The presence of hair on men’s bodies - chest, arms, legs, underarms, crotch, often on the back, etc. - is very common. Why is it, then, that in paintings and sculptures men are shown with hair only on their heads, face, and crotch but nowhere else? (Even if hair is shown in the nether-regions, there’s no treasure trail leading from the navel, which is just as common among men.)
WRS
Probably because many of the people in paintings and sculpture are idealized to some extent… and hairiness is considered less than ideal for whatever reason.
Alternatively, it’s technically hard to sculpt/paint hair without it just looking weird
Women are generally hairless, too (sculptures of, I mean). I agree with 1010011010.
Yeah, but you think you’d see it on, say, the Barberini Faun, or those Greek vases with the older, well-endowed men.
The difficulty of showing hair on statues I can understand: but what about paintings?
WRS
(a) It IS technically challenging to sculpt marble, mold clay, or cast bronze in such a way as to do a good job of depicting the overall body hair, w/o making it look like the subject has a major skin eruption.
(b) As 1010011010 said, it’s an idealized depiction of the body – and jut ask yourself: how many models these days are naturally hairy?
© Well, hair which does not completely obscure the underlying body might as well not be there at all: being able to see how the artist has interpreted the body proportions and the dynamics of movement is part of the art of depicting the body, and hair gets in the way just a little less than clothes. Think of how bodybuilders are hairless and oiled when competing: because they want you to see their definition clearly.
A lot of the more classical sculpture you see is just that – classical or influenced by classical scuplture. Classical sculpture grows out of the Greek tradition of kouros, which “is a statue of a standing nude youth that did not represent any one individual youth but the * idea* of youth.” (Getty Museum) Hair generally is associated with maturity, not youth.
Adolescents really aren’t old enough to get a good mat of hair going on his back or chest. I live on a co-ed floor, and it seems that a hairy guy in his late teens or early 20s is more the exception than the rule.
I think this and this is what JRDelirious means by “skin eruptions.” They’re beards, but still. Try rendering chest hair in marble.
As to the paintings, a lot of early paintings in western art were devotional paintings; that is, of saints and important figures in the early church. More emphasis was placed on capturing their saintly/virtuous qualities, rather than more hirsute/virile/sexual qualities, or even capturing a lifelike/accurate image. Also consider that in memorial art, such as Roman Egypt funeral portraiture, the emphasis was placed on capturing an accurate image of the face, not the body.
During the Renaissance, most paintings continued to be devotional, and the whole idea of youth and purity was still there. Commissioned portraits were generally of the artist’s patrons, and you really don’t want to piss off the guy who’s providing for your room and board by painting him as some hairy creature. Besides that, there really aren’t that many male nudes painted, and the majority of female nudes you see are from the waist up with the chemise open and breasts free. Most women don’t have noticeably hairy chests.
Later on, in the nineteenth century, there was this shame of body hair – it grows in “shameful” places, places that are “dirty”: groin, armpits, etc. It’s also associated with the start of adolescene and the beginning of sexual desire. (Hairy palms, anyone?) It’s interesting to note that Manet’s Olympia, which broke with the tradition of averted (i.e. shamed) eyes in nudes and odalisques, has no hair or nipples. Her breasts are perfectly smooth and white and there isn’t a hint of body hair. The increasingly stylized, informal painting styles seen in the latter half of the nineteenth and the early half of the twentieth century don’t call for the fine detail required for body hair.
It isn’t until the twentieth century that you begin to see brutal realism in portrayals of the human body, a sort of confessional style. Frida Kahlo is a good example of this.
Certainly not all classical Greek art is idealized youth. Take this full-grown adult, if you please (but not until I’m done with him!), or this red-figure kylix which features youths and older bearded men. The older men are shown with larger genitalia and beards; one might expect them to also have more body hair, but they don’t.
Ooh, good point. I was thinking of things like the tradition carried out in the Davids during the Renaissance, some of which do have limited body hair. I didn’t mean to imply that all Greek sculpture was nekkid young men.
I seem to recall reading that many wealthy Greeks and Romans would have their body hair shaved or plucked. one of Martial’s epigrams even lampoons the practice. When the rich people commissioned the paintings and sculptures, the artists catered to the rich people’s ideas of beauty.
And from the Renaissance to the mid-19th Century, most of the artists and their patrons aped the Classical ideas of beauty.
