, 2020. 

In these plaguey days, how eager should we be to examine the remains of a 16th-century codpiece firsthand?

Furthermore, how much full-strength, anti-bacterial hand-wash would we need to slather and squander in the panic-stricken, immediate aftermath of any serious, one-on-one act of visual-cum-tactile scrutiny?

Would there be fetid remnants of some ill-definable ancient pungency still remotely alive in the air? A certain suspiciously greasy slitheriness about the surface of the once costly fabric of the thing, now badly faded?

These questions hang mock-menacingly in the fresh south London air that I am still so fortunate (fingers crossed) to be breathing. Luckily, I have been spared all this potential misery, thanks to a deft seamstress and former ballerina called Anne-Marie Norton…

According to Anne-Marie, the ‘remains’ of a codpiece known to have been worn by Don Grazia de Medici in 1562 are preserved at the Pitti Palace in Florence. She learnt of this while delving into the history of the making of codpieces at my request.

Gucci’s Alessandro Michele revived the accessory for his spring/summer 2019 show: rendered in leather and snakeskin, worn harness-like and evoking Robert Mapplethorpe; in shiny diamante, hanging like a glitter ball; and framed like a seashell clutching the symbolic pearl.

The American designer Thom Browne also featured them in his spring/summer 2020 show, which nodded to deconstructed sportswear. His models wore them over pleated tutus and bell-shaped suit-dresses, accessorised with papier-mache-looking football helmets, broken umbrellas and headbands in the red, white and blue of the US flag.

Last autumn I published Thrust (David Zwirner Books, 2019), a little treatise that attempts to be, as the subtitle states, “A Spasmodic Pictorial History of the Codpiece in Art.”

The codpiece, a gross object of fleeting allure, went down almost as fast as it came up — living and dying as a thing of high fashion and indispensable male accoutrement in the 16th century — and for only about 50 years of that century, at that.

In the book, I discuss paintings by the likes of Titian, Moroni, Coello, Parmigianino, Giorgione, and others who recorded these great priapic occasions, when men of the church, aristocrats, kings, and emperors galore strapped them on as never before (or since) in a veritable orgy of tremendously eye-catching uprearingness.

What I did not do in that book, however, was to say much about the actual making of the codpiece, its materiality you might say, if were you endeavoring to earn a meager living as a culturally high-toned lecturer in fine art and fashion.

To be perfectly honest, I had not up to that point dandled or fondled a Renaissance codpiece in my very own hands. I had not even considered overmuch its actual fabrication — exactly how it was made and from what, and what it really looked like at the back…

I still have not.

Examined one of that vintage, that is.

In fact, thanks to dear Anne-Marie, I have gone one better by far. Having done on my behalf the heavy-lifting that careful research always demands, she was able to find useful pointers in a pattern book of our own time, Janet Arnold’s Patterns of Fashion: The Cut and Construction of Clothes for Men and Women, c.1560-1620 (Macmillan, 1985), which deals with the exactness of things way back when.

And then, faster even than Jumping Jack Flash himself, she made me one. An exact likeness! And so I now possess my very own faux-authentic Renaissance codpiece, made to the exact pattern of the one worn by that Medici whose name I have just cited (with a few extra bits of decorative embellishment boldly snatched from the codpiece of yet another Medici called Cosimo I, and worn just a little later, in 1574.)

So how did it work exactly?

First, she asked me for my measurements. (She knew that I wanted to show it off at a lecture). I sidestepped that nasty little bolt of unanticipated impertinence by giving her the measurements of my waistband. Was I being obtuse and unhelpful?

Not at all! Waistband measurements are very useful because you tie the thing on at the waist, where it hangs down (yet always pridefully, as the Honorable Member demands), at the height of every raised expectation.

On a now-distant day before the lockdown, Anne-Marie presented me with this delight of an eye-feast, in a tall and rather elegant black box, on the steps of a dancing academy in Covent Garden called Pineapple, which is three leaps and a single smart lunge away from the Royal Opera House. The codpiece was modestly nestled, nose down, as if it might have gently crash-landed, in white tissue paper.

When I lifted the lid, to the consternation of the many gathered around (who had been tipped off about the time and place of its imminent appearance), I felt a little like a waggish, thin-mustachioed, pier-end prestidigitator. But a codpiece, even when inert in a box, is a thousand times the cultural superior of a mere rabbit.

And yet, viewed from behind, you notice that there is no point of entry. It is flat-backed, sealed off. No nosing allowed then. The codpiece revealed its function not as a hubristic spectacle, but as mere decoration!

Did the member itself ever cower at the rear, one wonders, fearful that the codpiece may have made a promise that actual anatomy might not deliver? Never! Never! There was always too much at stake.

What was it made from then? Covered in gorgeous red-dyed damask, it was stabilized (like any fresh-primed time bomb of roaring lustfulness) with cotton ticking, and tightly stuffed (you have to pack it as hard as you can because it needs to maintain its solid-looking and -feeling shapeliness for hours, months, years) with an organic fabric called kapok.

Kapok! What an oddly jaunty little word that is. Kapok is the stuff with which children’s toys are stuffed. These materials are not authentic to the time, of course. (This we would have recognized well enough, I have no doubt, as soon as we hear the word “children” uttered. There were no children in the 16th century. There were only miniature adults, and they were always dressed as such.)

Way back when, the codpiece would have been stuffed with horsehair or bombast (a kind of cotton wadding). Its outside might have been made of leather. An animal bone could have been inserted to ensure the maintenance of shapeliness. Needs must.

The point was this: it must never flag in its attentions. Never.

