I’m looking into buying a block of marble and attempting to make a legitimate classical sculpture spoof. I’ve more on less settled on doing a female form and have been spending a good amount of time looking at classical and renaissance and modern statues for ideas and references and whatever. One thing I’ve always wondered about since visiting Rome as a teenager, and have been thinking about a lot recently, is what exactly caused the almost uniform decision across time and cultures to basically never attempt to carve female genitalia and just always give them the ol smooth Barbie crotch?
Did any Greek or Roman artists whose work survived ever experiment with actually carving a vagina and/or female pubic hair like they all did with penises, or was that just entirely off limits? Could there have been other, more lewd and anatomically correct statues that weren’t as valuable or well preserved in important places or were later destroyed by zealots or looters and are just lost to history? Is it possible that some of the Greek statues may have originally been more realistic and had been later carved down to Barbie form later?
Even in the Renaissance, would a nude sculpture of a woman with pubic hair or evidence of a vagina have been a scandal? Would the patrons just reject it and make them sand it down?
The short answer to this is: not really.
First it might be worth pointing out that the censorship of the female form is not something that is necessarily the norm across human history. We have found plenty of fully nude depictions of women from antiquity for example. One particularly noteworthy artifact is a roughly 4,000 year old vase depicting the Mesopotamian goddess Isthar, clearly not censoring anything. We also have examples from the Etruscans, such as this engraved bronze mirror from circa 300 B.C. depicting female nudity entirely.
However, as we move through time towards the ancient Greeks this changes. In the archaic period, depictions of female nudity are exceptionally rare. As we move away from the Archaic period into the Classical period we start to see some of the earliest depictions of female nudity, one of which being the now very famous Aphrodite of Knidos. But, as you can see, it includes that "barbie-like" anatomy you mentioned.
Within ancient Greek society, generally speaking, female nudity was considered very differently from male nudity. The majority of art depicting female nudity at all will be about goddesses, not about Greek women. For Greek women, nudity inherently related to ideas of vulnerability and as such they were mostly excluded.
Even as we move the Hellenistic period, where nude depictions of women are plentiful, we do not find anything akin to male depictions with finely detailed genitalia, or anything similar to the ancient Indian depictions of female goddesses which did not usually censor female genitialia.
I'm not aware of any explicit accounts explaining the decision to effectively censor the vulva, however, it is generally believed that within ancient Greek society it was simply considered too immodest or too (subconsciously) sexually aggressive to depict the female genitalia in detail. There is much more information about this in an essay by Larissa Bonfante^1 in which she compares ancient Greek art to that of their neighbors. Another worthwhile read is Undressing the Female Nude: The Paradox of Morality in Ancient Greek Sculpture by Lydia Schriemer. It provides a really thorough and through-provoking discussion about this subject.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that as far as I am aware, there are no depictions of female nudity as described by you (although some scholars do argue that the Aphrodite of Knidos would have had painted on pubic hair) from Ancient Greece. As for the Romans, because of their infatuation with Greek culture, they also copied many of their artistic practices. The result being that we don't (or exceedingly rarely) find any depictions of the female genitals in ancient Roman art either.
- Larissa Bonfante, Notes in the History of Art, Vol. 12, No. 2, ESSAYS ON NUDITY IN ANTIQUITY IN MEMORY OF OTTO BRENDEL (Winter 1993), pp. 47-55
Until a better answer comes along, I can tell you that the ancient romans were big on depilation. They often removed all the hair on their body other than their head.
More about that here: ancient Roman hair removal
ETA: answer by u/celebreth
