Samantha Fox, circa 1980s. Found postcard, 6 × 4 in. © Heroes: Posters, Cards, Prints, London 01-459-07244.

Page 3 was a fact of life. It was the faces, not the breasts, that were fascinating. Soft smiles spilling out between folds. Outlined eyes abandoned behind train seats at rush hour. Pools of bronze emulsion, pale blues, apricot cheeks, streaked hair, shimmering lips. For a child these images were an open secret. A lazy taboo. A joke and a dream. When they stopped printing images of topless women in the newspaper, it was as if they had demolished a paper palace I had glimpsed but never been to, one that had flapped about at the outskirts of my consciousness for as long as I could remember.

The right-wing tabloid The Sun began to include models with exposed breasts in the early 1970s, always on the third page, the most visible part of the paper’s insides and first thing the reader sees after opening it. Collectively, these images came to be known as “Page 3.” In the next decade, Page 3 became an institution. Several other tabloids established similar features. Samantha Fox, the first model to gain a large fan base after signing her contract with The Sun in 1983 at the age of sixteen, is said to have earned more money from Page 3 than Margaret Thatcher did as Prime Minister. Her fans, mostly teenage boys, flooded department stores to have their photos taken with her during meet and greets, and she was stalked more than once during her career as the most sought-after “Page 3 girl.” One photographer claimed to have unlocked the secret of her success: “You have the face of a child and the body of a woman.”¹

Fast forward to 2015. Page 3 is dropped from The Sun. Three years earlier, a group of women led by the actress and writer Lucy-Anne Holmes launched a campaign entitled “No More Page 3,” their motto “Boobs Are Not News,” that went on to gain more momentum than previous efforts to get rid of the feature.² The movement reached its climax towards the end of 2014, and by January 2015 impassioned discussions of the topic took place on UK television and online. The public network Channel 4 broadcast a debate featuring the Labour politician Harriet Harman, second-wave-feminist author Germaine Greer, and a model and reality-TV star named Chloe Goodman, who had appeared on Page 3 in the recent past. Responding to Harman’s point that people a hundred years from now would look back at Page 3 images with a distorted view of the role of women in British society, Goodman invoked the art of antiquity. “Well,” she responded with steely resolve, “what did we think of women and men one thousand years ago when you see statues written all over the walls, of men and women, nude.” Looking back just a thousand years takes us to the heart of the Middle Ages, when the naked figure in art tended to appear in Biblical contexts.³ But Goodman’s point was clear. After a pause, the presenter Jon Snow jumped in. “Ah, there’s a good thought: a thousand years ago they were all in the nude.” Chloe continued, “Yes, it was something to be celebrated back then.” The others laughed. Snow then affirmed that both he and Goodman had in mind the art of ancient Greece. The presenter agreed that the Page 3 girl might be seen as “the present day edition of Aphrodite, naked . . . whenever that was.” Neither of the other participants were able to refute this suggestion.

With more time to think, Harman or Greer could have pointed out that Goodman’s invocation of both male and female bodies undermines the connection forged between Greek art and the all-girl pantheon that is Page 3. If a classicist had been part of the conversation, they could have described how, in ancient Greece, the naked male figure was dominant. A life-size, undraped representation of the female body did not appear until the fourth century BCE, when the renowned Attic sculptor Praxiteles created what is thought to be the first naturalistic, monumental statue of a naked female body: an unprecedentedly sensual iteration of the Greek goddess of love known as the Aphrodite of Knidos.⁴ While statues of exposed, idealized male bodies had long been familiar to the citizens of Athens and were embedded into the spatial and civic organization of the city, the Aphrodite of Knidos was not designed to be displayed with pride—as male figures were—but kept in a temple in the relatively distant city of Knidia, part of present-day Turkey.⁵ Greek tourists had to sail to see the one-of-a-kind sculpture. Not until over a century later did more life-size naked female forms start to appear, leading to a proliferation of statues of Venus, Aphrodite’s equivalent, in the Roman Empire. In Greek sculpture, the naked female form began as an obscure and contentious subject. Pliny the Elder recounts a legend involving a young man breaking into the temple at night and being so overcome by the illusion of exposed flesh that he embraced the Aphrodite of Knidos before ejaculating onto the sculpture, leaving a stain on the marble.⁶ Whether fictional or based on an actual occurrence, this clandestine encounter is a far cry from the celebratory response to representations of the naked body invoked during the Page 3 debate.

