Loading the Canon #16 by Helena-Anne Hittel

I See Naked People

If you were to take all of your clothes off, it shouldn’t really surprise you what you’d see. You know by now what a naked man or woman looks like. Given this, why do people freak out over seeing another naked human being in a work of art?

To me, it’s all about presentation. This is where reading the labels at a museum is so important. I’ve seen lots of naked people. Granted, I knew none of them personally. Some of them might not have even been actual people, some of them were really nude models (fun fact! The woman featured in Manet’s Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe and Olympia is named Victorine! She most likely was a prostitute, but try not to hold it against her.) Yet, there they are, without clothes on. Depending on the subject of the piece, some make conscious efforts to cover themselves (for example, the Aphrodite of Knidos), while others really couldn’t care less. What’s considered as a classic naked male athlete to one person might be pornographic to another. As I’ve stated before, everything is subjective.

Let’s revisit Polykleitos’s High Classical creation, Doryphoros. As you might remember, this is a figure of a nude male athlete or soldier, and a canonical study of the human figure.

Now, let’s introduce a Hellenistic work, The Sleeping Satyr or Barberini Faun. With this work, we’ve left our nude male athlete type behind. This is a follower of Dionysus (Bacchus, to the Romans, the god of wine). He’s all partied out, as it were, and we see him reclining on what looks to be a panther skin (also associated with Dionysus), asleep. He’s even got a tail! From one angle, it doesn’t look too racy.

From another angle, though—

Yep.

As stated before, many, many times now: Doryphoros is a canonical study of—in unison, now—THE NUDE MALE ATHLETE. He would have been holding a spear. He’s kind of like the stereotypical “sexy firemen” in calendars. Still (partially) in his “uniform”, but doing a job. The Barberini Faun, however, uncovers a more sensual side of things. Here, the figure is asleep, maybe even dreaming. The conscious mind is suspended, and the unconscious runs amok. He really doesn’t care that you’re looking at him, but you feel uncomfortable nonetheless. His sleeping/dreaming state leaves him vulnerable, and the position of his body is teasingly erotic. What if he was wide awake? His being asleep, therefore, turns you into a voyeur.

Now, let’s look at a completely awake, conscious nude—Edouard Manet’s Olympia.

What do you see? Yes, it’s reminiscent of Titian’s Venus of Urbino.

I could go into all the ways that they’re different or similar. Instead, look around. Here’s a naked woman, clearly a prostitute, reclining on top of her robe, on a bed. She wears a necklace, a bracelet, a flower in her hair, and one mule. The black cat at the foot of her bed, with its arched back, is symbolic—brothels were “cat houses.” A dark-skinned woman holds a bouquet of flowers, maybe from an admirer. The most important part, though, is Victorine’s face. She’s staring straight at you. She’s challenging you. She looks almost bored, but she knows you’re staring. Somehow, this acknowledgement of the viewer makes it less risqué, to me, anyway. By staring out of the picture plane at the audience, she defies you. Look at the placement of her hand. She covers herself, but it’s not as demurely as the aforementioned Aphrodite of Knidos (note hand placement).

Manet’s Olympia is no longer about a nude female. With the look on her face and the placement of her hand, the woman with flowers and the cat on the bed, this becomes social commentary. This is Manet’s France, not merely a nude woman.

Context is absolutely everything. You might not love reading labels on a museum trip as much as I do, but what you’ll learn will keep you from immediately limiting what you’re looking at.  The way nudes are presented will give you clues. Art is open to interpretation, and art can see into us, as well.

So please, stop with the fig leaves.

___________

Helena-Anne Hittel (Episode 35, essay) earned a B.A. in Art History at the University of Central Florida.

Loading the Canon #13 by Helena-Anne Hittel

I Was a Greek Goddess

You’ve noticed it. It’s impossible to ignore. The magazines, the TV commercials-it’s everywhere. Skinny women and guys with rippling pectorals. We’re made to believe that this is what we should aspire to be. THIS is what you want.

Well, not way back when, it wasn’t.

Okay, so I may have lied to you a bit. The aggressively athletic male torso has been “the thing” since BC. The Egyptians were notorious for this in their art, which has been almost entirely consistent for millennia

(excepting that crazy period when then-pharaoh Akhenaton moved everything to Tel-el-Amarna and introduced the principal of Ma’at, or truth, into the way he’s represented for posterity). The pharaoh, after all, was an all-powerful figure in Egypt. He was almost a god. The thought, then, was that he ought to be carved into stone or painted on walls as muscular and powerful. The women, by contrast, were made soft and curvy.

Today’s Victoria’s Secret Angels would have sincerely worried them.

How was she ever going to survive childbirth?

The Greeks latched on to these ideas soon after. The athletic male developed in kouroi (free-standing nude male statues) from the Archaic period to Hellenistic. Fast-forward to Polykleitos in the High Classical period, and his über-famous Doryphoros (“spear-bearer”).

Myron’s Diskobolos (“disc-thrower”),

and Lysippos’ Apoxyomenos (“the scraper,”),

all of those represented-even the gods-were idealized. Spear-bearer, in fact, was so loved, the Romans coped him and all of his friends into marble. They’re the only extant copies we have of this statuary, as most Greek originals were bronze (these were melted down for weapons later). We stumble upon our Spear-bearer later on in a palaestrum (a gymnasium, essentially. No more complicated words, I promise) in Pompeii. It’s like pictures of bodybuilders at Gold’s Gym. This was not only decoration, but an aspirational tool.

Women, however, are a bit more complicated.

