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: Heroic Nakedness and Italian Statuary
The naked males represented in Italian statuary have been an excuse for a few things.
The significance of 'il nudo eroico' in the antique ("il nudo eroico all'antica") is an interesting concept.
We trace the history of the representation of the naked male body in Italian statuary.
We argue that although in early statuary, nakedness was UNMARKED, and clothing was used only to draw special attention to males, changes in visual rhetoric led modelators to make increasingly detailed reference to the male naked body, causing a loss of what we may call "semiotic innocence".
Naked male bodies thus came to carry messages about the male sex as well as the male gender.
The reinstatement of the naked male body in antique Roman and Italian statuary followed the development of a highly artificial convention in which beardlessness was equated with sexual immaturity and held to render the male body a-sexual, from an 'active' point of view.
The significance of 'il nudo eroico' in the antique ("il nudo eroico all'antica") is an interesting concept.
We trace the history of the representation of the naked male body in Italian statuary.
We argue that although in early statuary, nakedness was UNMARKED, and clothing was used only to draw special attention to males, changes in visual rhetoric led modelators to make increasingly detailed reference to the male naked body, causing a loss of what we may call "semiotic innocence".
Naked male bodies thus came to carry messages about the male sex as well as the male gender.
The reinstatement of the naked male body in antique Roman and Italian statuary followed the development of a highly artificial convention in which beardlessness was equated with sexual immaturity and held to render the male body a-sexual, from an 'active' point of view.
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