If stabilised masculinities depend for their survival on a limited range of conventional types transmitted and maintained through various forms of cultural production, then sculpture, being historically one of the most physically enduring, publicly viewed and icongraphically significant art forms, plays a vital role in constructing, reflecting and at times undermining dominant gender ideologies, especially as they are written on the body. Because of its priveleged position in Western aesthetics, the sculpted male body in particular has been essential in shaping our perception of what it means for a male body to be properly ‘masculine’. Sculpture is doubly influential on visualised masculinities when considering its role in monuments and memorials, those essential landmarks of urban space that often employ idealised male bodies to commemorate soldiers, athletes, civic leaders, politicians and other hero- or god-like figures.
For the Western tradition, classical Greek sculpture marks a key development in the theoretical and cultural relationship between sculpture and the male body. Until the fifth century BCE, Egyptian sculpture provided the prototypical model: males were depicted with linear, striding postures, clenched fists and vshaped torsos, common types in both Egyptian tomb sculpture and archaic Greek kouroi (commemorative sculptures celebrating the dead). Classical Greek sculptors, believing the youthful male body epitomised aesthetic beauty, still idealised the male form, but created more naturalistic and detailed figures. This model is exemplified by Polykleitos’s Doryphoros or ‘Spear-Bearer’ (c. fifth century BCE), the Apollo Belvedere (c. fourth century BCE), and the fragmented Belvedere Torso (c. first century BCE), all youthful, muscular depictions wrought according to canons observing harmony, proportion and balance.
Though the Greek influence has proven significant, its influence has not been uniform. Within the Italian Renaissance, a period that produced Michelangelo’s marble David (1504), which continues to represent the apotheosis of neo-classical heroic masculinity, there also springs Michelangelo’s sensuous, rounded Bacchus (1499) and Donatello’s adolescent, nearly androgynous David (1432), both of which depict highly eroticised and feminised male bodies. But it isn’t until the nineteenth century that the classically formulated male body is seriously threatened. Auguste Rodin, for example, continues to depict male bodies, but a statue like The Age of Bronze (1876), and his fragmented bodies like Walking Man (1878) portray realistic, less heroic male forms. The New Sculpture movement in Britain, represented by Frederic Leighton’s Athlete Wrestling with a Python (1877), enthusiastically embraced the heroic male nude, but James Havard Thomas’s Lyddas (1905), a product of the same movement, depicts a tall, lanky male whose shrugging pose suggests a helplessness reflective of the modern condition.
Twentieth-century sculptural depictions of the male body continue within the tradition, but two important developments challenge it in unprecedented ways: the machine aesthetic and the objectification of the sculpted body. Douglas Tilden’s Mechanics Fountain, a prominent public monument to industrialised labour in San Francisco, California, depicts an optimistic balance between man—represented by nude males draped over a giant punch press—and the machines they operate. Umberto Boccioni’s Futurist Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) is a proto-cyborg whose formidable, flame-like limbs transform flesh into pure metal, an embodiment of the Futurist paradigm that celebrates the machine’s potential for fashioning new supermen. Yet these more Utopian fusions of man and machine are contrasted by Constantin Brancusi’s Male Torso (1917). While Brancusi’s sculpture, consisting of smooth, tubular planes representing the abdomen and two legs, recalls the ancient Belvedere Torso, its radical objectification of the male body presents a very different type of masculine subject—one that is devoid of any essentially male qualities.
Twentieth-century public monuments provide a useful contrast to the objectification and machinisation of the male body. Serguiz Michalski notes that while the ‘cult of the great man seems to have lost…much of its normative appeal’ in twentieth-century figuration, the ‘archetypal vivacity’ of conventional monuments continues to retain their symbolic power (Michalski 1998:8). Theorising the sculpted male body, then, begins with establishing the extent of its public function, which is inseparable from such other theoretical matters as aesthetics, erotics and the gaze. Melissa Dabakis, for example, contends that Mechanics Fountain, as well as other male nudes that exist in public space, ‘both allows and refutes homosocial desire’ (Dabakis 1999:93). Michael Hatt’s important studies on sculpture and masculinity call attention to the complicated racial, national, sexual and gender politics involved in constructing and viewing the sculpted male body in public. In general, critics tend to agree that sculpture remains an important site for tracing, across different eras and cultures, the shifting status of masculinity as representation.
References and further reading
Chard, C. (1999) ‘Effeminacy, pleasure and the classical body’, in G.Perry and M.Rossington (eds) Femininity and Masculinity in Eighteenth Century Art and Culture, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 142–61.
Dabakis, M. (1999) Visualizing Labor in American Sculpture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dressler, R. (2004) Of Armor and Men in Medieval England, Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Getsy, D. (ed.) (2004) Sculpture and the Pursuit of a Modern Ideal in Britain c. 1880–1930, Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Hatt, M. (1992) ‘Making a man of him’, OxfordArt Journal, 15 (1):21–35.
(1999) ‘Physical culture’, in E.Prettejohn (ed.) After the Pre-Raphaelites, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp. 240–56.
Michalski, S. (1998) Public Monuments, London: Reaktion Books.
Poggi, C. (1997) ‘Dreams of metallized flesh’, Modernism/Modernity, 4 (3):19–43.
Potts, A. (1992) ‘Male phantasy and modern sculpture’, Oxford Art Journal, 15 (2):38–47.
Saslow, J. (1998) ‘Michelangelo’, in S.McHam (ed.) Looking at Italian Renaissance Sculpture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 223–45.
Sherman, D. (1996) ‘Monuments, mourning and masculinity in France after World War I’, Gender and History, 8 (1):82–107.