Roman copy of Praxiteles’s lost 4th century BC sculpture Aphrodite of Knidos (also known as Venus Pudica), restored by Ippolito Buzzi (Italian, 1562–1634). Marble, 81 in. high. Original elements: torso and thighs; restored elements: head, arms, legs, drapery, and jug. Museo nazionale romano di palazzo Altemps. Ludovisi Collection. Photo: Marie-Lan Nguyen. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cnidus_Aphrodite_Altemps_Inv8619.jpg

Yet Pliny’s tale suggests that the connection between Page 3 and classical sculpture is not entirely unfounded. The apocryphal man in the temple and the men who constituted Page 3’s intended audience were both fed a particular fantasy of the sexually available female body. Praxiteles’s sculpture provides an archetype of this fantasy in action. As a goddess, Aphrodite consolidates and idealizes the age-old construction of the female body and, by extension, female sexuality as fluid, formless, uncontrollable, and therefore threatening.⁷ The Aphrodite of Knidos represents the desire to harness this dangerous force, solidifying it into the dense material of marble, a substance ennobled by its association with the more conventional male figure. Praxiteles’s work allowed the desiring male subject to enjoy an eroticized image of the female body without fear of the annihilating potential of female sexuality.⁸ As an art form, sculpture makes this kind of one-way encounter possible to an extent that pictorial painting cannot. It is not just the three-dimensionality of the sculpted figure that allows the female body to be consumed on carefully prescribed terms, but also the way the art, particularly in marble, is able to highlight the sensuality of the human figure through surface treatment and contour, and at the same time contain it via these very same qualities. Michael Hatt notes the way in which the contour of the sculpted figure can be “deployed to limit the amount of bodily matter and to retain a sense of beautiful form rather than gross materiality.”⁹ Marina Warner, too, writes of the “bounded body” as a form, unique to sculpture, that allows representations of the female body to maintain an erotic allure while conforming to high-minded ideals.¹⁰ In contrast to sculpture, painting has inherent irregularities and its own wayward fluidity.

In mid-nineteenth century Britain, print emerged as another medium capable of at once facilitating and regulating the enjoyment of the undraped female form. When, in 1848, The Art Journal, Britain’s first periodical dedicated to bringing visual art to the masses, announced a new series of engravings to be featured in the journal, eleven out of the thirteen works listed in the advertisement centered on a nude or partially covered female body. These engravings were to be mass-produced, published regularly, and, like the tabloid newspapers that came into circulation toward the end of the century, targeted toward the “humblest classes.”¹¹ The figures showcased in these prints were based on original marble sculptures made by contemporary British artists over the course of the previous two decades. Known during the period as “poetic sculpture,” the variety of marble figures reproduced in these images is resolutely classical. Specifically, these works adhere to the sensual, female-oriented sculptural paradigm invented by Praxiteles in fourth-century Greece, recasting and updating it for a modern British audience. Yet the prints in The Art Journal do not present these sculptures as sculptures—as works of art—but rather depict them as if they were living women. Instead of simply rehearsing the cliché, familiar through the tale of Pygmalion, of a statue come to life, the engravings take advantage of the medium’s ability to, like marble sculpture, simultaneously exaggerate and control the erotic charge of the exposed female body. The annihilating potential of such a body is nulled by the page: its flatness, transience, and capacity to be turned at will. Caught between two and three dimensions, these are figures to be consumed with delight and abandoned. In this sense, they share common ground with the softly smiling Page 3 girls, who, with their streaked hair and shimmering lips, could once be glimpsed behind train seats at rush hour.

