Cod Pieces in Elizabethan Fashion Codpieces in Men's Costumes

Once upon a fourth dimension – in the Middle Ages, that is – the codpiece was aught much to write home about at all. The best and the worst that could be said of it was that it was serviceable. Why? And what was it for anyway? Answers to these questions have to practice with the manner men's hoses were created dorsum and so. Each leg was separate. Consequently, there was cipher in the middle. What might serve so as a useful air current-break or draught-excluder?

Something adequately crude and unproblematic and triangular, came the answer, to protect the wearer from harm. Certainly aught that might require the services of a tailor. So a triangle of cloth was fashioned, perhaps out of a slice of coarse linen. This was the codpiece, and its role was a protective one, to safeguard the precious honourable fellow member from harm.

By the sixteenth century, everything had changed. The Tudor monarch Henry Eight was a ability-dresser. He needed to impress all those European lineages which had been in existence much longer than the Tudors had – or would ever be. His attentions to the particular of dress – tilt of hat, many beringed fingers, shoulder pads, etc., etc. – was quite extraordinary – and much remarked upon at the time for its eye-communicable splendour and its singularity. Amongst these adornments of Henry's was a codpiece, e'er. A rampant codpiece. A codpiece which testified to male person bragadoccio. A codpiece which spoke of fertility. Alas, and as we are all, of class, enlightened, it was not to be. His only son, a sickly boy, died before he could procreate.

Henry's codpiece is seen at its nigh rampant in diverse royal portraits of the monarch. 1 is at the Walker Gallery in Liverpool. A second is at the National Portrait Gallery in London, and it is of particular interest to this particular writer considering the sight of information technology, hanging in the Tudor Gallery of sixteenth-century British portraiture, stirred into move an entire book near the codpiece in art.

That London portrait on view there today (online just at the moment) is a much-macerated version of its onetime self in then far as information technology is a cartoon upon which Hans Holbein the younger based a much larger painting. This painting suffered a calamity at the terminate of the seventeenth century. Information technology was destroyed, like much else that was precious, in the burn which burnt the Whitehall Palace to the ground in 1698. Now only the drawing survives by Holbein himself. A copy of the original by Remigius van Leemput, which he painted more than than a hundred years after the original, lives at Hampton Courtroom – at that place is likewise a version at Petworth House.

When I say that the drawing is macerated, I mean that it is much narrower than the painting. It excludes, for instance, two of Henry's hapless queens entirely. To lovers of codpieces, this is something of an advantage, as you will find.

When I looked at it 1 Saturday morning a couple of years agone, I saw an unusually tall portrait in a dimly lit room which showed off two kings – and no i else. Henry Vii stands behind his son, looking suitably ghostly. (He was, of course, dead past the time that Holbein fabricated this likeness.) His son, also Henry, stands in front, hogging the limelight, looking a niggling similar a stout tailor's dummy from which nigh every bit of fashionable accoutrement known to a prosperous male in the 1530s has been hung. And foremost amongst these accoutrements is the splendid, snail-like codpiece, which seems to exist positioned so centrally that it draws our middle to it irresistibly. Nothing is more of import than me, it seems to be saying.

For around fifty years of that century, the codpiece thrived in European portraiture as never before or since. This was its moment. You tin see it in great paintings by the likes of Giorgione, Titian, Moroni, Coello, Parmiginiano and many others. All these sitters (I mean standers because it is inconceivable that yous might wish to be comfortably seated for long in a codpiece) are prosperous men of eminence in their fields, men of the church, men of court, men of aristocratic lineage, kings, emperors.

Among the few to pigment codpieces worn by males of a lower social lodge was Brueghel. It took considerable wealth to commission a portrait, and such portraits were, mostly speaking, very studied representations of the sitter, showing them exactly as they would wish to be seen in lodge to print or overawe.

What is interesting about these portraits is the attitude of the subject to the codpiece that he is wearing. To united states of america, a codpiece looks outrageous, over-the-acme, rearingly priapic, well-nigh ridiculous in its claims. And yet information technology was seldom even remarked upon or written about at the time. Things were as they were.

What is more, the discipline seldom seems to admit the presence of the codpiece, equally if the evidence here of outsize genitalia is scarcely even to be noticed. Instead, there seems to be a full general mental attitude of studied unawareness, aloofness, or fifty-fifty indifference, every bit if there are far more important things in this earth to exist thinking about.

What was it for and then? To pull the girls? Non necessarily. Most likely it existed equally living, centre-communicable proof that this rich male was fecund, and could be guaranteed to produce every bit many male heirs equally any poor female body could ever promise to cope with. Not so poor Henry, no matter how many wives needed to be sacrificed equally he tried and he tried.

Michael Glover, poet, fine art critic and writer

Michael's book Thrust: A Spasmodic Pictorial History of the Codpiece in Fine art, published by David Zwirner Books, is available now

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