Classical Cover-Ups
Concealing the bodies of ancient statues with censorship or fashion adds another layer to their complicated politics.
We are so accustomed to classical nudes in the West that they often blend into the wallpaper — until they are covered up, that is.
Earlier this year, the Italian government came under fire for concealing nude statues in the Capitoline Museums during a visit from Iranian president Hassan Rouhani, drawing accusations of cultural self-censoring. The art historian John Berger may have famously declared that “Nudity is a form of dress,” but viewed through the lens of Islamic theocracy, classical nudity is all too easily revised as a form of shameful nakedness.
This was not the first time, of course, that the pagan statues of Rome had been covered up in the name of religion. As the politics of the body shift in line with religious and political ideology, so does the extent to which it is concealed or revealed. Notably, it seems no need was perceived to conceal Christian iconography during Rouhani’s visit to Rome: on the contrary, “common spiritual values” were stressed between Iran and the Vatican.
Amidst outrage at the idea that Italy need feel ashamed of its classical heritage, however, it was the idea that such asymmetrical diplomacy was all in the name of commercial enterprise that proved most unpalatable. With contracts amounting to $18.4 billion on the line, Italian-Iranian relations could not be compromised by naked bodies — no matter how idealized.
Strikingly, the drive to cover up the antique for mercenary ends has interesting parallels with a recent scandal in the world of Italian fashion. In that case, however, the statues in question were not Roman but Greek:
Since December 2015, a series of “spontaneous” ads published by the fashion house Gucci has been causing a storm on Instagram, prompting charges of disrespect and humiliation from online commenters. The UNESCO Club of Piraeus and the Greek Islands even described the #GucciGrams as an act of ‘artistic vandalism’. Designed by German-Turkish digital artist Derya Çakırsoy at the invitation of Gucci’s creative director Alessandro Michele, the images take the form of animated GIFs, in which reconstructed figures from the Parthenon pediments sport accessories from Gucci’s new “Blooms” and “Caleido” lines.
Rather than observing the miraculous birth of the goddess Athena, Dionysus now takes a selfie while reclining in a silk scarf and boxer shorts; Cecrops the mythical king of Athens and his daughter Pandrosus wear Gucci’s signature 70’s shades, their designer bags, high-tops and cell phones casting them as flash reality stars rather than Attic legends. Instead of the “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” that 18th-century art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann saw in Classical Greek sculpture, Gucci has given us a branded, Kardashianesque Klassicism for the 21st-century.
Çakırsoy’s digital accessorizing of the Parthenon sculptures is most obviously inspired by the recent trend of dressing ancient statuary in modern clothing. In 2013, French artist Léo Callaird’s “Hipsters in Stone” project took the internet by storm, photoshopping plaid shirts, tight T-shirts and jeans onto classical sculptures in the Louvre.
Gucci’s adaptation of this meme comes as no surprise in an Italian fashion industry that has intensively recycled and reimagined its own cultural heritage in recent years, from Dolce & Gabbana’s use of Byzantine-style Sicilian mosaics in their Fall 2013 collection to the Roman influences threaded throughout Valentino’s Fall 2015 couture spectacular.
In “branding” the Parthenon pedimental figures, however, Gucci has waded into stormier waters. The Parthenon marbles displayed in the British Museum are already a sore topic for the Greeks, removed by Lord Elgin over two hundred years ago. The new Acropolis Museum features striking white plaster replicas to highlight the absence of the originals taken by Elgin. But the notorious 1801 firman that supposedly authorized Lord Elgin to remove them was issued by the Ottoman government then governing Greece, and the identity of Derya Çakırsoy (who currently resides in Istanbul) has not gone unnoticed by her Greek critics online. Her #GucciGram project stirs up old tensions between Greece and Turkey.
Gucci’s Italian identity has likewise awakened ancient resentments over the Roman conquest of Greece — their descendants once more charged with plundering Greek culture for their own, less cultured ends. The Romans, history tells us, were the archetypal tacky imitators.
The practice of dressing up statues copied from Greek models has a venerable tradition in Italy. The Roman “speaking statue” Pasquino, an ancient sculpture rediscovered during the Renaissance, was dressed as a mythological figure each year on the Feast of St. Mark (April 25), accompanied by Latin verses which inspired the tradition of the satirical “pasquinade.”
The Pasquino tradition, “Hipsters in Stone” and #GucciGrams could all be described as creative statue-hacks that reanimate history’s inert objects within the present, restoring color and life to statues that were themselves once brightly painted. Çakırsoy’s images, however, direct this playful irreverence towards more overtly commercial ends.
If the #GucciGram controversy exemplifies the ease with which contemporary digital media can replicate, manipulate, and reimagine our cultural symbols, it also draws on a longer history. In this particular case, a traditional disdain for “inauthentic” copying practices within the fine arts is tangled with thorny questions of cultural ownership, national identity, and commercial branding.
Fashion, of course, has always vaunted its cannibalistic relationship to the arts. The intense historicity of current Italian design could be understood as a serious attempt to engage with the country’s European heritage at a time when Europe’s very identity is being radically questioned. Nevertheless, while Greece’s political and economic status is so particularly precarious, it’s not difficult to understand why its citizens might resent the accessorizing of their lost and impoverished gods for the sake of selling luxury goods.
The question of who owns the classical — and why it matters — was also at the heart of responses to Rouhani’s visit to Rome. Italy’s readiness to conceal its antiquities in the name of diplomacy with Iran threatens the very cultural foundations on which European identity rests. It should come as no surprise that these issues are being fought out on the bodies of ancient statues: while embodying historical ideals that the West holds dear, their nudity and whiteness also constitute a blank space onto which very current anxieties — such as the gaudy excesses of capitalism or the growing influence of Islam — can be projected.
Verity Platt is an Associate Professor of Classics and History of Art at Cornell University, and a Public Voices Fellow of the OpEd Project.
