Nature, culture and the body in classical Greek religious art

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between nature, culture and social action in cult statues in archaic and classical Greece. Following the model of recent work in the sociology and anthropology of art, it shifts the focus from decoding the meanings of images, to understanding how artistic languages work to create expressive effects in particular institutional settings. Classical 'naturalism' is characterized as an artistic language with a heightened capacity for the appropriation of natural bodily responses—partly given in universal processes of maturation, partly socially specific to the codification of such maturational processes according to the role system of ancient Greek society—in the construction of affective commitment to social roles defined and validated within Greek myth and religious culture.