Egregious Renaissance Maleness, From the Inside Out : An up-close look at the codpiece.

By Michael Glover. Hyperallergic , April 18, 2020

There really is no delicate way to open a story about a piece of horsehair-lined leather designed to cover and celebrate a man’s genitals, is there? So let’s just get on with it: The codpiece, as it is called, was wildly popular for just a brief few decades during the Renaissance, and yet it remains a cult object of comical fascination to this day. And it has, you may be delighted or terrified to learn, had a big year: it is the subject of a slim new treatise, the color of artisanal gatorade, entitled Thrust: A Spasmodic Pictorial History of the Codpiece in Art, by the English art critic and poet Michael Glover, released by David Zwirner Books. And it was an unexpected motif in the Spring 2020 menswear collection by American designer Thom Browne, shown in Paris this past June.

In celebration of these codpiece-driven coincidences, David Zwirner Books brought together Glover and Browne for an episode of their podcast, Dialogues, which host Lucas Zwirner taped with the pair in Browne’s midtown Manhattan showroom, where the codpiece-pieces themselves could gaze on in tender admiration. Following the podcast taping, we spoke with both author and designer to unpack how this bizarre fashion footnote has continued as a source of inspiration.

Like many objects sprung from delusional masculine grandeur, the codpiece is a punchline, yet so much more. “The codpiece is all about boastfulness and braggadocio, sad men pretending to be more than they could ever hope to be,” as Glover diagnoses in his book, and in a recent phone call, he shared the more pedestrian details: “It would have had to have a fairly hard exterior, probably made of leather. Inside, the padding would probably have been horsehair.” (Horsehair is very breathable—hence its starring role in the world of luxury mattresses.) It would have been measured, he confirmed, though a brief google search reveals that if there was once a special term for the profession of codpiece measurer, it has been lost to the sands of time.

The codpiece eventually reemerged as something more utilitarian in the worlds of ballet and sports—le cup, le jockstrap—but its original purpose was more direct as a visual symbol: “It extends and aggrandizes the genital area,” Glover said. “It suggests that the penis, and everything else that clusters about it, is enormous in proportion. And is tremendously potent. And that the owner, that person, is extremely virile, and is capable of achieving almost anything.”

Exhilarating!

Though it may be hard to imagine, the codpiece was once an object of deep seriousness. Glover’s notion for the book arrived during a hilarious visit to London’s National Portrait Gallery, where a “crepuscular” room filled with Tudor family portraits includes a drawing copied from a destroyed portrait of Henry VIII, “standing in front of his father, spread-legged looking like a mighty Tudor oak, just the way in which this is positioned on the wall, and the way I was standing, the more I looked at it, the more it became evident to me, in a blinding flash of insight, that this entire painting pivoted about this enormous codpiece. It was like a capturing wheel at the center of the painting, but the entire world pivoted about it, and that made me laugh inwardly.”

“There was a certain amount of humor” with which the codpiece was treated during its heyday, he explained, “but it was quite often serious. It was part of the grandiose self display, certainly with Henry VIII. [He] needed a lot of grandeur of self display, because the Tudor monarchs were not long on the throne. He needed to show himself off and he always did.So it was a weapon. It was power.”

That self-seriousness has only added to its comedic potential over time. Male vanity, of course, used to express itself visually with outrageous displays of myth-building tailoring and portraiture, while it’s now become something more like an oil-and-vinegar combo of preening and insecurity. The insecurity often gets in the way of the preening, unfortunately, and perhaps that is why despite the codpiece’s brief relevance to the history of fashion, it has returned again and again as a token of male virility disguised as performance wear in sports and dance. That’s the spirit Browne’s seersucker runway captured, with its pirouetting ballerinos in tutus, codpieces proudly displayed like badges, a sendup of the overt sexual signaling of historical fashion. (Panniers, the women’s basket-like undergarment that made the hips two doors-wide, got similar treatment in the collection.)

A runway fashion observer may not know “the history of it, but they know of a codpiece,” Browne explained in a recent interview. That vague sense of historicism gave the collection its edge of madcap humor, underscoring that the codpiece’s more familiar contemporary cousin, the cup, is far from immune to that same ridiculous interpretation. Rendered in seersucker and affixed to dresses, suits, and dresses that looked like suits, the codpiece, Browne said, was “somewhat for decoration, and for humor.”

Browne is not a designer who lets his collections hang heavy with laborious nods to other centuries, periods, or cultures. The levity of his work comes from his indulgence of a dilettante’s attitude towards his references: “I don’t really approach [fashion design] from a historical point of view,” he said. ”It’s more taking ideas and almost reintroducing them in ways that aren’t a time reference.” That’s why he loves endlessly tweaking and freaking the suit, an object so deeply embedded in the greater style consciousness that even minor changes, like his floodwater hems, drive people nuts: “We still get reactions, even 15 years later. Some people hate it—they don’t understand why it exists, and I love that about it.”

“I just like to make people see things differently,” Browne said. “And make people either love it, or hate it.”

Why the Codpiece Remains One of Menswear’s Most Essential Accessories.  By Rachel Tashjian. GQ , December  13, 2019.

The codpiece—a fashion curio, yes, but one whose padded cup runneth over as a conversation piece. The designer Thom Browne, whose collections have featured codpieces over the years, and the writer Michael Glover, who just published an unlikely and hilarious history of the codpiece in art, talk male vanity, gender fluidity, camp, Catholicism, tailoring, and more—all revolving around this little flap of cloth about the midsection.

Dialogues :The David Zwirner Podcast.  December 13, 2019. 

David Zwirner Books