Gender cannot escape the body. Biological differences between the sexes are all too quickly assimilated into differences of treatment and expectation. Through its domination of the twin spheres of aesthetics and medicine, the classical tradition has played an important role in determining the appearance, display, management, and pathologization of male and female bodies.
Classical art ensured that the body never left the gaze of western culture. The tradition of depicting stylized naked bodies to signify their heroic status is one of the most distinctive features of classical art (Bonfante 1989). Classical art served to legitimate such bodily display and permitted artists and viewers to use such displays as the focal point for their debates about masculinity and femininity. This can be seen most clearly in the genre of‘‘history painting’’ as it developed from the mid-fifteenth century, and especially in its intensely neoclassical phase from 1760 onwards. The focus of these paintings was almost always a classical male nude in heroic pose who was offered to the viewer as a moral paradigm.
Nudes are almost always idealist. They depict us as we should be rather than as we are. As Quatremere de Quincy (1755-1844) famously remarked, ‘‘nudity should be regarded as a form of costume.’’ Nudity contributes to the formation of gender categories by defining notions of beauty and encouraging imitation in its viewers. In its most extreme form women and men began to resemble classical statues (Dyer 1997). Although important since the Renaissance (Bober and Rubenstein 1986), this preeminence of classical statuary in western aesthetics was cemented in place by the influential critic and father of modern art history, Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-68; Potts 1994) and was facilitated by the large number of plaster casts that were dispersed in museums, art schools, and private collections throughout Europe and North America (Haskell and Penny 1981; Kurtz 2000). For women, white unblemished skin (in imitation of marble statuary) and the absence of body hair became essential components of female attractiveness. Similarly, the male body looked to the proportions and musculature of late classical and Hellenistic statuary for ideas of perfection.
For most of the history of the nude, it was the male form that attracted the most interest. Indeed, it was only in the nineteenth century that it ceded its place to the female nude as the primary object of artistic endeavor. The male form not only exemplified beauty; it also represented a series of ethical paradigms. Critical discussion of the male body constantly collocated it with notions of order, reason, proportion, structure, clarity, and luminosity. The male body became a text by which man’s inherent worth could be read (Solomon-Godeau 1997: 177-224). Traditionally, two rival versions of the male nude have competed for attention. At one extreme, we find hypervirile, overmuscled forms that owe their origins to statues such as the Farnese Hercules. At the other, we find the smooth, slim-hipped, boyish physique that looks to figures such as the Capitoline Faun (Solomon-Godeau 1997: 22-4). We can see both types operational in the work of Jacques-Louis David. The figure of Leonidas who occupies center stage in David’s Leonidas at Thermopylae (1814) exemplifies the ‘‘masculinized’’ male form. In Leonidas’ broad chest, we can see allusions to the Belevedere torso. This headless fragment of antique sculpture was beloved by Michelangelo and Winckelmann, and its masculine pedigree was assured by its supposed origins in a statue of Hercules. Leonidas stands in contrast to figures such as the Paris found in David’s The Loves of Paris and Helen (1788). Again the male nude form occupies a central position in the canvas. However, in this case, the male body is young, beautiful, and feminized. Both forms are equally idealized, and both find imitations in contemporary portraiture as subjects sought to portray themselves as successors to these classical ancestors.
