The Nude Portrait in Greek Art

The best evidence for the development of ‘portrait costumes’ in Greek art is found in funerary monuments, in the large corpus of Attic grave stelai of the fourth century BC. Here we find Athenian men, identified by name, depicted in three distinct guises: wearing the himation (the Greek civic cloak); in military uniform and carrying weapons; or shown naked with athletic equipment. All three kinds of representation had been appearing on Greek grave stelai from at least as far back as the late Archaic period, and it has been remarked that these ‘seem to present archetypes for the three ages of Archaic man’: young naked athlete, represented with strigil or aryballos(oil flask); mature bearded warrior, wearing hoplite armour; and senior citizen clad in a himation, shown with his dog, and leaning on a stick. The grave stelai of the fourth century BC continue this tradition. The individuals represented now no longer appear as isolated figures, however, but are combined into family groups—with a kind of self-consciousness as to their contrasted appearance which justifies the use of the term ‘costumes’.

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