A History of the Nude in Art
Learn to Look at Art, Part 11: Nudity
Welcome to the latest part in the Learn to Look at Art series. This time, we’re exploring the representation of the nude human body in art.
If you’re just joining us, the full series is available on the Learn to Look at Art page.
The Power of the Body
Few subjects have preoccupied artists across more centuries than the human form. Since the Renaissance, which peaked roughly 500 years ago, nudity in Western art has tended to focus heavily on the female body, with images of unclothed mythological goddesses treated by artists and their patrons as idealised, allegorical forms. These depictions tended to strike a careful balance between modesty and availability, between coyness and readiness, allowing the paintings to be read both as classically perfect and, in private, as scintillatingly alluring.
By the 19th century, it had become the standard institutional norm for artists to paint from nude professional models, from which the archetypal, often unequal artist-muse relationship emerged. Historically, women faced severe institutional bans from life-drawing rooms, meaning that there are vanishingly few recorded instances of female artists painting a male nude before the 20th century, whereas the number of male artists who depicted the female form is countless.
These circumstances have given rise to our modern-day awareness of the role of power in orchestrating who gets to look and who is looked at, so much so that the nude in art has become the site of charged debate.
There is a danger, however, of simplifying the story of nudity in art to one solely of chauvinistic exploitation. In fact, if we look back to early antiquity and the height of Classical ancient Greece, the female nude was more or less absent, as artistic interest focused almost exclusively on the naked male athlete and citizen.
So how did nudity in art evolve?