We can trace not only masculine ideals through these forms, but also their anxieties. Uncertainty about role and status translates into uncertainty about ideal form. This can be seen perhaps most clearly in the variety of images produced during the Revolutionary period, when traditional roles, structures, and institutions were swept away and values were in flux. In such ambiguous times, ambiguous bodies flourish. The rise of fragile, vulnerable male bodies typifies this period. A good example is Girodet’s The Sleep of Endymion (1791, exhibited in the Salon of 1793). The painting was enthusiastically received on its initial showing. Numerous imitations followed, including a sculpture (1819-22) by Canova. The subject matter of the painting derives from the story told in Ovid, Lucian, and Apollodorus about the Moon who was so smitten with the beauty of the shepherd boy Endymion whom she found asleep on Mount Latmos that she condemned him to perpetual slumber so that she could enjoy the pleasure of gazing at and caressing his body for eternity. It is the quintessential story of the vulnerability of male beauty in the face of powerful, unstoppable female desire and has been used to prefigure the love of noble women for men oflower status (Greer 2003: 112-15). These themes are brought to the fore in Girodet’s painting, in which we find the soft, girlish figure of the shepherd sprawled in a lush bower. Lost in sleep, he is naked and defenceless as shafts of moonlight play upon his skin. Passive and antiheroic, the figure of Endymion mediates anxieties about contemporary threats to masculinity (Solomon-Godeau 1997: 65-84) at the same time that it challenges traditional masculine paradigms (Davis 1994: 176-84).
There is indeed a darker side to these nudes, for they can also tell a story about improper desire. Despite the protestations of art critics, it was never fully possible to eradicate notions of the erotic from these classical displays. Sexual desire always threatens to emerge from these images. Thus, Correggio’s sequence of paintings on the loves of Zeus, which had been proudly displayed in a number of European courts in the sixteenth century, were deemed so obscene in the eighteenth century that they were displayed behind curtains. A similar fate befell the Tepidarium (1881) of Alma-Tadema, in which he depicted a nude woman relaxing in a Roman bath. There is a history of scandal that attends classical pieces. The performances of Emma Hamilton (1765-1815) in imitation of classical statuary were pilloried for their decadence by contemporary satirists, who saw in them confirmation of the loose morals of Nelson’s mistress (Boardman 2004: 52). Public art seems particularly susceptible. The colossal naked bronze Achilles erected as a memorial to the Duke of Wellington and his men in Hyde Park in 1822 was derided as inappropriate by contemporary broadsheets, and Horatio Greenough’s seminude classicizing depiction of George Washington (1841) was so unpopular on its unveiling that it was quickly moved from its intended spot in the Capitol and now lurks as an embarrassment in a corner of the Smithsonian Museum. These classical bodies not only regulate notions of beauty, but contemporary morality as well. They function as a litmus test of purity in which the morals of the viewer and the artists are put under examination.
Although artistic representation of classicizing male bodies faded away in the nineteenth century, we see a resurgence in the twentieth century. Fascism, for example, attempted to appropriate the classical male body for political purposes. Mussolini regularly depicted himself as a modern Hercules - much to the amusement of other European leaders who privately mocked his ‘‘sideshow strongman’’ performances (Blanshard 2005: xvii; Boardman 2004: 52-3). One of the distinctive features of European fascism was its focus on individual morality. This morality was communicated through a distinctive classicizing aesthetic (Taylor and Van der Will 1991). Onto the classical male form were grafted the virtues of discipline, courage, and self-sacrifice (Mangan 1999). Riefenstahl’s Olympia, which celebrated the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin, exemplifies this attempt at appropriation. From its opening sequence we see Riefenstahl endeavoring to create a genealogy for Aryan man through stressing the continuity of the Greek past with the German present. Thus, the ruins of classical Greece fade into the bucolic idyll of the athlete’s village on the Olympic games site, and Myron’s Discobolus (the discus thrower) is transformed into the figure of a contemporary German athlete (McFee and Tomlinson 1999). Through such artistic conceits, Reifenstahl was able to communicate the Fascist vision of its new ‘‘supermen.’’
Liberal democracies were also not adverse to the idea of their soft male populace transforming themselves into hard-bodied superheroes. In particular, one of the most indelible legacies of the classical past can be found in the rippling abdominals and bulging biceps of the modern bodybuilder (Wyke 1997a). The figure conventionally identified as the father of modern bodybuilding is Eugene Sandow (Kasson 2001: 21-76; Blanshard 2005: 151-7). Previously, sideshow strongmen had preferred bulk over definition - they were more fat than muscle. Strongmen may have worn lionskins in imitation of Hercules, but that was where the physical resemblance ended. What distinguished Sandow was the perfection of his muscle definition. His body was so amazing to his audience that Sandow eschewed feats of physical strength in favor of poses and flexing. Throughout his performances and publicity, Sandow constantly alluded to the classical past. He powdered his body so that it looked like a marble statue. The poses he adopted in his act were all derived from classical statuary. Over the course of his show, Sandow appeared as the Discobolus, Apoxyomenos, Farnese Hercules (with club and lion skin props), and Dying Gaul. These poses in imitation of statuary would form the basis of the first-ever bodybuilding competition held in the Royal Albert Hall in September 1901. Indeed, some are still used in modern bodybuilding competitions.
