Naked and the Nude

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What is the difference between the Near Eastern focus on female nudity, almost to the point of vulgarity, and the ‘Pompeian style’ of vulgar male nudity? Why did one civilization produce nude representations of women (almost exclusively) and the other nude representations of men (almost exclusively)?”

This question was put to me by the editors of Archaeology Odyssey—along with another, related question. In the September/October 2001 issue, the magazine had run a feature story called 046“Eros in Egypt,” written by New York University scholar David O’Connor. The article was largely about “concealed” erotic imagery in Egyptian art. But O’Connor also discussed a 3,000-year-old Egyptian papyrus containing explicit cartoon-like images of a man and woman copulating. To illustrate the article, Archaeology Odyssey included a reconstruction drawing of the badly fragmented papyrus. The images on this drawing precipitated a deluge of (mostly angry) letters—and so the editors turned to me: Why the uproar? And why the differences in the ancient world regarding taboo images of female as opposed to male nudity?

The explosive reaction of shock and dismay on the part of some readers is deeply relevant to these questions, since it suggests the power that images of nudity have exerted throughout history. Important, too, is the intellectual response of other readers, who urge that such images be looked at in the historical and religious context of their times, rather than as sexual pornography designed to titillate. These two reactions reflect our own ambiguous position today as heirs of two different traditions: our Judeo-Christian legacy and our inheritance of a “pagan” Greco-Roman culture for which we have deep respect, even though much of it is very alien to our own beliefs, ideals and customs.

The first question concerns the power of the image of nudity. The sight of a naked body has at all times evoked powerful feelings and emotions: shock, shame, fear, awe, disgust, liberation, helplessness and power. Being dressed is normal; being unclothed is always unusual, shocking, a taboo.

Like all taboos, it is broken at specific times and on special occasions, most frequently and most publicly in art. In artistic images all around us today nudity reigns—in advertisements, magazines and movies. But clear boundaries distinguish pornographic pictures from fashionable nudity, like today’s emphasis on women’s nipples and navels. This distinction is similar to the one described by Kenneth Clark in his influential book, The Nude: The nude is a body idealized and “clothed” through art, 047in contrast to the plain naked body, which has not been transformed into this ideal state.

We can make this distinction because English, with its rich vocabulary, has two words: “naked” and “nude.” The Anglo-Saxon word “naked” connotes the shame we feel in being naked, or in seeing the vulnerable naked bodies of men and women without the protection of their clothes. The nakedness of the prisoners at concentration camps like Buchenwald expresses the special horror of their helplessness. Both newborn babies and corpses are naked. Naked lovers reveal themselves to each other in all their weakness and need.

The Latin word “nude,” on the other hand, refers to nudity in art. Recognizing a nude statue as an ideal, a divinity or a mythological hero means accepting it because we know it goes back to a Greek classical model. It is a sign of our sophistication and culture, of how civilized we are. We rebuke children who gawk at the statue’s nakedness: “Don’t giggle, dear. It’s Greek.”

Because we follow in the Greek tradition and take their philosophy, drama, politics, architecture and art as models, we forget how often their institutions and attitudes made them the exception rather than the rule among ancient peoples.

Nudity was one of the most important and far-reaching contributions of classical Greek art. The Greeks themselves were deeply conscious of the 048singularity of this custom, and saw athletic male nudity as setting them apart from their own past as well as from the surrounding non-Greek “barbarians.”

This athletic male nudity marked a total change from the Near Eastern tradition of nudity as symbolizing a god’s divinity. Gods can afford to be naked. And in the ancient Near East, goddesses—Ishtar and Astarte—were nude. The goddesses’ nakedness vividly indicates their power, fertility, beauty, strength and divinity.

Near Eastern artists used the powerful, shocking image of exposed sexual organs to represent the ineffable—those religious feelings of awe, fear and mystery that words could not express. Ancient Near Eastern mother goddesses are nude, but they are also naked. They are shown fully frontal, with their vulvae explicitly represented and their hands often held at their breasts—all features calling attention to their sexuality. In a religious context, these powerful sexual symbols make visible the invisible workings of the divinity, particularly the mysterious power of procreation, which ensures the continuity of the generations of mankind. Through their nudity, in other words, these female gods reveal their divine selves to their worshipers.

Today, such an emphasis on the sexual organs would be—has been—considered deeply offensive. Properly cleaned up, however, and kept within strictly defined boundaries, it can be used to advertise anything from cars to mozzarella. Outside these boundaries, it is shocking and “vulgar” and is considered pornography.

