Alongside bronzes of Priapus and Aphrodite, it incorporates the image of a Celtic idol that the artist bought on the Internet.
Some may originally have been the leisure products of aristocratic voluptuaries; others, genuine inscriptions on shrines of Priapus.
Hacks himself lived comfortably south of Berlin in a walled-off villa with a statue of Priapus in the garden.
The sexologist Herman Lorre, author of "Priapus in the Third Reich," regales Aldous with tales of his New York days, when he lived "next door to de Kooning.
Lampsacus, ancient Greek city on the Asiatic shore of the Hellespont, best known for its wines, and the chief seat of the worship of Priapus, a god of procreation and fertility.
These drives might more happily have been the comic excesses of Priapus (Cheever was "the horniest man [she] ever met" attested the actress Hope Lange, with whom he had an abiding affair), but even sex, like social class, tormented him.
Even a well-known curator, Pierre Hugues, was expelled from Naples in 1769 after he published a study of the secret cult of Priapus, a compendium of lewd ancient Roman writings.
Times and sensibilities change, but the forward hussies, blushing vicars and Scots with bulging kilts bear – and bare – comparison with today's omnipresent cards of Priapus or suntanned bottoms.
William Hamilton, the British ambassador to the court of Naples (best known as the cuckolded husband of Emma Hamilton, the lover of Lord Nelson), wrote a paper in 1781 for the Royal Society of London comparing the cult of Priapus to the contemporary Roman Catholic cult of Sts.
Fresco of Priapus, Casa dei Vettii, Pompeii (PD-ART, Fer.filol).
