Nude Warriors

Nude WarriorsA print of Nude Warriors the Greek convention of heroic nudity, in which a warrior is stripped of the armour he would have worn in real battle and stands as an idealised, unclothed male body. Heroic nudity is one of the more startling inventions of Greek art. In real Greek warfare, hoplites fought in bronze helmet, cuirass and greaves, carrying a large round shield; they were not nude. But from the archaic period onward Greek sculpture and vase

The story is the subject of Sophocles' tragedy Ajax

where a figure reads as silhouette before it reads as anatomy

It survives only through Roman marble copies

Alternative angles of this statue: Proserpina 1 (hand detail)

A print of a headless Meleager — the fragmentary surviving torso of a classical statue of the Greek hero of the Calydonian boar hunt

where athletes competed nude

in the old Greek phrase

The subject is the abduction of Proserpina (Persephone in Greek mythology) by Pluto

Hercules wrestles Proteus

the anguished face of the Dying Gaul)

Her attributes are the helmet

A print of Walter Crane's Bellerophon Riding Pegasus — an illustration from Nathaniel Hawthorne's A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys (Houghton Mifflin