mantles. Consequently exposed to the sun, they clearly developed the dark suntan with which they were frequently shown in contrast to the white skin of the
women, who were more covered and went out less into
the sun. This traditional iconography appears, for example, on the fresco of the bull-jumpers from Knossos
(ca. 1450 B.C.). A guy and two girls are performing a bull-jumping exercise.
Fit perizoma. Only the colour, white for the girls, dark for the guy, recognizes the genders.32 This
It truly is found in later, Classical times,
worn by women athletes, along with by the barbarian
neighbors of the Greeks, the Etruscans and Romans.33
boots... "; 237, n. 36: "He is not mentionedin literature,
and his identificationwith the hero of the Gilgameshepic is
Totally without foundation."
Nudity appears in Geometric art, in a different context. Long after the Mycenaean age, Geometric artists
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
Naked; some wear a belt but this will not hide their
genitals. In http://nudist-young.com , also, male naked figures appear, in scenes of funerals, war, or processions, where
it was not necessarily a depiction of fact. http://nude-beach.net is hard to see that such male nudity has any connotation
other than that of distinguishing gender. Figures
wearing long skirts could be either women or charioteers, dressed in long robes based on the earlier
convention. J.L. Benson has indicated that some cases of a charioteer not wearing a robe, and so
presumably nude, might result from a strong
feeling, even at this early date, "for the arete in the
unclad state of warriors and athletes." At what stage
in Greek history can one safely assume this type of feeling
to have existed? Possibly, in Geometric artwork, as in Homer, it was just starting to exist, but wasn't yet
Completely grown, even for bare male figures represented with distinct sex organs.34
Indeed, we appear to find a gradual growth toward a limitation of nudity in Greek art, or instead a
definition of it as heroic, divine, athletic, 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
male kouroi and clothed female korai. naturist is hard to
significant: Robertson indicates the group represented
In the seventh century B.C., there started to appear
statues of nude youths, life-size or over, monumental,
heroic, divine, votive, or funerary-the
kouroi.36
Egyptian art inspired the size, pose and sort of kouros, but its nudity was a Greek innovation.
On the other hand, the apotropaic, bewitching quality
of nakedness survived in other nude, or rather, phallic
male bodies which soon made their appearance in
Greek art. Satyrs, animal-like human figures with
horses' tails, were symbolized full of vitality, naked,
with exaggerated huge phalli (or phalluses), on blackfigured vases of the sixth century B.C. Performers who
Signified satyrs in the theatre in the fifth century
wore animal skin loincloths with a big phallus sewn
on."37The herms the Athenians fell upon daily in
the streets of their city, from ca. 540 B.C. on, weren't,
strictly speaking, naked, since they had no body. Each
consisted of a male head sculptured on a column, on
which was carved an erect phallus, serving as a reminder of the strong magic residing in the alerted
male member (fig. 1).38 At the time of the mutilation
of the herms, the city of Athens maybe worried treason
as mass castration.
In art, hence, the nude male physique reigned from
the seventh century B.C. on. On the kouros, the sex
whilethe phalluswas emphawas simplyuncovered;
sizedon satyrsandherms,andon the period. The two
typesweredestinedto becomequitedistinctbyClassi-
cal times; any initial relationship was unrecognizedby
the enlightened intellectuals of fifth-centuryAthens.
There were to be, actually, during the sixth and fifth
Greek art:one reflectinga magicalor apotropaicfunction (herms, satyrs, etc.), characterizedby the erect
phallus; another, developing from athletic nudity, a
more empiric interest in the nude, athletic male
body (kouroi, athletes and male bodies in black- and
Reddish-figurevase painting), where the sex organsthemselves are less obtrusive."39
Nudity was surely important for the image of
the kouros. Exceptions like the statues of draped
youths from Asia Minor, probablyinfluencedby the
whom, as we've seen, male nudity was considered
shameful,40 just serve to underline the extent to
which, in mainland Greece, the consistentattributes