The Art of the Body: Antiquity and Its Legacy (Ancients and Moderns) (review)

As Michael Squire humorously points out, if you are looking for a book dealing with ancient literary accounts on the body or one that simply presents a linear, chronological treatment of the female and male nude in Western art, then this may not be the work for you. If on the other hand you are ready to throw down the gauntlet and challenge the traditional roles that we have assumed about the Greco-Roman nude in antiquity, then the time is ripe to read this book. Squire's The Art of the Body: Antiquity and Its Legacy provides a provocative and refreshing approach for non-specialists and specialists alike to unpack the visual vocabulary associated with both the ancient and modern nude. This book is part of the Oxford University Press' Ancients and Moderns series, the aim of which is "to illustrate that how we think about the past bears a necessary relation to who we are in the present" (x). Does Squire's monograph meet the challenge? The answer is an enthusiastic yes. This stimulating work in five thematic chapters will persuade readers to rethink the visual representations of the body within the history of the Western arts.

Chapter 1, "Embodying the Classical," first takes us into the world of the male nude and raises the important question of how modern interpretations have in a sense created "new" classical readings over time and space. To illustrate his point, the author opens the chapter with a discussion of a male nude marble statue that currently stands in London's Apsley House. Instead of providing readers with the generic opener of title, date, and provenance, Squire creates a scenario that would be similar to many (particularly non-specialists) encountering the piece in person for the first time. The author sets the stage for discussion of the piece's visual vocabulary by providing a descriptive account of the statue without alluding to the time when the piece was carved or who the subject is. Viewers would, for instance, pick up on the figure's nudity, its well-toned form, and its distinctive stance to say that there is something "Western" about this statue. Squire then asks the all-important question: is the piece ancient or modern? The representative piece, Napoleon as Mars the Protector, is, as Squire argues, both: we have consistently engaged with the past to formulate something new. To help shed more light on this issue, Squire then offers a brief, but concise theoretical overview of how Greek treatises on proportion and naturalism have been interpreted through the ages. This theoretical overview in turn sets the stage for the material in subsequent chapters.

Chapter 2, "Figuring What Comes Naturally? Writing the 'Art History' of the Body," takes readers back to the issues that have grounded traditional Western art historical analyses. Using the male body as his point of departure, Squire begins again with the notion of "Greek naturalism" which is believed to have sparked the so-called Greek revolution in the arts. On the whole, the chapter articulately addresses our obsession with trying to create the ideal form of the human body. Squire correctly observes how "the ancient fantasy of represented bodies looking like real bodies has directed not only what western art looks like, but also the histories that we have come to write about it" (30).

Chapter 3, "The Ancient 'Female Nude' (and other Modern Fictions)," examines the roles of the female body within Western art. To set the stage for discussion, Squire refers to Praxiteles' famous monumental statue of Aphrodite from Knidos. Interpretations of the nude goddess preparing for her bath have primarily concentrated on how she is seen from a male's perspective. Squire asks readers to reconsider what she would have meant to an ancient viewer particularly if we eradicate "two millennia of Christian thinking, swayed by the renewed...