Abstract
A Roman sculpture of a nymph and satyr provides a rich case study for changing ethics of viewing and display, with regard to sexual imagery from the ancient past. I trace receptions of the statue, which represents a mythical sexual encounter, from its Roman context, through its place in Charles Townley’s eighteenth-century collection of antiquities, and then into the British Museum. My analysis reveals that it has variously—often simultaneously—been seen as the object of sexual fantasy, intellectual analysis, and moral and ethical concern, the latter relating to obscenity and, more recently, the representation of sexual violence. It provides a powerful example of how statuary is both reinterpreted in the light of, and contributes to constructing, changing understandings of sexuality and obscenity over time.
I am grateful to colleagues at the British Museum for help in preparing this chapter, especially Ian Jenkins, Celeste Farge and Francesca Hillier. Thanks are also due to attendees of the 2017 Classical Association conference, for thought-provoking questions, and to the editors of this volume.
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Notes
- 1.
The female figure is identified as a nymph by, for example, Monique Halm-Tisserant and Gérard Siebert, “Nymphai,” in Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae (LIMC), VIII.1 (Zürich: Artemis, 1997), 891–902 (895) (Cat 52b). She is described as a maenad by Adrian Stähli, Die Verweigerung der Lüste: erotische Gruppen in der antiken Plastik (Berlin: Reimer, 1999), 75–89; and 364, and Bernard Andreae, Skulptur des Hellenismus (Munich: Hirmer, 2001), 182–8.
- 2.
Stähli, Die Verweigerung, 369, notes the same of the Capitoline Museum example.
- 3.
Stähli dates the original to 175–150 BC (ibid., 81–4) and the Townley version to AD 117–138 (ibid., 368).
- 4.
List of marbles with descriptions and provenance, no date, Townley Archive, British Museum, TY 10/8. All archival material is cited by permission of the Trustees of the British Museum. Item details for Townley Archive materials are based on Susan J. Hill, Catalogue of the Townley Archive at the British Museum: The British Museum Occasional Paper Number 138 (London: British Museum, 2002). On ‘Lo Sposino’ see Ilaria Bignamini and Clare Hornsby, Digging and Dealing in Eighteenth-Century Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 317–8.
- 5.
Stähli, Die Verweigerung, 364.
- 6.
Capitoline Museum, Inv 1729. Stähli, Die Verweigerung, 362–7, catalogues examples of the type.
- 7.
Kate Fisher and Rebecca Langlands, “Bestiality in the Bay of Naples: The HerculaneumPan and Goat Statue,” in Sex, Knowledge, and Receptions of the Past, eds. Kate Fisher and Rebecca Langlands (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 86–111.
- 8.
Ibid., 110.
- 9.
John Griffiths Pedley, Greek Art andArchaeology, 5th ed. (Boston: Prentice Hall, 2012), 367.
- 10.
Andreae, Skulptur, 187.
- 11.
R.R.R. Smith, Hellenistic Sculpture: A Handbook (London: Thames & Hudson, 1991), 130–1.
- 12.
Stähli, Die Verweigerung, 89.
- 13.
Ibid., 301–7.
- 14.
On such images in vase-painting, see Mark D. Stansbury-O’Donnell, “The Structural Differentiation of Pursuit Scenes,” in AnArchaeologyof Representations: Ancient Greek Vase-Painting and Contemporary Methodologies, ed. Dimitrios Yatromanolakis (Athens: Institut du Livre, A. Kardamitsa, 2009), 342–73 (342–3).
- 15.
For instance, Susan Deacy, “The Vulnerability of Athena: Parthenoi and Rape in Greek Myth,” in Rape in Antiquity:Sexual Violencein the Greek and Roman Worlds, eds. Susan Deacy and Karen F. Pierce (London: Duckworth & The Classical Press of Wales, 1997), 43–63 (45–6).
- 16.
Karim W. Arafat, “State of the Art—Art of the State: Sexual Violence and Politics in Late Archaic and Early Classical Vase-Painting,” in Deacy and Pierce, Rape in Antiquity, 97–121 (97).
- 17.
