Ancient Greeks invented wet T-shirt competitions

20 January 2015 - 02:00 By Harry Mount, ©The Sunday Telegraph
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"Adonis Mazarin Louvre
"Adonis Mazarin Louvre
Image: Wikimedia Commons

From Bondi Beach to Santa Monica, gym bunnies are in search of a six-pack worthy of Adonis, the Greek god of beauty.

It's no coincidence that we still think of ancient Greece as the natural home to the perfect body, alongside Doric columns and democracy.

The Greeks weren't just obsessed with athleticism - as founders of the Olympics - they also revered the naked body in a way no previous civilisation had.

Greeks didn't actually fight naked in battle, neither did they stroll down Athens High Street in the nude. But the idealised human form, the uniform of righteousness and heroism, was the naked one.

It wasn't just men who were depicted in the buff but gods too. The Greeks would have been amazed by the Charlie Hebdo tragedy, and the row over depicting religious figures, fully clothed or otherwise.

Zeus, Apollo and Poseidon were regularly carved as nudes. The Greeks were more circumspect about naked women: Aphrodite was the only one sculpted naked.

Fifth-century Athens produced a strange, unprecedented combination of artistic freedom and rigid artistic rules. Strict ratios governed the relationship between the height of columns, their width and the gap between them. On statues, the length of the torso was in precise proportion to the length of the line running at right angles to it, from nipple to nipple.

The extraordinary thing was that you were allowed to see the nipples at all. The art historian Kenneth Clark said the nude "is an art form invented by the Greeks . just as opera is an art form invented in 17th-century Italy".

How much were stone nudes supposed to titillate?

It's hard not to see a sexual element in some sculptures, such as the Nereids from a 390BC Turkish monument. These sea nymphs, now in the British Museum, appear to be sprinting into a headlong gale, thin gowns plastered against their chests by the wind and rain - the first wet T-shirt competition. The earliest known representation of a mythical figure is a 7cm tall, mid-eighth century BC statue of a naked Ajax.

Ajax, the strongest Greek, is depressed at losing Achilles's armour to Odysseus, after the wily Odysseus is more eloquent in staking his claim to it. And so he falls on his sword - a rather delicate operation since he is in a state of, erm, extreme excitement.

For decades supposedly obscene treasures such as little Ajax were stuffed away in the British Museum's "Secretum" - the name of the ultra-secret Cupboard 55.

Only in the 1960s was it opened up; only half a century ago that the modern West caught up with the Greeks' avant-garde approach to naked beauty.

In March, Defining Beauty: The Body in Ancient Greek Art opens at the British Museum - and all those items will truly be out of the cupboard.

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