A case could be made that the engravings in The Art Journal anticipate the images of topless models in The Sun and that both claim ancestry in Praxiteles’s sculpture. But to claim this as a direct teleological relationship would be to overlook the ways in which the new photographic technologies that came into use at precisely the same time as the prints were published transform the consumption of eroticized images and influence wider attitudes toward female sexuality.¹² By looking at Page 3, poetic sculpture, and print together, I offer what Georges Didi-Huberman describes, with reference to the work of Aby Warburg, as “knowledge-montage”: a method in which images from different times and places are juxtaposed in order to illuminate aspects that would not have come to light had they been examined solely in their own historical context. The knowledge-montage, writes Didi-Huberman, permits the rejection of chrono-stylistic divisions that are the foundation of traditional art historical scholarship, revealing the image to be a “whirling centrifugal field” rather than a closed field of knowledge.¹³

So rapid was technological progress in Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century that by the late 1840s it was claimed that the art of sculpture would soon be obsolete. The 1844 edition of The Anatomy of Expression, a popular early nineteenth-century guide to representing the human form by the surgeon and artist Charles Bell, suggests that the nation is heading toward an era in which “printing banished sculpture”; in the future, declares Bell, monuments will be made “in stereotype, not in marble.”¹⁴ The author is convinced that laborious and expensive sculptural craft is on the cusp of being replaced by emergent techniques of mechanical reproduction, including stereotype, a printing method that deploys a plaster mold and metal plate to produce a high volume of copies with relative speed.

At precisely the time of Bell’s prediction, however, the art of carving marble was thriving in Britain. Since the culmination of the Napoleonic Wars, a new type of three-dimensional figure had become steadily more prevalent: a variety of sculpture with an intrinsic relationship to print. In contemporary art criticism of the period, the term poetic sculpture was used to refer to works characterized not only by their idealized form—their kinship with the figural sculpture of classical antiquity—but also by their portrayal of literary personages, whether from ancient myth, poetry, or more recent writing that did not have an established iconography. This type of sculpture led to the creation of purpose-built sculpture galleries in English country houses, most notably the extensive hall of contemporary works in marble curated by the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire. Earlier on, contemporary sculpture tended to be displayed alongside paintings and, at least in the British context, the three-dimensional objects struggled to attract the same amount of interest as colorful and dynamic works on canvas. The first half of the nineteenth century witnessed a growing consensus that marble figures and groups required their own space and precise lighting conditions. Newly wealthy patrons sought to emulate the taste of the aristocracy, leading to a huge demand for poetic sculptures among the rising industrialist class.

Richard James Wyatt, Nymph Entering the Bath, circa 1834. Marble, 60 × 19 ¾ × 23 ½ in. © Yale Center for British Art. Courtesy of Yale Center for British Art.

Why exactly were these works referred to as “poetic sculpture”? Art historians have examined the proximity between such works and the written word, including the subject, the source material, and the original poetic verses that were often written in response to them and published in popular magazines.¹⁵ But while the textual component is significant, such a view overlooks the wider meaning of the word “poetic” in relation to nineteenth-century British art. For an object to be classed as poetic, it had to offer a retreat into fantasy, into an imaginative world untroubled by current events and political ideology. Sculptors of the previous generation had seen their craft repurposed to glorify men that had died during French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Before 1815, to make a successful living as a sculptor in Britain meant receiving commissions for large-scale public monuments. But the next generation was freed from this duty and, what is more, actively sought to break from the austerity of monumental convention. By 1835, one critic could designate a distinct audience for sculptures representing mythical and literary characters: “a visitor who, amid the heavier realities of life, is in a quest of . . . the poetic.”¹⁶ It is logocentric, therefore, to read the word “poetic” solely as an index of such works’ relationship to text. An anonymous nymph performing a momentary action, such as Richard James Wyatt’s Nymph Entering the Bath (circa 1834), could be heralded as a quintessentially poetic work because it ushers the viewer into a remote and disinterested space, in this case with no literary narrative at all.

