A Brief History of Nudes.

The naked truth about history's most beautiful –

and scandalous – artworks
1. Naked Greek athletes

The nude first became a significant feature in Western Art with the Greeks, whose
interest in the naked male form was an extension of daily life. In Ancient Greece,
men competed in the nude for athletic events and also disrobed for parties called
symposia, where they would eat, drink, and socialize in the buff. It is no surprise,
then, that art imitated life and that Ancient Greek sculptors associated the naked
male form with values such as triumph, glory, and moral excellence. This Kouros,
or statue of a nude boy, embodied Greek ideas of moral and physical beauty,
nobility, and youth.

Kouros, Unknown, 530 BCE or modern forgery (Collection: The J. Paul Getty
Museume)
2. Female fertility

If the nude male sculpture was associated with athletic talent and high moral
values, the female nude had a different genesis: she embodied fertility and
procreation. Naked female fertility deities have been found in very early prehistoric
art and, in historic times, were a recurring feature of Near Eastern and Egyptian
art. This naked Mesopotamian goddess is thought to represent either Ishtar,
goddess of love and war, or Ereshkigal, Ishtar’s sister and rival who ruled the
Underworld.

The Queen of the Night, 1899/1700 BCE, made in Babylonia (Collection: British
Museum)
3. Scandalous Aphrodite

Although the Greeks had no problem showing their male Gods and figures without
clothes, the same did not apply to women. Even Aphrodite, the Greek Goddess of
love, was always sculpted wearing loosely-draped robes. But in the mid-fourth
century BCE, a sculptor named Praxiteles gave form to a naked Aphrodite. His
Aphrodite, undressing for her bath and completely naked, her right hand modestly
covering her pubic area, was the first life-size representation of a nude female
form.

Originally commissioned as a cult statue for a temple in Kos, Praxiteles made two
versions: one clothed and one nude. The temple bought the clothed version, but
private citizens of the town of Knidos bought the nude version and put it on public
display in an open air temple. The naked Aphrodite soon became a sensation:
people came to visit it from all over Greece, numerous copies were made, and the
statue was written about throughout the Mediterranean. Praxiteles’ statue has not
survived. But because it was one of the most copied statues in the world, Roman
replicas and descriptions that survive today give us a pretty good example of what
the original looked like. This Roman Venus is a smaller scale copy of Praxiteles’
original.

Statuette of Venus (Venus de Clerq), 175-200 CE (Collection: The J. Paul Getty

Museum)
4. Naked and Afraid in the Middle Ages

With the arrival of Christianity, nakedness all but disappeared from Western art,
except for depictions of Adam and Eve, whose nakedness revealed their sin, and
Jesus, whose naked body revealed his wounds. Being naked was no longer
associated with male athleticism and female fertility, but rather with weakness and
defenselessness. Bare-breasted, nursing Madonnas and naked baby Jesus’ were
an exception to this rule, their bodies exposed for theological reasons.

The Gothic nude was very different from the Greek and Roman classical ideal:
Gothic bodies were long and slender, rather than shapely and athletic, and Gothic
painters emphasized women’s rounded stomachs rather than their hips.

Hugo van der Goes, The Fall of Man and the Lamentation, 1470/1475 (Collection:
Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien)
5. Erotic Art

Nudity was also an obvious feature of erotic art, which existed long before Playboy
and Playgirl made naked bodies mainstream. Every civilization, ancient and
modern, has its form of erotic art. In some countries, representations of sex are
entwined with spiritual beliefs, in others, they portray cultural practices. Before
photography, erotic art circulated via private paintings, small sculptures, and on
decorative objects. The idea that erotic images were “pornography” was a Victorian
invention; until the mid-nineteenth century, looking at erotic representations was
legal and probably more commonplace that one would think.

Sculptural ceramic ceremonial vessel that represents a scene of sexual union of a

man and a woman, Salinar Style (Peru), 1250 BC - 1 AD (Collection: Museo Larco
6. Males with Breasts?

