Neoclassicism and the camera, naked gods in marble and real men in photographs

In 1768 the man who had taught Europe to worship the naked Greek athlete was stabbed to death in a Trieste inn, in an age that filled its museums with marble nudes and hanged men for loving each other. Then came the camera, and for the first time a picture of a real naked man could be bought, hidden and passed from hand to hand.

Trieste, 8 June 1768. In a room of the Osteria Grande, the inn on the main square of the port, a German traveller who has signed the register as "Signor Giovanni" is attacked by the man from the room next door. Francesco Arcangeli, an unemployed cook, tries to strangle him with a rope, and when the traveller pushes him away, he pulls out a knife and stabs him again and again. The wounded man cries for help down the stairs. He lives a few more hours, long enough to dictate his will and to forgive his killer.

The dying man was Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the most famous scholar of ancient art in Europe, the man who had taught his century that the naked Greek male body was the highest beauty ever made. His life and his death sum up the period of this chapter: an age that put the male nude on a pedestal in every museum and academy, and hanged men who loved other men. By its end a new machine, the camera, would let anyone buy a picture of a real naked man, and the men who wanted those pictures would have a name.

A cobbler's son in love with marble

Winckelmann was born in 1717 in Stendal, in Prussia, the son of a cobbler. After years as a poorly paid schoolteacher and librarian, in 1755 he published a short essay on imitating Greek art that made him famous almost overnight. Its formula for Greek sculpture, usually translated as "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur", became the motto of a whole style.

That same year he moved to Rome. He later became librarian to Cardinal Alessandro Albani, owner of one of the great collections of ancient sculpture, and in 1763 he was named prefect of antiquities in Rome. He lived among marble gods.

In 1764 he published his masterpiece, the History of the Art of Antiquity. It told the story of art as styles that are born, flower and decline, and at the summit it placed the young male body: the Apollo Belvedere in the Vatican, which he described in a passage of almost religious rapture, and the athletes and gods whose calm, smooth surfaces he read as the image of Greek freedom¹.

He did not hide where his eye went. In an essay of 1763 dedicated to Friedrich Reinhold von Berg, a young Baltic nobleman with whom he had fallen in love, he argued that a man moved only by the beauty of women would never truly understand Greek art, because its highest beauty was male. His letters to Berg are love letters. The art historian Alex Potts has shown how Winckelmann's ideal body is at once a lofty abstraction and a very physical object of longing, something later admirers from Goethe to Walter Pater understood perfectly well, even when they only hinted at it².

Who killed Winckelmann

In the spring of 1768 Winckelmann left Italy for the first time in years. In Vienna he was received at court and came away with gold and silver medals, one of them from the empress Maria Theresa. Then, suddenly, he decided to turn back to Rome, and on 1 June he reached Trieste to wait for a ship.

For a week he spent his days with Arcangeli, his neighbour at the inn. He showed him the medals. On 7 June Arcangeli went with him to buy a penknife, then bought a knife and a length of rope of his own. The next day he attacked.

Arcangeli fled the same day and was caught a few days later on the road inland. He confessed to robbery, was sentenced on 18 July to be broken on the wheel, and was executed in the main square of Trieste on 20 July 1768.

Robbery is what the court punished. But from the start people wondered what a famous scholar and a young cook with a criminal record had been doing together for a week, and historians still disagree. The documents do not settle the question, and within a generation the murder had become part of Winckelmann's legend.

Souvenirs of naked gods

Winckelmann's Rome was also a shop. For young men of the British and northern European elite, the Grand Tour of Italy was the last stage of an education, and it ended with shopping: paintings, prints, plaster casts and, for the richest, ancient marbles.

Dealers such as Bartolomeo Cavaceppi and Thomas Jenkins sold statues dug out of Roman soil, often heavily restored with new arms, noses and genitals. A great many were naked men: athletes, satyrs, Apollos, Bacchuses, portraits of Hadrian's beloved Antinous. Shipped home, they filled the sculpture galleries of English country houses, where men with the same classical education dined beneath them.

Some gentlemen went further. In 1786 the collector Richard Payne Knight, a member of the Society of Dilettanti, a London dining club of former Grand Tourists, printed a learned study of ancient phallic worship, with engravings of erotic antiquities³. Scandal followed, and Knight withdrew the book.

The erotic finds from Pompeii and Herculaneum took another road. As chapter I tells, they were locked in the Secret Cabinet of the Naples museum, open by 1819 only to men with a permit, and it was around such collections that the word "pornography" entered English in 1850.