The contemplation of poetic sculpture as a means of escape from “the heavier realities of life” chimes with the preference for the female body demonstrated in this archive of figures. Whether a representation of Eve from Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667)——a recurring subject in poetic sculpture—or a depiction of Psyche, the mortal girl turned goddess known from Latin literature, such figures are opposite to the heroic male bodies, purged of sensuality, that had been commissioned in abundance toward the end of the previous century and into the Regency period, works that can be found in St. Paul’s Cathedral or, as with Richard Westmacott’s towering bronze Wellington Monument (1822), standing tall on Hyde Park Corner. Several of the younger artists who chose to focus on poetic works, Richard James Wyatt included, had been apprenticed to practitioners of Westmacott’s generation and were reacting against their forbears’ approach to the human form by favoring portrayals of young women and girls.¹⁷ Such figures required particular skills for the fabrication of smooth and supple skin. Characteristic in this respect, the body of Wyatt’s Nymph has been polished so that its texture sits between translucent soft tissue and velvet. The artist learned this finishing technique from a French sculptor, François Bosio, whom he met on his way to Rome in the early 1820s. Based primarily in Rome, Antonio Canova, the foremost sculptor in Europe at the time, was another key inspiration for Wyatt and other poetic sculptors. It was Canova who, with his “peculiarly obsessive attention to the envelope of his statues,” brought about a shift in contemporary sculptural practice away from the depth and weight of the subject matter toward what Satish Padiyar terms “a licked surface.”¹⁸ While Canova produced some striking representations of feminized male bodies, the female form dominates his oeuvre and remained the point of fixation among his imitators.¹⁹ In ancient Greece, the dangerous associations of female sexuality placed the naked female figure at the margins of sculptural practice; in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, the very un-civic qualities of the female body—softness, smoothness, and other sensual characteristics—were mined in order to nurture an art ostensibly uncontaminated by war and beyond linear time.

Richard Westmacott, Wellington Monument (Achilles), 1822. Hyde Park Corner, London. Bronze, 18 ft., 36 ft. with base. Photo: © Lars (Lon) Olsson. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:London._Hyde_Park_Corner.jpg

From the perspective of the collector rather than the practitioner, the popularity of poetic sculpture can be explained further by a growing fatigue with Greco-Roman antiquities. Throughout the eighteenth century, ancient relics had been sought with enthusiasm. Poetic sculptures came to offer a more authentic type of artwork than the heavily restored or fragmented figures that had been shipped in from the continent and were the height of fashion. Thomas Banks, one of the first modern sculptors to refuse to restore antiquities in favor of producing original compositions, complained of the way restoration intervened in the viewer’s encounter with the sculpted body. Writing of the Venus de’ Medici, a Hellenistic statue that draws on Praxiteles’s Aphrodite of Knidos and was thought of as the supreme embodiment of female beauty in eighteenth century Britain, he lamented that the “wrists and fingers” appear “evidently too small for the other corporal proportions.”²⁰ The artist continued: “These faults have arisen from the erroneous notion that small legs and arms are beauties in women.” In addition to “poetic” and feminized escapism, the emergence of an alternative, refreshed strain of classical figure during the first quarter of the nineteenth century marks a mounting desire for wholeness, for uninterrupted contours, for a version of ideal beauty closer to the organic body. Poetic sculptures offered an image of the human form that bears no trauma, an aspect strengthening their capacity to function as a mode of retreat from “the heavier realities of life.” Again, the primary vehicle for this escape into fleshy, fecund wholeness was the female body.

The formal break between Greco-Roman figures and poetic sculpture was palpable. When first exhibited, the best known sculpture of Milton’s Eve from the period, Edward Hodges Baily’s Eve at the Fountain (1822), was met with a lukewarm response, with one reviewer complaining about the “largeness of the thighs.”²¹ Two years later, however, this definitively poetic sculpture was on its way to becoming one of the most widely recognized and lauded artworks in nineteenth century Britain, repeated in a variety of formats and materials. A critic could even congratulate the artist for “seducing away the worshippers of the [Venus de’ Medici], and getting them to transfer their admiration to Eve at the Fountain.”²² Part of the widespread acceptance of the work stems from the fact that, as Eve, the figure’s nakedness becomes literal, with a clear and concrete justification: this is Eve before the Fall. Rather than simply confining the sculpture to a textual framework, the safe Christian subject permitted Baily to expand on what constituted the ideal female form and increase the volume of the body, thereby eroticizing the figure in a way less permissible in a nonnarrative work. Several sources from the period suggest that the proportions of the figure were based on a cast of a living woman whom Baily regularly employed, whose body was then combined with elements from the Venus de’ Medici and other works in the Praxitelean tradition. As long as the breasts remained the same size and conical shape as those of the Greco-Roman figures—“small, distinct and delicate” is how the polymath Joseph Spence described them—then other body parts were allowed to deviate.²³

