History Of The Nude In Art

The historical evolution of the nude in art runs parallel to the history of art in general, except for small particularities derived from the different acceptance of nudity by the various societies and cultures that have succeeded each other in the world over time. The nude is an artistic genre that consists of the representation in various artistic media (painting, sculpture or, more recently, film and photography) of the naked human body. It is considered one of the academic classifications of works of art. Nudity in art has generally reflected the social standards for aesthetics and morality of the era in which the work was made. Many cultures tolerate nudity in art to a greater extent than nudity in real life, with different parameters for what is acceptable: for example, even in a museum where nude works are displayed, nudity of the visitor is generally not acceptable. As a genre, the nude is a complex subject to approach because of its many variants, both formal, aesthetic and iconographic, and some art historians consider it the most important subject in the history of Western art.According to Francisco Calvo Serraller, "the nude is not only an art form, but it is the explanation or the very raison d'être of Western art: that dramatic point or intersection between the natural and the celestial, between the ideal and the real, between the carnal and the spiritual, between the body and the soul" (). Javier Portús, curator of the Museo del Prado, also believes that "for centuries the nude has been the artistic form par excellence in the West, the one capable of expressing better than any other the values of color and pictorial matter". ()

Although it is usually associated with eroticism, the nude can have various interpretations and meanings, from mythology to religion, including anatomical study, or as a representation of beauty and aesthetic ideal of perfection, as in Ancient Greece. Its representation has varied according to the social and cultural values of each era and each people, and just as for the Greeks the body was a source of pride, for the Jews—and therefore for Christianity—it was a source of shame, it was the condition of slaves and the miserable.

The study and artistic representation of the human body has been a constant throughout the history of art, from prehistoric times ( Venus of Willendorf) to the present day. One of the cultures where the artistic representation of the nude proliferated the most was Ancient Greece, where it was conceived as an ideal of perfection and absolute beauty, a concept that has endured in classical art until today, and largely conditioning the perception of Western society towards the nude and art in general. In the Middle Ages its representation was limited to religious themes, always based on biblical passages that justified it. In the Renaissance, the new humanist culture, of a more anthropocentric sign, propitiated the return of the nude to art, generally based on mythological or historical themes, while the religious ones remained. It was in the 19th century, especially with Impressionism, when the nude began to lose its iconographic character and to be represented simply for its aesthetic qualities, the nude as a sensual and fully self-referential image. In more recent times, studies on the nude as an artistic genre have focused on semiotic analyses, especially on the relationship between the work and the viewer, as well as on the study of gender relations. Feminism has criticized the nude as an objectual use of the female body and a sign of the patriarchal dominance of Western society. Artists such as Lucian Freud and Jenny Saville have elaborated a non-idealized type of nude to eliminate the traditional concept of nudity and seek its essence beyond the concepts of beauty and gender.

Prehistory

Prehistoric art is the art developed from the Stone Age ( Upper Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic) to the Metal Age, periods where the first manifestations that can be considered as artistic by human beings appeared. In the Paleolithic (25,000– 8000 BC), man hunted and lived in caves, producing so-called cave paintings. After a transition period (Mesolithic, 8000– 6000 BC), in the Neolithic (6000– 3000 BC) man became sedentary and dedicated himself to agriculture, with increasingly complex societies where religion gained importance and the production of handicrafts began. Finally, in the so-called Metal Age (3000–1000 BC), the first protohistoric civilizations emerged.

In Paleolithic art, the nude was strongly linked to the cult of fertility, as can be seen in the representation of the female human body—the "venus"—generally of somewhat obese forms, with generous breasts and bulging hips. Most of them come from the Aurignacian period, and are generally carved in limestone, ivory or steatite. The venuses of Willendorf, Lespugue, Menton, Laussel, etc. stand out. At the male level, the representation of the phallus—generally erect—in isolated form or in full body, was also a sign of fertility, as in the ''Cerne Abbas Giant'' (Dorset, England). In cave paintings—especially those developed in the French-Cantabrian and Levantine areas—hunting scenes are common, or scenes of rites and dances, where the human figure, reduced to schematic outlines, is sometimes represented highlighting the sexual organs—breasts in women and the phallus in men—probably associated with mating rites. Some examples are found in the caves of El Cogul, Valltorta and Alpera.