Renaissance sculptors such as Donatello and Michelangelo helped bring male and
female nudes back into classical art. Donatello’s naked David (1408-1409) was the
first free-standing statue of a nude since antiquity. A few decades later,
Michelangelo made a larger-than-life version. Even though Renaissance sculptors
may have had access to female models, they preferred to use male models. By
consequence, Michelangelo’s women often appear to have male bodies with the
addition of breasts. Although some historians argue that this was because of
Michelangelo’s preference for the male form (it’s commonly thought that he was
homosexual), others say that the normative human body in the Renaissance was
male. The most beautiful female bodies would be those that were the most
androgynous.

Michelangelo Buonarroti, Archers Firing at a herm, c.1530 (Collection: Royal Trust

Collection, UK)
7. Shock value

Nudity was a popular feature of mythological and allegorical genre painting in

eighteenth and nineteenth-century Western art. But the French Impressionists
pushed against the conventional notion of allegorical nudes by painting and
exhibiting bold, and sometimes surreal, nudes. Edouard Manet’s Dejeuner sur
l’herbe was an example of how the Impressionists refused to conform to
convention.

The woman has no explicit reason to be naked--she is not a mythological figure but
a normal lunch companion--and her partners are both clothed. The nudity wasn’t
even the almost shocking part of this painting though. Manet’s painting style and
his refusal to make subtle gradations between the light and dark part of the
painting, as well as his deliberately shallow depth and perspective, were also
considered avant-garde.

Edouard Manet, Luncheon on the Grass, 1863 (Collection: Musee d’Orsay, Paris)
8. Nudity and Japanese modernism

The nude body was mainly absent from Japanese art for centuries. Although male
and female nakedness was a routine part of life, specifically within bathhouse
culture, Japanese artists didn’t develop an interest in representing the naked body
until the nineteenth century, when their work became influenced by Western art.
Laws in Japan allowed painters to depict nudes if they were allegorical, although
painters often bypassed this rule.
Tetsugoro Yorozu’s Nude Beauty (1912) is important because it showed Japanese
audiences a non-idealized, ‘Japanese’ body rather than that of the idealized
Western woman typically featured in nineteenth-century Japanese art. The woman
wears a red koshimaki, or traditional Japanese female underwear, and is shown
reclining against a Japanese landscape. Yorozu’s refusal to ‘justify’ the nudity of
his woman by putting her in Western surroundings was radical for its time.

Tetsugoro Yorozu, Nude Beauty, 1912 (Collection: The National Museum of

Modern Art, Tokyo)
9 . The Female Gaze

Since most artists documented in art history are male, the female nude has often
been associated with the “male gaze” - the idea that women (both within and
outside of art) are meant to be passively ‘looked at’, while men are in the active
position of viewer. The rise of female artists in modern and contemporary art
allowed women to explore this issue in their own work. Contemporary women
artists such as Marina Abramovic, Yoko Ono, Nan Goldin, and Vanessa Beecroft
are known for using their own nude bodies or bodies of other women to make
statements against sexism within art history as well as society at large.

For this 1999 performance for the Kaldor Public Art Project, the 40th in Beecroft’s
series of works, 20 models stood in formation for periods of two and a half hours.
Dressed in red Wolford tights and Prada heels, the models were given a sheet of
papers with 54 rules such as “hold position; look plain, boyish, quiet.” As Beecroft
explained in the exhibition statement, “The practice is to stand, not talking, and to
wait until it ends, being watched as a picture and photographed as though on a
photo shoot.” Beecroft turns the ‘male gaze’ on its head, and interrogates femininity
and desire within modern consumer culture.