Edward Hodges Baily, Eve at the Fountain, 1822. Marble, 33 × 48 3/8 × 22 ½ in. © Bristol Culture (Bristol Museum & Art Gallery). Courtesy of Bristol Museum & Art Gallery.

Poetic sculpture reached the peak of its popularity toward the middle of the century. In 1847, Samuel Carter Hall, a well-known Irish journalist, set out to introduce these works to new audiences. As editor of the willfully inclusive periodical The Art Journal, Hall aimed to democratize the appreciation of figures by Wyatt, Baily, and others by wresting them from elite sculpture galleries and translating them into mass-produced prints. He commissioned a series of engravings after select works that, over the course of the next two decades, would appear regularly in the magazine, granted their own page and printed on thicker paper. Like the sculptures themselves, these engravings consolidate qualities of escapism, softness, smoothness, and wholeness, demonstrating the genre’s preference for female bodies. As the ephemeral and accessible counterpart to marble, print allowed for the magnification of these charms.

Published in The Art Journal in 1848, Henry Wilkinson’s engraving of Baily’s Eve at the Fountain downplays the Greco-Roman elements of the sculpture in favor of its more novel and provocative features. The work is represented from an angle at which the allegedly large thighs face the viewer, with the rest of the legs out of sight. Still “small, distinct and delicate” in accordance with works in the Praxiteleian tradition, the figure’s breasts are darkened by a pool of shadow cast by the raised hand, which draws the eye to the negative space where the breasts are located, giving the illusion that the figure is touching her own nipple. The pubic area is tilted toward the viewer, making the swell of the upper thighs and left hip appear all the more prominent. It is as if we are sitting alongside Eve rather than taking in the overall shape of the form at a distance. Rather than an impression of a human figure as a painting of a form in a similar pose would be, the play of light and shade on the surface uncannily conjures an intimate encounter with an actual body in space. Hence, while the sculpture integrates the classical paradigm with contemporary taste and, possibly, a specific life model, the print goes a step further. The image makes the idealized female form available, explicit, and obscene in the etymological sense: off scene, accessed from an unintended viewpoint.

Henry Wilkinson, engraving of Edward Hodges Baily’s Eve at the Fountain (1822), 1848. Paper, 11 ¾ × 9 ½ in. Courtesy of the British Museum.

Published in 1849, William Callio Roffe’s engraving of another poetic sculpture, Ino and Bacchus (1840), by John Henry Foley, does something similar. While represented at a more conventional angle, the form is brightly lit from the top right, giving the sense of much larger breasts than those possessed by the object in three-dimensions. The shadow along the figure’s outstretched upper arm and ribs exaggerates the transition to the illuminated curve of the hip, which is conspicuously rounder than in the sculpture. In the print, the infant Bacchus, meanwhile, is eclipsed by shadow, the majority of the child’s body absorbed into the base of the sculpture so that Ino’s shape takes center stage. In his 1850 volume Egeria, or The Spirit of Nature and Other Poems, Scottish poet Charles Mackay devoted a long poem to the sculpture, in which he rhapsodizes on Ino’s fecundity:

‘Beautiful Ino!’ lying ‘mid the leaves’ The vine-leaves and the luscious bursting grapes… About the babe she twined her round delicious arm²⁴

As with Baily’s Eve at the Fountain, the engraving ventures further down the path opened up by the sculpture itself, playing on the slippage between stone and organic matter captured in Mackay’s description of Ino’s “delicious arm.”