Ancient art

This is the name given to the artistic creations of the first stage of history, especially the great civilizations of the Near East: Egypt and Mesopotamia. It would also include the first artistic manifestations of most of the peoples and civilizations of all continents. One of the great advances in this era was the invention of writing, generated primarily by the need to keep records of an economic and commercial nature.

In the first religions, from the Sumerian to the Egyptian, the ancient cult of Mother Earth was related to the new anthropomorphic deities, linking the feminine form with nature, insofar as both are generators of life. Thus, the Egyptian twin gods Geb and Nut represented the earth and the sky, from whose union all the elements were born. In other cases, the gods are related to cosmological elements, such as the goddess Ishtar with the planet Venus, generally represented naked and winged, with a crescent moon on her head. Other representations of the Mother goddess are usually more or less clothed figures, but with bare breasts, such as the famous ''Snake Goddess'' (Heraklion Archaeological Museum), a Minoan statuette from around 1550 BC. These representations were the starting point for the iconography of Greek and Roman goddesses such as Artemis, Diana, Demeter and Ceres.

In Egypt, nudity was seen naturally, and abounds in representations of court scenes, especially in dances and scenes of feasts and celebrations. But it is also present in religious themes, and many of their gods represented in anthropomorphic form appear nude or semi-nude in statues and wall paintings. It also appears in the representation of the human being himself, whether pharaoh or slave, military or civil servant, such as the famous ''Seated Scribe'' of the Louvre. Undoubtedly due to the climate, the Egyptians used to wear little clothing, loincloths and skirts for men, and transparent linen dresses for women. This is reflected in the art, from the scenes that show the festivities and ceremonies of the court to the more popular scenes, which show the daily work of peasants, artisans, shepherds, fishermen and other trades. Likewise, in the war scenes appear the pitiful naked bodies of slaves and captives, treated with the same hieratic style and lack of dynamism typical of Egyptian art, where the law of frontality prevails, the body constrained to rigid static postures and lack of realism. The painting is characterized mainly by presenting figures juxtaposed in superimposed planes, with a hierarchical criterion. The profile canon predominated, which consisted of representing the head and limbs in profile, but the shoulders and eyes from the front. Among the works that have come down to us from Ancient Egypt, the nude, partial or complete, is perceptible both in painting and sculpture, whether monumental or in small statuettes, such as the Louvre's ''Offeror'' or the British Museum's ''Girl Playing a Harp''; we have statues such as those of '' Rahotep and Nofret'', the '' King Menkaure (Mycerinus) and queen'' or Louvre's '' Lady Touy'' that, although dressed in linen, the transparency of the fabric shows her nudity; in painting, the murals of the tomb of Nath, accountant of Thutmose IV, or the Tomb of the Physicians in Saqqarah. In the tomb of Tutankhamun was found a statue of the pharaoh naked, representing Ihy, son of the goddess Hathor.

On the other hand, in Mesopotamia, geographically and chronologically close to Ancient Egypt, the nude is practically unknown, except for some Assyrian reliefs such as '' Lion Hunt of Ashurbanipal'' (British Museum), where the king appears with a naked torso, or some scenes of torture of prisoners, while on the female side we only find the naked breasts of a Chaldean bronze representing a young Canaephora, present in the Louvre. Nor do we find nudes in Phoenician or Jewish art, where the Mosaic law forbade human representation.

Classical art

Classical artDerived from the Latin ''classicus'' ("first class"), the term "classical" referred to the period of Greek art between the Archaic and Hellenistic periods, valued as the most creative in the history of Greek art. Thus, the term became synonymous with creativity, excellence, the best period of any artistic style, so that many styles over time have had a phase called "classical". Heinrich Wölfflin, for example, referred to ''classical art'' when speaking of the Italian Renaissance (). is the art developed in ancient Greece and Rome, whose scientific, material and aesthetic advances contributed to the history of art a style based on nature and the human being, where harmony and balance, the rationality of forms and volumes, and a sense of imitation ("mimesis") of nature prevailed, laying the foundations of Western art, so that the recurrence to classical forms has been constant throughout history in Western civilization.

