In this presentation in honor of Pride Month, art historian Whitney Davis examines how homoerotic aspects of ancient Greek art began to affect 18th-century artistic uses of classicism. Greek sculpture and vase painting depicting nude men helped define a new concept of “queer beauty” in art and shaped queer people’s identity and subjectivity into the 19th century. Join Davis as he illustrates this trajectory, drawing on representations from Neoclassical painting to Robert Mapplethorpe's photography.
Ancient Greek Homoeroticism and Modern Queer Beauty
Statue of a Victorious Youth, 300–100 BC, Greek. Bronze with inlaid copper, 59 5/8 × 27 9/16 × 11 in. Getty Museum, 77.AB.30
About
Whitney Davis
Scholar
Whitney Davis is a professor in the Graduate School at UC Berkeley and 2024-29 Distinguished Scholar of the NOMIS Foundation, Zürich. Recent books include Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond and Visions of Art History. He is working on an intellectual biography of the Victorian arts writer and sex reformer John Addington Symonds.
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