The hellenization of Ishtar: Nudity, fetishism, and the production of cultural differentiation in ancient art

Oxford Art Journal

Volumn 19, Issue 2, 1996, Pages 3-16

  Bahrani, Zainab ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 63849286483     PISSN: 01426540     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/oxartj/19.2.3     Document Type: Review

References (49)

1. W. R. Paton, The Greek Anthology (New York and London, 1916), book 16.162
2. The equation of the nude female with high art has been made by a variety of writers. See most recently Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (London, 1992), p. 1
3. Most recently this view was expressed by L. Bonfante, 'Nudity as Costume in Classical Art', American Journal of Archaeology, vol. 93, 1989, pp. 543-57 (henceforth: Bonfante)
4. L. Bonfante, 'Introduction' in Source, vol. 12, no. 2, 1993, pp. 7-11
5. A. Stewart, Greek Sculpture: An Exploration (New Haven, 1990), pp. 105-6 (henceforth: Stewart)
6. General Art History text books also make this emphasis. See H. Gardener, Art through the Ages, 9th edn. (New York), 1991, p. 135
7. and contemporary investigations of the nude in the history of art usually assume that this is common knowledge, see for example, Gill Saunders, The Nude. A New Perspective (London, 1989), p. 9
8. also M. Perniola, 'Between Clothing and Nudity', in M. Feher et al. (eds), Zone: Fragments for a History of the Human Body, part 2 (New York, 1989), pp. 237-65
9. See, for example, Sir John Boardman's Greek Sculpture. The Archaic Period (New York and London, 1978), p. 66, where he states outright: 'We shall better appreciate the quality of their achievement when it is measured against the record of sculpture in the Near East and Egypt.'
10. See, for example, Kobena Mercer, 'Reading Racial Fetishism: The Photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe', in E. Apter and W. Pietz, Fetishism as Cultural Discourse (Ithaca, 1993), pp. 307-29
11. and, for the concept of reading racial stereotype in terms of fetishism, see H. K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, 1994), pp. 66-84
12. K. Clark, The Nude. A Study in Ideal Form (Washington DC, 1956), p. 4
13. E. H. Gombrich, The Image and the Eye (London, 1982), p. 27
14. J.J. Wincklemann in The History of Ancient Art written in 1764; see the English translation by G. Henry Lodge for James R. Osgood and Co. (Boston, 1872), vol. 1, pp. 312-13
15. For the use of these bi-polarities for the constitution of the Greek self see P. Du Bois, Centaurs and Amazons (Ann Arbor, 1982)
16. John Boardman discussing why Greek Kouroi do not follow the Egyptian canon of proportions in Greek Sculpture (London, 1978), p. 20
17. This situation was quite different from the contemporary Near East, where nude males appeared only in narrative scenes, in an act that may require nudity whether for positive reasons (e.g. priests in ritual scenes), negative reasons (e.g. prisoners of war who have been stripped), or neutral reasons (e.g. wrestlers and swimmers). In Mesopotamia, for example, unclothed men appear as gods, priests, warriors, wrestlers, prisoners, heroes, swimmers, and in the act of copulation, but never as a frontal representation without a narrative context. See Z. Bahrani, 'The Iconography of the Nude in Mesopotamia', Source, vol. 12, no. 2, 1993, pp. 12-19
18. W. Neumer-Pfau, Studien zur Ikonographie und gesellschaftlichen Funktion hellenistischer Aphrodite-Statuen (Bonn, 1982), p. 56
19. S. Pomeroy, Women in Hellenistic Egypt from Alexander to Cleopatra (Detroit, 1990), p. 32
20. Catherine Johns, Sex or Symbol: Erotic Images of Greece and Rome (London, 1982), p. 72
21. S. Freud, 'Fetishism', The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 21, ed. J. Strachey (London, 1927), pp. 147-57
22. G. Pollock, Vision and Difference (London, 1988), p. 153
23. H. King in A. Cameron and A. Kuhrt, Images of Women in Antiquity (London, 1983), pp. 109-25
24. see also A. Carson, 'Putting Her in Her Place: Women, Dirt, and Desire', in D. Halperin et al. (eds), Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in Ancient Greece (Princeton, 1990), pp. 133-69
25. R. Padel, 'Women: Model for Possession by Greek Demons', in Cameron and Kuhrt, Images of Women in Antiquity, pp. 3-17
26. M. Golden, 'Male Chauvinists and Pigs', Echos du Monde Classique, vol. 32, n.s. 7,1, 1988, pp. 1-12
27. S. Pomeroy, 1990, p. 80; L. Dean-Jones, 'The Cultural Construct of the Female Body', in S. Pomeroy (ed.), Women's History and Ancient History (Chapel Hill, 1991), pp. 111-37; Golden, 1988
28. E. Grosz, Jacques Lacan, p. 136
29. J. Lacan, Écrits, trans. A. Sheridan (New York, 1977), pp. 292-325
30. B. Foster, Before the Muses (CDL Press, Bethesda, 1993), p. 65. I am grateful to Benjamin R. Foster for permission to quote his translations
31. Plutarch, Virtues of Women, 9.248b and 5.246a
32. See Julian Reade, Mesopotamia (London, 1991), fig. 20
33. For example, Reade, fig. 16
34. I discuss the iconography of Ishtar in a forthcoming article, 'Ishtar: Truly all Woman and of Infinite Variety', in NIN: Gender Studies in the Ancient Near East
35. For an example of such a statement: A. Invernizzi, 'Problemi di coroplastica tardo-Mesopotamica', Mesopotamia, vol. 5/6, 1970/71, pp. 325-89, especially pp. 342ff
36. Urs Winter, Frau and Göttin (Göttingen, 1983), fig. 360
37. Among them: J. N. Coldstream, Geometric Greece (London, 1977), pp. 130-2
38. M. Robertson, A History of Greek Art (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 44, 58-9; Bonfante, p. 562
39. John Boardman, Pre-Classical: from Crete to Archaic Greece (Harmondsworth, 1978), p. 81; fig. 43. Boardman states here: 'The eastern figures are plump and rather gross to our eye, parading their sexual prowess.'
40. C. Walker-Bynum, 'The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages. A Reply to Leo Steinberg', in Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York, 1991), pp. 79-117
41. Jerrold Cooper, paper delivered at the Thorkild Jacobsen Memorial Symposium, The British Museum, London, 6 April 1994
42. See, for example, T. Jacobsen, The Harps that Once ... (New Haven, 1987), pp. 171ff.; Foster, pp. 496-7
43. Jacobsen, p. 157, no. 10; H. Holma, Namen der Körperteile in Assyrisch-Babylonischen (Leipzig, 1911), pp. 95-110
44. S. Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia (Oxford, 1989), pp. 54-5
45. See, for example, Winter, fig. 149
46. A. K. Grayson, Assyrian Rulers of the Early First Millennium B.C. The Royal Inscriptions of Assyria, vol. 2 (Toronto, 1991), 108: A.O.89.9. The word that Grayson translates as titillation is Akkadian siahu which might better be translated as erotic allure as it has definite sexual associations. See the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, vol. 16 (Chicago, 1962), pp. 64-5
47. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, quoted by M. Colledge in Parthian Art (Ithaca, 1977), p. 137
48. A. Invernizzi et al., The Land Between Two Rivers (Torino, 1985), no. 155 and 158 are two examples of this phenomenon
49. A. Caubet and M. Bernus-Taylor, The Louvre: Near Eastern Antiquities (Paris, 1991), pl. 33, AO 20127