David J. Colwill

Reimagining Alma-Tadema

2010-04-30T02:24:00.002+01:00

Just a little note on the reception of Classical Antiquity; a thought experiment if you will. Lawrence Alma-Tadema, the once eminent Victorian painter, specialised in Classicising depictions of Roman life, including several set in bathhouses. They largely feature attractive, frequently nude women within these settings (his protégé John William Godward largely went on to dispense of the settings). Obviously these will contain ahistoricities (although his art has been used even recently to inspire the art direction of films such as Gladiator, which is has a similar ahistorical verisimilitude): the underlying research into ancient architecture is generally good, but the twin forces of more than a century of continued scholarship and the requirement for compaction and elision in artistic composition make this inevitable. So, we're going to make allowances for these mistakes, whatever they may be.

Ok so far? Now replace the female subjects with male.

The results are interesting (and I say that from an entirely subjective, unempirical stance). The states of dress and undress, and the subsequent sexual frictions between both subjects and viewers, become all the clearer. The naked female form, supplanted by its masculine counterpart, shifts, becoming more shocking. And from shocking, it is a short step to thought-provoking. And the main thought it provokes to me is this: Classical environs were, and remain, a vehicle, and excuse even, for the 'artistic' representation of sexualised female bodies. Reimagining the images to feature the stark nakedness of men is perceptively more pornographic. It would certainly have been indecent in Alma-Tadema's day, and is still unusual today. This is ironic, as male nudity in art was a commonplace from ancient Greece onwards (on which, see Bonfante, Larissa. 1989), and although representations of nude females ascended in Hellenistic times male nudes remained a dominant artistic form. Nude women characterise the representation of the Classical past because it is, on one hand, the most palatable part in this respect of the (supposedly) debauched pagan past and, on the other, because it is the titillating part of the past that we want to receive.

Lawrence Alma-Tadema painted attractive, naked Roman women because to display naked men within the public space of art would have been unthinkably close to homosexuality and because the Roman context gave an accepted chance ("it's just history!") to paint sexy females. It's an attitude that still largely informs our popular reception of Classical times today.

Bonfante, Larissa. 1989. Nudity as a Costume in Classical Art. American Journal of Archaeology 93, no. 4 (October): 543-570. doi:10.2307/505328.

Image: Lawrence Alma-Tadema. 1881. In the Tepidarium. Oil on canvas. 24.2 × 33 cm. Lady Lever Art Gallery, UK. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tepidarium_Lawrence_Alma-Tadema_%281836-1912%29.jpg.

Agora and Centurion

2010-04-23T00:13:00.001+01:00

BBC Radio Four's Front Row has an enjoyable, fairly short review of the upcoming Agora and Centurion films.

This week sees the release of two feature-films about life under the Roman Empire: Centurion and Agora. Centurion is a thriller set in Northern Britain in the 2nd Century - and follows a group of Roman soldiers trying to evade warriors from the Pict tribe. Agora is set in 4th Century Alexandria - and tells the story of the brilliant astronomer, Hypatia, resisting the religious extremists who want to destroy the city's famous library. Classicist Tom Holland reviews both films and considers cinema's continuing interest in the Classical world.

It also has an interesting bit about with Antony Griffiths on his swansong print exhibition at the BM.

No longer just a confirmed Batchelor

2010-03-20T02:28:00.000Z

Guess that's official then. Yay.

Ides of March

2010-03-15T10:00:00.019Z

It's 2,053 years since poor old Julius Caesar was murdered for the faux pas of wanting to concentrate absolute power over the known world into his own hands, thereby propagating a series of events that led to the establishment of the empire and end of the republic.

Also, it's my lovely girlfriend's birthday. Happy birthday Lorna!

Disquisitive deliverance

2009-09-25T02:29:00.000+01:00

As of last Friday, the MA dissertation is all done (for my sins). Let's hope that my 20k on the issues of 'Public nudity in the recreational contexts of Roman society' make some sense and are interesting to someone else!

There were a few tidbits that didn't make it in, which I think should make for some interesting fodder at a later point. Given the uneasy quiet that comes with deliverance from an intense period of academeering, no doubt I'll see what I can make of them soon.

