For some reason or another we found ourselves watching on TV last night the programme compiled some time ago by the classicist Mary Beard, on the subject of the nude in art. In some ways it was very predictable, with the presenter running out a variant of the John Berger line about the male gaze. Two things, however, gave me pause for thought.
If I remember correctly Berger’s view about the defining role of the male gaze doesn’t really touch upon any possible counter-evidence. Although Mary Beard doesn’t do so either she does at least leave in the air some interesting questions. Her presentation began with classical Greece (as one might have expected from her) but she never really integrated the information about the prominence of the male nude in ancient Greece with her overall Berger-style analysis. Just what was going on (to put it simply) in the ancient Greek mind, when sculptors depicted either male or female figures? She did introduce us to the concept of kalokagathia (the integration of moral and physical beauty), and I was left with the impression that from the standpoint of ancient Greece that might have been applied to both male and female beauty.
More serious, however, was her failure to come to grips with the significance of images of the crucifixion. Surely one of the most commonly depicted nude figures in the whole of western civilisation is that of the crucified Christ. My interpretation of the importance of the nakedness of Christ in this situation is that it emphasis his basic, essential humanity, and affirms the reality of the incarnation. “Look” (the figure says) “God really did become incarnate in human form.” I suspect that it is the case that Mary Beard is not sufficiently theologically literate to get to grips with that one. A related point, which might have interested her, however, is that by implication a male body could be taken as generically representative of our humanity. It is worth asking how our perception of the situation might be altered by the depiction of a female Christ. I have some ideas, but for the moment I’ll leave you to ponder on that one.
PS: As I acknowledge in my subsequent post of 14 March, when I wrote this I had not seen the second part of her two-part series.