They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder — even if that beholder lived, breathed and fashioned his craft two thousand years ago.
As part of the Sex Week’s lecture series, Robert and Erin Darby, professors in the art history and religious studies departments, hosted a panel-style discussion to explore such a claim, entitled “The Naked Truth: The History of Beauty, Nudity, and Censorship” in McClung Museum Auditorium last night.
By kick-starting the discussion with bear-all Sports Illustrated models, Marky Mark’s crotch-grabbing Calvin Klein ad, and the infamous Kim Kardashian photo, the evolution of ancient art served as a springboard for a more complex topic — determining where modern perceptions of beauty and nudity take root.
For Erin Darby, nudity doesn’t just permeate physical senses, but persists in even the most subtle circumstances presented in advertisements and other venues of mass consumption.
“Nudity is a framework we bring to images,” Darby said while discussing the subtext of a suggestive Abercrombie & Fitch billboard. “It doesn’t have to be the image itself. It’s an implication that we draw even when the tiniest bit of it shows — and we freak out about it.”
As archaeologists and experts in art history, the lecturers mainly focused on the foundation of current conceptions of nudity by tracking art through ancient cultures, including Babylon, Israel, Greece and the Roman Empire.
Though their timeline featured a variety of nude sculptures, Robert Darby said a cultural shift from Near East preference for nude female to a Greek preference for nude male ignited another debate on the elusive concept of masculinity.
One of the livelier reactions stemmed from Robert Darby’s explanation of the ancient Greece’s preference for male nudity, forcing attendees to reconsider a media-defined impression of “manliness.”
“The source of ideal beauty was not the female body, but the male body,” Darby said. “What scholars have suggested range from different ideas of virility, the idea that men are athletes and soldiers and therefore were training their bodies and [that] they something to be exposed and be proud of.”
Avanti Rangnekar, an undeclared freshman, said the idea of such socially- constructed definitions was a major highlight from the Darbys’ open forum discussion.
“That wasn’t something I doubted, but something I definitely came to understand throughout that whole lecture,” Rangnekar said. “Just the concept that even back then, things like sex acts were just visually represented in art work where as today, we see that as something taboo.”
For Rangnekar, her prior interest in media’s influence over standards of beauty encouraged her listen to a more “academic perspective” of the nudity depicted in the artwork of bedrock civilizations.
She said, “I think more than ever, nudity and the concept of pushing boundaries is definitely prevalent, so I was interested in seeing how nudity was perceived throughout history and if there was any similarities to today’s society.”