The ancient female ideal, as mentioned earlier, was curvy. Large hips and rounded shapes meant that you could have all the babies you wanted and live to tell the tale. Evidence: the Aphrodite of Knidos.

There are no flattened abs or muscled legs, no dramatic cinches in the waist, and no “thigh gap” (talkin’ to you, “thinspiration” people). Here was a goddess personified and almost human, preparing for a bath.

Peter Paul Rubens’ women were another story. This was voluptuous on a whole other level. His Three Graces

and the portrait of his second wife, Hélène Fourment,

are good examples of this. He did not idealize the women in his art because he saw no need to. This is where we get the term “Rubenesque.”

Then came the rise in popularity of the corset. This changes EVERYTHING for the female in art from 16th century Europe. Waists were cinched to within an inch of their lives, compressing bones and organs and making breathing difficult (medical diagrams of this fashion fad are scary).

Every woman of status wore a corset.

In the late 19th century, pen-and-ink illustrator Charles Dana Gibson created what came to be known as his “Gibson Girls,” combining the voluptuous woman with the fragile one. One’s curves, bust line and hips and the other’s slender lines and respectability bore the illustrations that created a standard image of the American girl.

The point, then, is this. Fashions change. Ideals change. This is just an extremely cursory glance at beauty standards in the Western tradition, and already we see the male shape bulking up and the female shape slimming down as the years progress. There’s a huge constancy, one could argue, in the male ideal, but a fluctuation on the feminine side of things.

What was important to a man-that he appear powerful, athletic, capable and strong still seems to stick today. The child-supporting curves that made up what was important in a woman, however, did not. This is not your friendly, neighborhood art historian telling you that you are ugly because you don’t look like today’s superstickskinny tan girls and aggressively muscled men. This is merely an examination of how we must have gotten to these “ideals”. I’ve now put this word into quotations. Why? Because what one person considers art isn’t going to be the same as another’s preferences.!

ART IS SUBJECTIVE. It is human expression and a living timeline. “Here today, gone tomorrow” has never been a truer way to describe it.

___________

Helena-Anne Hittel (Episode 35, essay) is an Art History Major at the University of Central Florida and Intern at the UCF Art Gallery.

Loading the Canon #12 by Helena-Anne Hittel

Ars Moriendi: The Art of Dying

Happy Halloween, Drunken Odysseans! Loading the Canon is taking a deathly turn today, as I examine all things… well, slightly morbid, actually.

People have been making offerings to the dead since time began. They can be things as small as a few flowers to entire terra-cotta armies to protect you in the afterlife. Art historians love grave goods, because they say so much about a culture. Markers, tombs, statuary, pottery all seem to point towards an afterlife. The ancient Egyptians, for example, had some of the most lavishly given gifts buried with them (if you were of a certain station).

When given the words “ancient Egypt,” terms like “mummy”, “pharaoh”, “pyramid” and “sarcophagus” usually aren’t far behind (fun fact: sarcophagus translates to “flesh eater”). It’s true. The ancient Egyptians had, perhaps, one of the most recognizable burial cultures in the world. They were known for the preservation of bodies through mummification, gold funeral masks, colorful sarcophagi, and, of course, constructing giant pyramidal tombs to mark the graves of their pharaohs. The most recognizable (and intact!) of these is the Tomb of Tutankhamun, discovered in 1922 by Howard Carter and George Herbert, the 5th Earl of Carnarvon. This tomb, in particular, contained over 5,000 ritual and funerary objects, all of which are in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

The Greeks were well-known for their temple complexes, statuary, and pottery. Certainly the pottery. Vessels were used as household items, trade goods, grave goods, urns and grave markers. The Dipylon Cemetery in Athens, for example, contains graves from as early as 1200 BC to the Hellenistic Period. Many of these graves were marked with various large-scale decorative pottery. Different shapes also noted who was buried beneath each one. A krater, which is a large vessel out of which wine is served, was commonly used at symposia and therefore associated with men. Thus, this would most likely mark a man’s grave. Vessels such as a lutrophoros (literally, “Carrier of Washing Water”) were used fro a bridal bath before weddings, and would mark the grave of an unmarried woman.

The ancient Etruscans, predating the Roman civilization, had a similar idea as to what to put into a tomb. This idea, however, was made completely robber-proof. The Egyptian tombs held such expensive gifts and were so ostentatious, they basically waved a flag and called out, “Come loot me!” The Etruscans remedied this situation by carving all the objects they thought their loved ones would need, in relief, in the walls of the tomb at Cerveteri. Rob me now, sucker! I dare ya.

Fast forward to the Late Middle Ages. It wasn’t a “Dark Age”, and it probably wasn’t a bad time to be alive. It was just a short time. Religion was one of the most important things back then, and your faith dictated where you would go and what would happen to you. In 1415, a Dominican friar sought to make passing a little bit easier for the masses with the Ars Moriendi (roughly translated from the Latin as “The Art of Dying”). This text was a book of prayers written for the dead and dying and was published in two versions, with the shorter, more condensed version easily accessible by many. These were printed in black and white, but there were also hand-colored “deluxe” versions, if you could spare the expense. These books contained mostly illustrations for the illiterate masses, and could be read to you in Latin by a cleric.

Nobody really wants to die. I definitely don’t, but it’s like taxes: you really can’t avoid it. (Well, you can avoid taxes. It’s just recommended that you don’t.) The ancients knew this, too, but like today, they made cultural offerings to those they mourned. That way, when you woke up in your afterlife, you knew you were loved and it would be business as usual.

___________

Helena-Anne Hittel (Episode 35, essay) is an Art History Major at the University of Central Florida and Intern at the UCF Art Gallery.