ΚΑΤΑΛΟΓΟΣ ΤΩΝ ΕΙΚΟΝΩΝ ΤΗΣ ΔΙΑΛΕΞΗΣ

Slide 1.  Grimaldi Venus, 25.000 B. C.
     As far back as Paleolithic times, we find works of art that highlight both women’s breasts and buttocks.  Such female figures with awesome curves appeared in places as far apart as Spain, Central Europe and the Steppes of Russia.  They were, in all likelihood, fertility goddesses, mother goddesses, or nursing goddesses.   Their ample breasts, bellies, and hips seem to be saying that the womanly powers of procreation and lactation were worthy of veneration.

Slide 2.  Isis nursing Horus, Egypt, Late period.
    We find the sacred breast in Egyptian statues and wall paintings of the goddess Isis, who was associated with the milk-giving cow, the Tree of Life, and the throne of the pharaohs.  Images of Isis nursing a young pharaoh were meant to confirm his identity as a divine ruler entitled to reign on earth and to live eternally in the afterlife.  Elsewhere, as in this image, Isis is shown nursing her own son Horus.

Slide 3. Gold and ivory snake goddess, Minoan (Crete) 1500-1600 B. C.
   In Minoan Crete, if we can believe the images that have come down to us from wall paintings and figurines, priestesses exposed their breasts as part of religious ceremonies.  We do not know if women in daily life went about with their breasts uncovered, but it is safe to say from the images of snake goddesses or priestesses that these women in Minoan culture commanded great power and authority.
This goddess or priestess has large globular breasts that jut out from her bodice with an aggressive dynamism.  Fierce-looking snakes are coiled around her arms and extend from her hands.  This figure seems to be saying that she is equally capable of dispensing beneficial milk or noxious poison.

Slide 4.  Fertility goddess, Syria, 6th century B. C. E.
Fertility goddesses like this one were once found throughout the lands that are today’s Syria and Israel.  They lift up their breasts proudly, as if the breasts themselves could confer divine favor.  These are the “graven images” which the ancient Hebrews were determined to annihilate in order to make Jahweh the one and only God.

Slide 5.  Polymastic or “multi-breasted” Artemis
   The famous statues of Artemis with multiple globes on her chest, such as the two polymastic statues found at Ephesus, have traditionally been associated with mammary abundance, though more recent scholarship favors interpreting these globes as eggs or even bull’s testicles.  Whatever they were originally, they have been seen by later civilizations as breasts.  For example, this poster found in Turkey in the 1990’s leaves no doubt as to what the globes represent: they show milk flowing from several breasts into the mouths of all the children of the earth.

Slide 6.  ARTEMIS.  Turkey, 1990s.
The fantasy of the multi-breasted women springs from an enduring association between the female body, Nature, and nurture.  With their breasts represented as udders or fruit, women have traditionally been conflated with the animal and plant world and been expected to provide all the food that humans ingest on a daily basis, while men have been seen (by male thinkers) as having a priority on the thinking and spiritual realm.  For some time now, women in the Western world have been contesting this arbitrary division of labor.  Just because we have breasts does not mean that we cannot think or have spiritual experiences.

Slide 7.   Nursing Madonna, 14th century.

Slide 8.  Virgin and Child, Scandinavian, 14th century
Christianity developed its own sacred breast during the Middle Ages in the form of the nursing  Madonna.  From the fourteenth century onward, paintings and statues of the Virgo lactans with one breast uncovered became the prototype of female divinity.   Next to the blood of Christ, Mary’s milk was considered the most holy and miraculous of fluids.  Innumerable vials of what was supposed to be Mary’s milk were placed as relics in churches, where they reputedly cured a wide assortment of maladies.  In this Coptic image, Mary ejects milk from her breast to cure blindness.

Slide 9.  Coptic Madonna, Mary’s milk curing blindness.
Seen from the long view of human history, the Nursing Madonna  is merely one in a lengthy procession of female deities  extending backward to Paleolithic goddesses.  Like her predecessors, she represents female nurturance on a supernatural scale.  Those who imbibe her milk symbolically are imbued with faith and may anticipate divine favor.  Yet, Mary is different from prehistoric mother goddesses.  Her breast has value only because it nurtured the future Christ.  Without Jesus, Mary would have no history.  But without Mary, Christianity would have lacked a deeply moving female presence.  Mary’s breast offered all men and women a symbol with which they could identify, since they had all suckled at some female bosom.

