Nude Warriors

A 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 painting regularly shows warriors, gods and heroes either entirely nude or wearing only a sword-belt and helmet, as a visual convention separating the heroic sphere from the merely military. The Greeks themselves were aware of how strange this looked; Thucydides attributed it to the Olympic Games, where athletes competed nude. By the classical period it was the default mode for representing the hero, and it passed through Roman sculpture into the Renaissance and Neoclassical academies as the foundational exercise in idealised anatomy.

The tradition reaches from Polykleitos' Doryphoros through the Riace Bronzes, the Farnese Hercules and Canova to the whole academic tradition of the life class.