Greece

The main artistic manifestations that have marked the evolution of Western art were developed in Greece. After the beginnings of the Minoan and Mycenaean cultures, Greek art developed in three periods: archaic, classical and hellenistic. Characterized by naturalism and the use of reason in measurements and proportions, and with an aesthetic sense inspired by nature, Greek art was the starting point for the art developed on the European continent. The high point of Greek art occurred in the so called Age of Pericles, where art enjoyed great splendor, generating a style of interpreting reality: artists were based on nature according to proportions and rules (κανών, canon) that allowed the capture of that reality by the viewer, resorting if necessary to foreshortening. A concept of beauty was pursued based on the imitation of the natural, but idealized with the incorporation of a subjective vision that reflected the harmony of body and soul, equating beauty with goodness (καλοκαγαθία, ''kalokagathía'').

Greece was the first place where the human body was represented in a naturalistic way, far from the hieratism and schematization of previous cultures. Greek culture was humanistic, the human being was the main object of study of their philosophy and art, since their religion was more mythological than an object of worship. For the Greeks, the ideal of beauty was the naked male body, which symbolized youth and virility, like the athletes of the Olympic Games, who competed naked. The Greek nude was both naturalistic and idealized: naturalistic in terms of the faithful representation of the parts of the body, but idealized in terms of the search for harmonious and balanced proportions, rejecting a more realistic type of representation that would show the imperfections of the body or the wrinkles of age. From a more schematic composition in the archaic period, the study of the body evolved towards a more detailed description of the skeleton and muscles, as well as the movement and the different positions and twists that the human body can perform. The description of the face and the representation of states of mind were also perfected.

The Greeks attached great importance to the naked body, of which they were proud, since it was not only the reflection of good physical health, but also the recipient of virtue and honesty, as well as a component of social advancement, as opposed to the inhibitions of other less civilized peoples. For the Greeks, nudity was an expression of integrity, nothing related to the human being as a whole could be eluded or isolated. They related body and spirit, which for them were indissolubly united, in such a way that even their religiosity materialized in anthropomorphic gods. They related apparently antagonistic elements, and just as something as abstract as mathematics could provide them with sensory pleasure, something material like the body could become a symbol of something ethereal and immortal. Thus, the nude had a moral component that avoided simple sensualism, so it did not seem obscene or decadent to them, as it did to the Romans. This interrelation between body and spirit is inherent to Greek art, and when artists of later times imitated the Greek nude—as in the case of neoclassicism and academicism—stripped of this component, they produced lifeless works, focused on physical perfection, but without moral virtue.

In the Greek male nude, it is essential to capture the energy, the vital force, which they transcribed through two types of virile nudes: the athlete and the hero. At the Olympic Games it was customary to give the winner a ceramic vase—the "panathenaic amphorae"—with representations of the athletic discipline exercised by the winner, an excellent example of nude representations in movement, in scenes of action of great dynamism.

The first exponent of the male nude is a type of figures representing athletes, gods or mythological heroes, called '' kouros'' (''kouroi'' in plural), belonging to the Archaic period (7th century–5th century BC)—their female variant is the '' kore'' (''korai'' in plural), which, however, they used to represent dressed. Although in origin these figures denote a certain Egyptian influence, soon the Greek sculptors followed their own path, looking for the best way to represent the human body to convey their ideal of beauty. The ''kouros'' is characterized by the hieratic posture, where frontality predominates, with the feet on the ground and the left leg forward, arms close to the body and hands closed, and the head of cubic shape, with a long mane and basic facial features, highlighting its characteristic smile, called "archaic smile". The first examples date back to the 7th century BC, from places such as Delos, Naxos and Samos, generally appearing in tombs and places of worship. Later they spread to Attica and the Peloponnese, where they became more naturalistic, with descriptive features and greater interest in modeling. Some works that have survived to the present day are: the '' Kouros of Sounion'' ( 600 BC), the ''Cleobis and Biton Twins'' (600–590 BC), the ''Moschophoros'' (570 BC), the '' Rampin Horseman'' (550 BC), the ''Kouros of Tenea'' (550 BC), the '' Kouros of Anafi'' (530 BC), the '' Kouros of Aristodikos'' (500 BC), etc.