For example, Sharon L. James, “Talking Rape in the Classics Classroom: Further Thoughts,” in From Abortion toPederasty: Addressing Difficult Topics in the Classics Classroom, eds. Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz and Fiona McHardy (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2014), 171–86 (179). There is of course no universally accepted modern definition of what constitutes rape. See Joanna Bourke, Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present Day (London: Virago, 2007), 8–13.
- 18.
See for example Edward M. Harris, “Did Rape Exist in Classical Athens? Further Reflections on the Laws About Sexual Violence,” DIKE 7 (2004): 41–83.
- 19.
Stähli, Die Verweigerung, 372.
- 20.
Bonhams, The Hever Nymph and Satyr. Thursday 21 April 2005. New Bond Street, London (London: Bonhams, 2005), 8.
- 21.
The cast features in Townley’s accounts for 24 February 1773 (Account book, 28 October 1771–13 February 1774, Townley Archive, British Museum, TY 8/4). Gerard Vaughan, “The Collecting of Classical Antiquities in England in the 18th Century: A Study of Charles Townley (1737–1805) and His Circle” (Ph.D. diss., University of Oxford, 1988), 246, identifies it as a cast of the Vatican Museums’ sculpture of Pan and a seated nymph (Magazzino delle sculture no. 180). On the Vatican group, see Stähli, Die Verweigerung, 393–5. On the Invitation to the Dance, see Andreae, Skulptur, 184–5.
- 22.
Museo Nazionale Romano, Inv. 80005. On the Ludovisi type see Stähli, Die Verweigerung, 68–74 and 340–61. Stähli, ibid., 358, argues that this head—the only well-preserved example—copies the nymph from the Invitation to the Dance, casting doubt over whether it reflects the Hellenistic original of the Ludovisi type.
- 23.
Elizabeth Bartman, The Ince Blundell Collection of Classical Sculpture: Volume III: The Ideal Sculpture (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017), 122. The term ‘hermaphrodite’ is used in this chapter following established usage in discussion of ancient art, while recognising that it is a problematic term that is inappropriate when used as a description of intersex people.
- 24.
List of marbles, TY 10/8. Brian F. Cook, Documenting the Townley Marbles (London: British Museum Press, 2013), 57, notes that other documents give the date of discovery as 1772. He prefers this date on the grounds that the case was ordered on 24th February 1773 (citing Account book, TY 8/4). This case, however, was more likely for the cast of a nymph and satyr which appears in the same accounts (see Footnote 21). The April 1773 date for the discovery seems more convincing, given De Angelis received his permit for the site in January 1773 (Bignamini and Hornsby, Digging, 260).
- 25.
Elizabeth Bartman, “Erotic Statuary in the Roman House,” in Cultural Messages in the Graeco-Roman World, eds. Olivier Hekster and Stephan Mols (Leuven: Peeters, 2010), 57–65 (61).
- 26.
Caroline Vout, Sex on Show: Seeing the Erotic in Greece and Rome (London: British Museum Press, 2013), 177.
- 27.
Bartman, “Erotic Statuary,” 62.
- 28.
Fisher and Langlands, “Bestiality,” 96–7, observe the same in recent scholarship regarding the HerculaneumPan and goat.
- 29.
On Townley, see Vaughan, “Collecting,” and Brian F. Cook, The Townley Marbles (London: British Museum Press, 1985).
- 30.
Vaughan, “Collecting,” 373–8. Responses of female visitors to Townley’s collection are being considered by Miriam Stockill-al jamil in her ongoing research (Ph.D. diss., provisionally titled “Eighteenth-Century Women and Their Engagement with Classical Sculpture,” Birkbeck, University of London).
- 31.
Account July 1773, paid 12 July 1773, Townley Archive, British Museum, TY 8/74/9.
- 32.
Vaughan, “Collecting,” 246.
- 33.
Thomas Jenkins, Letter to Charles Townley, 19 February 1774, Letters from Thomas Jenkins, Townley Archive, British Museum, TY 7/327. Cook, Documenting, 57, identifies the nymph and satyr as the “Groupe” referred to here.
- 34.
