July 28, 2013 |
I have read that readers prefer the personal to the general, the confessional over theoretical. So I will confess. I used to think I was thin. So my clothes were tight. But then, at a party at my brother’s house, when I was merrily sprawled on a sofa, my brother said, “Oh man, put your belly away.” Like an uninvited medium-sized eel, my belly had joined the party. And I was not as thin as I had imagined. It is horrible when your body image and reality are not aligned and you are made aware of this fact.
This was years ago and, more recently, thanks to relationship break-up and trauma, I have lost weight. I now have a narrow waist.
Being slender, then. I am sure it won’t last (and I do look and check). But it feels wonderful. It feels very “light” around the waist. And I am thinking of the language we commonly use to describe the male shape – snake-hipped, for example.
The body is subject to fashion. We know that. Different body parts and shapes become more prominent, more discussed. More present.
For men I would argue the waist is fashionable. It was the six-pack, but now it is the waist. I noticed a recent Sylvester Stallone poster on the London Underground. Stallone has a waist. Which surprised me. I think Beckham is beginning to struggle with his. In the City gym I attend, the boys (and men) stare at their waists in the mirrors. In the tougher gym in north London’s Wood Green, where the Greek and Muslim boys speak with hip-hop accents, they looks at their six-packs, upper arms and shoulders. But the rich boys watch their waists.
Perhaps I should gather more evidence. But fashion is about playing hunches. And I have a feeling that a slender waist is more attractive than a defined six-pack. Personally, I find the six-pack too hard – over-defined and tense. Aesthetically speaking, anyway.
Go back a few centuries. Titian paints men tubbier than Michelangelo. If you compare the waist sizes in Titian and Michelangelo, then Titian’s men are bigger. Titian’s David does not have the body of Michelangelo’s David; Titian’s David has fat arms. Titian’s scourged Christ is soft around the abdomen, he does not have the definition of Michelangelo’s Pieta.
Titian is not about “fat”. He is about flesh and movement. But the waistlines of Michelangelo’s David and his gentle Dying Slave and Adam are slender. The oblique muscles on the sides of the trunk are stretched taut; there is no fat visible on the side of the body. It’s only at the end of his career that Michelangelo shows men who are thick-waisted. You will find them in his Last Judgement.
And Michelangelo’s David does not have an etched six-pack. David is taut and has definition. But not that much definition. Michelangelo himself was not a paunchy man. “I must record that Michelangelo’s constitution was very sound,” wrote Vasari in 1550, “for he was lean and sinewy… ”
The basic narrative of art history is that Michelangelo, Leonardo, Titian, Mantegna et al were influenced by Greek and Roman art. The teenage Michelangelo spent a long time in the garden of the Medicis studying their collection of Greek and Roman statues – copying them “with so much diligence”, said Ascanio Condivi in 1553.
The Greek statues have slender waists. And beautiful muscles. In the Olympia Museum in Athens is a headless torso from the west pediment of the Temple of Zeus – more than 2,000 years old – a narrow waist, sharp latissimus, obliques stretched tight under the skin, waist smooth and tight.
The actual body of the average Greek man was not as slender or muscular as the images they left behind. In reality bodies were “thicker” with “shorter limbs”, says Andrew Stewart in Art, Desire and the Body in Ancient Greece. He writes: “The image of their general appearance that one obtains from osteo-archaeological evidence does not coincide with the idealised representation of the human body in Greek sculpture.”
But Greek art shapes the ideal man. You can trace a line from Attica/Athens to Michelangelo to Daniel Craig, Beckham and the boys who stare, preen and swan in my City gym.
I am not expert in ancient Greek culture and belief. But they loved the human body. The surviving Greek art shows immaculate, idealised bodies. If you read Homer carefully there is the suggestion that the body is more valuable than the “shadow” or “soul”. The Greeks made their gods in the images of muscular, slender men. And there was a gym culture in Greece.
There seems to be some confusion about gay-ness and ancient Greece. This is what I have learned (from reading several books). Older men, usually upper-class men, routinely slept with upper-class younger men. And did not identify themselves as “gay”. This man-on-man relationship was socially codified in a different way. It worked like this. An older, powerful man took a younger (13 and upwards) boy as his lover. The older man trained or instructed the boy in exercise, warfare, art, economics, love and philosophy. Some of these men were “gay” as we might understand the word. Others would never have identified themselves that way. They were just regular, high-class Greeks with wives, families and a beautiful boy lover.
But they idealised younger men. They idealised them in the way our culture idealises young women. That is the why the art is the way it is. So we have Britney-Madonna; they had Ganymede-Kouros. There is a line from the Greek poet Anacreon. Someone asked him why he wrote so many poems about young men. He said: “Because boys are our gods.”
It is not difficult to “get” the Greek ideal. If you look at the images on the ancient Greek vases they show beautiful men – both older men and younger men – with narrow waists, good musculature, perfect proportions, triangular chests, undulating surfaces, prominent buttocks and fat-free bodies. Some things you have to imagine. Statues of perfect, beautiful men are in shining gold bronzes and black lacquer – they would have been amazing in the stark, burning, endless Mediterranean sun. It was a society in which “the homoerotic glance is taken for granted”, writes Stewart.
The Greek ideal re-enters the Western world in the Renaissance, when Michelangelo et al spent hours studying the fragments of Greek art. And the ideal runs all the way up to Mark Wahlberg, Beckham and modern liposuction. You could say the Western imagination sees its gods in the images of the Greek ideal. The emaciated, two-dimensional Jesus of the 12th century gave way to the fleshed-out Christ of Bellini and more muscular (and slender) Pieta and Risen Christ of Michelangelo.
But there is no reason why a fat-free waist is more attractive than a thicker, more sensuous body. I am sure we could learn to love the Titian silhouette; I have lived with such a body for most of my life. And at the end of his career Michelangelo painted thick-waisted men – he also saw the beauty that was here.
The word itself “waist” comes from the Old English “waest”, which means to grow or increase. Perhaps it is fighting nature for a man to have too slender a waist; the thing just grows, that may be its essential nature. No matter how hard we dream thin.
Thanks to The Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Painters, Sculptors and Architects by Giorgio Vasari; Vita di Michelangelo Buonarroti by Ascanio Condivi; and Art, Desire, and the Body in Ancient Greece by Andrew F Stewart (Cambridge University Press)
by Tony Marcus
