In her book D. takes the approach that the body language expressed in Roman sculpture reflects lived practices that played a key role in the expression and definition of gender in Roman society. The most salient question is not whether body language existed in the Roman mind, as this question is put to rest in Chapter 2's detailed examination of Quintilian's and Cicero's instructions for bodily comportment in oratory. Rather, the larger and more important questions are: how can modern scholars access ancient body language, do literary ideals of Roman body language overlap with the visual culture of statues in the Roman period, what values and ideals did the Romans attach to movement, and how did these intersect with gender?
The present work is the result of D.’s career-long study of classical sculpture. She argues that a better understanding of ancient body language advances our understanding of gender and social dynamics among Rome's urban elite. The book examines textual evidence and free-standing portrait sculpture, with further sections devoted to ideal and relief sculpture. In the introduction D. lays out a brief definition of body language based primarily on modern psychology and sociology: ‘the various ways of holding the body (posture and pose …), movements (especially of the head and limbs), and facial expression and gestures’ (p. 2). Based on this definition, she argues further that features like bodily positioning, affect, dress, hairstyles, emotion and gesture combined to construct gender in Roman art and that some postures and gestures were read as particularly feminine or masculine. Next, she turns to the problem of legibility. While modern viewers will never be able to understand fully the nuances of ancient gestures, D. cites P. Collett's discussion of evolutionary psychology research in The Book of Tells: How to Read People's Minds from their Actions (2004) to suggest there are some indications that certain types of body postures are endemic to all hominoids. Further, D. asserts that modern English and American ideas about body language can translate to Rome and that gestures in modern South Italy are probably quite similar to ancient ones (pp. 18–20). Through these longer-term consistencies, she argues, modern scholars can read bodily postures in their historical and social context to extract their meanings.
In Chapters 2 and 3 D. lays out literary evidence for Roman concerns with the body. Men, at least according to Cicero and Quintilian, should wear a toga, avoid excess displays of emotion and use honest, heartfelt gestures to underscore their words while orating. Relying on oblique literary and legal references, D. argues that women are asked to act in ways that appear weak, vain and diminutive, to keep their gaze downcast and avoid recognition when in public.
After dealing with the textual evidence, D. turns to sculptures, devoting chapters to standing nudes, clothed statues of men, clothed statues of women, seated statues, and images of men and women together. I will comment here on the discussion of the standing nudes and images of men and women together, which are representative of the book's strengths and weaknesses. In Chapter 4 D. contrasts the Aphrodite of Knidos and the Doryphoros to explore the gendered meanings of sculptural nudity. Through a careful reading of contemporary scholarship by A. Stewart, C. Havelock, R. Osborne and N. Salomon, among others, D. demonstrates how wide a variety of scholarly readings of the Knidia's body language and nudity, ranging from feminine power to feminine shame to sexual desirability, exists. She rightly notes that these divergent readings result from two factors: the statue's varied copy tradition and each scholar's own assumptions of gender and sexuality. Modern viewers who engage with the more open Venus of Colonna, D.’s copy of choice, may interpret the now-lost Aphrodite of Knidos differently than those looking at the Capitoline Venus, which depicts the goddess in a more hunched pose with the right arm covering her breasts, which D. interprets as a ‘defensive and submissive’ posture (p. 89).
Turning to the Doryphoros, D. notes the scholarly insistence on the statue's impassivity. While Havelock has considered both the Knidia and the Doryphoros as gendered ideals, the Doryphoros epitomises male power and virility with an open posture and exposes his genitals and idealised body confidently, with no regard for the viewer. More interestingly, the Doryphoros’ nudity is rarely associated with sexuality. While Havelock has suggested the statue could represent an ideal erastes, most scholars, particularly male scholars, tend to cast the image as virile without prompting desire, as a role model with which Greek male viewers can identify themselves. Thus, for both men and women, nudity casts a statue as a gendered archetype, informed by Roman social norms, for mortals to follow.
The last chapter examines how male and female figures interact with each other. Though men and women are often set near each other in statue groups, the figures often stand apart from each other in ways that seem detached to modern viewers. In an unusual pair from the Isola Sacra cemetery at Ostia (Capitoline Museum inv. 652, depicting a couple as Mars and Venus), the woman initiates physical contact and looks tenderly at her male counterpart, who stares off into the distance and fails to return his partner's gaze. Relying particularly on Plutarch's Moralia, D. argues that these seemingly aloof postures are indicative of a desire, particularly in later periods of Roman culture, for a harmonious conjugal relationship enabled by female compromise. In instances where the figures engage more directly with each other, as in the case of the dextrarum iunctio gesture seen frequently in freedmen's funerary reliefs or mirrored physical postures in freestanding statues, D. argues that the images play on the concept of familial relationships. D.’s rereading of this gesture clarifies its familial aspects and deftly explores how it can be applied elsewhere. The handclasp, however, can also convey political relationships that rely on familial metaphors, as on an aureus depicting Claudius clasping the hand of a Praetorian (41–2 ce, BMC I Claudius no. 228, pl. 34.4) to cement the imperial-Praetorian bond.
This book interrogates an intriguing and valuable question, but there are significant problems. The concept of body language and its relationship to existing work in the field is vaguely defined. Though the textual evidence of Chapters 2 and 3 is handled deftly, this evidence is not brought to bear directly on the material evidence. The separation makes it difficult to understand how text and image worked together, if they did at all, to inform how Roman sculptors represented the body. Further, while D.’s careful attention to previous scholarship, particularly in Chapter 4, reveals fundamental problems with previous assumptions about body language and gender, more self-reflexivity is needed. The book highlights the importance of performing gender roles through proper use of the body, but gender-fluid subjects like Attis are mentioned only briefly, and intersex characters like Hermaphroditus are entirely absent. This omission represents a missed opportunity to probe the boundaries of appropriate gender performance and representation. Overall, however, D.’s integration of recent work on emotion, affect, dress, gender norms and gesture is novel, and future work in this area will drive the field in productive and promising directions.
