PART III: Poop in the Renaissance: The Rebirth of Scatosculpture

The term "scatosculpture" was first coined by me approximately 2 seconds ago, and has quickly evolved to describe sculpted masterpieces that depict poop or figures in the act of pooping.

Scatosculpture can be traced back to early Sumerian civilizations in which poop-holding figures carved in wood were placed in holy tabernacles to shun constipation demons and appease Ungdasbedda,

FIG 4: The poop in David's hand may have been modeled after that of Leonardo da Vinci, the ingenious artist/inventor/architect best known for throwing his feces at passers-by without cause or warning.

the ancient god of regularity. Similar devices of shit-related superstition were later adapted throughout the Tigris/Euphrates river basin, in ancient Egypt and eventually in the mountain-top Himalayan shrines of Tibet, where "Holy shit!" was not just an expletive but a also a life-affirming spiritual mantra.

But no piece -- ancient, contemporary or otherwise -- has breathed so much life into the art of scatosculpture as Michelangelo's 1504 masterpiece, The David.

Following the lead of early art historian Giorgio Vasari, experts on Michelangelo have long held it as inarguable fact that the object located in David's right hand is a stone about to be launched from his sling -- the projectile that felled and killed the Philistine champion, Goliath. But a 1977 re-translation of the Old Testament corrected what has turned out to be a long-accepted misinterpretation: the Israelite king did not pick up a rock from the ground with which to kill his opponent, but in fact picked up a large lump of his own excrement (see Fig. 4).

This discovery has of course rocked the art world ever since. Some of those who once praised Michelangelo's genius and hailed him "The Master" found themselves forced to change their tune. In the early '80s, a caretaker at Florence's Casa Buonarotti, the home in which Michelangelo spent the majority of his adult life, was awakened to find a gang of 80-year old Italian men spraypainting epithets such as "Poop Freak" and "Il Maestro di Caca" on the historic building's 16th century façade.

The discovery begs many questions: Why did Michelangelo depict a poop-wielding David? Had someone correctly translated the ancient Hebrew texts for him way back in the early 1500s? Or was he, as critics have charged, merely a Poop Freak?

The world may never know. But as men with ugly wives often say, "One's man trash is another man's treasure."

While the stuffy conventionalist faction burned Michelangelo in effigy for including feces in a monumental piece of sculpture, more open-minded fans of the artist's work found inspiration in the his reckless abandon and indifference toward upholding the status quo.

FIG 5: Pre-pubescent boys pooping on each other's heads is the subject of post-modernist Girolamo Sonopuzzi's The Poop Waterfall. This piece is thought to symbolize the ephemeral reality of a utopian state.

The great Rodin, who battled starvation and poverty to become one of the world's best sculptors (not to be confused with the great Rodan, who battled Godzilla and Mothra to become of the world's best monsters), showed a clear love for scatosculpture in his famous piece The Thinker, which depicts a seated man deep in thought while he pinches a loaf. Some contend that the sculpture -- acting as a prequel to Michelangelo's masterpiece -- may even portray King David himself, taking the dump that would soon become his only weapon against Goliath.

More recently, an Italian named Girolamo Sonopuzzi breathed new life into scatosculpture in his 1995 work La Cascada de Fece. The piece demonstrates the artist's uncanny talent -- a particularly-disturbing obsession with poop and an equally-grotesque fetish he may have learned from Donatello: a fondness for sculpting young naked boys (see Fig. 5). The masterpiece is a bronze casting with the artist's own poop permanently adhered in noticeable locations. Sonopuzzi is currently doing six to eight for pederasty.

(Surely you read Part II, right? So then all that's left for you is Part IV.)