Agnieszka Fulińska
Jagiellonian University, Krakow
[email protected]
WHAT IS “HEROIC” ABOUT “HEROIC” NUDITY?
One of the memes surrounding Frank Miller/Zack Snyder’s Leonidas and his 300 warriors
was the “men in pants” ridicule, alluding to the absurd black lingerie worn by the Spartans.
Absurd because incoherent with any specific tradition, and in a way negating the idea behind
the design of the movie warriors: the long-standing belief that the Greeks perceived male
nudity as a heroic (and divine) trait. In other words: that male nudity denoted heroic or divine
status of a person represented in art.
The employment of black pants is of course easily explained on the grounds of modern (postclassical) morality, which covered the intimate parts by the decree of pope Clement XIII in
the 18th century (a custom already in use for some time). The pope not only forbade to show
genitalia in contemporary art, but also demanded that the existing statues be covered with
appropriate leaves. This in turn forced the artists to develop ingenious evasions, some of them
regarded – at least by post-modern criticism, because we don’t have testimonies of such
period reception – as subversive and covertly sexual, e.g. the sword of Leonidas in David’s
painting.
The problem of the pants, however, lies elsewhere: our minds see them as ridiculous because
they are incongruent with the classical image of the warrior, and thus they are not perceived
as heroic. They are much less ridiculed when worn by a Conan the Barbarian, because despite
the obvious similarity of the images on the structural plan, we do not perceive – by the grace
of visual tradition – a barbarian hero as a naked hero. What our western culture oriented mind
unconsciously sees as traditionally sanctified nakedness, are the classical heroes, posed and
styled after classical ancient art. Or are they?
Paradoxically, the truth about Greek art is such that naked heroes are not as common as one
might want.
(I tried to trace the earliest conscious description of “heroic nudity” in Greek art but failed:
this notion seems to permeate writings about classical art without actually being formulated.
Interestingly, the Encyclopédie of Diderot and D’Alembert clearly distinguishes between
naked Greek statues: “Statue grecque. C’est une statue nue et antique. Les Grecs se servaient
de ces statues pour représenter leurs divinités, les athletes des jeux olympiques et les héros”,
and clad Roman statues: “Statue romaine, est une statue couverte de quelque habillement”.
The Romans themselves had some issues with nudity, too, but this does not fall into the scope
of this paper, and I only mention it because of the 18th century distinction.)
First and foremost we are at a loss about the use of male nudity in Greece, because the
examples are contradictory, and it is impossible to name many groups that are always naked
or always dressed. Apart from the archaic kouroi, the athletes follow the naked canon most
rigorously, but we have at least one example of a victor of sport games who is represented in
full dress: the Delphic Auriga. One might argue that he is not shown as the victor but as the
participant, and unlike runners or wrestlers who apparently fought naked, chariot drivers
would appear in long robes.
Warriors, however, are mostly clad in vase painting, even if not so necessarily in sculpture.
Maybe, then, the distinction runs between media, not human or social types? Vase painting is
usually narrative, while sculpture is static and honorific. One of the major arguments in
favour of the “heroic nudity” hypothesis are the statues of the Tyrannicides, Harmiodios and
Aristogeiton, the founders of Athenian democracy, represented as naked in late 6th/early 5th
century art. The other are, obviously, statues of gods and mythological heroes. The former,
however, are either clad or naked, depending mostly on their age. (And this, in turn, depends
partly on the period of execution, e.g. Dionysos will be mature, bearded and naked, until mid5th century, and then since the turn of the 5th/4th century the image of the youthful, beardless,
and of course naked god prevails. The same change of image applies to Heracles, but is less
clearly defined chronologically.)
Modern age valued mostly classical and late classical Greek art (5th-4th centuries), which
glorifies ideal nudity in its search for the perfect rendition of human (male, for now) anatomy
in art. Even if Hellenistic art (3rd-1st centuries) had not been very highly valued either in early
modern age, or by Winckelman whose mid-18th century ideas influenced perception of
ancient art for roughly two centuries, it could not escape the viewers that the kings who
followed the conquests of Alexander the Great – as well as Alexander himself – had not
shunned naked representations. Not so the Roman emperors, however. Thus apparently naked
started to mean Greek, and moreover heroic, because the ideal nude statues were identified as
gods, heroes, warriors and athletes – in any case persons who either by their divine nature are
superhuman, or had achieved a victory and/or heroic deed that bestowed a nearly divine status
on them. Add to this the fact that the enemies, be it generic barbarians, the mythological
Amazones, or actual Scythes or Persians, were always clad in the relief scenes depicting the
fights of the Greeks with any of these classes. All this in turn started to mean that nakedness
implied heroism and was its attribute or immanent trait in art.
