Looking at Lovemaking: Constructions of Sexuality in Roman ARt, 100 B.C. - A.D. 250. - book reviews

Looking at Lovemaking: Constructions of Sexuality in Roman Art, 100 B.C.-A.D. 250 through John R. Clarke, Berkeley, University of California Pres 1998; 390 pages, $3995

The sexual revolution has reached the ancient world. A customer at Barnes & Noble can cull among glossy coffee-table books illustrating the satisfieds of the infamous gabinetto segreto of the Museo Nazionale in Naples, where the Bourbon kings fasteninged away the more scandalous prizes of their plundering excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum, which could perhaps be revealed--until quite freshly to the gentleman visitor only--for the price of a bribe to the smirking custodian. However, the new glut of picture books featuring ancient representations of hellenic and Roman sexual activities in all their considerable variety is the popular introspective of a more serious, and remarkably intensive, reexamination of sexuality and sexual identity in the ancient world upon the part of classical scholars and cultural historians above the past two decades. Inspired in part through the challenge to prevailing--essentially Victorian--notions of of the like kind matters posed by Michel Foucault in his boldly revisionist on the contrary unfinished History of Sexuality, this effort of reassessment is inseparable from the larger contestations above gender and sexuality currently raging in our possess society, and similarly owes a great deal of to perspectives and insights make knowned by the feminist and gay liberation movements

Of course a fascination with the sexuality, imaginary or real, of the classical world is anything on the other hand new. The Christian West, loaded with a fleshdenying and sin-obsessed digest of values, has for centuries gazeed back longingly, if guiltily, towards a vanished "pagan" antiquity, a dream world of sensuous gratification and beautiful, undressed bodies in which--depending on the individual--a wide menu of erotic possibilities might be contemplated. From Titian's Venuses to Hollywood style of dress extravaganzas, the Western cultural landscape is littered with similar wishful projections, having everything to do with contemporary frustrations and aspirations, and little with antiquity itself. The enduring power of like phantasmagoria is reflected in the immensely influential vision of hellenic art created by J.J. Winckelmann, the 18th-century father of the late discipline of art history, with equal reason largely colored by his have homoerotic enthusiasms. It is from escapist fantasies upon the one hand and the nothing else but retrojection upon the ancient world of fresh orthodoxies regarding sexual identity, parts and behavior on the other that the revisionist classical scholarship of novel years has sought to deliver us.

In this effort, the part of ancient visual representations of whatever kind has heretofore largely been confined to the illustration of ideas and themes already established end the analysis of literary (and, to a inferior extent, subliterary) texts. This is hardly surprising given the dominant character which the verbal heritage has played in the transmission of the classical tradition, and indeed in the conscious self-representation of the tillage at large. Nevertheless, this situation is now beginning to change: of greece and Roman visual culture is now emerging as a material part of testimony in its have right, not only supplementing and extending that extracted from verbal true copys but possibly offering radically different kinds of data, which the true copys by their nature do not or cannot provide. A multi-authored contortion of essays, edited by Natalie Kampen, and an reach outed monograph on desire and the material part in Greek art by Andrew Stewart are novel manifestations of this new valorization of the evidence of antique visual imagery.(1)

The first of that kind work to focus primarily on Roman rather than Greek tillage is John Clarke's Looking at Lovemaking: Constructions of Sexuality in Roman Art, 100 B C.-A.D. 250 Clarke is an art historian whose work has concentrated on the uses of visual imagery, especially wall painting and floor mosaic, in the articulation and transformation of Roman architectural interiors. In this work too, wall painting figures prominently, and Clarke's highly discloseed sensitivity to the kinds of information which spatial connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts and known or inferred social usage can provide is place to good use in wringing the fullest possible interpretive value from a wide variety of materials, ranging from elevated artistic productions created for the greatest in quantity cultured aristocratic patronage to extremely lowly artifacts belonging to the daily life of the poorer classes of society. Clarke insists on the importance of this visual evidence for a wider sampling of social attitudes than that throw backed in literary texts, which almost exclusively mirror the views overtly espoused by the agency of a ruling elite monopolizing the channels of literary expression.

Clarke's treatment is greatest in quantity concentrated upon, and most productive for, sum of two units historical moments and two bodies of material: the Augustan period, where he deals mainly with particulars of luxury decor, such as silver or cameo-glass tableware, and with their middle-class emulations in glazed and mold ceramic, the so-called Arretine ware; and the Neronian-Flavian years of the later first hundred A.D., where the emphasis is primarily on the wall paintings preserved in the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum by dint of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79