List of marbles with original costs and valuations, no date, Townley Archive, British Museum, TY 10/6.
- 35.
Vaughan, “Collecting,” 246.
- 36.
For example, the similar-sized group of two boys playing knucklebones, while purchased for the higher price of £400, was still valued at £400 (List of Marbles, TY 10/6).
- 37.
British Museum, GR 1805,0703.227. Cook, Marbles, 15, suggests Townley paid £50 for this, a high price relative to similar objects, because of the “mildly erotic” subject.
- 38.
Viccy Coltman, Classical Sculpture and the Culture ofCollectinginBritainSince 1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 159ff.; and Colette Crossman, “Priapus in Park Street: Revealing Zoffany’s Subtext in Charles Townley and Friends,” The British Art Journal 6, no. 1 (2005): 71–80.
- 39.
Bruce Redford, Dilettanti: The Antic and the Antique in Eighteenth-Century England (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum & The Getty Research Institute, 2008), 202.
- 40.
Ibid., 97ff.; Coltman, Classical Sculpture, 164ff.; and Crossman, “Priapus,” 75.
- 41.
See Fisher and Langlands, “Bestiality”; Giancarlo Carabelli, In the Image ofPriapus (London: Duckworth, 1996), esp. 31–40; Whitney Davis, QueerBeauty: Sexuality andAestheticsfrom Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 51–81.
- 42.
Pierre Hughes d’Hancarville, Recherches sur l’Origine, l’Esprit et les Progrès des Arts de la Grèce, vol. 1 (London: B. Appleyard, 1785), 329–30 (Note 189).
- 43.
Davis, QueerBeauty, 56.
- 44.
First Townley Inventory, A Catalogue of the Ancient Marbles in Park Street Westm [sic], The Places Where They Were Found and Where They Were Bought, Department of Greeceand Rome archives, British Museum, GR1, Statues No. 7. Cook, Documenting, 12, suggests that this was compiled in 1784 and may have been intended for visitors.
- 45.
Parlour Catalogue, 1804, Department of Greeceand Rome archives, British Museum, GR2, 25; Parlour Catalogue: Volume II, 1805, Department of Greece and Rome archives, British Museum, GR 2009,5002.2, 26.
- 46.
Copy of Parlour Catalogue owned by Simon Townley, Department of Greeceand Rome archives, British Museum, ST2, Introduction.
- 47.
The Pan and goat is now in the National Archaeological Museum, Naples (MANN 27709). Townley owned an approximate small-scale terracotta copy (British Museum, M.550). For the NaplesGabinetto Secreto, see Walter Kendrick, The Secret Museum:Pornographyin Modern Culture (New York: Viking, 1987); Kate Fisher and Rebecca Langlands, “The Censorship Myth and the Secret Museum,” in Pompeiiin the Public Imagination from Its Rediscovery to Today, eds. Shelley Hales and Joanna Paul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 301–15.
- 48.
British Museum, GR 1805,0703.280, as described in Townley’s book of lists of antiquities bought in Italy from 1768, Townley Archive, British Museum, TY 10/3, 8.
- 49.
Cook, Documenting, 56.
- 50.
Cook, Marbles, 33–4.
- 51.
James Dallaway, Of Statuary and Sculpture Among the Antients: With Some Account of Specimens Preserved in England (London: J. Murray, 1816), 328.
- 52.
These two responses are not mutually exclusive and often went hand in hand. See Fisher and Langlands, “Censorship,” 310–1.
- 53.
Cook, Marbles, 60.
- 54.
British Museum, Synopsis of the Contents of the British Museum (London: Printed by Cox and Baylis, 1808), 90.
- 55.
Nor does it appear in A Description of the Collection of Ancient Marbles in the British Museum; with Engravings, the multi-volume catalogue of the Townley collection published between 1812 and 1861.
- 56.
Register of the Townley Collection, 1848, Department of Greeceand Rome archives, British Museum, T.2 (henceforth cited as ‘1848 Register’).
- 57.
Cook, Marbles, 16. In Documenting, 57, Cook notes that the sculpture was displayed in 1808 and had been removed by 1817.
- 58.
