Professor Starbuck (Psychology of Religion, Chapter XXX) refers to unpublished investigations showing that recognition of the rights of others also exhibits a sudden increment at the age of puberty.
Perez, L'Enfant de Trois à Sept Ans, 1886, pp. 267-277.
It must be remembered that the Medicean Venus is merely a comparatively recent and familiar embodiment of a natural attitude which is very ancient, and had impressed sculptors at a far earlier period. Reinach, indeed, believes ("La Sculpture en Europe," L'Anthropologie, No. 5, 1895) that the hand was first brought to the breast to press out the milk, and expresses the idea of exuberance, and that the attitude of the Venus of Medici as a symbol of modesty came later; he remarks that, as regards both hands, this attitude may be found in a figurine of Cyprus, 2,000 years before Christ. This is, no doubt, correct, and I may add that Babylonian figurines of Ishtar, the goddess of fertility, represent her as clasping her hands to her breasts or her womb.
When there is no sexual fear the impulse of modesty may be entirely inhibited. French ladies under the old Régime (as A. Franklin points out in his Vie Privée d'Autrefois) sometimes showed no modesty towards their valets, not admitting the possibility of any sexual advance, and a lady would, for example, stand up in her bath while a valet added hot water by pouring it between her separated feet.