the individuals living in Etruria and other regions of early Italy. The usage of male nudity and female exposure among the Gauls reveals the survival of early

The deep and often painful emotions of pleasure,
pain, shock, or shame the sight of the nakedbody
arouseswere used by artistsin many means. click
was, and still is, always something special. It can
signify divinity, or reveal human helplessness. Most
which accounts for the survival of the apotropaic
Picture of the phallus into Classical times, on the herm
I have attempted to illustrate some aspects of the representation of nakedness,partial and entire,for men
and for women, in Greece, and in the barbarian
world; to interpret some of the early accounts, and
to "read"some of the images, in the Greek artistic
language, along with in some really queer barbariandialects. There are obviously difficulties of translation,
Regularly involving our own understandingof the nude
Robertson413, 488. Barbarianprisonerson Roman
trophiesarefrequentlyaccompanied
bytheirwives,whoare
nursingbabies.
148 Suprans. S. Freud,A GeneralIntroduction

to Psychoanalysis(orig. English publ. 1920; rev., repr. Awesome
York 1964) 160: "The number of things which are repre-

sentedsymbolically
in dreamsis notgreat. The humanbody
as a whole, parents,children,brothersand sisters,birth,
Passing, nakedness....

(Boston1971).
149
Suprans.9-10, 38. AmongrecentstudiesseeL. di Stasi,

569

figure in artwork. We tend to think of it as mostly lusty.
Eros absolutely moves behind the sight of the nude
human body, but its sensual significanceis not the only
one in art. Actually, when it's only eroticits meaning is
least powerful. In
Greece the remarkable innovation of athletic male
nudity, which surely originated in a rite, religious
Circumstance, developeda special social and civic significance.
It becamea costume,a uniform:exercisingtogetherin
the gymnasia marked guys's status as citizens of the
On the vases, this is how young
men were shown.
Female figuresshown nakedin public, on the other
hand, were generally entertainers. Women represented
as exposed were violated, stripped of their clothing,
and in dreadfuldanger,as vulnerableand unguarded
before a male attacker as Athenian law conceived
Clothes distinguishes men from
animals. This differentiation continues to be valid in Classical
Greek artwork for girls (thoughnot for men). Polyxena,
and Iphigeneia, naked by the altar, are about to be
sacrificedlike creatures.
The perspective of nakedness among barbarians differs,
often contrasting sharply with that of mainland
Greece in the Classical period, and allows us to see
more clearly, maybe,just how special the Greekconcept and customwere. Hebrews and Romans made a
Assortment of adjustmentsto contain-in a limited waythe classical ideal of Greek male nudity and of the
gymnasia in their own artwork and in their life. The Gauls' custom of fightingnakedwas remarkedon as "foreign"by
the Greeks. In Etruria, and in Italy, female nudity
and the image of the breastfeeding mom still mark the
power of the mothergoddess,as they did in the Mediterraneanbefore Greek art prevailed.

In Classical antiquity, therefore, the contrast between the clothed and the naked human body was
used to express some of the most fundamental contrastsof the
human encounter:God and man, human and animal,
man and girl, public world and privatelife

Cultural studies practitioners have long debated the signication of clothes and
the means in which they signify sensuality, sexuality, status, along with the ethics
and codes of creation of garments, consumption, the operations of ideas of
Fitting in the subscription to fashion fads -- all in all, the ways in which
clothing represents. Evaluations of clothing and fashion have often treated the
'naked' body like it really is prior to rendering apart from in its depiction in art,
Porn, advertising and other media. The discussions in art history and public
sphere parlance over the differences between naked and bare are moot points
when seen through a post structuralist lens. Kenneth Clark (1956) indicates
that aesthetic representation -- high art -- has the ability to depict the naked as nude,
as if 'nude' is another form or design of clothes, leaving behind 'naked' as the truly
disrobed. Treating the nude body in this manner ignores how it's consistently already
represented and constrained by codes of behaviour, circumstances, distinction from
the clothed body, loose signications and cultural rituals.
most frequently performed during, with or alongside practices of sexuality, it seems