William Callio Roffe, engraving of John Henry Foley’s Ino and Bacchus (1840), 1849. Paper, 10 × 13 ¾ in. Courtesy of the British Museum.

Each of The Art Journal’s engravings after poetic sculpture were produced using a technique called stipple. Thought to be the best way of representing sculptural bodies in two dimensions, the technique relies on a sharp-tipped tool called a burin to create tiny dots on the metal plate that coalesce to give a sense of light and shade on a volumetric form. Prints dating between the early 1820s and 1850 were made using a steel plate, a method invented in Britain that allowed for a larger number of impressions at a minimal cost. (Before 1820, copper plates had been used. After 1850, printmakers tended to use a copper plate coated on one side with iron, a method known as steel-faced printing.) Stipple had long been deemed a feminine aesthetic. In contrast to the more didactic connotations of etching and engraving in outline, stipple was prized for its softness and capacity to blur the line between flesh and marble, transcending both to produce a third texture, one more smooth, soft, and sensual than either skin or stone. By 1873, so engrained was the femininity of stipple that it could be invoked as having surpassed both marble and flesh as the touchstone for this kind of tactile surface. That year, a critic wrote that Antonio Canova’s Venus Victrix (1808), a crucial work in the development of poetic sculpture, has a “delicacy [that] is almost carried to excess—it is the ‘stippling’ of sculpture.”²⁵ Here, stipple, not sculpture, is the primary point of reference, which adds credibility to Charles Bell’s hypothesis that printmaking would soon “banish” sculpture.

John Henry Foley, Ino and Bacchus, 1840. Plaster, 76 × 39 3/8 in. Private collection. Courtesy of Adam’s Fine Art and Auctioneers, Dublin.

Stipple was associated with Francesco Bartolozzi, a Florentine engraver based in London whose reputation rested on his aptitude for, in the words of John Buckland Wright, “softness, his luminous effects, . . . grace, tenderness and above all . . . elegant sentimentality.”²⁶ To represent an emphatically female body using a feminized technique was to add an extra layer of idealization to the image. Stipple did not diminish the erotic charge of the figure, but rather functioned as a kind of makeup, deftly highlighting certain features while playing down others. Because of Bartolozzi’s ties to Britain, stipple came to be known as the English manner. The particular kind of idealization it achieved acquired nationalistic implications that complimented poetic sculpture’s transcendence of Greco-Roman exemplars. Eve at the Fountain could be heralded as “borrowing some mere abstraction from the Greek, and clothing it in a natural beauty that the English heart can understand,” as Foley’s Ino and Bacchus was praised for allowing the classical paradigm to blossom into “the prettiness of more recent times.”²⁷ The engravings take advantage of this geographical and temporal unmooring. Based on another sculpture of a nymph by Wyatt, Nymph at the Bath, William Henry Mote’s stipple after the sculpture presents the figure as simply A Girl at the Bath (1849), doing away altogether with the figure’s already vague and inconsequential mythological identity. This move was licensed by the hairstyle Wyatt afforded his figure: a center parting with two clusters of curls on either side. This was a fashion popular among British women during the early 1830s when the work would have been designed. We are left with a portrayal of an unclothed living woman, one whose naked breasts, contoured by the configuration of light unique to stipple, appear larger and whose swell of hips appears rounder than they would in a marble work. Again, the engraving fulfills the agenda latent within the sculpture. With its nationalistic and gendered connotations, stipple, even more than carved and polished stone, is able to exaggerate and disguise the eroticism of the depicted subject, in this case, a particularly dangerous figure: a modern woman with no anchor whatsoever in a literary work.   

William Henry Mote, A Girl at the Bath, 1849. Engraving of Richard James Wyatt’s Nymph at the Bath (circa 1834). Paper, 13 1/8 × 9 7/8 in. Courtesy of the British Museum.

