toga. So do a great many Etruscan bronze statuettes,
studied by Emeline Richardson as the antecedents of
the Roman honorary togatus statue. T here are really
numerous Etruscan statuettes of naked kouroi and
Nude dancing bodies (although these sometimes
wear something, a necklace, or shoes, to avoid the
Entire nudity of their Greek models).'134 Pliny tells
us, and the monuments show, the Etruscans and
later Romans favored numbers of warriors, typically
wearing armour, rather than nude like the Greeks.'35
When people on the peripheries of the Etruscan world
learned to represent the life size human figure in order to
Symbolize a dead warrior, a hero, they imitated the
Greek kouros by way of Etruria. Such a barbarian
rendering of a Greek statue is the so-called Hirschlanden Warrior, discovered on a grave mound near Stuttgart in 1962, and now in the Stuttgart Museum.136
Above, it is flat, like a stele; under, its legs look like the
legs of a kouros. It's nude, but equipped. Its nudity
presents a difficult problem.
may have really fought http://tapg.org/__media__/js/netsoltrademark.php?d=nudebeachpicture.net . The fully armed
Warrior of Capestrano, from Chieti, is distinguished
as an important figure by the axe on his left shoulder-and his enormous helmet-but he wears the Etruscan kind of perizoma.137 Some years past, the Capestrano Warrior reigned as a exceptional picture, challenging to
Clarify in the context of the artwork of historical Italy. In the
and sixth centuries B.C. have come to light, allowing
us to see more clearly how artists in Italy responded to
the innovation of the monumental statues of kouroi.138
The notion of the kouros came from Greece indirectly,
by way of Etruscan art, where the kouros is not naked,
This way, the Etruscans interpreted Greek innovations for barbarian, nonGreek cultures.
antiquity. view is like that of an Archaic kouros.
The arms and their spot-Venus pudica-are of
Lessons not those of a kouros. A Greek artist in Italy,
FEMALEFIGURES
The contrast between mainland Greece and Italy in
the Archaic period in the matter of artistic nudity extends to female figures in addition to male.
Previously traditions endured-spiritual, social, and
ritual-occasionally
expressed in new, non-traditional artistic types.
The image of the nude female, prohibited from Classical Greek art, makes surprising looks in
Etruscan art. Two examples will serve to reveal how
differently this image was perceived.
large-scale statuette of a naked goddess, found in Orvieto, in the safety of Cannicella, over 100 years
ago, in 1884. Its special characteristics have lately been
more carefully analyzed.139 The figure, half life-size,
made of Parian marble, and rather clearly of Greek
workmanship,was broken,fixed,and reworkedin
NUDITY AS A COSTUME IN CLASSICAL ART
commissioned to make an image of a mother goddess,
for which the reigning Greek artistic style supplied no
model, might well have created such a strange work
as this one, whose peculiar look expresses a tension
between Greek artistic tradition on the one hand and
native faith and ritual on the other.
Manner where the Greek custom of nudity was imported and transformed. Again, we have a surprising
occurrence of a nude female body. After in date, but
still earlier than the Hellenistic period, when the type
was accepted in Greek artwork, we see husband and wife
under the round tebenna, which functions as a blanket,
a symbol of their marriage. Such an image of a couple
does not appear in Greek artwork. In Etruscan artwork, too, it is
Exceptional: but the pose of husband and wife, united on
the kline, is Etruscan. Etruscan, too, is the likeness
of their manner of dressing-in this instance, their nudity.
Clearly, the Etruscans didn't perceive the comparison
between male and female nudity, so characteristic of
Greek Classical art. What then did this "costume" signify for those who commissioned the work, or for those
who saw it? Was this nudity a hint of the affair of
the marriage bed? Or did it signify a kind of heroization of the couple, as ancestors, revealed in departure
dressed in the Greek fashion, in a "epic" nudity
considered suiting for the afterworld? We do not know.
Also linked to female nudity, or rather exposure, is
the regular image of the nursing or suckling mother,
a motif absent from Ancient Greek art. Several monuments, for instance, signify the rite suckling and
adoption of the mature Heracles by Uni (Hera). The
myth is unknown in mainland Greek artwork. On an