Ancient Sculpture and Twentieth-Century American Womanhood - (Imagines - Classical Receptions in the Visual and Performing) by Hallie Franks

About the Book

The first and only book to study how ancient Graeco-Roman sculptures of Venus were used to visualise the "fit American woman" in the fitness and beauty industries that emerged at the turn of the 20th century.

Book Synopsis

This book examines the reception of Graeco-Roman sculptures of Venus and their role in the construction of the body aesthetics of the "fit" American woman in the decades around the turn of the 20th century. In this historical moment, 19th-century anthropometric methods, the anti-corset dress reform movement and early fitness culture were united in their goal of identifying and producing healthy, procreative female bodies. These discourses presented ancient statues of Venus - most frequently, the Venus de Milo - as the supreme visual model of a superior, fit, feminine physique. An America of such Venuses would herald the future prosperity of the "American race" by reviving the robust health and moral righteousness of the ancient Greeks.

Venuses had long been symbols of beauty, but the new situation of Venus statues as an aesthetic and moral destination for women set up a slippage between ideal sculpture and living bodies: what did it mean for a woman to embody - or to try to embody - the perfect health and beauty of an ancient statue? How were women expected to translate this model into flesh? What were the political stakes to which this vision of a nation of American Venuses was bound? Who was believed to conform to this ideal, and who was excluded from it? In taking on these questions, Franks engages with physical culture and dress-reform media, modern artwork that adapts Graeco-Roman traditions, anthropological texts, art histories of ancient Greece, film, advertising and medical reporting on women's health.

Review Quotes

"[This] is an important, and timely, volume that deserves a wide readership. Accessible to advanced undergraduates and graduate students, it should be required reading in courses on gender and Classical reception... I very much hope that Franks' insightful and highly relevant work is read far beyond our discipline." --Bryn Mawr Classical Review

"Culture and ethnicity is key to Hallie Franks's Ancient Sculpture and Twentieth-Century American Womanhood, which offers a great example of material reception studies ... This book not only considers their influence in a new area (twentieth-century American popular culture, particularly health and lifestyle magazines) but reframes what their receptions should look like in the twenty-first century." --Greece and Rome

About the Author

Hallie Franks is Associate Professor of Ancient Studies at New York University, USA. She is author of The World Underfoot: Mosaics and Movement in the Greek Symposium (2018) and Hunters, Heroes, Kings (2012).