In ancient societies, the robe of modesty was essential to social standing. But in the modern world, a public display of nudity has many different meanings and experiences.
Jean-Honore Fragonard painted great landscapes, religious and mythological paintings but he was also a master of frivolity. His Shirt Removed from 1770 scandalised the Salon and caused a sensation in the public.
Art History
Figures with no clothes are peculiarly common in the art of the Western world. They aren’t simply a record of the human body as it appears in daily life, however; naked figures reflect a complex set of formal ideals and cultural concerns.
While the emphasis on chastity in Medieval Christianity kept nude women at bay, they were reborn during the Renaissance. Artists drawing on Greco-Roman art expanded the Platonic metaphors of naked goddesses and took them to decadent extremes. Michelangelo turned biblical saints into nude beefcakes and Titian drew on Renaissance Neoplatonism to turn female bodies into allegories of fertility.
In the Mannerist era of the 16th and 17th centuries, artists truly liberated nude paintings from religious constraints and a sense of modesty. The figure in Francisco Goya’s La maja desnuda, for example, confidently gazes into the viewer’s eyes and suggests unabashed eroticism. The graceful curves of this immodest Venus trace, on the diagonal, a characteristic “serpentine” line that characterizes Mannerism.
Edouard Manet
Edouard Manet was a French painter who was able to inspire many young artists with his work during the 1860s. He was a man who was always ready to challenge conventions and take risks. This is evident in several of his paintings, such as the Luncheon on the Grass, which shocked many due to its inclusion of nude women and men.
In this painting, Manet was able to https://www.ilovetosquirt.com capture a moment from Parisian cafe society and break artistic convention. He also incorporated several genres in this piece, including portraiture, landscape, and still life. Manet also challenged prevailing views on depicting nudes with his work Olympia, in which he paraphrased a famous Renaissance masterpiece by Titian. The modern Venus’ languid pose is a clear rejection of the body type revered by art academy standards and hints at the influence of Francisco Goya.
Egon Schiele
One of the most influential artists of his time, Austrian master Egon Schiele honed a striking visual signature that remains unmistakable to this day. In his drawings and watercolours, the artist depicted the body in a way that was both sensual and grotesque. He played with distorted shapes to destabilise preconceived ideas of what the human form should look like, challenging the beauty cult of his day.
Schiele’s female nudes are powerful and unflinching, displaying an intense eroticism in the midst of their vulnerable poses. The sitters in his paintings and drawings are not passive portrayals of Venus; they pose in assertive, revealing positions and make direct eye contact with the viewer.
Although his life was tragically cut short by Spanish flu at the age of 28, Schiele carved out an artistic legacy that is now widely recognised as a precursor to Expressionism. In his work, we can see bold contradictions coexist: death and sex, light and dark, good and evil, love and hate.
Botticelli
The poster image for this traveling exhibition of Renaissance paintings is a slender, elongated rendering of Venus that is almost life-size. In her pose she hides a bit of genitalia and reveals a breast, an image that is both provocative and sensual. It was a revolutionary work in 1485 because, during this era of art, painting nude women was seen as obscene. The only exceptions were recreations of Eve from the biblical story of her and the apple.
Botticelli broke the rules and opted to depict the goddess Venus in her naked form. He drew on ancient Greco-Roman art and a new Renaissance ideal called Humanism that promoted the rational sciences.
The movement pushed artists to study the structure of the human body and to create works that would be considered scientifically accurate. Despite this new focus on the scientific, the nude figure still carried a sense of sexual emancipation. It was a sign that the Renaissance was on the cusp of change, moving away from Medieval religious iconography and toward the libertine spirit of the 18th century.