Subsequently, the nude underwent a slow but steady evolution from the rigid, geometric forms of the ''kouroi'' to the soft, naturalistic lines of the classical period (the severe style, developed between 490 BC and 450 BC). The main factor in this innovation was a new concept in conceiving sculpture, moving from idealization to imitation. This change began to be noticed in the first years of the 5th century BC, with works such as the ''Apollo of Piombino'' (), the ''Ephebe'' of Kritios () or the '' Tyrannicides Group'', representing Harmodius and Aristogeiton, work of Kritios and Nesiotes (). In these works, the cult of physical perfection is denoted, which was expressed mainly in athleticism, which combined physical vigor with moral virtue and religiosity. The new classical style brought greater naturalness not only formal, but also vital, by providing movement to the human figure, especially with the introduction of the '' contrapposto''—generally attributed to Kritios—where the various parts of the body are harmoniously opposed, and which provides rhythm and balance to the figure. With these premises, the main figures of classical Greek sculpture emerged: Myron, Phidias, Polyclitus, Praxiteles, Scopas, Lysippos, etc.

Myron made with his ''Discobolus'' (450 BC) a magnificent example of figure in movement, achieving for the first time a coordinated dynamic effect for the whole figure, since until then the figures in movement were made in parts, without a global vision that provided coherence to the dynamic action—as in the case of the '' Poseidon of Cape Artemision'', bronze figure of Attic origin from around 470 BC, in which the torso is static, not following the movement of the arms.

Phidias was especially dedicated to sculptures of gods—he was called the "maker of gods"—especially Apollo, which he treated with a mixture of naturalism and certain vestiges of the archaic hieratic frontality, which gave his figures an aura of majesty, with a balanced harmony between strength and grace, form and ideal, as in the ''Apollo of Kassel'' (). However, he also produced works of ordinary characters, with a more human, less idealized treatment, such as his figure of Anacreon ().

Polyclitus' work had a special relevance in the standardization of a canon of geometric proportions on which his figures were based, together with the search for balance within movement, as can be seen in his two main works, the '' Doriphorus'' (440 BC) and the '' Diadumene'' (430 BC)—unfortunately, only Roman copies of his works have come down to us. Another important contribution of Polyclitus was the anatomical study (the ''diarthrosis'' or articulation of the various parts of the body), especially of the musculation: the perfection of his torsos has led them to be nicknamed in French ''cuirasse esthétique'' ("aesthetic armor"), and they have long served for the design of armor.

Praxiteles designed more human figures ('' Apollo Saurochthonus'', 360 BC; ''Resting Satyr'', 365 BC; ''Hermes and the Infant Dionysus'', 340 BC), with graceful movements, with a latent sensuality, combining physical power with a certain air of grace, almost sweetness, with a fluid and delicate design.

Later, Greek sculpture lost in a certain way this union between the physical and the ideal, moving towards more slender and muscular figures, where action predominated over moral expression. This can be seen in works such as the '' Ephebe of Antikythera'' (340 BC), the '' Athlete with Strigil'' of Ephesus and the ''Ephebe of Marathon''. Among the artists who excelled in this period is Scopas, author of the frieze of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, full of moving figures, such as his ''Greeks and Amazons'' (), where the use of clothing is characteristic—especially the cloaks of the Greeks, who otherwise wear the rest of the body naked—to give the sensation of movement. He also worked on the Leochares Mausoleum, author of the famous ''Apollo of Belvedere'' (), considered the best ancient sculpture by the neoclassicists, which inspired many modern artists, such as Dürer's ''Adam'' (1504), Bernini's ''Apollo and Daphne'' (1622–1625), Canova's ''Perseus Triumphant'' (1801) and Thomas Crawford's ''Orpheus'' (1838). In the Mausoleum the so called "heroic diagonal" was introduced, a posture in which the action runs through the whole body from the feet to the hands following a pronounced diagonal, and that would be reproduced assiduously in the future—as in the '' Borghese Gladiator'' by Agasio of Ephesus (3rd century BC) or the ''Dioscuri'' of the Quirinal, reaching the ''Hercules'' and ''Theseus'' by Canova.

Lysippos, perhaps the last great name in Greek sculpture, introduced a new canon of proportions, with a smaller head, a more slender body and long legs, as in his main work, the '' Apoxymenos'' (325 BC), or in the ''Agias'' (337 BC), in ''Eros drawing the bow'' (335 BC) and ''Heracles at rest'' (320 BC). He also introduced a new conception of the human figure, less idealistic, more focused on the everyday and anecdotal, as his figure of an athlete scratching, the ''Hermes resting'' (330–320 BC) of Naples, or the ''Young praying'' of Berlin. Lysippos was the portraitist of Alexander the Great, of whom he made several statues, several of them nude, as in the ''Alexander with the spear'' of the Louvre (330 BC).

