Contrapposto
On bodies, love, and what an eight year old noticed that the rest of us missed
Aphrodite is shown nude everywhere. I had never thought about why before yesterday.
I stood in front of her armless sculpture at the North Carolina Museum of Art and looked, really looked, and found myself staring at her feet.
Then I turned around and noticed every Roman sculpture in the hallway was standing the same way. Weight shifted. Hip tilted. One leg carrying more than the other.
Rebecca, a magnificent docent at the NCMA with a sharp mind and a sense of humor, takes public tours every month. I was eagerly waiting to see her name on the docents’ roster for the past 4 weeks, after she left an impression on our first meeting in late February.
Yesterday, she taught me the word for it.
Contrapposto
The way a body stands when it is at rest but alive. Not rigid. Not performing. Just present in itself.
I have been thinking about that word ever since. And yes, I was making notes.
Aphrodite, Venus in Roman mythology, is the goddess of love. She was never born from a womb. She appeared on the surface of the ocean, fully formed, with a beautiful face and body. The ocean just offered her up one day. No origin story. No beginning. She was just there.
And I find that quietly radical.
In the group, there was a young girl on the tour accompanied by her grandmother. Around eight years old. She had a quality of attention I have rarely seen in adults. At one point, she looked at a portrait of Louis XV and guessed his age just by looking at his hands.
At another point, she defined geometry without ever having heard the word. She said “shapes”. And she knew what a triangle was. There were a few adult concepts she was not exposed to, and that’s completely acceptable for a kid in that age bracket.
But the moment that stunned me completely was in front of a sculpture of an enslaved family, circa 10 BCE. Nobody in the group noticed what she noticed almost immediately. She pointed at their hands.
They were holding hands. In ancient Rome, a married couple holding hands in public was a statement. It was dignity claimed in impossible circumstances. It was love made visible in a world that wanted to make them invisible.
She saw what the rest of us had walked past. And it absolutely swelled my heart with immense love and hope in the world and in the next generation who will take over from us someday.
That evening, I came home from work and looked at what I had made recently in a fiber art class.
An abstract heart soft sculpture using textiles. The word Ishq in Urdu for love stitched into it with a dried red rose sewn in. I wondered if Aphrodite would recognize it.
How crucial it is to document our humanness before it lapses. Before it goes quiet and the noise drowns it out completely.
Ishq. Love. Contrapposto. A young kid in a museum pointing at held hands.
It is all the same. Noticing.
Noticing beauty, Noticing art, Noticing spring.
What are you noticing?
— Nida
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Image citations:
Aphrodite Anadyomene (Cyrene type): https://learn.ncartmuseum.org/artwork/aphrodite-of-cyrene/
Funerary Monument for Sextus Maelius Stabilio, Vesinia Iucunda, and Sextus Maelius Faustus: https://learn.ncartmuseum.org/artwork/funerary-monument-for-sextus-maelius-stabilio-vesinia-iucunda-and-sextus-maelius-faustus/
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