Culture or porn? Barbican show is posing a most seductive question

It may be the most sexually explicit exhibit ions ever mounted in a London gallery. It is almost certainly the first to ban under-18s.

But the Barbican insists its new survey of 2,000 years of sex in art - from Roman marbles to Andy Warhol's 41-minute film, Blowjob - is a most serious academic show.

Curated by heavyweight art historians from Oxford University and Central Saint Martin's, the exhibition, Seduced, spans Etruscan vases, 19th century Japanese prints and 20th century photography such as Robert Mapplethorpe's images of male bondage.

It aims to question the line between art and pornography and explore shifting attitudes towards sexually explicit imagery, when material was either acceptable or hidden.

One of the first objects visitors will see will be a fig leaf made for the private parts of Michelangelo's David to spare Queen Victoria's blushes when she visited.

Kate Bush, the head of the Barbican Art Gallery, said it was not an attempt to use sex to lure visitors.

"It is an incredibly important and ambitious exhibition," she said. "It is 2,000 years of world art history. Nobody has ever tried to cover sexual experience through the eyes of great artists in one show before. It has huge amounts of scholarship and learning behind it, but is filled with spectacular works of art."

Highlights include items from the Gabinetto Segreto or Reserved Cabinet in Naples. Sexually charged pieces, including phallic amulets and frescoes from a Pompeii brothel, were kept from view after 1819 when King Francis I saw them with his wife and daughter and was shocked.

The UK equivalent was the British Museum's Secretum which housed a collection of ancient erotica, some of which will be on show.

The Metropolitan Museum in New York is lending a Picasso it does not display. It is a depiction of the artist being sexually pleasured. Other items include notebooksof JMW Turner containing-secret sketches of people having sex and sexually explicit etchings by Rembrandt.

Ms Bush said: " We are adamant that everything is in this show because it has great artistic value. But it is for adults only because there is explicit imagery."

The exhibition opens on Friday and runs until 27 January next year.