Although Ottoman art is not well-known for its erotic content, there are in fact a considerable corpus of sexually explicit manuscript illustrations that, with precious few exceptions, have been entirely neglected in the literature. Moreover, those among them that were produced during the late eighteenth and even the very early nineteenth century contradict the received idea that Ottoman miniature painting ended in the early eighteenth century, the painter Levni representing its swan song. Quite to the contrary, sumptuously illustrated volumes continued to be produced for nearly another century, only to be ignored by modern art historians due to their explicit content. The goal of this paper is to present a selection of these works and highlight the evolution of their visual codes and conventions, from the highly abstract and ambiguously situated in the sixteenth-century, to the naturalistic and meticulously localized in the late eighteenth. Nineteenth-century lithographic books and even early twentieth-century manuscripts will also be briefly reviewed to demonstrate that the line remained more or less unbroken until the advent of mass-circulation publishing, which reinvented the genre on a western model. This paper is in part based upon joint work with XXXXX XXXXX.