Gender and Body Language in Roman Art by Glenys Davies (review)

Asserting that modern studies of body language offer comparative support to an understanding of ancient gestural codes, and marshaling decades of theorization of how gesture and comportment together work to establish social configurations of identity, Glenys Davies promises here an analysis of how visual art in the Roman world made use of body language to express "status, and the relationship between status and gender" (1).

The introduction quickly clarifies the author's methods and assumptions: that art from all Greek and Roman periods can be lumped together as evidence for Roman visual modes (she begins the discussion with a red-figure vase from 430 bce); that literary evidence is of primary value when interpreting visual evidence (she consults Cicero, Valerius Maximus, Seneca, Quintilian, and Plutarch, among others, throughout); and that display context is irrelevant to how artworks communicated ideas of gender and status (the Barberini Faun, the Capitoline Seated Girl, some philosophers, and the Terme Ruler illustrate opening themes, with no discussion of placement and little acknowledgement of dating or replication). A case-study is then built upon Cancelleria Relief B, focusing on the gestural connections between its principal figures, that indulges in Jocelyn Toynbee's reading (in The Flavian Reliefs from the Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome [Oxford 1957]) of the scene's emotional subtext before signaling that Vespasian's gesture toward Domitian is unique and interpreting it remains problematic. What to make of this strange impasse is evidently up to each reader to decide—a difficult challenge considering there will not be any more images to consider for a good sixty pages.

The first two chapters present the surviving ancient testimonies relevant to body language, each one devoted to a normative gender: first male, then female. About male comportment we read of exempla traditions, of oratorical training and performance, and of good manners. Themes include status display, imperial power, and the dangers to men of femininity. About female comportment we read of proofs of inferiority and weakness, of tendencies toward frivolity, and of matronly values and modesty. Veiling and clothing requirements follow, along with demonstrations of subordination, and some closing thoughts on the dangers to men of female masculinity, before we are promised an analysis of the representation of Roman women in art.

How disappointing it was after all this to turn the page to chapter 3 (82) and discover the Vatican copy of the Aphrodite of Knidos. "The Standing Nude," so Davies argues, best illustrates the differentiated body languages of males and females on account of their opposed sexes being so visually evident, and before too many pages go by there appears the inevitable Naples Doryphoros. Although these famous statues are in fact Roman artworks, they are here treated as unproblematic exemplars of Greek Classical design, works that demonstrate (one assumes?) the timelessness of gendered gestural codes. The bibliography is thorough and responsible—one finds the support of Ridgway, Havelock, and Lefkowitz, among others—but the discussion fails to take us far beyond the luscious treatments of Andrew Stewart's Art, Desire and the Body in Ancient Greece (Cambridge 1997). Beyond their status in elite culture, how do these opera nobilia inform us on the gestural attitudes of lived experience promised earlier? I fear it was a mistake to linger so long among elite male opinion and fetishized works of Classical culture, rather than jumping straightaway into well-documented viewing contexts from the Roman period. What might be said of these as Roman works? I think of Valentina di Napoli's recent study of displays in Roman Achaea of exactly these two statue types, the Knidia installed in baths and domestic contexts in small-scale formats while the Doryphorus was placed in civic settings on scales life-size or greater ("Looking at the Classical Past: Tradition, Identity, and Copies of Nobilia Opera in Roman Greece," in S. E. Alcock, M. Egri, and J. Frakes [eds.], Beyond Boundaries: Connecting Visual Cultures in the Provinces...