by Nigel Spivey
THE BEAUTY OF KRITIAN BOY
IT WAS THE distinguished British art historian Sir – later, Lord – Kenneth Clark (1903–83) who, in one of his most engaging books, The Nude, handed Kritian Boy the absolute accolade of being ‘the first beautiful nude in art’.We may not agree with such a generous verdict, but we can be sure that for ancient viewers this statue embodied a potent ideal of male beauty. Although Kritian Boy is not what we might understand as a portrait, it is probable that he represents an individual youth in his mid-teens who had been victorious at the Panathenaic Games – a regular festival at Athens, involving various physical contests.With his diaphragm filled, the figure may well be that of a sprinter, whose passing success has been caught forever in marble. But the very poise of Kritian Boy displays a winning body as esteemed by prevalent social and erotic values. In early fifth-century BC Athens there was no shame attached to pederasty, the custom of older men courting teenage boys for friendship and sexual favours. So one competition at the Panathenaic festival was simply a sort of beauty parade – a challenge to see who exhibited most of what the ancient Greeks termed euandria (fine manliness). All the evidence suggests a culture in which the most desirable male body – to men and women alike – came in the shape of a successful all-round athlete.
30 Kritian Boy, from the Acropolis of Athens, c.490 BC. The scale is slightly under life size.
31 Doryphoros or ‘Spear Carrier’, after Polykleitos, c.440 BC.
For young men, the pressure to aspire towards a more or less predictable Polykleitan formula – broad shoulders, contoured thorax, firm waist, powerful thighs – was onerous. It was literally cast as a norm by one Classical sculptor after another. But was it an attainable ideal?
THE RIACE BRONZES: ‘MORE HUMAN THAN HUMAN’
In August 1972 a scuba-diver exploring the coastal waters off Riace, near Reggio in Calabria, the southernmost province of Italy, made what he at first thought to be a horrifying discovery.A human hand was reaching out from the seabed about 9 metres (30 feet) below. Could it belong to some half-buried corpse? The diver, Stefano Mariottini, plunged down to investigate.To his immediate relief, the hand was made of bronze, and to his amazement, he realized that the hand was part of a statue – and this statue was not alone. Another figure, no less lifelike, lay encrusted in the sand nearby.
Brought to the surface, cleaned and now permanently displayed in Reggio’s archaeological museum, these are the ‘Riace Bronzes’ – a pair of Greek statues probably made c. 450 BC.The most likely explanation as to how they came to be submerged in the straits between Calabria and the island of Sicily is that some ancient Roman connoisseur of Greek art – perhaps an emperor such as Nero – once intended them to grace the walkways of his villa or palace.The vessel transporting the statues had foundered, and they were not salvaged until espied by Stefano Mariottini on his summer vacation.
APHRODITE AND THE BIRTH OF THE FEMALE NUDE
32 (above) Roman copy, c.180 AD, of Praxiteles’ Aphrodite of Knidos, c.350/340 BC.
WHY WAS THE Venus of Willendorf called ‘Venus’ by those who found her? Simply because she is a woman without clothes, a female nude; and the archetypal female nude is Venus, who in turn equates to the ancient Greek goddess of love, Aphrodite.This chapter has indicated how and why the Greeks constructed the male nude as an embodiment of athletic prowess, military valour, epic heroism, ethical virtue and even mathematical harmony. So what was embodied in their creation of the female nude? Pornography is a word with roots in ancient Greek. Porne means prostitute; graphein, to depict or describe. ‘Prostitute description’ will not equate to all that modern usage implies by ‘pornography’. But the moral delicacy of ‘the nude’ as a category inWestern art can only be understood by considering its ancient origins.
Fertility goddesses, some with proportions akin to those of the Willendorf Venus, others clearly pregnant, are known from various Neolithic and Bronze Age sites in Anatolia and around the Mediterranean. More specific is the identity of the Phoenician goddess Astarte, whose cult from c.1300 BC seems to have involved some kind of ‘sacred prostitution’ – temples staffed by women serving as ‘priestesses’, whose bodies offered ‘union’ with Astarte. Images of Astarte are sexually explicit, and may have influenced the eventually ‘shocking’ representation of Astarte’s Greek equivalent, Aphrodite.
Was it so much of a shock? Only copies survive of an original marble statue made by the Greek sculptor Praxiteles around 360 BC (Fig. 32).The story is that Praxiteles produced two images of the Greek goddess of love at the request of the citizens of the island of Kos. One was draped, the other nude.
33 (opposite) Venus of Urbino by Titian, c.1538.
