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  • The Art of the Body: Antiquity and Its Legacy by Michael Squire
  • Andrew Lear
Michael Squire. The Art of the Body: Antiquity and Its Legacy. Ancients and Moderns. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. xv, 240. $99.00 (hb.). ISBN 978-0-19-538080-4; $24.95 (pb.). ISBN 978-0-19-538081-1.

The representation of the body is a fashionable topic these days, as are reception studies. It is thus surprising that The Art of the Body is (as far as I know) the first book-length study of the relationship between Classical and modern Western representations of the body. This is even more surprising because, as Squire argues, post-Classical Western representation of the body has (perhaps inevitably) revolved around a complex series of adaptations of, and reactions against, Classical representations.

In the preface, Squire announces that the importance of ancient models for post-Classical depictions of the body will be one of his book’s main themes. The others include the ways in which post-Classical Western representations of the body have affected our interpretation of Classical representations and (consequently) the ways in which ancient and modern representations can illuminate each other. Chapter 1 presents an introduction to the “legacy of naturalism” that the Classical world left to the modern West, which, in the author’s view, though particularly apparent in the Renaissance, nineteenth-century neo-classicism, and Fascist art (all of which he discusses), persisted even in twentieth-century art movements that intended to reject this legacy. The following four chapters each focuses on a different topic: the male nude (chapter 2), the female nude (chapter 3), political nudes—and almost-nudes (chapter 4), and the bodies of gods, ancient and modern (chapter 5). The chapters are not parts [End Page 125] of a united narrative; instead, they are in effect separate essays, connected to each other by the above-mentioned themes, as well as a few others, in particular, the important (but now often ignored) religious dimension of many ancient depictions of the body.

Each of the chapters makes an important broad point or a group of points. The second chapter discusses the way in which many modern viewers, on the basis of an analogy with the Renaissance, tend to assume that the story of the ancient Greek male nude centers on an ever-improving capacity to represent the body accurately. Instead, as Squire argues, there is no reason to think that the sculptors of archaic kouroi wanted to make images as naturalistic as Classical sculpture—which, as he emphasizes, does not in fact represent bodies accurately but rather in an idealizing fashion that merely seems natural. In chapter 3, he points out that feminist critics of the nude in art generally miss the fact that female nudes were rare in antiquity and only appeared relatively late; the Aphrodite of Knidos, though the beginning of the Western tradition of female nudes, was also a cult image of a goddess and an object of worship and fear as much as of voyeuristic lust. In chapter 4, Squire compares widely derided modern political nudes (of Napoleon, Mussolini, Washington) to Roman adaptations of the Greek nude, in which a veristic Roman head is affixed to an idealized Greek body; he argues that while we see the Roman statues as unsuccessful amalgams of differing elements, the Roman viewer saw the parts symbolically “as a series of amalgamated parts that together added up to more than the whole” (152). In chapter 5, Squire argues that while Christian art has attempted to distance itself from pagan art, the fact of Christ’s embodiment in human form has left Christian artists facing dilemmas similar to those facing ancient artists portraying the gods in human form.

The book is written in an engaging and highly personal way, although it seems to me that it occasionally verges on glibness. For instance, it criticizes Gombrich and Richter’s view of the development of the naturalistic male nude without suggesting an alternative reason for the increased naturalism of Classical art. It also claims that Roman veristic portraiture is as much a kind of idealization as the naturalism of the Classical...

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