Introduction
One of the earliest accounts of statue love comes from Roman author Pliny the Elder , who described how the Venus of Knidos , sculpted by Praxiteles , aroused such desire that it fell victim to sexual assault.1 Roughly 1800 years later, in the late nineteenth century, Austrian sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing discussed sexual desire for statues in Psychopathia Sexualis (1886). These are just two examples indicating statuary’s widely mythologised and theorised power to provoke an erotic response from human interlocutors.2 The appeal of sculptural objects is not limited to the desire to have sex with statues, however, as sculpture has a far wider erotic appeal.3 Sculptural depictions, especially the naturalistic, free-standing and three-dimensional statuary art often associated with the classical world and the Renaissance , have persistently raised questions about the ideal form of the human body. The material presence and perceived immediacy of sculpture, appealing to sight as much as touch , as noted by fourteenth-century scholar and poet Petrarch and eighteenth-century art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann ,4 have also drawn heightened attention to the physical and sensual dimensions of the encounter with sculpture . At times, this has led to anxieties about the “improper” reception of sculpture, but such debates have also opened up new articulations of diverse sexualities, including same-sex and opposite-sex desires. This erotic appeal of sculpture has resulted in long-lasting discussions about the propriety and acceptability of creating and displaying partially clothed or nude sculpted bodies in public or semi-public spaces, such as museums or art galleries.
While the erotic and sexual dimensions of the engagement with sculpture have been noted widely in existing scholarship, this volume examines sculptural erotics in relation to the medium’s temporal qualities, especially with regard to the past and history.5 Much attention has been given to Winckelmann’s famous response to the Apollo Belvedere , an ancient Roman copy of a Greek statue, found in Italy in the fifteenth century, in which he felt himself “transported to Delos and to the Lycian groves, places Apollo honoured with his presence”.6 The medium of sculpture connotes durability and permanence, which is why it is often used for purposes of memorialisation. Statuary conveys the sense that it has outlived and will continue to outlast the observer in the present. This feeling is only heightened if a specific sculpture is historical, originating in a moment in time that is far removed from the present. While representing the past, sculpture is also materially present, sharing the here and now of the human individual. As such, the encounter with sculpture is characterised by a tension between the object’s contemporaneousness and its pastness: the tangible existence of the material object and the distance of time it seems to represent.7 This complex temporality means that sculpture holds out the promise of offering access to the past while also making the viewer aware of the fact that the past is inaccessible and ultimately out of reach. It is for this reason that sculpture has continuously inspired thinking about the experience of the past and the engagement with history. In modernity, statuary has been central to the reception and re-appropriation of the ancient past, for instance, via eighteenth-century Neoclassicism or the Victorian plaster cast copying industry.8 The collecting and appreciation of diverse sculptural objects, including classical statues but also modern Italian phallic wax votives or African masks , also fed into the modern fascination with allegedly primitive cultures.9
This volume is the first to consider in tandem the erotic and temporal dimensions of statuary, going well beyond Winckelmann’s widely discussed engagement with ancient sculpture.10 In so doing, it intervenes in three broad areas of study. First, it opens up a new understanding of how aesthetic appreciations and experiences of sculpture have been shaped by related concerns about sexuality and the past. This speaks to art historical scholarship by demonstrating that the engagement with sculptural objects cannot be teased apart from the medium’s erotic potential or its temporal qualities.11 Second, the volume as a whole reveals the central role sculpture has played in articulating understandings of sexuality and gender in relation to the past.12 Indeed, the visceral and sensory appeal of sculpture foregrounds the embodied and erotic dimensions of such processes of knowledge production. Sculpture highlights that sexual knowledge is not the outcome of intellectual endeavours alone, but involves a complex negotiation of intellectual, physical, sensual and erotic factors. In exploring these questions, the book intervenes in existing scholarship across a wide range of disciplines and fields concerned with the articulation and production of knowledge about sex, gender and sexuality, including the history of sexuality, literary and cultural studies, and gender studies and queer theory, to name but a few. Finally, through its focus on sculpture and the erotic dimensions of its reception, this book offers an opportunity to investigate how explorations of the past and accounts of history are themselves gendered and eroticised.13 In opening up these questions, the book contributes to existing scholarship in reception studies, historiography and other fields concerned with the construction of knowledge about the past.
To explore these broader concerns raised by the entanglements of statuary, temporality and sexuality, Sculpture, Sexuality and History: Encounters in Literature, Culture and the Arts brings together a group of contributors from a wide range of disciplines and fields, including art history , classics, film studies, literary studies, museum studies, reception studies and queer theory. Challenging the assumption that sculptural art falls within the remit of art historians and reception studies scholars alone, the volume opens up dialogue between these and other disciplines and fields. The disciplinary breadth allows the volume to explore encounters with statuary in relation to different cultural contexts and debates, including antiquarianism , collecting cultures, censorship and museum spaces, and across different genres and media, such as literary writing, painting , film and science . The fact that sculpture has resonated so powerfully with diverse writers, thinkers and artists demonstrates that sculptures, as real objects made of bronze , marble or wax and as imagined objects found in literature and the visual arts , have offered a rich array of possibilities for engaging with the human body, desire and the past, which this volume begins to explore.
The chapters collected in this book focus on the period from the eighteenth century to the present and mainly explore sculptural encounters in Western European and Norther...