(This notion persisted until in the 1970s a German scholar, Tonio Hölscher, showed that not
only the heroes painted on vases would be clad in narrative scenes (and in static images, too),
but that the order “naked Greek/dressed enemy” could be reversed, as in the Dexeleos stele,
where the commemorated Athenian wears a chiton, while the vanquished enemy lies on the
ground, naked. His discovery caused some stirring in the academic world, had no impact on
popular perception, though, so we note it here as a scholarly fact only.)
Yet another interesting thing is that actually the naked “heroic” image does not have actual
grounds in post-classical European tradition, either. If we look at the series of portraits of
rulers and military heroes from different parts of Europe, represented à l’antique or à la
grecque, we see that most of them do wear something, thus following the Roman style rather
than the Greek one. The period which tried to change this attitude, neo-classicism of the late
18th and early 19th centuries, failed in this particular respect. The actually heroised by means
of ideal nakedness statue of general Desaix, erected in Paris in 1810, was ridiculed by the
public as indecent (even if the sculptor did use one of the aforementioned trick to cover the
intimate parts). This in turn could have caused the condemnation in 1811 of one of the
period’s greatest sculptural masterpieces – the statue of Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker by
Antonio Canova. (The paradox here is that had this statue reached Paris when it was executed,
i.e. in 1806, it could have been accepted, but in the meantime the tastes of the general public
began to change to the romantic on the one hand, and bourgeois on the other.)
Why, therefore, would the heroes of the heroic movies, especially when there is a more or less
clear connection to antiquity, be naked? The answer is three-fold, I believe. First and
foremost, the tradition described above, must be taken into account; actually, it is its memetic
quality, and not the actual Greek art, which is of consequence. In other words: it does not
matter what the Greeks believed about the meaning of male nudity in art, or what they put
into this art; what matters is what had been popularly believed about this meaning in the
following ages. It does not matter, either, whether the Greeks actually fought naked in wars
(they did not): there exists a convention of representing them in such a way in art, and this
convention can be adopted in other visual arts.
This poses problems, however. Snyder’s pants were ridiculed because they were incongruent
with the Greek model, but they were indispensable if the movie were to be shown to a wide
public. Frank Miller’s original graphic novel could avoid showing actual nakedness in more
ingenious ways, but moving actors would risk exposition. The question is, however, how
much heroism was deducted from the images by the addition of the pants.
This is because of the other aspect of nudity as heroic. Heroism in visual arts that employ it is
about exposition. Not necessarily of the intimate parts, though, and if we move away from
Greek conventions for a moment, we will see that even partial exposition of crucial parts of
the body can denote heroic character of the image. Let us consider naked heads in combat.
They are almost as absurd from the point of view of the warriors’ or soldiers’ safety and
comfort as the complete nakedness of the Greek convention. Apart from the thorax the head is
the very part of the body which had been covered and shielded from the very earliest times.
Helmets, shakos, shapskas, hats and again helmets, usually with protruding parts that would
deflect the blows or at least weaken their impact, they all served to protect the head and face.
However, art and movies abound in images of ancient and modern heroes who fight
bareheaded. The basic intention may be in many cases – especially of the movies – very
simple: the viewer must be able to recognize the character. If a Jack Bauer put on a bullet
proof helmet, he would not stand out from his task force; the main characters who do fight in
helmets are usually shown after battle taking them off. This can work for other purposes, too.
The stormtroopers of the Empire in Star Wars are an anonymous group which can be easily
annihilated by the good guys because they are clad from head to toes in identical armours, and
thus dehumanized. Traditionally perceived heroism is about the individual; this is why in the
new Star Wars series, the stormtrooper who plays on the side of the good guys must take off
his helmet to become recognizable and individualized for the viewers. And there is nothing
more individual than full exposure of the body, even if our perception misses the point of the
Greek convention which employed ideal, un-individual bodies for its purposes. For the
Greeks ideal nakedness in heroic context had most likely the aesthetic quality in the first
place, and also clad the victors or heroes in the most perfect of costumes: a perfect body,
which must contain – according to the ideal of kalokagathia – a beautiful mind and soul. This
aspect has been lost over the centuries, but as has been already remarked: it is the reception
that builds the perception.
