The Roman Nude: Heroic Portrait Statuary 200 B.C. - A.D. 300 (review)

Hallett's thorough and well-researched study aims to explain a conundrum of Roman art: why did the Romans, who associated nudity with shame, commission public portraits of themselves in which they wore no clothes? His answer, that by doing so they assumed the heroic guise that had long been associated with nudity in Greek culture, is not novel, but no previous scholar has so deeply situated the Roman nude in its ancient context. Hallett achieves this by assembling a large corpus of images hitherto regarded as unrelated, tracing the classical and Hellenistic Greek (and to some extent, Etruscan) backdrop for their creation, and drawing from a wide range of literary texts. As others both ancient (Pliny) and modern (L. Bonfante, AJA 93 [1989] 543–70) have persuasively argued, nudity was a kind of costume, bearing a host of specific meanings that distinguished the "wearer" from those outfitted in different modes (e.g., men who wear the toga or cuirass).

Adopting an essentially chronological approach, Hallett strives to chart a developmental path, although by his own admission it is not seamless across the divisions of East and West, imperial and private. He corrects several hoary notions that have become conventional wisdom: he concludes that nudity was not an essential element of Hellenistic kingship, but rather connoted youth and virility and in all periods nudity signified the divine. Contra Henning Wrede, he argues that nudity was adopted not just by freedmen but by private persons of various social classes.

Critical reception of the Roman nude in modern times has been much shaped by the perceived stylistic clash between supposedly "real" (and occasionally unflattering) faces and nude, "beautiful" bodies; reactions cited by Hallett range from amusement to revulsion. Earlier scholars had a more positive verdict, however. Writing in 1882, Johann Bernouilli devoted many pages to the nude "Pompey" in the Palazzo Spada; today Bernouilli's "prize full-length portrait of the generalissimo . . . has now ceased to interest anybody" (M. Beard and J. Henderson, Classical Art [Oxford 2001] 212). Today the nude portrait statue, ancient as well as modern, continues to elicit discomfort. Indeed as a portrait concept it is so foreign, and so explosive politically, that Eric Fischl conceived (and described) his colossal bronze nude of Arthur Ashe for the U.S. Tennis Association's Tennis Center in Queens, New York, as not a "likeness." I would argue that our modern apprehension of the public nude stems not from its totalitarian associations, as the author argues (272–76) but from the eroticizing of the nude via pornography and other erotica. Unlike the ancients, we simply cannot conceive of the nude as heroic rather than sexy.

Hallett explains the Roman taste for these statues as grounded in their combination of two ideals: the Roman ideal of the aged face whose marks express worldly experience and the Greek ideal of the body beautiful. (That this explanation does not explain the phenomenon among women underscores a criticism that I raise below.) This may be so: it has long been recognized that so-called Roman verism was to some extent idealizing in that it utilized stock iconographic elements. But I believe that modern observers may exaggerate the statue's stylistic clash. Given the hardy Mediterranean diet that kept even the middle-aged slim and the lack of protection that weathered the skin prematurely, the disparity between real face and ideal body may actually have looked less jarring to ancients than it does to modern viewers. Negative reactions today, moreover, may be conditioned by the circumstances in which most nude portraits are viewed—through the medium of old black-and-white photographs (unfortunately Hallett's illustrations do not reverse this situation). As with any artistic genre, there are works of average quality as well as superior, but the corpus of Roman nudes includes some undisputed sculptural masterpieces (pl. 2, the "Tivoli general"; pl...