Visual Arts & Political Powers: Rethinking Nudity
The nature of visual arts, crucial in shaping and depicting the world we live in, overlaps through levels across national boundaries between the physical and the psychological worlds. They operate in a way distinct of linguistics/philology, possessing ambiguous non-verbal qualities infused with abstract emotions.
Throughout the history of modern man, this nature of visual arts has allowed it to offer good illustration of politics and society. Sufficient concise analysis of the intertextual indeterminacy would emerge through a look into the historical development of the beau idéal, the transcendent beauty of the nudes, located in the interstices of philosophical, aesthetic (or poetic), and political discourses which we would further limit to the historical west, aligned with defining moments in the history of political sciences.
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The peculiar (by contemporary standards) practice of nude or partially nude honorific statues of living nobles or statesmen developed during the time of Aristotle (384–322 BC) which has been considered to be the true founder of political science when he introduced empirical observation into the subject. A practice we will dissect by examining the ambivalence of the cultural mix between Late Republican Rome and the Augustan Period.
Take for example the statue of a Roman General from Tivoli made by a Greek sculptor. Portrayed in heroic semi-nudity, it is quite striking in view of literary sources which record a Roman attitude against public nudity as it would have been associated with the potential decline in Roman martial valour, and yet this type of portrayal of ruling figures was a common one. On one level, the statue evokes the long tradition of Greek nude statues depicting deities but these were not the point. The reference is not to life it is to Greek modes of representation and the evolving ideas behind them. Emphasising how the nudity of a statue is obviously different from that of a living man.
This sculpture, as the portraits of its time were an eclectic mix of Greek idealised body and Roman veristic facial features, its severe lines, blemishes, and wrinkles served as an expression of the resolute devotion Roman aristocrats possessed for the mos maiorum, the rigours of public service, and the solidarity of the ruling class.
Augustan nude art lacked specificity, there was an absence of narrative propagandist content, done empirically according to the teachings of Aristotle to allow as many possible interpretations as they could, even contradictory ones, before being guided to the generally approved direction by a clear overall meaning, it presented Augustus as a Roman auctor (a leader exercising moral influence) rather than a modern dictator, intentionally degrading and elevating him and his contemporaries to allow the public a quasi sense of power.
It would only be befitting to acknowledge next the first modern political scientist, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), who ranks alongside Aristotle as one of the founders of political science. His infamous work The Prince (1531), a treatise originally dedicated to Florence’s ruler, Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici, presented amoral advice to actual and would-be princes on the best means of acquiring and holding on to political power, completing the secularisation of politics as begun by Marsilius.
It is through his letter exchanged with Biagio Buonaccorsi that we can affirm his acquaintances with Renaissance Genius Michelangelo Buonarroti. In fact, Michelangelo’s masterpiece, the David, had such an impact on his thoughts and religious founding that he made one definite but oblique reference of him in the Discourses on Livy, prompting princes to learn from how the sculptor was able to transform coarse marble into the gem.
Michelangelo’s David as a nude, had attained a unique status as a symbol of the defiant spirit of human freedom and independence in the face of extreme adversity. This emblematic preeminence of the David is due largely to Michelangelo’s having incorporated in a single revolutionary image two quintessential constituents of the idea of liberty: one creative (therefore personal) and the other political (therefore communal). It is the superiority of his purely intellectual and technical prowess and an attempt by the republican government to claim David as its own hero.
The commission for the David came during a crucial period in the history of the Florentine Republic that had been installed after the Medici were ousted. Any Florentine at its time would have immediately recognised Michelangelo’s allusion to the Petrarchan broken laurel as a reference to Lorenzo the Magnificent. It was a lament to Lorenzo’s premature death in 1492, which deprived the artist of a great friend and early patron, and yet the commission came from Piero Soderini, the city’s anti-Medicean governor.
Michelangelo’s David is distinguished by its unprecedented isolation of the moment before the epic battle with the Philistine, diverting over the traditional depiction of a triumphant David over the decapitated giant, meant to show subversion from the Medicean Tyranny, even its placement in front of the Signoria facing Rome where the Medici had gone for exile deems to be a warning. Its nudity, in contrast to how active political figures were portrayed in antiquity, emphasises the combination of Christian and pagan elements in the statue, alluding to how David rejected Saul’s armour.
However upon the return of the Medici with greater power, under Duke Cosimo I, the giant was repurposed once more to allude to the Medici greatness, it was the beginning of how political entities utilised works of art as weapons of statecraft, and the Medici court transmitted this form of political art-propaganda, for better or worse, into the blood-stream of European culture.
The next defining moment came with the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) who was a radical. Rousseau’s The Social Contract (1762) constructs a civil society in which the separate wills of individuals are combined to govern as the “general will” (volonté générale) of the collective that overrides individual wills, “forcing a man to be free.” Rousseau’s radical vision was embraced by French revolutionaries and later by totalitarians, who distorted many of his philosophical lessons. Paired with Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, His visions were later translated by the many Baroque and Neoclassicism artists.
One of which stood out is “Brutus Returning Home after Having Sentenced His Sons for Plotting a Tarquinian Restoration and Conspiring against Roman Freedom; the Lictors Brint their Bodies to be Buried.” by Jacques-Louis David. In which we see a scene where after having led the fight which overthrew the monarchy and established the Roman Republic, Brutus tragically saw his own sons participate in a plot to restore the monarchy. As a judge, he was called upon to render the verdict, and unhesitatingly condemned his own boys to death.
In 1789, it was highly controversial for David to bring up such a subject, it reveals how deeply committed the artist was to the new ideas and enlightenment principals. Indeed, had the revolution not occurred, this picture would doubtlessly could never have been exhibited publicly. But in the exciting days following the fall of the bastille, David’s picture was seen as a republican manifesto, and influenced his reputation for the better.
The nude figure in this painting, seen as the dead body of his son with all of its impact has influenced a dynamic relation between politics, philosophy and aesthetic debates, summarising the relationship between nudity, politics and art. Paul Ricoeur stated the fundamentality of imagination, implying that what we understand as the autonomously aesthetic is something that is made possible by the work of the imagination. The work of the imagination also acts as the condition of possibility of what we’ve come to understand under “aesthetic heteronomy”, meaning that the potential for the politically transformative or the liberating elements of art become recognisable because the political realm itself contains something “imaginary”.
The autonomy of the artwork can be understood, in the context of the nudes, as a product of the imagination’s aesthetic labour and, therefore, as a condition of possibility for engagement. The political artwork is still an artwork and not an election poster or a party manifesto. What the autonomous political artwork allows us to do instead is to imagine and to re-imagine a possible socio-political “world” via the double movement of reference of which the imagination is capable. Art is a specific, fragile mediation that is expressive of and, at the same time, constitutes “human freedom”.
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