Heroes without clothes

The sculptors of the age set out to make new antiquities. The Venetian Antonio Canova, who settled in Rome in 1781, made his name with Theseus and the Minotaur: a naked hero sitting calmly on the body of the monster he has just killed. His Perseus went on to replace the Apollo Belvedere itself.

His great rival was the Dane Bertel Thorvaldsen, who arrived in Rome in 1797. His breakthrough came in 1802 with Jason with the Golden Fleece, naked but for a helmet, a cloak and a sword belt. The rich English collector Thomas Hope ordered it in marble in 1803, and then waited twenty-five years for it: the statue, over two metres tall, reached him only in 1828. Today it stands in the Thorvaldsens Museum in Copenhagen.

Nobody called these works erotic. They were made for popes, emperors and museums. But they gave a respectable reason to stand in front of a naked man, life size, and look at him for as long as one liked.

The painters' fraternity

In Paris the new style had a headquarters: the studio of Jacques-Louis David. His Oath of the Horatii (1784) set the model of the muscular, patriotic male hero, and around him gathered brilliant pupils: Jean-Germain Drouais, Anne-Louis Girodet, Antoine-Jean Gros and later Ingres. The historian Thomas Crow has described the studio as an intense male community, where rivalry and devotion between master and pupils shaped the pictures themselves⁴.

Girodet produced its strangest masterpiece. In Rome in 1791 he painted The Sleep of Endymion, the mortal loved by the moon goddess and granted eternal sleep so that his beauty would never fade. Endymion lies naked in a forest clearing, bathed in moonlight, while a small Cupid pulls back the branches. He is pale, soft and passive, nothing like David's warriors.

The painting was a hit at the Paris Salon of 1793. The art historian Abigail Solomon-Godeau has argued that French art around 1800 offered two kinds of male nude, the fighting hero and the languid body laid out to be looked at, and that the second spoke above all to men⁵.

The line runs on. In Rome in 1835–36 Hippolyte Flandrin painted a student exercise, a naked model curled on a rock by the sea. Napoleon III bought it for the Louvre in 1857, and in the twentieth century it became an icon of gay culture, echoed by photographers from Wilhelm von Gloeden to Robert Mapplethorpe.

Drawing men, day after day

Every one of these artists had learned the same way. In the Académie royale in Paris, and in the academies founded on its model across Europe, a student copied prints, then plaster casts of ancient statues, and finally the living model.

Women were barred from the life class, and the model who stood on the platform was, as a rule, a man. The nude that generations of students drew over and over was male.

The finished study of a single model was called an académie. Thousands survive, in red chalk, charcoal and oil: men leaning on a staff, sitting on a block, stretched out on a draped platform, in poses borrowed from ancient statues. They were exercises, but together they made a vast and perfectly respectable archive of naked men.

Sunday night in Field Lane

In London itself, men who desired men met in a very different setting. In the early eighteenth century the city had a network of taverns and rooms called molly houses, where men drank, danced, flirted and had sex. "Molly" was slang for an effeminate man.

From trial records the historian Rictor Norton has rebuilt this world: its meeting places and cruising walks, its slang, the "maiden names" men gave each other, the mock weddings staged for fun⁶.

The best known house belonged to Margaret Clap, "Mother Clap", in Field Lane, Holborn. Informers paid by the Society for the Reformation of Manners watched it for months. On a Sunday night in February 1726 the constables burst in and arrested about forty men.

Three of them, Gabriel Lawrence, William Griffin and Thomas Wright, were convicted of sodomy and hanged at Tyburn on 9 May 1726. Margaret Clap was sentenced to the pillory, a fine and two years in prison.

The raids never really stopped. On 8 July 1810 constables broke into the White Swan in Vere Street and arrested twenty-seven men. In September six of those convicted were driven to the pillory in the Haymarket, where the crowd pelted them with mud, dung, rotten fish and dead animals.

Sodomy had been a capital crime in England since 1533. Executions were rare compared with prosecutions, but historians count dozens in the early nineteenth century alone, and the death penalty was only replaced by prison in 1861⁷.

Paris lets the matter drop

France took the opposite road. The penal code of 1791, written by the revolutionary assembly, simply left sodomy out. For the first time in a major European country, sex between consenting adult men was no longer a crime.

