zukosgay:

aeide-thea:

zukosgay:

zukosgay:

Albrecht dürer was an absolute legend he didn’t go “send nudes” to his bf he was like “you know what, *I* will send *YOU* hand-drawn nudes of *yourself*”

16th century gay boys make do 

my probably-imperfect attempt (improvements welcomed!) to translate the above into english, for the benefit of a wider audience:

“…relates back to findings from the letters. Pivotal here is Dürer’s ‘unusually unofficial’ silverpoint portrait (undated, from around 1503), which is reproduced on the cover of the yearbook. The fleshy face, drawn in profile from the right, under a hood, displays the decidedly ‘non-model’ likeness of his grinning friend, with his mouth half open, and the inscription placed above it, probably by Pirckheimer, seemingly demonstrably in the same silverpoint as the portrait, turns the sketch into a puzzle as challenging as it is scatological: it contains, in Greek, a direct request for homosexual anal sex (‘ársenos tē fо̄lē es tòn prо̄któn’). It does not have to do with a quote from Aristophanes, as some have thought; and what, or even whom, the line refers to remains uncertain for the time being.” (Source)

NB that the greek transliteration given above is definitely, and importantly, wrong about the third word, which is ψωλή (psо̄lē), or ‘erection’ (LSJ: ‘membrum virile praeputio retracto’), rather than the meaningless fо̄lē; and that i personally absolutely can’t tell whether its take on the first two words is right, or at least, not by looking at the scanned image on wikipedia i can’t. so, you know, any Actual Paleographers out there who want to take a crack, be my guest:

that said, we’ve definitely without a doubt got the words for both hard-on and anus, so the main point i think stands on that evidence alone.

thank you for translating 500 years old dirty texts from albrecht dürer