Vito Tomasello

Vito Tomasello (Italian, ?-1987), also known as Menico, was one of many trained artists who turned their attention to physique art during the heyday of beefcake magazines, but he never enjoyed the wide acclaim or popularity of his contemporaries. Because his publication history, his output, and his sales of photographic prints were so limited, his work is particularly rare.

Tomasello's more explicit homoerotic works were usually given as gifts to friends and remain in private collections, few of them have been seen by the public. There is one particularly fine example of his later homoerotic work at the Leslie-Lohman Museum in New York.

In the early 1960s, Vito Tomasello lived with Walter Kundzicz (Champion Studios). Kundzicz very much admired Tomasello's talent and wanted to help him generate some income. In the same way Champion marketed sets of physique prints of individual models, Kundzicz thought they might market a set or two of Tomasello's gay-oriented artworks. They chose the name Menico as Tomasello's pseudonym. The office supply firm who made the rubber stamp mistakenly spelled it "Menigo". Photographic prints of Tomasello's art may sometimes be misidentified as the work of "Menigo" for this reason.

Although examples of Tomasello's better works are held by the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art and several important private collections, Tomasello is largely forgotten today.