The people of Kos chose the former. It was a nearby Greek colony, Knidos, on the Asian mainland, that made a bid for the undressed Aphrodite – or, more precisely, the figure of Aphrodite espied while taking a bath. This became notorious around the Mediterranean. In Roman imperial times, we are told, boatloads of tourists went to Knidos with the prime purpose of sharing the sight. A special circular temple was constructed, allowing visitors a front or rear view according to their erotic preferences; bushes and couches were made available in the sacred enclosure for those wishing to perform ‘Aphrodite’s business’. One boy committed suicide after ejaculating over the statue. But the notoriety of the piece did not stem just from its implied artistic audaciousness in representing a female deity without clothes. Greater offence was caused by the rumour that Praxiteles had used as a model his own mistress, a well-known courtesan called Phryne. This was the same woman who, when brought before an Athenian court on charges of impropriety, gained acquittal simply by exposing her breasts to the jury. Could she – a mortal, for all her charms – be the icon of Aphrodite?
Whatever the original issues of taboo and transgression, this statue had a lasting influence in the Western tradition of art (Fig. 33).The Aphrodite of Knidos makes a gesture with her hand, as if to cover her clitoris. But the move to hide the pudenda – a Latin word meaning ‘those things of which we should be ashamed’ – serves also to draw attention to that area of the body, making the gesture utterly counterproductive, and furthering the thrill of some voyeuristic intrusion upon personal privacy.
Modern connoisseurs cannot agree which great name of Classical Greek sculpture may have produced the Riace Bronzes. One suggestion is Pheidias, mastermind behind the decoration of the Parthenon temple on the Athenian Acropolis. Another is Myron, whose ‘Discus Thrower’ was admired and copied by the Romans.A further candidate is Polykleitos, also highly popular with Roman collectors.The problem is that while Greek sculptors of the fifth (and fourth) century BC preferred hollow-cast bronze as a medium for free-standing statues, very few such statues have survived. (Ancient descriptions of the site of Olympia, for example, indicate that the sanctuary was once congested with gleaming brazen images, but later predators broke them up and melted them down.) For the Riace pair, therefore, the name of the artist remains as elusive as the identity of the statues – rather disappointingly known only as ‘Statue A’ and ‘Statue B’. Statue B once wore a tipped-up helmet on his head; both figures evidently carried large round shields, and weapons too.
Relaxed in stance, and with their lips slightly apart – as if conversing or taking breath – the Riace Bronzes appear at first glance to be perfectly realistic.They have been planted very firmly on their bases in the Reggio museum (for fear of earthquakes), yet they seem light on their feet, tall but not ponderous.The veins on their arms and hands are unnervingly subtle and ‘alive’, a delicate feature of ancient bronzeworking technique, the accomplishment of which is judged by some modern practitioners to be unattainable today (Fig. 34). But on closer scrutiny, the impression of absolute naturalism begins to fade. It was Protagoras, a Greek philosopher of the mid-fifth century BC, who insisted that ‘man is the measure of all things’. But is man the measure of the Riace Bronzes, or have these statues gained their form as a result of many calculations: measurements
taken to extremes?
In fact, neither of the Riace Bronzes is anatomically correct. One of them – Statue A – has been deemed almost hermaphrodite: his pronounced backside, according to expert analysis, is more like a woman’s. But both statues exhibit departures from normal human resemblance. No one, however athletic, will ever look this way.The division between upper and lower body has been emphasized by raising the edge of the so-called iliac crest, a band of muscle and ligament that most men fail to find on themselves. At the front of the body this contour may not be anatomically impossible, but its continuation around the back is so powerful as to strain belief.The suspicion dawns that what matters here is not faithfulness to reality, but geometric symmetry. An implausibly deep groove runs up the centre of the chest.The length of the legs has been extended to match the length of the upper body.The muscles of the back are tense and over-defined. And as for the channel of the vertebrae – not only is it deeper than would ever be seen on an ordinary mortal, but it descends into the cleft of the buttocks with no interruption from a coccyx, the bone at the base of the spine that helps us to sit down (Fig. 1, page 2).
34 Detail of one of the Riace Bronzes (Statue A), the delicate veins clearly visible on the arm and hand.
35 A curvaceous yakshi figure, in the Great Stupa of Sanchi, central India, c.50–25 BC.
In other words, the Riace Bronzes display exaggerated specifications of the human body; a further case, then, of peak shift.
EXAGGERATION RULES
‘Human kind,’ in the words of the poet T.S. Eliot, ‘cannot bear very much reality.’ That observation may be enough to account for the peak-shift principle, or make a case for people liking to ‘accentuate the positive’. Either way, the human trait of distorting images of the body seems to be pervasive in many cultures, and recurrent across many centuries. In most contexts it is simply the image that is distorted, such as the yakshi figure curvaceously symbolizing wealth and fertility in the bracket of a Buddhist shrine (Fig. 35).Where bodily beauty has become a commodity, direct means of exaggerating personal appearance may be marketed, to the extent of cosmetic surgery offering a virtual sculpture of the flesh.The tendency for exaggeration, to create bodies ‘more human than human’, is very much alive.What began with the Venus of Willendorf is not just a thing of the past.
