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Mary Beard at Crawford
Art Gallery in Cork.
“Why and how do we let
some people look at some
things and not others?
Why are there fig leaves
on some things but not
others?” she asksA replica of Praxiteles’
fourth-century BC statue
of Aphrodite, believed to
be the first full-size
sculpture of a female
nude in the west“have his way with her” is what books usually say. The story
goes that he left the “mark of his seed” on her thigh, before
throwing himself off a cliff.
When classicists read that story, they often say: “Isn’t that
odd?” And yes, in some ways it is an odd story – but really it’s
about how art provokes human desire. When, today, you say
that the nude is implicated in the male gaze and male desire,
people tend to think that’s an invention of radical feminists in
the 1960s and 70s. But the idea that art provokes sex goes right
back to the very origin of the western female nude.Why, for so long, was the nude a female nude?
I don’t think it really was. The historical truth is that, although
the female nude was the nude that caused anxiety, there had
been male nudes in the Greek world long beforehand. Early
Greek sculpture of men, back to the seventh century BC,
was usually naked.
This demonstrates a really puzzling difference between
the representation of the male body and the female body.
In some ways, the male body in the classical world wasn’t
much associated with desire, but instead with virtue and
good citizenship. You saw the virtue of the classical citizen
in the virtue of their naked body – but you didn’t see that in
women, who weren’t active citizens. They didn’t have any
political rights and their bodies were viewed quite differently.
It’s really quite striking that, today, what you can and
cannot show of the male body – for instance, on television –
is more restricted than what you can show of the female body.
I think this would have amazed the classical Greeks.Why do you think that is?
It’s almost impossible to give a simple answer to these kinds
of questions. But it’s partly due to the fact that Christianity,
at some level, changed and undermined the sense that the
naked male body, genitals and all, was a symbol of citizenly
goodness. It became much more associated with sex and desire.
You can see that, for instance, in Michelangelo’s [16th-
century sculpture] David. That became the fridge-magnet
version of the male nude: people, me included, still flock in