The Anatomy of Melancholy

Why display your milk-white bosom, Your very breasts, without a cloth to cover them? This is to say, “Ask, ask: I yield”; This is to summon lovers to love.

As Fredericus Matenesius aptly observes, all that is lacking is a crier to go before them dressed like that and tell us to look, a trumpet to sound—or, failing that, a sow-gelder to blow his horn:

Look out, look out and see What sight this may be That dazzles my eye: A splendid lady goes In rich and showy clothes, But where, God only knows. ——Look out, and so on, and what follows.

Or to what end and purpose? But leaving these fanciful flights aside, I shall pursue my intended subject. Nakedness, as I have said, is repulsive in itself, “a remedy for love”; yet when used partially and at chosen times it can be the most powerful enticement of all:

Neither clothed Diana nor naked Venus pleases me: The one has no sensual delight, the other too much.

That was how David saw Bathsheba, and the elders Susanna. Apelles fell in love with Campaspe when he was to paint her naked. Tiberius, in Suetonius, chapter 42, dined with Sestius Gallus, an old lecher—“a lustful old man”—“on condition that naked girls should serve.” Some say the same of Nero, and Pontus Heuter of Charles the Bold.

Among the Babylonians, some lustful women used to dance and frisk in that fashion, says Curtius in book 5; and Sardus, in Customs of Peoples, book 1, writes similarly of others. At certain formal banquets the Etruscans had naked women to wait on them, a practice Leonicus, in his Miscellaneous History, book 3, chapter 96, also records of other lewd nations.

Nero always wanted obscene pictures hanging in his room, a practice all too common in our time; and Heliogabalus “even had people performing before him, to arouse his lust.” So things can be misused. A servant in Aristaenetus watched her master and mistress through the keyhole as they were enjoying themselves; the sight made her fall in love with her master.

Antoninus Caracalla saw his stepmother with her breasts enticingly exposed. He was so stirred that he said, “Ah, if only it were allowed!”—“Oh, if only I might!” She happened to overhear and replied just as shamelessly, “Whatever you please is permitted”: you may do what you wish. Tempted by this, he married her. The object itself was not the cause, but its unseemly, indecent presentation.

When all is said and done, “the arrows come from clothing”: the greatest provocations to lust come from our apparel. God makes, they say, and man shapes; and there is no inducement like it.

It makes even beauty more beautiful, And utterly bewitches a wretched eye.