and purpose. The boy would also be naked (and uncircumcised, which was the custom for Italian sculpture at the time, but significant given that the warrior had objected to the giant in part because the latter was uncircumcised). The boy was David, the giant was Goliath and the sculptor was Michelangelo.
On 8 September 1504, forty men begin to haul Michelangelo’s David to the place in Florence where it is to stand, a place that had been decided by a committee that included Leonardo da Vinci and the painter Botticelli. On the way, crowds gather. Our pubescent teenager is amongst them. The sculpture is stoned. The teenager does not fully understand why. Presumably the protestors did not want to look at its nudity, and nor did they want others, especially children, to do so. They felt that looking at bodies was wrong, or looking at them in public was wrong, or allowing women or children to see them was wrong.
The story of how we look at other people’s bodies builds on what we have seen so far. We have talked about distance in looking, meeting others’ eyelines, social looking, the pleasure we take in looking at the sky and nature, the visuality of objects, and a growing interest in our own self-image. So what happens when an evolving young person’s gaze becomes desirous? This chapter is about such evolution – those moments in our lives and in human culture when seeing something physical leads to something less physical, as a road leads from here to there. Bodies, shapes and the sun are the starting points of this chapter, but desire, abstraction and God are its destination.
In the case of David, marble had led to desire, and the fear of desire. David was a teenager, and our teenage years are when we first have erotic responses to the world, so how does our Italian Renaissance teenager look, and how do other teenagers look? Consider this remarkable one.
The movie actor Lauren Bacall was nineteen when this image, a still from the Hollywood movie To Have and Have Not, was shot. She is in shallow focus, like the Mona Lisa. Her body is torquing, her chin drops, her hair is a frame, her eyes complete the twist. The key light is top left. It catches the top of her hair, her right cheek, her upper lip, the tip of her nose and her chin. Bacall in real life was interested in light, and talked of how Marlene Dietrich was lit with a top or ‘north’ light. Bacall’s image here was called ‘the look’. Bacall had ‘the look’. The look meant sexy, confident and disdainful. She was saying, Do you really expect me to believe that?
The surprise, therefore, is that Bacall was shaking when images like this were filmed. She was so nervous, so new to cinema, so intimidated by her director Howard Hawks and her leading man Humphrey Bogart, that she shook. To stop the shaking she dropped her chin, which made the back of her neck stiffen and throat clench, thus stabilising her head. Her lack of confidence resulted in something that looks very confident.
There is an optimal time to see certain images. The impact of some photos is hidden. Guarded. Not here. The confidence in this image, its sexuality, its graphics, mean that it is clear and present. Her face is in your face. The best time to see this photograph is when you are young, like Bacall is young. It is so available, so full of attitude, so unforgettable, so ready for life and all it will throw at it. Lauren Bacall is dead, but here she still disdains, still attracts, still abstracts, still refrains. Bacall is a teenager here, and so is the image, and so are we. When we think about our own looking as a teenager, we realise that there was quaking in it, shaking in it. We felt both insecure and desirous, both of which make you tremble. We wanted to stand confidently and look like we knew what we were doing, but we were faking it in some ways. Teenage looking is formative looking because it is so alert and adrenalised. It is fight-or-flight looking.
There was fight or flight in those who threw stones at Michelangelo’s David. Looking for them was a force field. When the Australian film-maker Baz Luhrmann was making William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, he could not think of a way of filming the moment when the teenagers first glimpse each other. He racked his brains. One night he was in a restaurant, and went to the toilets. At the washbasins he looked up and saw a fish tank and, through it, the ladies’ washrooms. As he looked through the tank, he realised that this was the visual solution to his problem. Here, in a very horizontal image, he has Juliet glimpse Romeo, who is dressed as a knight and is reminiscent of medieval stories of courtly love – Abelard and Eloise, Dante and Beatrice, Lancelot and Guinevere or, in Iran, Layla and Majnun.
Luhrmann’s image shows teenagers like our Renaissance one. It makes us ask what we are looking through when we look at the body of another. What does a teenager look through? What is the fish tank, what is the medium? In any love story, the question is What is stopping them? In Romeo and Juliet, it is family. Often it is the fact that home, that camera obscura, that place where we learn the seeing network, wants to keep the teenager childlike. It is scared of what the young adult might see. It realises that looking can be disruptive, especially when the looked-at is a body. Teenagers’ erotic looking often scares those who want to arrest their childhood gaze.
This painting by Titian, which was finished in 1559, tells the mythological story of Actaeon who, whilst out hunting, happens upon the bathing spot of the goddess Diana and her nymphs.
He pulls back the red curtain, sees their naked bodies, and they recoil. Diana’s response is to turn Actaeon into a stag, who is then hunted to death by her own hounds. Though he did not intend to transgress, he is punished for looking, for pulling back the red curtain, for entering the force field – as the Florentines did when they looked at David, as we do when we look at Bacall, as Juliet did when she looked at Romeo – and for not, then, averting his gaze. His looking led to something else – desire, reproach, transformation and then death. We cannot blame Actaeon, but in feminist terms we can say that the force field in which he looks is political. In Ways of Seeing John Berger says that a woman’s presence ‘defines what can and cannot be done to her’. If you get to look at another’s naked body, it is often because you are more powerful than they are, because you are rich or male or white, or all three – especially in Western culture. Such privileged looking is the male gaze. As most artists have been men, as have their patrons, the dominant direction of looking in culture has been from a man to a woman. The road has led that way.
In France in 1863, Édouard Manet painted this scene which complicates or plays with the male gaze. In it, we the viewers are the only ones who look at the naked woman. The men in the picture do not look at her. They are dressed fashionably, the hipsters of their day. The obvious thing would have been to make her the visual centre of gravity, but Manet’s network of glances is less expected. We are challenged by the desire in the scene. It does not work in conventional ways. The men lie back but the naked woman sits up, alert, looking at us, restless, unengaged by the hipsters, needing more from the force field.
Flip the picture so that the men are naked and the woman is not, and you will get an equal scramble of looking frequencies. The image has been restaged numerous times, including, in the 1980s, for the band Bow Wow Wow’s LP The Last of the Mohicans and for the Star Wars generation, where the naked woman is Princess Leia, the man on the right is Darth Vader and the man in the brown jacket is Chewbacca.
Three years after Manet, Gustave Courbet, who we saw earlier scraping back his hair and being shocked by his own face, painted the genitals of his lover, and called the result The Origin of the World. The woman’s legs are spread. We see her vulva, belly and right breast.
An image from the world of pornography had migrated into the realm of art and, by doing so, challenged the low culture/high culture distinction. The latter enriched and the former debased, so the bourgeois assumptions claimed.