Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum has acquired a 200-year-old condom, upon which is etched three men with erections and a half-naked nun. She is pointing at one of the penises, and a caption reads: “Voila, mon choix” (“There, that’s my choice”).
The object joins the museum’s collection featuring Rembrandt masterpieces like The Night Watch (1642).
The early contraceptive, which dates to 1830, is thought to be made from a sheep’s appendix. It’s the showstopper in the museum’s new “Safe Sex?” exhibition, which runs through November and features Dutch and French prints and drawings detailing 19th-century sex work and sexual health.
Purchased for $1,000 at an auction in Haarlem, northwest Holland, at the end of last year, the condom is being displayed in a glass case. “It embodies both the lighter and darker sides of sexual health, in an era when the quest for sensual pleasure was fraught with fears of unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, especially syphilis,” the museum said in a statement.
It’s not clear which penis the nun is pointing at. They belong to a bald man, a thin man, and a more rotund man. “That way, any type of man could feel spoken to,” Joyce Zelen, a curator at the Rijksmuseum, told the Guardian. She said the etching deliberately alludes to the Greek myth of the Judgment of Paris, in which a Trojan prince is asked to choose between three goddesses. “So we believe that whoever acquired the condom would have been fairly sophisticated and well-educated,” Zelen added.
Before vulcanized rubber was invented in 1839, rudimentary condoms were fashioned out of materials including linen, turtle shells, and animal membranes. They were uncomfortable and not particularly effective. “In the 1830s, when this condom was made, the use of condoms was still frowned upon, especially by the church,” Zelen said. “They were mostly sold under the counter at brothels or barber shops, though there are some reports of luxury shops offering bespoke tailoring.”
Measuring 20 cm in length, Zelen added that she doesn’t believe the condom was ever used after analyzing it under UV light. She believes it may have been a souvenir from an upmarket French brothel, probably in Paris.
A condom from the 1800s sold for nearly $14,000 at a French auction house in 2011, while another made from a pig’s bladder from 1830 sold for $2,275 in 2019.
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