On the Museum Secretum, see David Gaimster, “Under Lock and Key: Censorship and the Secret Museum,” in Sex: The Erotic Review, ed. Stephen Bayley (London: Cassell & Co, 2001), 126–39. Cook, Documenting, 58, lists Townley’s nymph and satyr as Museum Secretum no. 666. In fact, it appears in the Register of the Museum Secretum, Department of Britain, Europe and Prehistory archives, British Museum, as no. 466.
- 59.
Gaimster, “Under,” 130.
- 60.
Here, I focus only on these erotic groups. Rebecca J.I. Mellor is considering the categorization of wider classes of sexual material in her ongoing research (PhD diss., provisionally titled “Phallus-ies Galore: Examining the Continuing Impacts of Archival, Display, and Collecting Practices of Greco-Roman Sexual Antiquities from Private to Public Collections in the Long Nineteenth Century,” University of York).
- 61.
The relief appears in the 1808 Synopsis, 65, in Room III, and the well-head in Room VII (ibid., 91).
- 62.
It does not appear in the 1808 Synopsis, is marked ‘not exhibited’ in the 1848 Register, and is listed in the Museum Secretum Register as no. 465.
- 63.
See Footnote 47.
- 64.
British Museum, GR 1805,0703.127.
- 65.
British Museum, GR 1805,0703.31. Both of these objects remained on display following the demolition of the Townley Galleries from 1846 (on which see Cook, Marbles, 61): in the 1847 Synopsis (52nd ed.) both are listed in the Grand Central Saloon.
- 66.
It is also omitted from the 1812 Synopsis (5th ed.), and appears in the Museum Secretum Register as no. 467. Though not marked as ‘not exhibited’ in the 1848 Register, it is one of a relatively small number of sculptures (approximately thirty of 280) which have no Synopsis reference in this register, which suggests they may not have been displayed in the preceding years.
- 67.
There is no mention of their removal in the minutes of General or Committee Meetings, the Officers’ Reports or the Original Papers, Central Archive, British Museum, for these years.
- 68.
For a detailed description of changing access arrangements in the period see Derek Cash, Access to Museum Culture: the British Museum from 1753 to 1836: The British Museum Occasional Paper number 133 (London: British Museum, 2002), 59–82, http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/publications/research_publications_series/2002/access_to_museum_culture.aspx.
- 69.
Report of the Principal Librarian Respecting the Admission of Strangers to the British Museum, 10th March 1810. Original Papers, Central Archive, British Museum.
- 70.
General Meetings, Minutes, Vol. 5, 1074, Central Archive, British Museum.
- 71.
15,390 in 1808–9; 15,197 in 1809–10; 29,152 in 1810–11; 31,402 in 1811–12 (Original Papers, Vol. III, 1047, Central Archive, British Museum).
- 72.
Jennifer Tyburczy, Sex Museums: The Politics and Performance of Display (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 27.
- 73.
The requirement for “decent” appearance dated to the 1803 regulations (Cash, Access, 65).
- 74.
Women are however included in the list of art students admitted to the Gallery of Antiquities, “without special comment or notice despite the issues of propriety around the drawing of even the sculptured nude figure by female artists which crops up in contemporary commentaries” (Martin Myrone, “Drawing after the Antique at the British Museum, 1809–1817: ‘Free’ Art Education and the Advent of the Liberal State,” in British Art Studies 5 (Spring 2017), https://doi.org/10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-05/mmyrone/p22). It is possible that this may have been another cause for concern.
- 75.
The satyr’s erect penis, though damaged, is visible in the relief, which makes it more surprising that this object was never transferred to the Museum Secretum. The relief is relatively small and was fixed quite high on a wall in the Townley Galleries, so perhaps this detail was not readily observable. The remains of the penis are not shown in the engraving featured in A Description of the Collection of Ancient Marbles in the British Museum; with Engravings: Part II (London: W. Bulmer and Co, 1815), Plate I.
- 76.
Richard Parkinson, A Little Gay History: Desire and Diversity Across the World (London: British Museum Press, 2013), 48, has noted that, in Townley’s home, the well-head was displayed with the erotic pursuit scene featuring a bearded man and a hermaphrodite (now re-interpreted as showing two males) placed against the wall.
