Two traditions, male and female
Why the difference? The male nude grew out of the athlete: Greek athletes competed naked and were admired as the best of humanity, so the naked male body meant excellence. The female nude has another ancestry. Naked female figures appear in very early prehistoric art and, in historical times, in images of Near Eastern fertility goddesses such as Ishtar. The Greek Aphrodite belongs to that family, yet for many centuries the Greeks preferred to see her clothed. A respectable woman, a goddess, a girl offered to a sanctuary: all were dressed.
Korai: the clothed maidens of the Archaic period
The female counterpart of the naked kouros is the kore (maiden), always clothed. Korai stand frontally, lifting their garment with one hand while the other holds a flower bud or a fruit before the chest. Their dress is the point. Phrasikleia, a funerary kore made around 550-540 BCE, wears a red peplos and jewellery; on the Acropolis, the Peplos Kore of about 530 BCE wore a white peplos painted with rows of animals and riders, a blue chiton and bronze earrings. Fine clothes, colour and jewels were part of the gift.
Caryatids: women as columns
In the Erechtheion on the Acropolis (421-406 BCE), six female figures support the ceiling of the south porch in place of columns. Five of the originals are in the Acropolis Museum and one in the British Museum. Here the dressed female figure literally does the job of a column, and the porch becomes a row of maidens holding up a roof.
Is drapery only about modesty?
Modesty is part of it, but dress also carried precise messages. Around 320 BCE an Athenian family set up marble statues of a maiden and a little girl on a grave, now in the Metropolitan Museum. The older girl wears her mantle pinned at the shoulders and hanging down her back, a way of dressing apparently reserved for young unmarried women who led processions to sacrifice carrying a basket with barley, fillets and the sacrificial knife. Being a kanephoros, a basket-bearer, was the highest honour for a girl before marriage, and the dress tells us she had it.
Drapery could also suggest movement and power. The Nike of Samothrace (about 200-175 BCE), a winged Victory 3.28 metres tall, lands on the prow of a ship, a goddess of triumph caught in motion. A female statue’s clothes carry as much information as Greek dress painted on a vase.
Praxiteles breaks the rule
In the mid-fourth century BCE Praxiteles made a naked Aphrodite for Knidos, and with it established a new tradition for the female nude. The Aphrodite of Knidos had idealised proportions like the male athletes, and her pose, head turned to one side and one hand covering the body, seemed to show the goddess surprised in her bath. The gesture may express modesty, or a wish to shield the viewer from too full a sight of the divine. The original is lost, but its impact survives in many Hellenistic and Roman replicas and variants, such as a bronze statuette and a marble statue in the Metropolitan Museum.
So why were women shown clothed? Because for most of Greek history the honourable female body in art was a dressed body, whose clothes told its story. The nude Aphrodite is the exception that made a new tradition, more than two centuries after the first korai.
Where to see them
In Athens, the National Archaeological Museum has Phrasikleia and the Acropolis Museum the Peplos Kore and five Caryatids. The Metropolitan Museum in New York has the funerary statues of the basket-bearer and her sister and later versions of the Knidian Aphrodite; the Nike of Samothrace is in the Louvre. Check opening times before you go.
Sources
- J. Sorabella, “The Nude in Western Art and Its Beginnings in Antiquity”, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2008).
- National Archaeological Museum, Athens, “Sculpture Collection”; Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, Odysseus: Phrasikleia (4889).
- Acropolis Museum, Athens, Peplos Kore (Acr. 679) and Erechtheion; Acropolis Restoration Service (YSMA), “Erechtheion”.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection records 44.11.2, .3; 52.11.5; 12.173. Musée du Louvre, Ma 2369.