The divine image of female nudity in the ancient Near East contrasts sharply with contemporaneous male nakedness as a sign of vulnerability and shame. This is illustrated by a mid-second-millennium B.C. ivory from Nimrud—the ancient Assyrian city of Kalhu, in modern Iraq—showing naked, bound prisoners. In the Book of Genesis, once Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden of Eden, they feel exposed in their nakedness—no divine, ideal nudity for Eve! A drunken Noah uncovers his nakedness, which then has to be piously covered up again by his son. Nakedness, especially male nakedness—the exposure of the intimate “private parts”—expressed slavery, loss of control, helplessness, dependence, 049deprivation, humiliation and mortality. To lose the protection of one’s clothing was shocking and shameful; it provoked fears of rape, castration and utter vulnerability in the face of violence.

These feelings of shock and shame never disappeared. They were even embedded in language: The Latin and Greek words for the sexual organs are pudenda and aidoia respectively—both meaning “things to be ashamed of,” or “things we should be ashamed to expose.”

By the same token, images of nakedness in antiquity were powerful in other ways. They carried a magical potency that was closely related to their religious power, and thus images of exposed sexual organs also protected against malefic influences. This latter use of sexual imagery seems to be universal and timeless. Throughout ancient Western history, amulets with sexually explicit images remained privately in use, while “official” artistic images—those created for temples or palaces, for example—reflected the religious beliefs and ideals of their time. The purpose of many depictions of ithyphallic males and other images that we consider pornographic was apotropaic, religious or magical—though these categories overlapped in ways we cannot always understand today.

In the Near East, then, female nudity in art was generally reserved for the representation of goddesses, while male nudity was rarer and, for the most part, used to depict vulnerability, death and defeat. (Male nudity, of course, could also become a “costume” for special occasions, as when a priest appeared before his god, or when young men participated in initiation rites in their transition to adulthood.)

Beginning in the eighth century B.C., however, the Greeks reversed this situation. In Greek religion, male weather gods took the place of mother goddesses, who were “demoted” to being their daughters, wives and mortal lovers. The sacred, powerful nudity of the mother goddesses was banned from Greek art; female nakedness was left to slaves, prostitutes and mythological figures in moments of extreme danger—such as Cassandra (daughter of the Trojan king Priam) about to be raped by Ajax, or Clytemnestra (wife of the Greek king Agamemnon) about to be killed by her son Orestes.

Male nudity, on the other hand, was transformed from the religious nudity of initiation rites to the “civic” nudity of the classical period. In art, the image of the kouros (youth) makes its entrance—young, aristocratic, athletic and stark naked, in contrast to the well-dressed statues of the aristocratic maiden or kore.

Magical and apotropaic nudity remained alive, 050however, especially in images of the exposed, erect phalluses of herms (pillars featuring a bust of Hermes and an erect phallus) set up at street corners and at private doorways as protectors of cities and houses. It also remained alive in the mythical image of satyrs, companions of Dionysus, the god of wine, freedom and nature; they were represented on Greek vases with horses’ tails, animal ears and erect phalluses. In the satyr plays of Greek drama, actors wearing fake phalluses played the parts of the playful, lustful, wine-loving satyrs.

These large phalluses, symbolic of male sexual potency and fertility, were imbued with magical power. Their symbolism made them popular as an apotropaic (healing) aspect of minor deities, such as Pan, who was a nature god mostly interested in having love affairs, but who also had an awesome power to cause panic among mortals. Pan’s father, Priapus, once a popular god of nature and fertility, became in Roman times—especially at Pompeii—a god of gardens, a sort of combined fertility figure and scarecrow. One of the many representations of Priapus from Pompeii shows him as a grotesquely ithyphallic figure, busy weighing his member on a scale.

In Greece, female nudity disappeared for over 300 years. When the nude goddess returned to classical art in the Hellenistic period (late fourth century B.C.), she was Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Her nude image was first accepted in the eastern Greek city of Knidos, in Asia Minor, where the tradition of the naked mother goddess had never completely disappeared.

The nude Aphrodite of Knidos, carved by the fourth-century B.C. Greek sculptor Praxiteles, set the model forever after. Hundreds of examples of this most popular of “classical” artistic images populated Hellenistic and Roman temples, homes and gardens—and continue to fill museum galleries today. 051Roman empresses and even upper-class Roman ladies had themselves depicted in the classical mode, with portrait heads over the body of a nude Venus; their husbands chose Mars or Hercules as the model of the nude classical ideal. Roman gardens sported small statues of the sensuously nude or half-draped Venus, the nude Hercules or an ithyphallic Priapus—signifying abundance, fertility, pleasure and wealth. In the Louvre, the Venus de Milo is a must for tourists, as the nude Riace Warrior statues were in Florence soon after their recovery and restoration.

What is rarely noticed in this proliferation of classical nudes is a small but important difference between the male and female nudes. Whereas the male phallus is often depicted in realistic detail, pubic hair and all, the female genitalia are only rarely depicted in a sexually explicit manner. The vaginal cleft and pubic hair have been omitted. The female nudes, that is, are not naked; they have been “cleaned up.” This distinction between male and female nudity is beautifully illustrated by the difference between the proudly exposed kouros statue above and the shyness of the Venus Pudica, who shields her nakedness from the prying eyes of unwelcome intruders as she rises modestly from her bath (see photo of the Venus Pudica at the beginning of this article).