Vanessa Beecroft, Kaldor Public Art Project 12: Vanessa Beecroft 1999
(Collection: Kaldor Public Art Project)
From Egyptian deities, to classical Greek ideals, through Peruvian erotic art, and
up to Kim Kardashian’s naked selfies, the history of nudity in art has a long and
interesting trajectory. The biggest change of the past one hundred years has been
the inclusion of female artists in the mix. Yet, the basic reason for wanting to depict
unclothed figures has remained constant over time: the human body is a wonderful
sight to behold, both clothed and unclothed.
A Brief History of Nudes. The naked truth about history's most beautiful –
and scandalous – artworks
1. Naked Greek athletes

The nude first became a significant feature in Western Art with the Greeks, whose
interest in the naked male form was an extension of daily life. In Ancient Greece,
men competed in the nude for athletic events and also disrobed for parties called
symposia, where they would eat, drink, and socialize in the buff. It is no surprise,
then, that art imitated life and that Ancient Greek sculptors associated the naked
male form with values such as triumph, glory, and moral excellence. This Kouros,
or statue of a nude boy, embodied Greek ideas of moral and physical beauty,
nobility, and youth.

Kouros, Unknown, 530 BCE or modern forgery (Collection: The J. Paul Getty
Museume)
2. Female fertility

If the nude male sculpture was associated with athletic talent and high moral
values, the female nude had a different genesis: she embodied fertility and
procreation. Naked female fertility deities have been found in very early prehistoric
art and, in historic times, were a recurring feature of Near Eastern and Egyptian
art. This naked Mesopotamian goddess is thought to represent either Ishtar,
goddess of love and war, or Ereshkigal, Ishtar’s sister and rival who ruled the
Underworld.

The Queen of the Night, 1899/1700 BCE, made in Babylonia (Collection: British
Museum)
3. Scandalous Aphrodite

Although the Greeks had no problem showing their male Gods and figures without
clothes, the same did not apply to women. Even Aphrodite, the Greek Goddess of
love, was always sculpted wearing loosely-draped robes. But in the mid-fourth
century BCE, a sculptor named Praxiteles gave form to a naked Aphrodite. His
Aphrodite, undressing for her bath and completely naked, her right hand modestly
covering her pubic area, was the first life-size representation of a nude female
form.

Originally commissioned as a cult statue for a temple in Kos, Praxiteles made two
versions: one clothed and one nude. The temple bought the clothed version, but
private citizens of the town of Knidos bought the nude version and put it on public
display in an open air temple. The naked Aphrodite soon became a sensation:
people came to visit it from all over Greece, numerous copies were made, and the
statue was written about throughout the Mediterranean. Praxiteles’ statue has not
survived. But because it was one of the most copied statues in the world, Roman
replicas and descriptions that survive today give us a pretty good example of what
the original looked like. This Roman Venus is a smaller scale copy of Praxiteles’
original.

Statuette of Venus (Venus de Clerq), 175-200 CE (Collection: The J. Paul Getty

Museum)
4. Naked and Afraid in the Middle Ages

With the arrival of Christianity, nakedness all but disappeared from Western art,
except for depictions of Adam and Eve, whose nakedness revealed their sin, and
Jesus, whose naked body revealed his wounds. Being naked was no longer
associated with male athleticism and female fertility, but rather with weakness and
defenselessness. Bare-breasted, nursing Madonnas and naked baby Jesus’ were
an exception to this rule, their bodies exposed for theological reasons.

The Gothic nude was very different from the Greek and Roman classical ideal:
Gothic bodies were long and slender, rather than shapely and athletic, and Gothic
painters emphasized women’s rounded stomachs rather than their hips.

Hugo van der Goes, The Fall of Man and the Lamentation, 1470/1475 (Collection:
Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien)
5. Erotic Art

Nudity was also an obvious feature of erotic art, which existed long before Playboy
and Playgirl made naked bodies mainstream. Every civilization, ancient and
modern, has its form of erotic art. In some countries, representations of sex are
entwined with spiritual beliefs, in others, they portray cultural practices. Before
photography, erotic art circulated via private paintings, small sculptures, and on
decorative objects. The idea that erotic images were “pornography” was a Victorian
invention; until the mid-nineteenth century, looking at erotic representations was
legal and probably more commonplace that one would think.

Sculptural ceramic ceremonial vessel that represents a scene of sexual union of a

man and a woman, Salinar Style (Peru), 1250 BC - 1 AD (Collection: Museo Larco
6. Males with Breasts?

