Sexuality in Ancient Art

In a 2009 article entitled “Women’s Desire, Archaeology and Feminist Theory,” Natalie Kampen explored different ways in which women in the Greco-Roman world might have responded to statues of a nude Aphrodite, especially Praxiteles’ Aphrodite of Knidos. As Kampen herself pointed out, much of the scholarly work produced on the Knidia for the past two decades has tended to discuss this well-known sculpture as a locus for male-viewing practices and men’s sexual desires (Kampen 2009, 208).

In the mid-4^th century BCE, Praxiteles broke with previous tradition to sculpt the first monumental nude of Aphrodite, which became the cult statue of Aphrodite Euploia in Knidos. This paper argues that the mythological narratives the Knidian Aphrodite evokes invite the identification of female viewers and the reverence of worshippers by suggesting her divine power to dominate, unite, and protect mortals. At the same time, I contend that her sideways gaze constructs her as an unattainable erotic object for all spectators.

In “Omphale and the Instability of Gender,” Natalie Boymel Kampen’s own contribution to her seminal volume Sexuality in Ancient Art: Near East, Egypt, Greece, and Italy (Cambridge 1996), Kampen focuses on an early-third-century CE statue of a noble Roman woman depicted as Omphale. At issue for Kampen is why and how Omphale, a figure long associated with the dangerous feminizing power of the East, could suddenly serve as a positive paradigm for an elite Roman woman.

The gaze and the role of viewing in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses have been useful theoretical models for understanding how Lucius progresses (or fails to progress) through his bewildering journey (Slater (1998); Slater (2003)). In Metamorphoses 2.4, for instance, the ‘curious gaze’ (curiosus optutus) of Apuleius’ Actaeon has been seen as a didactic exemplum for Lucius, who should recognize himself in the voyeuristic statue but fails to interpret the spectacle accurately (Heath (1992)).

In 1898, a group of German archaeologists working in the Demeter sanctuary at Priene unearthed a set of Hellenistic figurines with a peculiar and distinctive iconography. The head of each of these female figurines is placed directly onto her legs and, lacking a torso, the chin and vagina merge into one another. Each has long hair that drapes around her back, resembling a lifted veil, or skirt. “Surely we are dealing with a creation from the context of the grotesque-obscene aspects of the Demeter cult,” (Wiegand and Schraeder, 163. My translation) the excavators write in the 1904 report.

In choosing to paint scenes of youths in the company of a herm--the distinctive statue featuring a bearded male head set on a rectangular shaft with an erect phallus carved on the front--the painters of Athenian sympotic pottery ostensibly portray a scene of daily life.