Sandow had numerous imitators, many of whom continued his classicizing style either in their stage names (‘‘Charles Atlas’’) or in their performances. Perhaps one of the most influential of these was Steve Reeves, whose performance as Hercules in the film Le fatiche di Ercole (The labours of Hercules, 1957) made him an international star and raised the profile of bodybuilding to new heights (Solomon 2001: 119-22; Wyke 1997a: 63-8). The film enjoyed tremendous success. It was seen by 24 million people and made up to $18,000,000 at the box-office. Reeves’s success even created a minigenre of muscle films set in antiquity. Christened ‘‘peplum’’ films by the French critics (after the short tunics worn by the male leads), these films were produced largely in Italy and starred American bodybuilders in the lead roles. Over 170 such films were produced. Again male anxiety seems to be a driving force in the adoption of these classical bodies. To the flabby, disempowered office workers of sixties America, these bronzed heroes became aspirational figures. These films were responsible for filling the gyms and introducing the art of bodybuilding into mainstream culture.
While the male body could (with work) be perfected, the fate of the female body was far more precarious. Condemned by classical medical writers as imperfect, deficient, malformed, even at times monstrous, the female body was hard to redeem. It is hard to overstate the impact of such writings on the history of medicine in western Europe. The writings of Galen, Hippocrates, and Aristotle were crucial in understanding the operation of the human body from the medieval period through the Renaissance and into the Enlightenment (Maclean 1980). Even when doctors were being innovative, they still often preferred to invoke classical authority to cloak the novelty of their suggestions.
This central role played by classical texts had a number of important implications for the conception and treatment of women, especially given the strong belief that behavior and temperament had biological origins. Supposed feminine attributes such as physical weakness, irrationality, and uncontrollable appetite were all attributed at various times to bodily causes. According to a traditional reading of Aristotle and Galen (using passages such as De generatione animalium [On the generation of animals] 737a27, Historia animalium [The history of animals] 608a21-5, and De usu partium corporis [On the usefulness of parts of the body] 14.6), women were passive, dominated by cold and moist humors, and driven by a desire to achieve completion through copulation. The origins of this difference lay in the lack of heat during the process of generation. This lack of heat caused a woman’s genitals not to form correctly and to remain internal. It also meant that she was, by nature, prey to the dominance of cold and moist humors and unable to manufacture perfect ‘‘semen.’’ This prejudice against the female body can be found in a number of writers.
For example, Kaspar Hofmann (1575-1648), in his 1625 commentary on Galen’s De usu partium corporis, combines passages drawn from Hippocrates and Aristotle as well as Galen to equate the high heat that attends the generation of men with perfection. It is this heat that makes men stronger, larger, healthier, and longer-lived than women. Moreover, this heat also endows a man with a complementary set of moral qualities. Man is more courageous, open, strong-willed, and honest. Women either lack these qualities or have corresponding vices (Maclean 1980).
Admittedly, many of these views were later rejected or fell out of favor, especially with the rise of the ‘‘feminist’’ school of medical practitioners in the late sixteenth century who argued that there was nothing inherently wrong with the female body and that it was a mistake to regard female genitals as flawed versions of the male genitals. Nevertheless, the prejudices set up by these views were never completely eliminated, and their legacy can be seen in the pathologization of female behavior, particularly in relation to diseases such as hysteria (Rousseau 1993) and ‘‘green sickness’’ (King 1996, 2004).
World History