Renaissance sculptors such as Donatello and Michelangelo helped bring male and
female nudes back into classical art. Donatello’s naked David (1408-1409) was the
first free-standing statue of a nude since antiquity. A few decades later,
Michelangelo made a larger-than-life version. Even though Renaissance sculptors
may have had access to female models, they preferred to use male models. By
consequence, Michelangelo’s women often appear to have male bodies with the
addition of breasts. Although some historians argue that this was because of
Michelangelo’s preference for the male form (it’s commonly thought that he was
homosexual), others say that the normative human body in the Renaissance was
male. The most beautiful female bodies would be those that were the most
androgynous.

Michelangelo Buonarroti, Archers Firing at a herm, c.1530 (Collection: Royal Trust

Collection, UK)
7. Shock value

Nudity was a popular feature of mythological and allegorical genre painting in

eighteenth and nineteenth-century Western art. But the French Impressionists
pushed against the conventional notion of allegorical nudes by painting and
exhibiting bold, and sometimes surreal, nudes. Edouard Manet’s Dejeuner sur
l’herbe was an example of how the Impressionists refused to conform to
convention.

The woman has no explicit reason to be naked--she is not a mythological figure but
a normal lunch companion--and her partners are both clothed. The nudity wasn’t
even the almost shocking part of this painting though. Manet’s painting style and
his refusal to make subtle gradations between the light and dark part of the
painting, as well as his deliberately shallow depth and perspective, were also
considered avant-garde.

Edouard Manet, Luncheon on the Grass, 1863 (Collection: Musee d’Orsay, Paris)
8. Nudity and Japanese modernism

The nude body was mainly absent from Japanese art for centuries. Although male
and female nakedness was a routine part of life, specifically within bathhouse
culture, Japanese artists didn’t develop an interest in representing the naked body
until the nineteenth century, when their work became influenced by Western art.
Laws in Japan allowed painters to depict nudes if they were allegorical, although
painters often bypassed this rule.
Tetsugoro Yorozu’s Nude Beauty (1912) is important because it showed Japanese
audiences a non-idealized, ‘Japanese’ body rather than that of the idealized
Western woman typically featured in nineteenth-century Japanese art. The woman
wears a red koshimaki, or traditional Japanese female underwear, and is shown
reclining against a Japanese landscape. Yorozu’s refusal to ‘justify’ the nudity of
his woman by putting her in Western surroundings was radical for its time.

Tetsugoro Yorozu, Nude Beauty, 1912 (Collection: The National Museum of

Modern Art, Tokyo)
9 . The Female Gaze

Since most artists documented in art history are male, the female nude has often
been associated with the “male gaze” - the idea that women (both within and
outside of art) are meant to be passively ‘looked at’, while men are in the active
position of viewer. The rise of female artists in modern and contemporary art
allowed women to explore this issue in their own work. Contemporary women
artists such as Marina Abramovic, Yoko Ono, Nan Goldin, and Vanessa Beecroft
are known for using their own nude bodies or bodies of other women to make
statements against sexism within art history as well as society at large.

For this 1999 performance for the Kaldor Public Art Project, the 40th in Beecroft’s
series of works, 20 models stood in formation for periods of two and a half hours.
Dressed in red Wolford tights and Prada heels, the models were given a sheet of
papers with 54 rules such as “hold position; look plain, boyish, quiet.” As Beecroft
explained in the exhibition statement, “The practice is to stand, not talking, and to
wait until it ends, being watched as a picture and photographed as though on a
photo shoot.” Beecroft turns the ‘male gaze’ on its head, and interrogates femininity
and desire within modern consumer culture.

Vanessa Beecroft, Kaldor Public Art Project 12: Vanessa Beecroft 1999
(Collection: Kaldor Public Art Project)
From Egyptian deities, to classical Greek ideals, through Peruvian erotic art, and
up to Kim Kardashian’s naked selfies, the history of nudity in art has a long and
interesting trajectory. The biggest change of the past one hundred years has been
the inclusion of female artists in the mix. Yet, the basic reason for wanting to depict
unclothed figures has remained constant over time: the human body is a wonderful
sight to behold, both clothed and unclothed.