By Harry Mount for the Daily Mail. Perhaps the most famous Greek sculpture of all, Discobolos, the discus-thrower, shows how athletes competed in the nude. About two-and-a-half thousand years ago, a cultural miracle took place in ancient Greece. Democracy was born in Athens, the first great tragedies and comedies were written — and statues were carved that were more astonishingly lifelike than ever before. Warriors die on the Trojan battlefield in the buff. Athletes hurl the discus in the altogether. Goddesses step into the bath without a stitch on.
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The Sydney Morning Herald
Venus — or Aphrodite as she was originally called by the Greeks — was a primordial creature, said to have been born out of an endless black night before the beginning of the world. Ancient Greek poets and myth-makers told this ghastly story of her origins. The earth goddess Gaia, sick of her eternal, joyless copulating with her husband-son, the sky god Ouranos sex which left Gaia permanently pregnant, their children trapped inside her , persuaded one of her other sons, Kronos, to take action. Gathering up a serrated flint sickle, Kronos frantically hacked off his father's erect, rutting penis and threw the dismembered phallus and testicles into the sea. As the bloody organs hit the water, a boiling foam started to seethe. And then something magical happened. From the frothing sea-spume rose "an awful and lovely maiden", the goddess Aphrodite. This broiling, gory mass proceeded to travel the Mediterranean, from the island of Kythera to the port of Paphos in Cyprus. Sandro Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, painted in But despite her violent and salty start, the young goddess, as she emerged from the sea on to the barren, dry land, witnessed a miracle: green shoots and flowers springing up beneath her feet.
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The choice to depict their greatest heroes and gods in the nude was not on a whim, but rather part of a deeply rooted philosophical and cultural ideology in which the human body was celebrated rather than shamed. Further, the ideal ization of the body was even more important in the Greco-Roman tradition than simply admiring the human form. In the nude sculptures, the bodies are portrayed as mathematically ideal, not realistic — a common theme throughout most Greek art, although Romans were more realistic in their portrayals of people in general. This is essential in comprehending the message behind the choice to portray their greatest heroes and the gods, because it is not about making them vulnerable, weak, or overtly sexual although the argument differs when it comes to the depictions of women and goddesses.
Marble sculpting is my favorite art medium. The Greeks considered the toned male body nude to reflect the highest form of beauty, therefore most sculptures of Gods and heroes are nude. Marble sculptures appeared in the early 6th century BCE with the first life-size statues. Marble is a wonderful medium for rendering idealized perfection of the human body. Faces were more expressive, and the draping of cloth clinging to the shapes of the body with what is called the wet—look or wind-blown.
