As I write this review, headlines are filled with heated reactions to the resignation of a Florida charter school principal over the showing of Michelangelo's David without prior content warning. These outcries demonstrate the perennial power of the nude figure and the complicated, changing social constructions of nudity. Perhaps no culture is more associated with the celebration of the male nude than the ancient Greeks, and the scholarship devoted to this topic is vast. One might indeed wonder what more can be said. In the book under review, however, M. not only identifies a lacuna in existing scholarship, but also presents refreshing conclusions by focusing on a period for which this imagery has surprisingly only been cursorily treated.
The introduction articulates why the origins of the cultural practice of male nudity and its close association with athletic competition have been poorly understood: a reliance on Homer has impeded serious inquiry into earlier evidence. M. pinpoints the earliest consistent tradition of the nude male in a series of Early Iron Age (EIA) bronze figurines, which form the focus of her inquiry. She provides a critical review of past approaches to the material and literary evidence before laying out her ‘process-oriented’ approach, focused on the figurines’ context of creation as much as their formal qualities. Her presentation of the figurines (Chapter 2, App. B), contextualised within other visual traditions, locates the source of the type, ritual practice and technology in Crete at the end of the Bronze Age. Chapter 3 reviews their iconographic and regional patterns, highlighting the figurines' extreme stylistic and typological heterogeneity and their circumscribed dedication at rural, open-air sanctuaries, often in dramatic settings, in Crete and western Greece. The majority come from three sites: Syme Viannou, Olympia and Delphi. M. reconstructs two competing ideologies: a Cretan/south-western and central mainland tradition linking male nudity with ritual activity and an eastern association of nudity with weakness and death. She reconstructs a ritual landscape in which bronze figurines were made and dedicated, animals were sacrificed and boys endured initiation rituals that involved nudity, physical feats and perhaps homoerotic relationships.
In Chapter 4 M. reconstructs the figurine chaîne opératoire as a multi-step process requiring different technological skills and materials and considerable human labour that belie the deceptive simplicity of the final product. She argues that the complex manufacturing process compared with often flawed figurines suggests that their social value was in the making, not in the finished objects, and that different people with different skill levels were involved (boy initiates as artists and smiths as casters). She concludes that the ‘performance of technology’ was the primary goal, not a refined product.
Going beyond economic models focused on elite competition, markets and state formation processes that view metallurgy as a peripheral activity in sanctuaries, Chapter 5 explores these spaces as centres of metalworking, with foundries located in the sacred core and smiths working not as itinerant economic opportunists, but instead as multi-skilled specialists who accrued social capital through their religious role as ‘priest-smiths’. A reconstruction that could be further supported by noting that among the earliest genre scenes in EIA art are three figurines depicting smiths, suggestive of their privileged position and cultic role (S. Langdon, ‘Art, Religion, and Society in the Greek Geometric Period’ [Diss., Indiana University, 1984], pp. 282–3). M. supports her model with comparative evidence from the eastern Mediterranean as well as with pre-industrial ethnographic examples, where bronzeworkers held important political and religious roles (even kingship). The sensory qualities of metallurgical work, which in a ritual setting would have been awe-inspiring, further corroborates the importance of the act of creating figurines. This compelling argument could be strengthened by engaging with the scholarship on sensory archaeology (e.g. Y. Hamilakis, Archaeology and the Senses: Human Experience, Memory, and Affect [2013], R. Skeates and J. Day [edd.], The Routledge Handbook of Sensory Archaeology [2020]). M. reconstructs these remote sanctuaries as places of transformation by fire: wax and molten metal into solid figurines, boys into men, and living animals into smoke and meat.
Errors in the volume are few. For a study reliant on close visual analysis, it is unfortunate that many of the figures are black-and-white photographs of dark bronzes against black backgrounds when white backgrounds would make them more legible. The catalogue (App. B) as the main source of data is sparse; it would have been helpful, given the diversity of this corpus, to provide brief descriptions of each figurine (including the presence of sprues, bases), dimensions and catalogue numbers referenced in the text and captions.
Although M.'s astute exploration of the manufacturing process leads to compelling interpretations, she perhaps underestimates the impact of the final product by emphasising the figures’ underwhelming aesthetic appearance and size, seeing them as by-products of ritual action whose value lies only in the transformational process of creation (p. 203). Aesthetic value, however, is culturally determined, and we do not know what EIA people deemed visually significant. Although J. Porter's The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece: Matter, Sensation, and Experience (2010) deals with historic Greek thought, he underscores a different aesthetic approach. While M. is certainly correct in differentiating the figurines from the more impressive bronze tripods, rather than exploring different types of viewing and consumption for figurines, she dismisses any aesthetic value, even arguing that they ‘appear instead to have been cast more or less directly into the waste from the animal sacrifices that accompanied the rituals for which they were produced’ (pp. 182–3). These black layers, however, are not primary depositional contexts, and the presence of bases or sprues for insertion into a base on some figurines suggests that some were displayed; there is also later evidence that figurines were hung from trees. It is possible that the figurines were valued exactly for their imperfections and miniature size as visual mementos of their ritual creation. Miniaturisation theory and scholarship on the appeal of the unfinished (e.g. S.R. Martin and S.M. Langin-Hooper [edd.], The Tiny and the Fragmented: Miniature, Broken, or Otherwise Incomplete Objects in the Ancient World [2018]) provide alternative ways of understanding the value of these imperfect objects.
M.'s attention to differences in regional representations, craft traditions and the broader visual language is commendable, but she does not return to compare her interpretations of the bronze nude figurines with other bronze figurines from the same sites and deposits. For example, do other figurine types share the same degree of flaws/unfinished qualities and, if so, could they also have been made by initiates? How do the more uniform qualities of other types impact our understanding of workshop operations? How should we interpret the bovine and animal figurines, the terracotta nude males (some even with the same poses) or a bronze nude female found in the same deposits?
None of these points take away from this highly original contribution to the growing body of EIA scholarship. M.'s adamant rejection of seeing the value of this period relationally through the lens of continuities and discontinuities is impressive and adds to its ‘unflattening’ (Chapter 6). She has decidedly reversed the pernicious approach of starting from texts or from earlier/later periods and instead has boldly demonstrated how her new conclusions should be used to re-evaluate existing understandings of male nudity, athletics and metallurgy in later periods and how archaeological material can even elucidate texts. She states that ‘the EIA in the Aegean need not only interest us because it bridged an imaginary gap between two ages, which are an entirely modern invention, or because it was an incubation chamber for the later Greek achievements, which we value for reasons that are ultimately more about modern than ancient societies. It constituted a rich, lively social, political, economic, and ritual environment with immense regional diversity in culture that can sustain much interest in its own right’ (p. 47). This work indeed is a fascinating read, bringing to life a dynamic world that looks nothing like what came before or after. M.'s thorough and creative analysis of the nude male complicates any simplistic, unified, linear views of nudity and explodes earlier theories on the origins of this practice. Her approach demonstrates the rich, even if at times hypothetical, conclusions possible from robust attention to the ‘scarce and gappy’ (p. 135) EIA material record.