On a final note, I don't know what I would have done without the magical use of Zotero. I just wish that I'd discovered citation management software years ago.

The Shades and the sun

2009-08-03T13:00:00.000+01:00

Sun, fields and a pig on a funeral pyre. What fun: mobile phone photos

The last day of the British Festival of Archaeology was marked in grand fashion at St Fagan's yesterday. With the sun, a welcome visitor after its absence the past fortnight, beaming, my morning was occupied up at Llandeilo constructing a funeral pyre. We'd put together the base the night before, but had to layer it up to about four foot, while members of staff went about faggoting in the nearby woods. And all in all I think a good job was made of it, considering that it both caught and didn't immediately burn itself out. The manner in which the flesh and fat liquefied and burnt off to expose the specimen's skull, teeth and other bones, as well as the resilience of the pottery to the intensity to the flames.

The Vicus did an excellent job of making a piece of experimental archaeology into a crowd drawing event. And talking to intrigued members of the public who stopped by later in the day, there was a lot of interest in the purpose of the experiment. Hopefully it have proved illuminating on the mode of deposition, and it has already seemed to have spurred an entire upcoming series of similar pyre events, testing different hypotheses.

Also, the Vicus put on a great show with their Britons and Romans military demo, its great to see those shields really crashing.

Presentation on 'Nudity and Roman public bathing'

2009-08-03T01:29:00.006+01:00

This is an embed of a presentation I gave a couple of months ago outlining some issues to do with nudity at the thermae and balnea of Roman society. A bit of the formatting / timings have been lost in the conversion to the Google Docs version unfortunately.

Abstract

With bathing a key feature of Roman social life and a trip to the baths a normal daily event, the issue of whether or not and where the Romans went nude takes on a clear significance. On the one hand it is important for a greater understanding of the social and symbolic expression of Romanitas, and on the other it enables us to repopulate the extinct ruins of Roman bathhouses, thereby developing our comprehension of ancient social realities and improving our (re)presentions of them. In a social context that equated public nudity with shame and depravity, and in which the term nudus had an ambiguous meaning, it is remarkable that nakedness and, moreover, mixed-sex bathing at the baths were both tolerated and expected. Specialised clothing was available but would likely have been localised to non-bathing and ancillary zones of the bath complexes. Roman bathhouses would have accommodated all stations of Roman life. As a point of contact for the multitude of Roman states of life, it was a location at which all nodes of the social graph would have had contact. Far from the admixture of classes precluding nudity due to loss of dignitas, nakedness and vertiginous social hierarchies coincided. Disrobing does not necessarily mean divesting oneself of dignity, and social standing could be expressed by other semiological means: conspicuous consumption, hangers-on, servile retinues, and the owning or commissioning of bathhouses would all mark status without the need for clothing. The mapping of social structure onto functionally defined architectural spaces developed a pragmatic need for somatic cleansing into an alternate moral mindscape. Consequently nudity became the de facto costume of Roman bathing culture.

Sherds and shadows

2009-07-22T14:37:00.029+01:00

Squint and you'll see me at the pottery stall.
photo (c)Amgueddfa CymruKids are all kinds of crazy awesome. And I never knew there were so many of them. Yesterday was spent for the most part helping them cut, stick and create shadow puppets, with an hour or so manning the pottery tables, trying to blag what little Mediaeval pottery knowledge I remembered from my small involvement with LEARN (humanities provision at which is currently, scandalously endangered). And turns out some of those blighters had an insatiable desire to know, and to be involved. And you can see that some of them really do engage with that notion of Reconnections, the theme of this year's festival. Today my voice has still been sore, worn out by the sheer enthusiasm of those youthful wards whose interests and knowledge often went beyond what you would expect (like the six-year-old telling me about Boudicca) and beyond what their own parents/guardians could understand (like the little boy and girl who spent an easy hour sorting misshapen lumps of pottery).

I wonder if these will form those formative experiences that imprint on the psyche, as the dinosaur exhibit of my youth, in that very same building, still haunts my imagination.