Samuel Carter Hall insisted that the engravings after poetic sculptures in The Art Journal were part of a noble mission to bring classical art to the masses. According to the editor, the prints reflect the tremendous skill needed to produce figures in marble. “To invest the hard and unpliable marble with life and motion—to animate the ‘senseless stone’ with the various passions and feelings of human nature—to create beauty out of barrenness,” wrote Hall in an article about the engravings, “requires a high order of genius.”²⁸ Such a declaration normalizes the exposure of flesh in such works, taking for granted the exceptional status of nudity, especially female nudity, when refracted through the prism of classical beauty. But not all of Hall’s readership viewed the images in this light—as simply two-dimensional representations of consummate feats of sculptural practice: some responded to them as if they were, in fact, images of living bodies. After the first few engravings were published, Hall claimed to have been sent some back to his office, ripped out and mutilated. “I had numerous warnings I was ruining the publication,” he writes in his autobiography, “when not once, but several times, a plate of semi-nude figures torn through, was sent to me by post, with protest against such attempts to introduce indecencies into families.”²⁹ Hall’s desire to create “a public for art,” in his words, was not compatible with the exaggerated sensuality that, although controlled by marble and by print, is the essence of these objects.³⁰

Montaging the engravings from The Art Journal with Page 3 illuminates the extent to which this power to outrage has diminished over time. Rather than just another symptom of our culture’s growing de-sensitization to explicit imagery however, the incorporation of photographs of topless women in a newspaper points to an increasing reliance on representations of the female body to, like poetic sculpture, provide respite from the drudgery and brutality of modern life. Many would have expected Germaine Greer to take an openly critical stance in the Channel 4 debate with Harriet Harman and Chloe Goodman. Instead, she defended Page 3, quoting a man she knew who read The Sun: “It cheers me up.”

The most striking conclusion that can be drawn from a knowledge-montage of Page 3 and the engravings in The Art Journal relates to this capacity of the female body to offer a particularly viable means of escape. Poetic sculpture grew out of decades of warfare. The studied sensuality I have explored—the femininity, softness, smoothness, and wholeness—was a reaction not only to a more masculine and war-torn variety of classical body, but also to the cruelty of war itself. These works were an antidote to, but also a reflection of, the “heavier realities of life” they try so desperately to avoid.³¹ The emphatic femininity and heightened sensuality of the body in this kind of sculpture indicate the artist overcompensating for the trauma of the recent wars and the implication of sculpture—works like Westmacott’s towering Wellington Monument—within that trauma.

Print, particularly new methods of mass-producing stipple, fostered techniques of idealization that regulated the sensuality of the naked female body, rendering it an even more alluring means of distraction. But the page can be turned, the volume closed, and the viewers instantly find themselves back in the world of conflict, of disease and poverty, the world in which bodies are torn apart and drained of the “delicious” vitality that these engravings celebrate.³² With breasts much larger than the “small, distinct, delicate” classical ideal, Page 3 models stare straight into the eyes of the reader, as if having to work even harder to usher them into a remote space in which all suffering fades from view. That Samantha Fox’s appeal was seen to be her combination of a child’s face and womanly body suggests that this space was fragile, that it needed to be reinforced by an image of youth that counterbalanced the inherent dangers of a more mature female body. Her image was the very embodiment of that simultaneous exaggeration and containment that characterizes poetic sculpture and the prints in The Art Journal.

Detail of “Page 3,” The Sun, February 4, 2004. Courtesy of Tim Ireland of Bloggerheads.com.

Around the millennium, The Sun began to bring the poles of escape and confrontation into the same image. Under the heading “News in Briefs,” bubbles of text started appearing next to Page 3 girls, giving the facetious impression that they themselves were commenting on current events. The captions frequently touched on the war in which the British state was then participating. On February 3, 2004, a model with streaked hair was shown staring out, her outlined eyes beneath thin eyebrows. Placed next to her head as if fallen from her shimmering lips, the text read: “Tony Blair was right to take Britain into the war with Iraq. . . . You don’t need to be an international diplomat to realise the world is better off without Saddam. We should be proud of what has been achieved.”³³ Fantasies of the sexually available female body need war, and war needs these fantasies. They depend on each other.

Cora Gilroy-Ware is an artist and scholar based in London. Her first book, The Classical Body in Romantic Britain, will be published in spring 2020 with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.