The Cambridge Museum of Classical Archaeology

 

The Museum of Classical Archaeology: almost as crowded as a store room

Why is the Cast collection at Cambridge called the Museum of Classical Archaeology? That seems the first confusion as you enter the building. One thing you will notice when you enter, is that this is not a place for euphemism: let’s call a cast a cast. It doesn’t look like an archaeological museum: there is not a trowel in site, and this collection was created for students of art history. Not one of the objects on display was ever excavated. No, they are all copies, and let’s not be coy about it  - and the truth is, it doesn’t make any difference. Surrounded as you are by the proliferation of representations of the nude human body in this relatively small space compels you to think about what it all means. 

How can a gallery of copies can have such a powerful effect. Of all the artistic genres, landscapes, still lifes, abstract canvases, even portraits are all very fine, but they simply don’t have the impact of representations of the naked human form. Most, if not all, of the works on show here are studies of the human body, and mostly naked. And not just any old body: the majority of the studies are of idealized male and female nudes, displayed at or near life size, and in close proximity to the viewer. As a visitor, I found myself turning away from one naked figure to find myself facing the genitals of another one. The experience is quite overwhelming. Was it the same for the first audience for these sculptures? John Boardman, in his Greek Sculpture (1985), blithely states that the ancient Greeks were used to it, that it had no special significance: “in Greek art … the nude could carry no special “artistic” connotation, nor could it  exclusively designate a special class, such as hero or god.” [p238]. Well, I simply don’t believe it. It certainly has an effect for us today; we still don’t believe (with some few exceptions) in nudity in the media, on beaches, or in public. 

One of the Tyrant Slayers, Roman copy of a lost Greek original

Of course, as Caroline Vout, director of the Museum, points out, in her in her Classical Art: A Life History for Antiquity to the Present (2018), our present-day thinking about these works is very much a construct of our modern attitudes. But to create a historiography of Greek art is hardly a novelty. Take any major historical or cultural event or individual, and you can trace dramatic changes in attitudes over time. What the French Revolution means to us has varied in the 250 years or so since the event, and continues to change. What makes the Cambridge Museum of Classical Archaeology particularly interesting is that it presents the case for Classical art, as it were, full on. Much more vividly than, say, the Fitzwilliam Museum or other art gallery, it proudly presents just one group of objects and demands that you respond to that sole genre: “what do you think of all this?” In that sense, it doesn’t matter that this is a museum full of copies. The “originals”, as Vout points out, were often not themselves the originals. We all know about how most of what we call Greek sculpture is a Roman copy of a lost original, but Vout discovers even more. She points out that the two life-size sculptures known as the Tyrannicides, themselves Roman copies of Greek originals, are actually copies of another Greek original. It’s like a Russian doll  - as you examine it closely, you find there is another one beneath, and another, and another. None of them has a claim to be the original. But what does that matter? I was in Athens at the National Museum a few months ago, and the impression of the originals was very like the impression of these copies I saw this week. Our human response, in other words, is not attuned to originals versus copies. In fact, as far as bodies go, we can celebrate beautiful bodies, and any number of them. 

As many people have pointed out, the astonishing thing about Greek art is that the sculpture in front of us may have lost a limb or two, or even, sometimes, the head, and yet we respond to its power. The body alone is capable of conveying meaning. The Belvedere Torso is a case in point: 

Belvedere Torso, Rome, Vatican Museums

So, we have established that this is not the art of individual facial expressions – the faces of the men and women are not, for the most part, the memorable part of the object (the faces are idealized, except for some Roman portrait sculpture, which probably achieves its immediacy by using death masks of the subject). No, the Cast museum is for the most part an art of idealized, generalized bodies. 

What kind of bodies? Going back to Kenneth Clark’s famous distinction between the naked and the nude: 

The English language, with its elaborate generosity, distinguishes between the naked and the nude. To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition. The word "nude," on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenceless body, but of a balanced, prosperous, and confident body: the body re-formed. [Clark, The Nude, 1956] 

That reads like an attitude from that last century; and while the name of Winckelmann crops up in many discussions about Classic art, he was in turn limited to his 18th-century idea of the beautiful, and we today we have no difficulty in dismissing most drama of the Enlightenment era as insufferably sentimental, while retaining our admiration for other forms of 18th-century literature. Yet, surprisingly, Winckelmann has a much more visceral response to these ideal nudes.

Apollo Belvedere

In gazing upon this masterpiece of art, I forget all else, and I myself adopt an elevated stance, in order to be worthy of gazing upon it. My chest seems to expand with veneration and to heave like those I have seen swollen as if by the spirit of prophecy, and I feel myself transported to Delos and to the Lycian groves, places Apollo honoured with his presence—for my figure seems to take on life and movement, like Pygmalion’s beauty. [Winckelmann, The History of the Art of Antiquity, p332]

This is a very sensuous description, and much more revealing than Clark’s rather frigid response. The Classical nude was frequently nothing if not erotic. 

Kenneth Clark, in his The Nude (1956), apologises for covering both classical and post-classical art when he is not  a specialist in both. I’m a specialist in neither, but the Cambridge MCA seems to present in concise form some of the key principles of Western art history. For many centuries this represented the ideal of beauty, and still today, the muscular male nudes look remarkably like the desirable (to some) but very atypical males that appear in some gay magazines: exceptionally muscular. There is clearly much sexual stereotyping going on here. 

The art historians carefully present the progress of Classical art from kouros to Hellenistic, but let’s leave that aside for the moment. Can we enter the gallery and view this collection of Classical sculpture without an art historical background? Can we try simply to describe what we see without the assumptions and cultural baggage that we bring with us when we visit an art gallery? It might be useful to try to summarize what this collection comprises, and take advantage of it being a crème de la crème selection from all the major European collections of classical sculpture:

• Greek art is mostly about the male nude
• It is an art, for the most part, of the body, rather than the face
• There appear to be two kinds of male beauty: the muscular hero, like Apollo, and the youthful adolescent type, much less muscular, and often called Narcissus

Narcissus

• Female nudes are much less common than male nudes. When they occur, they are of two types: a more passive posture than males (the various types of Venus), or the woman of action, such as the Nike of Paionios

Nike, by Paionios

• The males have genitals displayed, although smaller than in real life. The males usually show evidence of pubic hair, but the females show no hair and have no visible genitalia
• To my mind the Greek nude, whether male or female, is frequently very erotic; it is not just, as Clark describes, without embarrassment, but nudity celebrated (which hardly ever occurs again until the Renaissance) 

And how does this collection compare with art of later periods or in other regions?

• Non-Western art only rarely, if ever, celebrates the individual nude figure. 
• From the Renaissance to the 20th century, the most common nude representation has been the female nude
• Nonetheless, whether the nude is male or female, the prevailing type in Western art has been, at least until the late 19th century, based on Greek attitudes to the beautiful. 

I can’t claim to have any explanation of this strange set of characteristics. Certainly, it would take a book or two to try to explain them all, but in the meantime, let’s just celebrate that this cast collection has opened its doors and presented the sculptures so we can examine and ponder. There are a lot of questions to answer, but at least those questions are clearly presented in this small building.