- 77.
Gaimster, “Under,” 136.
- 78.
Ibid., 130. Jen Grove previously highlighted this and questioned the link with the 1857 Act, “The Collection and Reception of Sexual Antiquities in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century” (PhD diss., University of Exeter, 2013), 53–5.
- 79.
The Pan and goat had been segregated from its discovery in the mid-eighteenth century, but the Secret Cabinet was not created until 1819 (Fisher and Langlands, “Censorship,” 306–8).
- 80.
According to a typewritten insert in the Museum Secretum Register, Department of Britain, Europe and Prehistory archives, British Museum.
- 81.
Cook, Marbles, 63, Fig. 58.
- 82.
See Stuart Frost, “Museums and Sexuality,” in Museum International 65 (2013): 16–25, for a range of examples, with a focus on LGBT+ themes.
- 83.
Tyburczy, Sex Museums, xvii.
- 84.
Caroline Vout, “The Shock of the Old: What the Sculpture of Pan Reveals about Sex and the Romans,” The Observer, 23 March 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/mar/23/pan-sculpture-sex-and-romans. On its display in Naples, see Fisher and Langlands, “Censorship”. This group is perhaps particularly controversial, as it represents bestiality (though Pan is himself part goat). There may equally be a suggestion of bestiality in the idea of sex between a nymph and a part-goat satyr, but in the Townley type the satyr is sufficiently human that this was not considered significant for the discussion in this chapter.
- 85.
Tyburczy, Sex Museums, 105–13.
- 86.
I was Project Curator, working with Senior Curator Ian Jenkins, on the Ancient Olympic Games and Body Beautiful exhibitions (then known by my maiden name, Victoria Turner).
- 87.
Ian Jenkins and Victoria Turner, The Ancient Olympic Games: An Exhibition from the British Museum (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Heritage Museum (Bilingual edition), 2008), 138. The exhibition was shown in Hong Kong and Shanghai.
- 88.
Ian Jenkins and Victoria Turner, La Belleza del Cuerpo: Arte y Pensamiento en la Grecia Antigua (Alicante: MARQ (Bilingual edition), 2009), 219. The exhibition travelled to ten international venues. The catalogues were adapted for each venue but all were based on the same texts.
- 89.
See above, pg. 150.
- 90.
This consideration parallels recent attention in academic pedagogy to the issues inherent in teaching sensitive subjects, for example in Rabinowitz and McHardy, Abortion.
- 91.
I was not involved in curating the DefiningBeauty exhibition.
- 92.
Ian Jenkins, Celeste Farge, and Victoria Turner, DefiningBeauty: The Body in Ancient Greek Art (London: British Museum Press, 2015), 177.
- 93.
The only published evaluation of an exhibition in which this object was included, of which I am aware, does not mention this object in particular (Morris Hargreaves Mcintyre, Spellbound by Serenity: A Summative Report of DefiningBeauty: The Body in Ancient Greek Art at the British Museum, 2015, http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/research_projects/all_current_projects/visitor_research.aspx).
- 94.
James, “Talking Rape,” 175.
- 95.
There is a growing trend towards tackling challenging and difficult histories and themes with associated discussion of the ethical issues involved. See for example Jenny Kidd, “Challenging History: Reviewing Debate Within the Heritage Sector on the ‘Challenge’ of History,” Museum and Society 9, no. 3 (2011), 244–8 (244).
- 96.
There is a considerable history of justifications for rape based on the notion that all women either secretly or unconsciously want to be raped (Bourke, Rape, 67–76).
- 97.
In the DefiningBeauty exhibition, a brief reference was added to the fact that the head is restored, but without mentioning the question of the nymph’s expression. Decisions about label text are, of course, affected by many considerations such as word limits and the overall exhibition narrative.
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Donnellan, V. (2019). Ethics and Erotics: Receptions of an Ancient Statue of a Nymph and Satyr. In: Funke, J., Grove, J. (eds) Sculpture, Sexuality and History. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95840-8_7
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