ABSTRACT
Sculptures of wealthy individuals represented nude or semi-nude in the guise of heroes or deities were relatively common in Roman art. Matrons with the sensuous curves of Venus or emperors with the bulging physique of Jupiter wore a nude “costume type” reflecting characteristic virtues of their status and gender. It is generally assumed, however, that the eventual disappearance of such statuary by late antiquity speaks at least partly to more prudish Christian attitudes to the body. This chapter will argue that such a restricted focus on one visual medium and the polemics of churchmen has left us with a distorted picture. With the statue habit in steep decline in late antiquity, we must look to other genres of visual representation. When we do, we see that societal attitudes to the nude female body were not as simple as such literary sources suggest. This chapter will focus on the small corpus of images in mosaic and metal-work spanning the fourth and fifth centuries AD which continue the earlier tradition of representing women nude or semi-nude. Through these examples, we can explore how approaches to the female body intersected with age and class and can complicate our understanding of the role that the body could play in constructing ideal femininity.
