Goat Statue: Will It Scare The Children?
Even Robert Mapplethorpe didn’t go this far: An erotic statue has caused the British Museum to install a “parental guidance” warning in their new exhibition, “Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum.” The sculpture is of the mythical half-goat, half-man Pan having sex with a nanny goat. (Thank God it’s not a billy goat, or “pro-family” folks would have really freaked out.) The museum is determined to display the object in plain sight, rather than hidden behind a curtain or in a “museum secretum” – a restricted area for those aged over 14 in the Naples Museum. Paul Roberts, senior curator, said the statue may be unconventional today, but would not have raised eyebrows in Roman Pompeii: “The Romans would see the god goat having sex with a goat, so it wouldn’t have troubled them at all.” Oh, those ancient Romans: so decadent!
