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John Singer Sargent’s studies of the male nude remain one of the least explored aspects of the artist’s production. Taking into account his passion for textiles, which he collected and used repeatedly in his work, this article analyses a group of charcoal drawings, watercolours, lithographs and oil paintings of semi-draped male models from the period between 1890 and 1915, some of which have never received scholarly attention. Examining them as an independent project unified by the presence of fabrics - rather than as preparatory works or isolated formal exercises - exposes the ambiguities of Sargent’s approach to the male form, which cannot be limited to clean-cut categories such as ‘academic’ or ‘homoerotic’. A closer exploration of the treatment of the relationship between body and cloth reveals the significance of the use of textiles as a means of expanding the possibilities of interpretation of these works. This might have enabled a queer reading of them within the realm of the artist’s home and studio. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archaeologists have been wary of tradition, employing the term in either an empty or an abusive sense. When they do use it they tend to align it to habitus, on the one hand, or to ritual, on the other. This paper makes the case for distinguishing tradition to describe agents' conscious engagement of current actions with past actions, and for the importance of understanding such engagement in order to understand agents and agency. It exemplifies the value of tradition by discussion of two ancient Greek statues of naked men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]