Research: Male and female nude over the centuries

The oldest known figurative works of art discovered in Europe are stone sculptures portraying human bodies - mostly nude women - and traditionally referred to in archaeology as Venus figurines.

The widely held belief is that these depictions of nude women with exaggerated sexual features represented early fertility symbols, one of the best-known of which is the Venus of Willendorf, a tiny limestone figure of a naked woman found in Austria, and believed to be between 27,000 and 32,000 years old.

Ancient Greek sculpture featured male nudity as the highest form of beauty, though with a more naturalistic, if somewhat idealised approach, showing a thorough understanding of the human body, with aristocrats and youthful male athletes serving as models to represent their heroes and gods.

With the spread of Christianity however, especially from the Middle Ages until the Renaissance, tastes and attitudes changed - the Christian emphasis was on chastity, celibacy and new concepts of morality, and the depiction of nakedness and naked divinities became much less acceptable. The study of the nude lost importance, unclothed figures were rare in medieval art, and Greco-Roman nudes were considered immoral. Depictions of Adam and Eve portrayed their nakedness as a symbol of weakness.

The Renaissance saw the rediscovery of Greco-Roman cultures, and nude male figures based on the antique model reappeared as part of religious biblical art, such as Donatello’s David and Michelangelo’s Sistine chapel murals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sistine_Chapel_ceiling

The Renaissance also saw the return of the female nude with new images of Venus, placing her in landscapes or domestic interiors, highlighting the seductive warmth of the female body rather than the idealised form.

https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/numr/hd_numr.htm

The Venus the Urbine by Titian is a famous example

Ever since the Renaissance the nude has been present in Western art, and whether embracing or refashioning classical ideals, artists from the seventeenth century to the present day have favoured the nude form and made it an endlessly compelling means of creative expression.

Baroque art’s fascination for classical art renews the approach to the nude, appearing in works such as Hendrick Goltzius’ the Farnese Hercules and Rubens’ The judgment of Paris

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the prestige of the classical nude was high, and students were directed to life drawing studios to improve their skills. The nude was however portrayed in a classical, mythological or imagined ways so as not to offend nineteenth-century morals. From the late nineteenth-century however artists with a freer attitude to the nude started to appear such us Edouard Monet, who painted nudes in a modern situations like Olympia in 1865

In this portrait - of an aristocrat prostitute, the controversial status of the nude was exposed and academic ideas began to be challenged, and although the classical tradition lost its cultural supremacy in the twentieth century, the appeal of the nude remained strong in modern and contemporary art. Jean Sorabella, 2008 https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/nuba/hd_nuba.htm

For this research I listened to John Berger analysing the trend of the nude in western European art, which discussed the subject in term of woman as an object of pleasure, which made me ask myself questions on the subject -

1. What is the connection between nudity and the preconception of evil or sin?

It seems to me that ancient populations portrayed the nude as a symbol of fertility much as a child who hasn’t been conditioned to see evil in nature, and the Greeks portrayed the nude as a symbol of strength and beauty in the same way, so the nude was a natural thing without evil.

2. What is the relationship between morality, nudity and religion?

Morality and immorality are social constructs, products of civilization originating from the need to regulate societies in which many people lived together in close association (E. M. Stuart, Fine art Journal, Hener and Renoir, two exponents of nude art, 1914)

I suspect that the concept of evil was introduced into art by religion, in the sense of morality, which associated nudity with sin, and as a weakness, which has carried over in the minds of some people and became difficult to overcome.

3. Why are there more female than male nudes in later European painting?

It seems to me that the change from predominantly male to predominantly female subjects is related to the changing purpose and motivation for commissioning art over time. The Greeks portrayed male nudes because they wanted to show the power of their heroes and their gods. In the later European period however, though paintings were often commissioned by the church, paintings were increasing commissioned also by wealthy individuals, and often for pleasure. I believe that in many cases portrayal of the female nude form was effectively the pornography of the time – and their portrayed in biblical or mythological ways was largely to make them more acceptable given the morality of the age.

4. Where do I stand on nudity?

Since a child I have always looked on nude paintings as works of art – especially of women - as objects of beauty and composition, without questioning why they were there or why they were done. We had classical art magazines in my home in Peru and I watched my older brother replicating Velasquez’ Rokeby Venus and Delacroix’ Mademoiselle Rose of Delacroix, which were hung in prime position in our living room, and it never occurred to me that male or female nudes were sexual objects.

I think this early introduction to the nude in art must have made me more open-minded on the subject, and thinking back to the Berger film, as a woman I don’t see myself in any of the paintings as an object of pleasure.

And this carries over into my attitude when I go to exhibitions. Even when I see a contemporary work of art which has explicit references to male or female genital, or some other sexual connotation, it doesn't offend me and I don’t see it as pornography. It may have been done or commissioned for that reason, but for me it’s a work of art and to be appreciated as such. Personally however I prefer clothed figures in art, rather than nudes, as I find them more challenging.