Naked bodies in modern popular art have one more aspect, though, one that was generally
lacking – at least in the terms of today – from classical art. The naked body is obviously
erotic, or even sexual in its appearance. This aspect can underlie the concepts of the movies
that employ ancient warriors, as the example of the series Spartacus shows. In the 1960 movie
Kirk Douglas would of course appear almost naked in the arena, with equally almost naked
rivals, but the main undertone was much less erotic. The pants in these scenes deserve a
separate analysis, since apart from being entirely ahistorical, they are quite clearly designed to
denote the level of barbarism of the characters. The previous remark, much as it may appear
as comical, is not entirely so. If we look at Xerxes from Snyder’s movie, he is also almost
naked, but the chains, piercings and other body modifications stand in ultimate contrast with
the ascetic costumes of the Spartans. Xerxes’ nakedness is “effeminate” (in accordance with
some Greek opinions on the costumes and habits of the Persians), and much as in the modern
world it may appeal to part of the public in erotic terms, it is still fringe eroticism, contrasted
to the “heroic” and “natural” image of Leonidas and his warriors.
One more meaning of nudity ought to be mentioned here, which must have influenced the
modern model of nude male heroic figure in popular culture, i.e. the relationship between
nakedness and strength, apart from virtue and bravery. Heracles strangled the lion with his
bare hands, to prove his superhuman strength and heroic status. A number of his later tasks
required pure physical strength, and there is no better way of presenting it than by the display
of musculature, as also the example of modern Hercules in New York shows. In art this model
did not apply to classical mythology heroes only, as we see by the example of Michelangelo’s
David. Even Michelangelo, though, the greatest early modern advocate of heroic nudity, did
eventually cover parts of the body of Christ in his Last Judgement. Christ is a purely heroic
figure in the fresco and shows off his perfectly built (divine) body in a very same manner as
David or a Lysippean hero of the 4th century BCE would, but interestingly, while portraying
people he disliked, the painter would use nakedness according to the medieval model of
perception: as a sign of sin and humiliation.
We have so far spoken only about male nudity in the “heroic” context, because the classical
and post-classical tradition knows only this aspect. Female nakedness had always been
viewed as in the first place erotic trait: the first half-naked and naked paintings and sculptures
in Greece were images of Aphrodite (very rare in historical times before 4th century).
Heroines, even those who possess the “warlike” trait, like Atalanta, let alone the goddesses
Athena and Artemis, are invariably dressed, even if in the cases of the huntresses, the robes
are not typically feminine. However, popular culture would see modern heroines, especially
those modelled to some extent on ancient myths, as half naked, like Xena or most warrior
princesses from the covers of fantasy books. Thus the model once reserved for men,
transgresses gender boundaries, and adapts itself to the female costume, which produces
warriors in bikini. Of course, this costume has nothing to do with the original convention, but
very much to do with the erotic undercurrent of modern nudity, influenced in many ways not
only by the classical or classicist notions, but also by the academic classicizing art of the late
19th century, when the main purpose of the naked bodies, of women but also of men,
regardless of the subject of a painting, as long as it was mythological or historical, was to
smuggle erotic motifs into bourgeois art.
Is there, therefore, anything heroic about nudity? Apparently yes, and simply because visually
represented heroism is in the eye of the beholder, and the modern beholder brought up in the
western, “meditteranean” culture, has it imprinted, despite all moral reservations of the
Victorian era, which keep shaping our ideas of decency, that the perfectly built body is a sign
of strength, bravery and heroism. As long as the convention within visual culture allows for it,
such images will evoke proper associations, which is why we do accept, as viewers, naked or
almost naked warriors in a movie about antiquity, and in particular in a graphic novel about
antiquity, but also about fictitious past. Our eyes and minds can even pass over the covering
devices demanded by decency, as long as they are not entirely incongruous with the model,
because in many museums we still look at fig leaves on ancient sculptures, since not all of
these additions had been removed in the process of returning the monuments to their original
shapes. Whatever transgresses these undefined boundaries, however, risks to be perceived as
ridiculous.