EROTIC BREAST

Slide 10.
A century after the appearance of the nursing Madonna in 14th century Italy, the mistress of the King of France—Agnès Sorel—was also painted with one breast uncovered, but hers was clearly not sacred in the Christian sense.  Hers was an erotic breast intended to excite male desire rather than inspire holy veneration. 
The idea of portraying the mistress of King Charles VII of France in a pose usually reserved for the Virgin Maria caused the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga to write of this painting that it has “a flavor of blasphemous boldness. . . unsurpassed by any artist of the Renaissance.”  The contemporary art historian Anne Hollander isolates it as the moment when the single bare breast became “an erotic signal in art.” Stripped of its relation to the sacred, the breast became the uncontested playground for male desire.
Women’s fashions at court-- in France, Italy, and Germany-- favored low cut dresses, a fashion that was heartily condemned from the pulpit.  Numerous sumptuary laws were passed throughout Europe to discourage sexually provocative attire.  To no avail.  In France and Italy and elsewhere on the continent, breasts were celebrated as a part of the new sexual freedom that marked the Renaissance.  Women of all classes became bolder in revealing their bodies, and Italian courtesans and prostitutes, in particular, went about with their breasts more or less uncovered.

Slide 11. Veronica Franca, 1575.
The bare-breasted woman in this picture is Veronica Franca, the most celebrated Venetian courtesan of her era.  She was also a writer who published a volume of verse and a volume of letters.  But it was her youthful flesh that made her a commercial success.  Her breasts didn’t have to be large, but they had to be firm and could not droop.  As soon as a courtesan’s breasts began to sag, her days as a courtesan were numbered.
To preserve their breasts from stretching and disfiguration, many affluent Renaissance mothers decided not to nurse their children.  Subservient to the eroticized ideal of the youthful bosom, they stopped nursing and engaged wet nurses to do the job for them.  Husbands often favored the use of a wet nurse, since it was believed that couples should refrain from sexual intercourse while the mother was nursing. 
As the “erotic breast” took hold, there were two kinds of breasts in Renaissance society: compact upper-class breasts intended for male delight, and full, lactating, lower-class breasts belonging to women who nursed their own children and those of their affluent employers.  A portrait of Gabrielle d’Estrées, the favorite of King Henri IV of France, graphically represents this hierarchy.

Slide 12.  Gabrielle d’Estrees at her bath.  Early 17th century.
Gabrielle d’Estrees, the mistress of Henri IV, displays her “unused” breasts.  In the background, a wet nurse offers a large, globular breast to a babe in swaddling clothes, one of the three children born to Gabrielle from her liaison with Henri IV.

POLITICAL BREAST

During the eighteenth century, when Enlightenment thinkers set out to change the world, breasts became a battleground for controversial theories about the human race and political systems.  This is what I call the “political breast.”  It is not too far-fetched to speak about the political breast in discussing the medical theories of the Englishman Dr. William Cadogan, the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus, and the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  At a time when most upper-class European women were entrusting their babies to wet nurses, these men led a campaign against wet nursing and encouraged all mothers to breast-feeding their offspring.
Rousseau’s “back to Nature” philosophy, with its special emphasis on breast feeding, reached as far as the court of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette.  At Versailles, the queen lived out the fantasy of bucolic life at the hamlet she adapted for her personal use with its dairy, milkmaids, shepherdesses and lambs.  In homage to the lactating mother, she commissioned from the manufacturer of Sèvres two porcelain bowls in the form of a pair of perfect breasts, reputedly molded on her own ample bosom.

Slide 13.  Porcelain bowls from the dairy at Rambouillet, produced by Sèvres for Marie-Antoinette.
The wet nursing campaign was a great success in France, where the percentage of breast-feeding mothers increased dramatically during the last two decades of the 18th century. In 1780, of approximately 20,000 babies born in Paris, as few as 10 percent were being nursed in their homes; the rest were sent off to wet nurses in the country.  Yet by 1801 half of all Parisian babies were breastfed by their mothers. 
The New French Republic decided in 1793 that if a mother did not nurse her baby, she and the child would not be eligible for the state support offered to indigent families.  France went so far as to fetishize women’s chests in graphic representations of the nation as a bare-breasted woman. Later, in 1830, Delacroix’s painting of “Liberty Leading the Nation” became an enduring icon of revolutionary breasts engaged in battle.

Slide 14.  Delacroix.  Liberty leading the people. 1830.
In the midst of slain bodies and unfurled banners, Delacroix’s bare-breasted Liberty leads the people to victory.  Her naked breasts have become symbols of defiance.  This form of political breast—dynamic and aggressive—would reappear in French propaganda during World War I and on American airplanes during World War II.  The defiant uncovered breast was also used during the political manifestations surrounding the Women’s Liberation movement of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, as in the following French and American images.

Slide 15. Faites chier les gens.

Slide 16.  Topless car wash, Santa Cruz, Ca.

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL BREAST

Slide 17. Cover for Charles Rycroft.  A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, 1972.
The “psychological breast” emerged with the work of Sigmund Freud.  Freud posited that the breast was not only the baby’s first activity, but the starting point of sexuality.  The pleasurable erotic sensation of suckling was thought to persist in many unconscious forms throughout one’s entire life.  The breast offers a psychoanalytic paradigm for the Garden of Eden.  As adults, we are forced to wander through a non-mammary wilderness, endlessly seeking the comfort of the original bosom.
By now, the breast has become the combat zone for several generations of psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, and psychologists.  Their focus on the breast has also become the staple of popular humor.  Think only of the countless cartoons that depict an association between inanimate physical objects, such as apples eggs, and mountains, and the primordial breast image in the human mind.  Philip Roth’s novella The Breast mocks the Freudian veneration of the breast, as do many other writers and filmmakers.

