The Warren Cup: Highlighting Hidden Histories

Abstract

Contemporary artists and art galleries have been more active than museums in representing gay and lesbian culture in public spaces in recent decades. However same-sex relationships have a long history that is reflected in the collections of museums that have material from the classical world. The culture of ancient Greece and Rome was less inhibited about the representation of sexual acts than many nineteenth-century museums would have liked. Objects with frank images of sexual acts were discreetly censored or hidden away in secret cabinets. This article draws on one object as a case study, a Roman silver cup dated to the early years of the first century AD acquired by the British Museum in 1999. The cup is decorated with beautifully realised scenes in relief decoration which show two pairs of males engaged in lovemaking, each pair consisting of one older male and a youth. The object could never have been acquired or publicly displayed earlier in the twentieth century. The vessel known as the Warren Cup (after a previous owner) provides a provocative stimulus for debate about male-to-male lovemaking. Discussion of the meaning of the scenes, and the possible reasons why they were represented on such a high-status object, generates more questions than answers. This uncertainty contributes to the power of this object to open up debate. This article will raise questions for educators and students to consider about the Cup, an object which society has only recently ceased to regard as pornographic or obscene. Abstract

Disidencias sexuales, estéticas Museari, procesos críticos en el aula y ritos online mediante el proyecto Arteari.

“…Recorrer la historia de la representación de San Sebastián en los numerosos ejemplos de los museos del mundo supone entender la mirada del arte hacia el cuerpo humano en diferentes épocas y tradiciones. Incluso analizar aquellos elementos invisibilizados por parte de los museos puede suponer un memorable ejercicio de aproximación a los tabúes tradicionales (Frost, 2007).…”

Review of Exhibitions

“…One, therefore, was invited to join a self-guided "trail" in order to locate such objects as the Roman "Warren Cup" (named after a previous owner) which is notorious for showing a scene of sodomy between two adult men (when it was long assumed that classical culture only accommodated sexual acts between adult men and male youths). 4 Tate Britain's exhibition was on a much bigger scale than the other two and was accompanied by an exhibition catalogue edited by the curator Clare Barlow. 5 Whilst this book illustrated a wide selection of the items on show it was not laid out in the form of a catalogue but as a series of illustrated essays by art historians and cultural critics (I need to declare an interest here since I was one of the line-up).…”