ARTnews

“Where Did Praxiteles See Me Naked?”

March 2007

Maxwell L. Anderson

 

The goddess Aphrodite’s purported question, “Where did Praxiteles see me naked?” (Greek Anthology, VI, 160), will be revived in March of this year, when the Musée du Louvre opens an exhibition about one of the giants of Greek sculpture. The display will present research concerning the artist’s works of some 2350 years ago, along with copies and works in his style. Scholars are in disagreement about which sculptures were by his hand, but most concur that Praxiteles was the preeminent Athenian sculptor of the 4th century B.C.

 

Praxiteles carved what is believed to be the first life-size, life-like nude statue of a woman, known as the Knidian Aphrodite (ca. 350 B.C.), which stood in the goddess’s temple on the island of Knidos, and allegedly elicited her wrath for its shocking realism. The statue was said to have been modeled on the courtesan Phryne; Aphrodite is shown at the bath, alluding to her divine birth from the sea. Her right hand is positioned above the pubic region, which may read as a signal of modesty, but also serves to draw attention to the implied power of her sexuality.

 

The public of Praxiteles’ time was described as awestruck by the bold result, notwithstanding the depiction of more stylized female nudes from the Neolithic period onwards. Until Praxiteles, sculpted depictions of the female form were either somewhat abstract or, at their most revealing, characterized by the ‘wet drapery’ style of the mid-fifth century B.C., which afforded the possibility of prurient admiration but left something to the imagination.

 

Praxiteles was thus a pivotal figure in the tradition of portraying the female nude, a tradition that to this day stirs up powerful responses in caliphates and democracies alike. Just a few months ago, a schoolteacher was fired for allowing her students to see nude statuary at the Dallas Museum of Art. The observer in antiquity was accustomed to male nudity, by virtue of unclothed competition in the Olympic and Panathenaic Games. But the hysteria surrounding Janet Jackson’s fleeting self-revelation two years back at our modern equivalent of such sporting spectacles shows that even after more than two millennia, we still tend to consign the nude female body to the Pre-Praxitelean realm of forbidden fruit.

 

Our experience of classical and late classical Greek sculpture is largely limited to marble copies made by artists in the Roman period of the 1st centuries B.C. and A.D.  These adumbrations of lost original works are more than stand-ins; they are works of art in their own right, carved and polished by hand, and commissioned or sought after by collectors who pined for a version of the famous originals that inspired them.

 

The intervening two- to three-hundred years between originals and copies should nonetheless give us pause when relying on Roman statuary for an evocation of Praxiteles’ talent. Not only is the gap as wide as the distance between the rococo period of Boucher and Watteau and our own, but it is also clear that Roman copies normally had a decorative purpose for private patrons, while the original works of Praxiteles for the most part stood in public or religious contexts. Furthermore, the original sculptures were carved of large-grained marble from the Greek island of Paros rather than fine-grained Italian Carrara marble, and were likely painted, some perhaps by Nicias, a famous artist of the time, with bright and lifelike colors that to a modern eye would evoke the directness of Jeff Koons rather than the pristine, bloodless neoclassicism of Canova.

 

Our reliance on Roman interlocutors for an understanding of Praxiteles’ work extends to literature as well as to works of art.  In the first century A.D. the Roman historian Pliny the Elder writes that there were two works by Praxiteles portraying Aphrodite, one draped, on the island of Kos, and one nude, on the island of Knidos (Natural History, 36.20-22). Of the nude version he notes that it is: "the finest statue not only by (Praxiteles) but in the whole world." Lucian, in the second century A.D. (Amores, 13-14), writes of its original display: “The temple has a door on both sides for those who wish to see the goddess directly from behind so that no part of her be left unadmired.”

 

Born in Athens, Praxiteles was the son of Cephisodotus the Elder, and had two sons who followed in his footsteps as sculptors, Cephisodotus the Younger and Timarchus. There is conflicting evidence about another Praxiteles, the artist’s grandfather, but the exhibition and works in it focus on the figure who achieved fame and distinction in his lifetime.

 

Praxiteles and those in his circle seem to have worked primarily in marble, while classical sculptors of preceding generations are known to have favored casts in metal, either in gold, silver, or bronze. He broke ranks with the prevailing frontal formality of classical Greek sculpture, and opened a new sensuality in the plastic arts, that would be built upon throughout the succeeding Hellenistic period following the death of Alexander the Great.

 

The Marathon Boy, a major bronze statue lent to the exhibition by the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, is linked to Praxiteles in style, but is not assuredly by the master himself, any more than is the case with the Cleveland Museum of Art’s bronze version of the Apollo Sauroktonos, or Lizard-Slayer, acquired in 2004.

 

It would be a welcome development if this landmark exhibition could contribute not only to our appreciation of a great artist, but also to the acceptance of the human body, in unclothed form, as a wondrous and unthreatening feature of life.

 

Maxwell L. Anderson is director and CEO of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which will host a major exhibition of Roman sculpture from the Louvre in September 2007.