Why are Greek statues always NAKED?
The extraordinary answer’s laid bare in a magnificent — if risque — exhibition at the British Museum
ABOUT two-and-a-half thousand years ago, a cultural miracle took place in ancient Greece. Democracy was born in Athens, the first great tragedies and comedies were written — and statues were carved that were more astonishingly lifelike than ever before. What’s even more incredible is that many of those statues were naked. Walk around the dazzling new blockbuster show at the British Museum — already being hailed by critics as ‘the absolutely must-see exhibition of the year’ — and there’s barely a scrap of clothing to be seen.
Warriors die on the Trojan battlefield in the buff. Athletes hurl the discus in the altogether. Goddesses step into the bath without a stitch on. Nowadays, we take Greek nakedness for granted. But when those statues were first carved, the Athenians were breaking an extreme taboo.
Yes, there had been naked figures in the art of earlier civilisations. You can see them in a 730 BC panel from Nimrud in ancient Assyria, now in modern Iraq — one of the ancient cities tragically bulldozed by Islamic State militants earlier this month.
But in the Nimrud panel — which is also at the British Museum — it is dead enemies of the Assyrians who are impaled, naked, on stakes. Other naked men have their heads chopped off. The victorious Assyrians, however, are all clothed.
For there was a vital difference in civilisations that existed before the Greeks. For them, nakedness was a sign of weakness; a sign of losing the battle, of your body being humiliated.
The Greeks were the first to see nakedness as, literally, a heroic state.
‘Greek nudity is a sign not of humiliation, but of moral virtue among the social elite of male citizens,’ says Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum. ‘When a youth removes his clothes to compete in the ancient Olympic Games, he does not merely stand naked before his peers, rather he has put on the uniform of the righteousness.’
It’s not as if the Greeks were naked
Being in the buff was a sign of moral virtue
the whole time, such as when they were doing t he s hopping or eating a meal. But they were naked i n the gym; in f act, the word ‘gymnasium’ comes from the Greek ‘gymnos’, meaning ‘naked’.
A 530 BC Athenian vase shows four athletes — a long-jumper, two javelinthrowers and a discus-thrower, all of them naked.
Indeed, perhaps the most famous Greek sculpture of all, also in the show, is the Discobolos — the discusthrower. He is a study in composed balance, with the discus in one outstretched hand, the other bent in counterbalance down towards his knee. He is also completely naked.
All the athletes covered themselves not with garments but olive oil mixed with dust; an early sort of suntan lotion to protect themselves from the blazing Mediterreanean sun in their outdoor gyms.
A 300 BC bronze statue shows a young athlete wiping off the oil with a strigil, or scraper. Quack doctors scooped up this gloop — ‘ paidikos gloios’, or ‘boy oil’ — and prescribed it for illnesses and ageing skin. Enter the first moisturiser.
Experts still aren’t sure why athletes competed at the original Olympics in the nude. Some suggest it dates from an early event, when an athlete won the 200m after he’d lost his trunks, and his rivals promptly copied him.
Another theory proposes that the nakedness reflected an ancient ritual to mark the reaching of adulthood, when you took off your child’s cloak — a shorter gown worn by juveniles — at the age of 20, and ran naked to join the grown-up citizens.
In Athens, there was also an annual naked celebration i n honour of Athena, the city’s patron goddess. Nude young Athenian men ran from a gymnasium on the edge of the city all the way to the Parthenon. The fatter and slower men were slapped by the watching crowd as they stumbled past.
Whatever the origin of the naked fashion, passions ran high in the gyms, where older men often lusted after the athletic bodies of younger men in an age when homosexual sex was common.
What’s more, t he gyms were f requently decorated with nude statues of Eros, the winged boy-god of desire. One appears in the British Museum show.
Greeks also stripped off for symposia — now the word for grand, intellectual conferences, but then a kind of binge-drinking party (‘symposium’ means ‘drinking together’). At symposia, citizens downed gall ons of wine, before dancing and having sex with prostitutes and young boys.
In the British Museum exhibition, there’s a 500 BC Athenian drinking cup from a symposium: it’s shaped like a breast, with a nipple at the bottom. You couldn’t rest the cup on a flat surface when it was full; the only option was to take a deep draught, or even down it in one.
Another cup, from around 480 BC, has a picture of a gorgeous slave — you can tell she’s a slave because she has close-cropped hair — having sex with a bearded Athenian. The picture was painted inside the cup, so the drinker saw the titillating image only when he’d drained his wine.
It’s no coincidence that she’s a lowly slave. The Greeks weren’t quite so happy depicting free women in the nude, although they gradually became more relaxed. By the fourth century BC, Aphrodite — the Greek goddess of love — was regularly sculpted naked. She was often shown half-hiding her modesty in a seductive way.
One terrific example at the British Museum shows Aphrodite making a lazy attempt to cover her breasts and her crotch. In fact, you get a good view of pretty much all her charms. If you look at her from the back, her
Passions ran high at wild drinking parties
hand slyly beckons towards the viewer in a come-hither gesture.
Who owns this pulse-racing chunk of sensuous marble? No less an upstanding figure than Her Majesty the Queen.
Another 323 BC statue of Aphrodite shows her about to step into the bath, balanced on one foot. Absolutely everything is on cheerful, open show.
Even when the women aren’t actually naked, they are often shown in clingy, wet-look outfits.
The Elgin Marbles — the most famous Greek statues on earth, taken from the Parthenon by Lord Elgin 200 years ago — include two goddesses: Aphrodite and Dione. They are wrapped in paper-thin gowns stretched around their breasts, and gathering in their laps, which don’t leave much to the imagination.
The Elgin Marbles mark a unique point in artistic — and human — history. Where statues of a century before were stiff and clunky, something magical clicked in 5th BC Athens. The sculpted bodies slipped into natural, relaxed postures; hard marble was fashioned so exquisitely it might have been soft skin.
For all their unprecedented open--
ness about nakedness and sex, the Greeks didn’t like losing sexual control and becoming openly aroused in public — which they regarded as a sign of weakness. That’s why classical statues are so modestly endowed; even — or especially — the ultimate strongman, Heracles.
An Athenian vase from 500 BC depicts him wrestling with the god Apollo. To put it politely, Heracles’s sexual parts are hardly of heroic proportions. An exception was made for satyrs — drunken, sex-mad beasts, with tails and goat-like features. These monsters, celebrated for their lack of self- control, are shown in a state of excitement.
A 500 BC Athenian wine-cooler shows a satyr balancing a drinking cup on his impressive manhood. On another Athenian cup, a satyr becomes bestial with an alarmed deer.
Comic actors, too, were meant to be entertainingly sexual; they were often kitted out with a big, floppy, fake phallus. A 380 BC wine-bowl in the exhibition shows a wellendowed comedian doing a sort of clown routine on top of a ladder, while two gossipy women look on appreciatively.
The Romans were initially shocked at Greek nudity. But soon, as in so many other things — such as architecture, tragedy and comedy — they copied their ancient ancestors and took up the nudity craze.
In the show, there’s a particularly kinky Roman statue of Hermaphroditos — the Greek mythical figure with male and female sexual organs. His/ her body lies on a squashy mattress, offering a comprehensive collection of appendages to all takers.
Like so much in t his unmissable show, Hermaphroditos is an exceptional combination of artistic genius and wild sexual freedom.
Did the one produce the other? No one knows — but it’s well worth a trip to the British Museum to decide for yourself.