There's nothing wrong with fondling Molly Malone's statue

Telegraph

07-05-2025

There's a folder on my iCloud's photo storage labelled 'art' that I may need to delete before the sex police haul me off to the gulag. For every snap of me grinning happily by a Van Gogh masterpiece, there's another of me goosing a statue, generally male. I freely admit I find it hard to visit Cambridgeshire's Anglesey Abbey without visiting the Colossal Bacchus with Panther and giving his non-colossal marble member a fond pat.
Partly because the garden's pagan sculptures always make me think of the impish moving statue in Peter Greenaway's film The Draughtsman's Contract and partly – to state the glaringly obvious – that being drawn to representations of the naked human form is an instinctive and time-honoured impulse. From the Greek myth of Pygmalion to CS Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, there's been a lurking fear and hope that cold stone might spring to life.
But statue-fondling is now an endangered pastime, with self-appointed decency monitors denouncing the practice. This week a 23-year-old Dublin student, Tilly Cripwell, announced a campaign to stop tourists buffing the bronze breasts of the city's Molly Malone sculpture (believing the gesture brings luck) by raising her on a plinth. Cripwell, who often busks close to the figure, views the bronze-handling as 'disgusting behaviour' that violates 'one of the few representations of women in Irish culture.'
I would find her outrage more convincing if Malone was a verified historical figure, rather than the coquettish subject of a popular ditty, and if the figure's breasts weren't so cartoonishly large (the late sculptor Jeanne Rhynhart appears to have channelled Barbie). Even Dubliners affectionately refer to the sculpture as 'the tart with the cart'. Yes, I know this sounds close to statue blaming; but can we all remember for a second that we're discussing an inanimate object and, for that matter, a decidedly ropey work of art.
If you want to seek love's blessings from a rather better statue, try Verona where you can queue at the Casa di Giulietta to touch the polished right breast of Romeo's innamorata. So popular is this fertility ritual with both sexes that Juliet's breast wore thin, meaning a replica was installed in 2014 – only for the copy to develop a small cavity too.
There was a brief public contretemps about the petting but, this being Italy, the scales tipped in favour of sensuality. In Paris, meanwhile, nobody appears too outraged about the shiny, caressed breasts of the Buste de Dalida (an iconic 70s' chanteuse) in Montmartre. Quite right too. There are plenty of examples of male sculptures being pawed by an adoring public – especially if you count the much-massaged testicles of Arturo Di Modica's charging bronze bull on Wall Street.
Another fine Parisian example is the tomb of 19 th -century journalist Victor Noir, who died duelling. His prostrate effigy boasts a gleaming crotch and lips from the thousands who subscribe to the story that getting handsy or smoochy will enhance their fertility and general desirability. The city's authorities had a brief fit of the vapours in 2004 and installed a fence, but it was taken down after a public outcry.
There are limits, of course. No one would wish Parliament Square's dignified statue of British suffragist leader, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, to be manhandled. It was bad enough when trans rights protestors defaced her image with graffiti last month. An act which starkly demonstrated our current schizophrenic attitude towards public sculptures: are they there to be embraced, defaced or pushed in a river? In my view, a little light fondling is vastly preferable to vandalism.