The way of all flash

THE first work you encounter in Michael Turner's exhibition at the Nicholson Museum is a picture of the discovery of the Delphi Antinous in 1894.

THE first work you encounter in Michael Turner's exhibition of photography and the classical nude at the Nicholson Museum is a picture of the discovery of the Delphi Antinous in 1894.

 The famous statue of the Emperor Hadrian's favourite is seen uncovered as far as the thighs, head turned down and slightly away in the wistful attitude common to the many cult images that were made after his mysterious drowning in the Nile in AD130. As when we read a piece of ancient literature, we are amazed to find the thought and feeling of the past as alive as ever, preserved in the miracle of aesthetic form, while all the men and women of the time have long vanished.

Here, partly fortuitously, and thanks to the long exposure time required by cameras at the end of the 19th century, the point is made for us in the most concrete visual terms. The peasants who have been enlisted to do the digging stand on either side, illiterate and only dimly aware of the significance of their find. Unable to stand still for long enough, their features are blurred: they, too, are ephemeral -- human existence, as Greek poet Pindar wrote, is but the shadow of a dream -- while the statue they have found lives forever.

The words and objects produced by art subsist in this way because they have been removed from the domain of becoming and translated into the durable order of ideas and forms. It is because they are abstract

and inorganic that they outlast our mortal bodies, ready to be rediscovered and reinvested with living experience by another generation. Ancient sculptures of the human body, for all these reasons, have always held a special fascination, not only for viewers in general but for artists who have drawn them in the originals or in casts, and endlessly borrowed and varied their attitudes in their own compositions.

Statues are a particularly rewarding subject for photographers because of the way sculptural form can be expressed as tonal structure, and carved bodies animated through the use of light and shade. The most remarkable example in this exhibition is Herbert List's Antikythera I (1937), another picture of a comparatively recent archeological discovery. In 1900, Greek sponge divers accidentally came upon a shipwreck off the island of Antikythera, presumably a vessel sailing from Greece to Rome in the 1st century BC. Among the treasures of the wreck is the so-called Antikythera Mechanism, an astonishingly complex astronomical calculator that has been considered a kind of analog computer.

List's photograph shows the back of a youth, and his treatment of light is so effective -- picking out carved forms of great anatomical accuracy and sensitivity in the treatment of the spine, the scapulas, the sacrum -- that we are momentarily seduced by the illusion of life, even as we can clearly see that the torso is damaged and the lower part encrusted with molluscs.

The arms are broken, the head almost gone except for the long hair that falls over the nape of the neck and identifies him as Apollo (only Apollo and Dionysus are shown with unshorn hair, according to Roman poet Tibullus, representing their eternal youth); most shocking is to realise the front of the figure is completely worn away to an amorphous mass.

List's deft use of light and shade to animate a work of sculpture is again evident in his Classical Head of a Youth (1939), a sculpture of the Hellenistic period, with a characteristic handling of the brow, hairline and hair. The slightly melancholy, introspective air is also typical, and List has emphasised this through his use of shadows around the eyes and cheekbones, a lighting that suggests momentary experience rather than timeless being. The hands, meanwhile, attached to the head in the absence of their arms, prompt one to imagine the original attitude of a stretching or reclining figure.

List is indeed the artist whose work tends to persist in the memory, no doubt because of a particular affinity for the art and the erotic sensibility of ancient Greece. One of his striking images is of a colossal but truncated phallus, flanked by two enormous ovoid testicles, from the sanctuary of Dionysus on the island of Delos. The island was sacred as the birthplace of Apollo, but even in antiquity, and long before Nietzsche's modern formulation of the Apollonian and the Dionysiac as archetypal principles, the Greeks understood the passion and ecstasy of Dionysus as complementary to the lucidity and serenity represented by Apollo.

Two pictures by List from the end of the war speak of the horror of destruction, but also of the poverty of National Socialist emulations of the classical. On the ground, in one picture, we see the supine bronze figure of a statue by Bernhard Bleeker, a shallow and soulless attempt to imitate the simplicity of archaic form. In the other, in the devastated, snow-filled plaster cast room at Munich's Academy of Fine Arts, a young male figure is framed by a doorway, gazing at two overly muscled modern male torsos.