THE COMMERCIALIZED BREAST

Slide 18.  Maidenform, Chansonette, 1952.

Slide 19.  Wonderbra, 1990s.
In our breast obsessed society, breasts have almost endless commercial possibilities.  They generate a mullti-billion dollar industry in brassieres, body lotions, and endless products to enhance the breast.
Also, when pictured in advertisements beside cars, beverages, fruits, and other products, they promote the sales of these items as well.  For example, from the 1920s to the 1950s, the sale of American fruit was promoted through a subliminal identification with breasts.  Fruit-crate labels often combined pictures of buxom pin-ups with images of the fruit in question. The label for Yankee Doll Apples (circa 1940) pictured the upper half of a woman in a red blouse with round breasts that look good enough to eat.

Slide 20.  Yankee Doll apples.
Breasts, covered and uncovered, are notoriously featured in videos, films, live entertainment, and pulp pornography.  As of now, the “commercial breast” keeps the wheels of business rolling and feeds the fantasies of countless men and women worldwide.

MEDICAL BREAST

Slide 21.  First X-ray treatment for breast cancer.
The “medical breast” has always been with us, documented as far back as the ancient Egyptians and Greeks.  Breasts have commanded the interest of doctors in two primary areas: one centered on lactation and the other on disease. In our own time, advances in the treatment of breast cancer and a renewed interest in breastfeeding have produced dramatic changes in both arenas.
Once considered a death sentence, breast cancer is now thought of as a treatable malady rather than as a terminal illness. In the developed world, about 5% of women are breast cancer victims, whereas in developing countries, less than 2% of women contract breast cancer. This gap has been attributed to differences in diet and environment.  The United States now leads the world in the incidence of breast cancer, but it is also the country where the use of mammograms and aggressive treatments have cut the death rate dramatically.  Part of the reason that breast cancer victims now have a much better chance of survival is because women themselves have taken the lead in calling attention to the disease and in demanding more research and better treatment, as in this photo of a mastectomy survivor.

Slide 22.  Cancer affects everyone, San Francisco
Similar attention to breastfeeding is also producing notable results.  Most American women had stopped breastfeeding in the 1940s and 50s in complicity with their doctors, who considered formula an adequate substitute for mother’s milk.  But since the 1970s and 1980s, when medical researchers and activists began to publicize the benefits of maternal breastfeeding, American women have been encouraged to nurse their own babies, and we are now seeing a significant increase in nursing mothers, at least during the first 3-6 months after birth.  The United States still lags behind such countries as Australia, where almost all mothers breastfeed, and other parts of the world where breastfeeding is the norm.  With most American mothers now working outside the home, it is very difficult for them to fulfill their duties as paid employees and breast-feeders.  On the whole, the workplace has been hostile to breastfeeding mothers, and American society has done little to make breast-feeding the norm.  But at least activists have, within the last two decades, succeeded in overturning the state laws that once prohibited breastfeeding in public.

THE LIBERATED BREAST

It is no accident that the Women’s Liberation movement of the late 1960s was associated with “bra burning.”  Bra burning demonstrations were intended to protest the over-erotization of women in general and breasts in particular.  Since then, women’s breasts have been connected to numerous aspects of the women’s liberation movement, ranging from serious medical concerns (e. g., breast feeding and breast cancer) to less weighty desires, such as the right to appear topless on beaches.  Whereas topless bathing for women is allowed in many European countries, it is still prohibited on almost all beaches in the United States.
Another issue concerns breast augmentation--a controversial subject at best.   Is it liberating for women to be able to increase the size of their chests through plastic surgery?  Or is this just one more incident of women willing to harm themselves in order to satisfy an artificial ideal?  Personally, I counsel women against breast augmentation, except for reconstructive surgery after a mastectomy, and I wish more Americans would follow the counsel of this Italian poster.

Slide 23. Silicone?  No grazie.  Italy.
Another example of the liberated breast is found on the cover of this New Yorker magazine, which reminds us that working women can also be breastfeeding mothers, even if we don’t recommend nursing in such a dangerous setting.

Slide 24.  New Yorker, 1998.
The meanings attributed to breasts vary in the eyes of each beholder.  Babies see food. Men see sex.  Doctors see disease.  Businessmen see dollar signs.  Depending on one’s age and personal situation, women see a panoply of meanings, ranging from aesthetic issues to erotic pleasure to nursing concerns and medical anxieties.  How women regard their breasts is a good indicator of their self-esteem and status.  The breast has been throughout history, and will continue to be, a marker of society’s values and its treatment of women.