Vintage Erotica: Terracotta vase in the form of a phallus

Today's erotic artwork comes from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This piece isn't currently on display in the museum, but there's a lovely picture in the online catalogue.

The ancient Greeks made plenty of sculptural vases. This piece was probably made in a workshop in Rhodes around 550–500 B.C. It would have been used to store perfumed oils.

This particular vase was recently used in a political piece by art critic Jerry Saltz, who protested a recent art censorship by pointing out that shocking art is by no means a modern invention. It was the perfect piece choose for the Open Letter to Republicans of the 111th Congress; the vase is both a stunning work of art and an unusually accurate rendering of the male organ.

Image and credits are after the jump. It's not safe for work unless you're a classicist.

Vintage Erotica: Petroglyph of a Vulva

I abandoned my planned vintage erotica series in frustration because I couldn't find the picture I wanted anywhere. Thanks to the mighty Wikipedia, I finally tracked it (or a remarkably similar engraving) down.

I first saw this design in a natural history museum, where it was labeled as "either a vulva or a hoofprint." This particular vulva currently residents in the French Musée des antiquités nationales. I'm having a hard time tracking down the exact age of this particular carving. I can tell you that this particular picture is prehistoric, but I can't find the exact estimated time period.

If you like what you see here, you'll be happy to know that vulva-form petroglyphs are a reoccuring theme across the globe. Humans just love drawing vulvas--almost as much as we love drawing dicks.

Picture is after the jump. It's probably safe for work unless your boss really hates rocks. Once again, my thanks to Wikimedia Commons.

Vintage erotica of the week: Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife

Yeah, it’s an actual weekly feature! With thousands of years of recorded human history to choose from, I probably won’t be running out of material any time soon.
Someday soon, I’m going to write up a history of tentacle porn, which is actually a product of a very interesting period of Japanese and American history. For now, I’ll leave you with the most famous erotic tentacle image in the world. Although it's a well-known image, it may violate my blog host's content policy, so I'm going to link to its NSFW wikimedia content page.

This woodblock print is by Hokusai, who's better known for his Views of Mount Fuji series (including The Great Wave off Kanagawa). It’s arguably not the first piece of tentacle erotica in Japanese art, but it’s usually cited as a precursor to modern tentacle porn. You can read more about the print’s history here.