Mantles Hence exposed to sunlight they obviously grown the dark suntan with which they were consistently revealed in contrast to the white skin of the

the sun. This traditional iconography appears, for instance, on the fresco of the bull-jumpers from Knossos
(ca. 1450 B.C.). A man and two women are performing a bull-jumping exercise.
Fit perizoma. Only the shade, white for the girls, dark for the man, distinguishes the genders.32 This
had a long life. It truly is discovered in later, Classical times,
worn by women athletes, as well as by the barbarian
neighbors of the Greeks, the Etruscans and Romans.33
boots... "; 237, n. 36: "He is not mentionedin literature,
Completely without foundation."


Nudity appears in Geometric art, in another context.
in Athens reintroduced the human figure in art and
developed a different set of conventions for its depiction. Most of the male statuettes of Geometric age are
Bare; some wear a belt but this will not hide their
genitals. In vase painting, also, male nude bodies appear, in scenes of funerals, war, or processions, where
it wasn't always a depiction of truth. It is challenging to see that such male nudity has any connotation
Aside from that of recognizing gender. A Nude School Celebration Was My First Intro Into SocialNudity
wearing long skirts could be either girls or charioteers, dressed in long robes according to the before
convention. J.L. Benson has indicated that some cases of a charioteer not wearing a robe, and consequently
presumably nude, might result from a powerful
feeling, even at this early date, "for the arete in the
unclad state of warriors and sportsmen." At what stage
in Greek history can one safely assume this type of feeling
to have existed? Maybe, in Labiaplasty: To get the vagina you never knew you needed , as in Homer, it was just starting to exist, but wasn't yet
fully grown, even for bare male bodies signified with distinct sex organs.34
Indeed, we appear to see a gradual development toward a restriction of nudity in Greek art, or rather a
definition of it as epic, divine, fit, and youthful
for men; and something to be prevented for women. A
group composed of a enormous bronze statuette of a youth
from Dreros (more than 21/2ft high), found collectively


with two smaller female figures, already shows, in the

eighth century B.C., the difference between nude
It truly is difficult to
Essential: Robertson indicates the group represented
Apollo with Leto and Artemis.35
In the seventh century B.C., there started to appear
statues of nude youths, life size or over, monolithic,
heroic, divine, votive, or funerary-the
kouroi.36
Egyptian art inspired the size, pose and sort of kouros, but its nudity was a Greek invention.
On the other hand, the apotropaic, enchanting quality
of nakedness endured in other nude, or rather, phallic
male figures which soon made their appearance in
Greek artwork. Satyrs, animal-like human figures with
horses' tails, were signified full of vitality, naked,
with exaggerated huge phalli (or phalluses), on blackfigured vases of the sixth century B.C. Actors who
Signified satyrs in the theater in the fifth century
wore animal skin loincloths with a large phallus sewn
on."37The herms the Athenians fell upon daily in
strictly speaking, nude, since they had no body. given them and feel that the all natural gives them the freedom to be who they're, revealing
consisted of a male head sculptured on a pillar, on
which was carved an erect phallus, functioning as a reminder of the powerful magic residing in the alerted
male member (fig. 1).38 At the time of the mutilation
of the herms, the city of Athens perhaps feared treason
as mass castration.
In artwork, consequently, the naked male body reigned from
the seventh century B.C. on.



whilethe phalluswas emphawas simplyuncovered;
sizedon satyrsandherms,andon the period. The two
typesweredestinedto becomequitedistinctbyClassi-

cal times; any initial connection was unrecognizedby
the educated intellectuals of fifth-centuryAthens.
There were to be, in fact, during the sixth and fifth
centuries B.C., "two concurrentstrains of nudity in
Greek art:one reflectinga magicalor apotropaicfunction (herms, satyrs, etc.), characterizedby the erect
phallus; another, developing from athletic nudity, a
more empirical interest in the naked, athletic male
body (kouroi, sportsmen and male figures in black- and
Reddish-figurevase painting), where the sex organsthemselves are less obtrusive."39
Nudity was certainly critical for the image of
the kouros. Exceptions like the statues of draped
whom, as we have seen, male nudity was considered
shameful,40 only serve to underline the extent to
which, in mainland Greece, the consistentattributes