PORTRAITS AND CARICATURE
THE MIRROR is the master of painters,’ according to Leonardo da Vinci. But is it? The various portraits assembled here suggests that a version of the peak-shift principle is at work whenever artists successfully produce a specific ‘likeness’ of human individuality. To put it another way, distortion is part of the portrait-making process, and is, for some artists – for example, the twentieth-century British painter Francis Bacon – paradoxically the only way of getting a ‘truthful’ record of appearance.
36 (below) Sixteen Grotesque Heads by Leonardo da Vinci, from the 16th century.We are told that whenever Leonardo spotted teste bizarre (fantastic heads) in the streets, he would follow them, memorizing their features. Nevertheless, an element of caricature is embedded in these and many other portrayals (notably of warriors) by Leonardo, and seems to express his belief – exemplified in the ‘character studies’ of the 12 disciples in his Milan fresco, The Last Supper – that physiognomy was indicative of sentiments and character. (Our concept ‘personality’ derives, significantly, from persona, the Latin word that originally entailed a theatrical mask.)
37 (above) A fleeting supercilious look transfixed, or an enigmatic, meditated composition? This painting of 1476 by Antonello da Messina, entitled simply Portrait of a Man, combines both aspects of portraiture, and so reminds us that a portrait is not a copy, but has a life of its own.The successful portrait conveys ‘an increase of being’.The painter (or photographer or sculptor) does more than hold up a mirror. What is represented is not only what can be seen at a glance, but gathers – as has been said of this particular portrait – ‘the feeling of a human monument’.
38 (above right) Polynesian sculpture typically isolates the head of a figure as the seat of personality or mana (spirit). This colossal image of the Hawaiian god of war, Kukailimoku, from Hawaii, c.1800, goes further, by incorporating facial gestures of aggressive disrespect: pronounced frown, wide grimacing mouth and jutting chin. But it is not necessary to be a local believer in Kukailimoku to interpret this as a mask of intimidation. In 1872 Charles Darwin showed that expressions of emotion – especially facial expressions – were universal to humans around the world. These expressions commonly caused distortion of the face, and, as Darwin pointed out,‘reveal the thoughts and intentions of others more truly than do words, which may be falsified’.
4
ONCE UPON A TIME
…THEREWAS A STORY.
It was told, we suppose, to people crouched around a fire: a tale of adventure, most likely – relating some close encounter with death; a remarkable hunt, an escape from mortal danger; a vision, or something else out of the ordinary.Whatever its thread, the weaving of this story was done with a prime purpose.The listeners must be kept listening.They must not fall asleep. So, as the story went on, its audience should be sustained by one question above all. What happens next?
The first fireside stories in human history can never be known.They were kept in the heads of those who told them.This method of storage is not necessarily inefficient. From documented oral traditions in Australia, the Balkans and other parts of the world we know that specialized storytellers and poets can recite from memory literally thousands of lines, in verse or prose, verbatim – word for word. But while memory is rightly considered an art in itself, it is clear that a primary purpose of making symbols is to have a system of reminders or mnemonic cues – signs that assist us to recall certain information in the mind’s eye.
In some Polynesian communities a notched memory stick may help to guide a storyteller through successive stages of recitation. But in other parts of the world, the activity of storytelling historically resulted in the development or even the invention of writing systems. One theory about the arrival of literacy in ancient Greece, for example, argues that the epic tales about the Trojan War and the wanderings of Odysseus – traditionally attributed to Homer, a blind Ionian bard of the eighth century BC – were just so enchanting to hear that they had to be preserved. So the Greeks, c. 750–700 BC, borrowed an alphabet from their neighbours in the eastern Mediterranean, the Phoenicians. A full text of Homer’s verse was not established until over a century later; meanwhile, at least snatches of his matchless oral expressions could be inscribed on clay and stone.
The custom of recording stories on parchment and other materials can be traced in many manifestations around the world, from the priestly papyrus archives of ancient Egypt to the birch-bark scrolls on which the North American Ojibway Indians set down their creation-myth. It is a well-tried and universal practice: so much so that to this day storytime is probably most often associated with words on paper.The French word for a narrative is récit, implying some oral delivery, and our conversations may be full of stories; but the formal practice of narrating a story aloud would seem – so we assume – to have given way to newspapers, novels and comic strips.This, however, is not the case. Statistically it is doubtful that the majority of humans currently rely upon the written word to get access to stories. So what is the alternative source?
Each year, over 7 billion people across the world will go to watch the latest offering from Hollywood, Bollywood and beyond. It means leaving their homes to sit with many others in a darkened room; yet they go.This is what prevails: not one voice by cosy firelight, but numerous sounds and images projected on to a big screen.The supreme storyteller of today is cinema. In 1948 a French critic prophesied that cinema would develop into ‘a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language’. Even the author of a book – albeit a book commissioned to accompany a television series – must concede that prediction to be fulfilled.