The theme of sculpture looking at sculpture is treated in a far more light-hearted vein by Robert Doisneau in a 1956 picture of statues in the park at Versailles: a Barbarian captive seems to peer over a hedge at the deliberately exposed bottom of the Callipygian Venus. A far more common theme is of men or women gazing at sculptures with various nuances of desire, longing or admiration. The same Venus appears again in the National Archeological Museum in Naples in a 1960 photograph by another Frenchman, Henri Cartier-Bresson, where she looks around at a delightful pair of boys who seem to have engaged the Crouching Venus in conversation.

List, again, has a witty picture of a woman, again in Naples, looking up the Farnese Hercules and spontaneously smiling at this embodiment of oversized masculinity; he subtitled this 1961 photograph "the flirt". Also witty and at the same time melancholy is Friedrich Seidenstucker's 1930 picture of a woman almost bending over backwards to photograph a neoclassical statue in a park; her fur coat, the wintry trees in the background and the grime-encrusted figure all speak of a land and culture where ideal nudity seems sadly out of place.

Clarence White's Lady in Black with Statuette, circa 1908, shows a chastely dressed young woman who seems to turn regretfully away from the happy nudity of the Venus de Milo -- a relatively modern antiquity, only discovered in 1820.

In other cases, it is simply the juxtaposition of the modern body with the classical statue that can evoke various nuances of meaning. Sometimes the timeless elegance of the ancient is used simply as a foil for modern glamour, as in the work of several fashion photographers. At other times the connection is closer, as in Louise Dahl-Wolfe's Night Bather I (1939), in which the pose of a model in a bathing costume closely echoes that of a cast of the Venus de' Medici.

Similarly, the model descending a staircase in a 1934 shot by George Hoyningen-Huene repeats the attitude of the torso of the Aphrodite of Cnidus, although even then the model is too thin; the photographer here, nonetheless, makes up for the rather brutal and fascist style of the 1931 picture of his boyfriend as an ancient horseman.

In some cases parallels and conjunctions are designed to recall the sexuality latent in images of the human figure.

Thus, in Len Prince's Poseidon with David (1992), a young male model covered in chalk or white paint stands behind a statue of the god Poseidon, repeating his attitude. The lighting not only emphasises the arm of the model, missing in the original, but also the penis that was broken off the sculpture, accidentally or intentionally at some point in the past.

The male member is also an important detail in Tod Papageorge's 1975 picture of a museum opening, playing something like the part of a thought balloon for the young woman whose posture, drink, open mouth, and slightly pendulous breasts under a sheer silk dress all speak of a certain moral deliquescence.

The connection of beauty with the erotic is not an inevitable one. There are cultures, such as that of China, in which the highest idea of beauty is associated with nature and where, correspondingly, the highest genre of painting is landscape. It was the Greeks who conceived the idea that the body could be beautiful and who thus established the figure as the highest subject for sculpture and painting.

The idea has become so fundamental to Western art we forget how bold and unlikely it is. Look at most of the real bodies we encounter: they fall somewhere between the desirable and the repellent. Seldom are they the object of the disinterested admiration, let alone the spiritual elevation implied by the idea of beauty.

The Greeks imagined the body as beautiful because they turned it into a metaphor for the harmony and dignity of man. It became an emblem of humanism and was rediscovered as such in the Renaissance. But in attributing beauty to the body, we can never escape its primary erotic charge, and that is why the Western idea of beauty has always been characterised by a tension, a knife-edge between the ideal and the sexy. Our idea of love, too, is poised between an ideal and spiritual version, ultimately derived from Plato's understanding of it as the aspiration to beauty and virtue, and another more carnal version, frequently celebrated in classical literature in all its forms but disapproved of by the early Christians.

Fortunately for the cause of sexual tolerance, the prestige of classical culture was so immense it could only be chipped at by the attacks of various Christian critics, and the church ended up assimilating a vast amount of the Greek and Roman heritage. What has been called the classical alibi refers to the way we have for centuries been able to read and look at things that might otherwise have been prohibited, under the pretext that they pertained to classical culture.

The appeal to classical authority doesn't always wash with wowsers, though. One of the pictures in the exhibition shows the Royal Botanical Gardens in Sydney full of marble statues in the late 19th century. Two little girls stand in the foreground, dressed from neck to knee and perhaps rather nonplussed by all these bare limbs. Sure enough, years later a campaign was mounted to rid the gardens of such incitements to vice. Removed in 1915, the Venus de' Medici somehow ended up at the National Art School, where after many years outdoors she now dwells safely in the library.