The few images of nude female figures from the early period of Greek art are instructive about the change that took place at that time, forever shifting the image of male and female nudity in Western art. A good example is a small, mid-seventh century B.C. ivory carving of two women discarding their clothes, a sculpture now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Some scholars believe, as the museum label says, that the figures represent the daughters of Proetus, a mythical king of the Mycenaean city of Tiryns. According to an obscure Greek myth, Proetus’s daughters, driven mad by the jealousy of the goddess Hera, threw away their clothes and ran in frenzied abandon throughout the countryside.

However, it seems more likely that the female figure who has already untied her belt, releasing her drapery and revealing her nakedness, is Aphrodite, the goddess who most closely parallels Ishtar and Astarte and whose nudity symbolizes her fearsome 052sexual power. The second figure, whose head has unfortunately been lost, is being persuaded by the goddess to unfasten her belt and become naked; this figure might be Helen, loosening her belt before the arrival of her husband, Menelaus, or her lover Paris, who carried her off to Troy and precipitated the Trojan War. (Aphrodite is Paris’s tutelary goddess in the Iliad of Homer, whose poems were well known by the seventh century B.C.)

In this ivory carving, Aphrodite has explicitly represented genitalia. This had been—and continued to be outside of Greece—a regular feature of female nudity and nakedness. But it then disappeared from Greek art, along with other images of female nudity, and never reappeared. Classical art of Roman and later times regularly avoids the female genitalia. In female figures, this absence of genitalia marks the 053difference between nudity and nakedness, and between art and pornography. Now, whenever we see women on Attic Greek vases depicted fully naked, we can usually be sure they are prostitutes at work.

Throughout the sixth century B.C., black-figure Attic vases show male athletes competing in the nude, as well as nude gods, heroes, mortals and revelers. Male nudity as a costume was more than simply fashionable; it was expected, and it was regularly represented on vases used in the symposium. The nudity of ancient initiation rites and the kouros became, in Athens at least, the “uniform” of the ephebe, the future citizen and soldier. Older men, too, exercised in the gymnasium, but they were not represented as nude. On Greek vases, respectable women, the wives of these athletes and symposiasts, did not participate in this nudity. The distinction came to be between male citizens—especially upper-class citizens—who exercised, and women and slaves, who did not. The Greeks celebrated the athletic male nudity we call “heroic” in their own art, and saw it as clearly different in kind from the nakedness of slaves, prisoners and women that signified vulnerability and humiliation.

Were these or other images intended as pornography? Did these two parts of the ancient world—Near East, and Greece and Rome—have anything like pornography as we moderns understand it? Much of the answer depends on the context of the images. There seems to have been something like this intention in the erotic scenes featuring nude youths and naked slave girls, courtesans or hetairai, on Attic vases made for the symposium, or “stag” drinking parties to which respectable Athenian women were not invited. Near Eastern images of nude goddesses, on the other hand, as we have seen, represented their sensuality and spirituality, similar perhaps to erotic representations in Indian art.

Because we admire Greek tradition, we forget how often their institutions and attitudes made them different from other ancient peoples. And we are often unaware of how ambivalent our own attitudes to nudity are, as we try to balance between an inherited cultural tradition of nudity as Greek, and therefore “civilized,” and our own basic impulses, especially those powerful reactions of shock, shame, fear, awe, disgust, liberation, helplessness and power that the sight of a naked body continues to cause. Our Judeo-Christian tradition of shock and shame frequently prevails. When Otto Brendel published his ground-breaking “The Scope and Temperament 062of Erotic Art in the Greco-Roman World” in the “liberated” 1970s, people were shocked. Readers too embarrassed to borrow the volume stole it so frequently that librarians could not keep it on an open shelf.

Shocking images have always been used by artists to transmit important messages. Crucifixion, originally a shocking mode of torture and death reserved for thieves and criminals, was transformed into a powerful religious symbol. The same is true of our sexuality, images of which continue to disgust and thrill us. As we have seen, some of this ambiguity comes from our conflicting traditions and ideals. In the end, I think Freud was right. The shock value of sexual images derives from their basic erotic power and from the great mysteries associated with sexuality: birth, love and death.

What is the difference between the Near Eastern focus on female nudity, almost to the point of vulgarity, and the ‘Pompeian style’ of vulgar male nudity? Why did one civilization produce nude representations of women (almost exclusively) and the other nude representations of men (almost exclusively)?” This question was put to me by the editors of Archaeology Odyssey—along with another, related question. In the September/October 2001 issue, the magazine had run a feature story called 046“Eros in Egypt,” written by New York University scholar David O’Connor. The article was largely about “concealed” erotic imagery in Egyptian art. But […]