(in)voluntary absentmindedness

2009-07-21T02:13:00.005+01:00

Last night I had that very strange feeling you get when you realise that earlier that day you'd been happily chatting away to someone who not only do you know of but actually have a couple of their sitting books on the shelf.[1] Books with some outstanding public library fines.

The Festival of British Archaeology is in full swing, with a wet start to the festivities at the Celtic village for me on Sunday. The bell casting experiment did however prove to be a highlight. This years theme is Reconnections, with activities at all the major centres in South Wales, including the National Museum, St Fagans, Caerwent and Caerleon. The festival blog will be updated throughout. And if you look carefully you'll see a very gormless me standing there, after a hard day's work clearing out

---
[1] Brewer, R.J., 2000. Caerleon and the Roman Army 2nd ed., Llyfrau Amgueddfa Cymru/ National Museum Wales Books; Brewer, R.J., 1997. Caerwent Roman Town 2nd ed., Cadw Welsh Historic Monuments.

On the news of Alex Smith

2009-04-27T11:20:00.003+01:00

I've just learnt about the unfortunate and untimely passing of Alex Smith last Thursday. I didn't know her very well, but from talking to her it was obvious that she was a very nice person, and my condolences are with those lucky enough to have known her well. Alex was a promising young academic and her passing will touch many.

My conference

2009-04-07T13:14:00.003+01:00

Papers attended: 25
Free meals eaten: 9
Nights in hotel: 3
Flights: 2
Distance travelled: about 1,000 miles
Free mugs: 3
Cups of coffee drank: innumerable

Open Access to UK theses

2009-04-06T01:05:00.005+01:00

It would seem that in conversation earlier today I unfairly maligned the lack of easy and affordable provision of copies and database metadata of UK theses; getting back to my room I discover that the British Libraries EThOS project is now live, providing just that.

A definite step in the right direction towards Open Access in British academia.

via Blogographos, via History News Network.

Presidential address

2009-04-05T23:57:00.000+01:00

This year's CA presidential address was by Richard Seaford, who--while covering such diverse subjects as monetisation, the economy, Greek tragedy, semiology, the relationship between ritual(isation) and meaning, and global warming--gave a substantial and brilliant talk. At once witty and weighty, it gave much to think about.

Oh and it combined on one hand the deconstruction of social mythologies, a la Barthes, and classics/ancient history. So the perfect talk for a joint honours Ancient History and Cultural Criticism graduate. Like me. It's both refreshing and encouraging to see eminent scholars such as Seaford prepared and accomplished in such a way as to be able to combine these disciplines of thought.

Glasgow Classical Association Conference 2009

2009-04-04T17:30:00.013+01:00

Hotel and the ClydeSo. This is, I guess, the first bit of real, non-lorem ipsum content on this blog. I'll keep it simple and just make a few reflections on the first two days of the Classical Association / Classical Association of Scotland annual conference.

First thought: its all a bit overwhelming. Coming from the comparative bubble of taught higher education (I'm still only on my MA after all), it's a bit of a shock to be suddenly plunged into a the wider world of British (and international) classicism. Or rather a bit of cognitive dissonance. It's a whole wide world of academic networking and interpersonal skills; a number of fellow delegates have said outright that they come more to touch base and renew friendships than to listen to papers themselves.

Not that the sessions are to be sniffed at, as some of those I have seen have been thought provoking, or at least interesting. For me highlights of today have included Kate Hammond's talk on the political intent of Catullus, Micheal Beer on Roman sumptuary legislation, Janett Morgan on the sexuality of Herodotean barbarian women, Llewellyn-Jones on Alexander's concubines, and also Juan Pablo Lewis Jr's reassessment of slaves as talking talks. Janett's talk was a pleasure in particular as it followed the bulk of my undergraduate dissertation in topic, though adopting a different stance in agency.

So far the conference has been generally well organised, and as a full bursary student I certainly can't complain with the standard of the room, venue and food (all provided!). It's just a pity that Classics don't attract the same freebie giving businesses that frequent the conferences of other industries. That would please the freebooter in me.