Napoleon's penal code of 1810 kept that silence, and French rule carried it to the Netherlands, Belgium and parts of Italy. The police still watched the places where men met, and arrested them for public indecency. But in Paris they could seize a picture; they could not hang the man who wanted it. The city was about to become the capital of a new trade.

Studies for artists

On 19 August 1839, at a packed joint session of the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris, the secret of Louis Daguerre's photographic process was made public. The daguerreotype was a single image on a silvered copper plate, sharp and fragile. Within a few years exposures were short enough to photograph people, and photographers began to make nudes almost at once.

They sold them under the name the painters already used: académies, studies for artists. It was partly true. In June 1854 Delacroix himself directed the photographer Eugène Durieu in sessions with nude male and female models, and copied the prints in his drawings.

It was also a cover. Most nude photographs sold in Paris in the 1840s and 1850s showed women and were bought by men for pleasure, and the police decided where art ended. In 1851 the daguerreotypist Félix-Jacques-Antoine Moulin and two dealers were tried behind closed doors for selling obscene images. Moulin got a month in prison and a fine, and his stock was confiscated.

Male nudes survive in far smaller numbers, and most look like true académies: a man with a staff, a rope or a drape, posed as in the life class. The film historian Thomas Waugh has argued that these prints still became the first photographic archive of the male body for men who desired it, bought and kept by artists and by others whose interest was not only professional⁸.

Then photographs became cheap. In 1854 André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri patented the carte de visite, a small print mounted on card, and after he photographed Napoleon III in that format in 1859 they sold by the million. Most were family portraits. But the format also carried athletes, strongmen, nudes and pairs of male friends posing arm in arm, and for the first time pictures of men could pass from hand to hand in private.

A poet, a painter and a new word

In July 1855 Walt Whitman published in Brooklyn the first edition of Leaves of Grass, poems that celebrated the body, the male body included, with a frankness American readers had never seen. The third edition, printed in Boston in 1860, added "Calamus", a sequence of forty-five poems about love between men and comrades⁹.

In old age Whitman denied the reading his admirers gave those poems. It made no difference. For readers on both sides of the Atlantic, "Calamus" became the first modern text in which they recognised themselves.

In London the painter Simeon Solomon, born in 1840, was a rising star of the Pre-Raphaelite circle and a friend of the poet Swinburne. His pictures of androgynous male beauty, and of the lovers Sappho and Erinna, were admired and collected.

On 11 February 1873 he was arrested in a public urinal near Oxford Street with George Roberts, a sixty-year-old stableman. Both were convicted of attempted sodomy. Roberts went to prison; a wealthy cousin got Solomon's sentence reduced to police supervision, but a second arrest in Paris in 1874 cost him three months in jail. His career was over, most friends deserted him, and he died in poverty in 1905¹⁰.

In those same years, men like him got a name. The Hanoverian lawyer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs had been defending the "Urning", his word for a man who loves men, since 1864. On 6 May 1868 the writer Karl-Maria Kertbeny used the word Homosexualisten in a private letter to Ulrichs. In 1869 he put "homosexual" into print, in two anonymous pamphlets against the Prussian law that punished sex between men.

The campaign failed: in 1871 the new German Empire adopted the same ban as Paragraph 175. The word survived, and it is still the one we use¹¹.

Six men at the swimming hole

The period ends in Philadelphia, with a painter who trusted the camera more than the plaster cast. Thomas Eakins had trained in Paris under Jean-Léon Gérôme and taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he wanted his students to work from the fully naked model.

In the early 1880s he and his circle photographed naked models in fixed poses, front, side and back, like the strip above. He also photographed his male students and friends naked outdoors, bathing and posing in classical attitudes.

In the summer of 1884 he took some of them to a lake outside the city, photographed them, and turned the pictures into a painting he called Swimming, finished in 1885 and later known as The Swimming Hole. Six naked men swim, dive and sun themselves around a stone pier; one of them is Eakins himself.

The picture had been commissioned by Edward Hornor Coates, chairman of the Academy's committee on instruction. After it was shown at the Academy in 1885 he gave it back and took an earlier, safer painting instead. It now hangs in the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth¹².

A few months later, in January 1886, Eakins removed a male model's loincloth during a lecture attended by women students. In February he was forced to resign.

The Swimming Hole gathers the whole century in one frame: the classical nude, the academic pose, the camera, and men looking at one another in a place that is both innocent and charged. Next, a few photographers would carry the camera out of the studio and into the Mediterranean sun, to build Winckelmann's Greek dream in real flesh: they are the Arcadian photographers of chapter IV.