The Muses of the Medals
The third to last essay in the beloved art critic John Berger’s collected About Looking is about the sculptor Auguste Rodin’s renderings of the nude female form. In the constrained, contorted figures, often subsumed “as though the figures were being forced back into their material,” Berger sees a reversal of the myth of Pygmalion. Consumed with desire for one of his sculptures of a woman, Pygmalion’s offerings to Venus were rewarded when the sculpture came to life and became his wife, even bearing him children. In Berger’s reading, Rodin’s desire is not for his clay to be transformed into flesh, but rather the opposite. The artist sought in his nudes more control over the bodies he molded from his medium than he could exercise over those of the living, breathing women who modeled for him, married him, or shared his bed as mistress. The result, Berger writes, is that “Rodin’s figure have been reduced to less than they should be as independent sculptures: they have suffered oppression.” The pressure of Rodin’s grasping, consuming hands are marked into the clay of the bodies, his masculine force imprinted on their flesh to a degree that “if the same pressure were further increased, the three-dimensional sculptures would become bas-reliefs,” on the verge of drowning in their media. Berger imagines even more compression, forcing the image into two dimensions. A figure that disappears when seen on edge, crushed out of existence by the force of Rodin’s ardor.
In the language of coining, the metal to be used is struck into a die. After a sculptor designs the relief of the coin, a die impression is made into which the gold or bronze or other metal is forced by extreme pressure. The process leaves a bas-relief, the image emerging only partially from the medium of the coin—the middle step in Berger’s stages of a sculpture’s oppression. This process, carried out with solid gold, is how the Nobel Prize medals are created. On the front of each medal is a portrait of the prize’s patron Alfred Nobel, and on the back, is a tableau relating to each of the specific prizes in Peace, Economic Science, Literature, Physiology or Medicine, and Physics and Chemistry. On the reverse of this last is the familiar scene of Science unveiling Nature, portrayed as allegorical female figures in classical style by the sculptor Erik Lindberg.
Nobel medals are quite small, only about three inches in diameter. Despite being the icon of the most prestigious prize for scientists, their design is curiously prosaic, and the figures are supremely lifeless. Nature’s jaw is set in an almost petulant frown; her chin pushing her lip up into a small downward curve; and her perfectly symmetrical eyes stare directly ahead. Nature carries a cornucopia of ambiguous fruits; her other arm limp at her side, and her breasts are exposed above a fold of cloth. Science is shown in profile, reaching up to pull Nature’s veil away from her head. But her eye is not rendered sharply, so it appears like the hollow orbit of a skull. Her nipples, however, raise the thin cloth of her toga in sharp draping creases. Like many of Rodin’s nudes, Lindberg’s figures are truncated by a pillowy pile of clouds that fall away shapelessly into the body of the coin, so they appear mired in the lumps of gold. Science’s right knee is cut off at the same place as her left thigh, an effect that flattens the image even further. It is conservative academic imagery of the most perfunctory kind, but it still bears all the marks of a long aesthetic tradition of constraining and compressing the image of woman into the physical media itself, into the neoclassical conceptual hierarchies that reached their apex in the Enlightenment.
Science is notoriously uninterested in its own history, unless it has to do with uncritical adoration for the heroic heritage of the early modern scientific revolution. As historian Londa Schiebinger argued some three decades ago, the familiar allegorical representation of Science as a female figure (Nature, she reminds us, has almost always been gendered female) dates to the early modern period. It appears on the frontispieces of early printed scientific books, as the subject of beloved classical sculpture, and on the pediments of public buildings. Schiebinger shows that the use of these images was connected to gendered structures of language and social and cultural ideas about the investigation of nature, the gendered hierarchy of knowledge and power, and the philosophical commitments of early modern science. In particular, Neo-Platonic ideas about the essential unity of masculine and feminine aspects governed the representation of Science as a woman. “Scientia, then, is feminine in the early modern culture because it is feminine in the language but also because the scientists––the framers of the scheme––are male: the feminine Scientia plays opposite the male scientist,” Schiebinger writes. “In order to unite in creative vision with the female, the male scientist images his science as his opposite.”
By the end of the 18th century, such images had largely fallen out of use, and so it is with a nostalgic eye that Lindberg returned to them at the turn of the 20th century in crafting the Nobel medals. But the sharp gendered divisions of early modern conceptions of science, where the male scientist was opposed to the female science, were still in play in Lindberg’s time. And the same medals are still made for Nobel laureates today. There is much discussion at present about the gender representation of these prizes and debate about the real value of the prize itself and its larger meaning for the place of science in a world that could do with stepping down the valorization of progress more than a few degrees. But what of the material and aesthetic heritage of science that this medal represents, its representational conventions and the visual culture of knowledge?
There can be no realization of Pygmalion’s dream for Science and Nature because they must be ideas, abstract concepts to be slotted into the Neo-Platonic program of the scientific self. Science and Nature are rendered on this medal in exacting accordance to tradition and convention—nominally chaste but ever so slightly erotic, styled in classical garments and arrayed with allegorical objects, surrounded by Latin inscriptions. But the figures are as formally oppressed as any of Rodin’s radical nudes. They are merely rendered in deference to a rational ideal of the pursuit of knowledge that we consider much more laudable than Rodin’s base desires. The figures on the medal are two pocket muses struck in gold and bound in service to the laureate’s creative vision, the opposing and balancing feminine force to the masculine intellect.
The design of the medals dates to the inception of the prize itself––all laureates in their respective categories have received the same medal. The medals awarded to Marie Curie, the first woman to ever receive one and the only woman to receive two in different fields, are twins, both stamped with the image of Science unveiling Nature. Beyond the issue of gender representation among laureates, there is a persistent visual and material culture of science that reflects a privileged male view of scientific genius, which sets the feminine apart from the masculine in the hierarchy of knowledge creation. There are many men who have handled the figures struck into the gold of the Nobel medals, but only a very few women.
Image Credit: Louis-Ernest Barrias, Nature Unveiling Herself before Science, 1900 | National Gallery of Art, Public Domain.