The female nude was less frequent, especially in archaic times, where the nudity of the ''kouroi'' contrasted with the clothed figures of the ''korai''. Just as Western art has considered—preferably since the Renaissance—the female nude as a more normal and pleasant subject than the male, in Greece certain religious and moral aspects prohibited female nudity—as can be seen in the famous trial of Phryne, Praxiteles' model. Socially, in Greece, women were relegated to housework, and in contrast to the nudity of male athletics, women had to be dressed from head to toe. Only in Sparta did women participate in athletic competitions, wearing a short tunic that showed their thighs, a fact that was scandalous in the rest of Greece. The first traces of female nudity are found in the 6th century BC, in everyday scenes painted on ceramic vessels. In the 5th century BC the first sculptural traces appeared, such as the '' Venus of the Esquiline'', which probably represented a priestess of Isis. It presents a crude and poorly elaborated anatomy, robust and of short stature, but it already contains mathematical proportions, based on the canon of the seven-headed stature.

The subsequent evolution of the female nude was sporadic, with hardly any full nude figures, but partial or with the technique of ''draperie mouillée'' ("wet cloths"), light dresses and attached to the body, such as the ''Aphrodite'' of the Ludovisi Throne, the ''Niké'' of Paeonius (425 BC), or the ''Venus Genetrix'' of the Museo delle Terme in Rome. Around 400 BC a bronze figure of a girl was sculpted (Munich Museum), by an anonymous author, which presents the classical ''contrapposto'', giving the female figure a sinuosity—especially in the arch of the hip, which in French is called ''déhanchement'' ("swinging")—that enhanced her figure and would remain as an almost archetypal model of representation of the female figure.

The main classical sculptor who dealt with the female nude was Praxiteles, author of the famous '' Aphrodite of Cnidus'' (), represented at the moment of entering the bath, with the dress still in one hand. It is an image that combines sensuality with mysticism, physical pleasure with spiritual evocation, and that was a material realization of the ideal of Greek feminine beauty. He was also the author of another famous image, that of the goddess Aphrodite with legs wrapped in garments and bare breasts, which has come down to us through several copies, the most complete being the so-called ''Venus of Arles'' in the Louvre, but which is most famous for the copy of an anonymous artist of about 100 BC, the ''Venus of Milo''. The subsequent evolution of the female nude led to typologies such as the ''"Venus Pudica"'', which covers her nudity with her arms, as seen in the ''Capitoline Venus''—sometimes attributed to Praxiteles himself—or the '' Venus Calypigia'' ("of beautiful buttocks"), which lifts her '' peplos'' to reveal her hips and buttocks, of which a Roman copy of a Hellenistic original has come down to us, now in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples.

A genre where the female nude abounded a little more was in the representation of bacchanals and Dionysian rites, where along with the satyrs and sylenes appeared a whole chorus of maenads and nereids in sensual and unbridled postures, whose scenes were widely represented in funerary sarcophagi, and was a frequent theme in the sculptural workshop of Scopas, author of several figures related to the cult of Dionysus, such as the ''Maenad'' of Dresden. In particular, the nereid figures gained great popularity and influenced subsequent art produced throughout the Mediterranean. As a symbol of the liberated soul, their representation became a frequent ornamental motif in various artistic techniques, from painting and sculpture to jewelry, cameos, ceramic vases and cups, chests, sarcophagi, etc. In the late Roman Empire it had a great diffusion, being found from Ireland to Arabia, and reached as far as India, where we see its forms in the figures of flying gandharvas. Even in the Middle Ages, its typology was identified with the character of Eve.

During the Hellenistic period—beginning with the death of Alexander the Great, when Greek culture expanded throughout the eastern Mediterranean—the figures acquired a greater dynamism and twist of movement, denoting exacerbated feelings and tragic expressions, breaking the serene balance of the classical period. In contrast to the vital and triumphant energy of heroes and athletes, ''pathos'' emerged, the expression of defeat, of drama, of suffering, of battered and deformed, sick or mutilated bodies. If heroes and athletes were victors, now man is subdued by fate, suffers the wrath of the gods, the divine prevails over the material, the spirit over the body. This is seen in myths such as the slaughter of the sons of Niobe, the agony of Marsyas, the death of the hero (as Hector or Meleager) or the fate of Laocoön, frequent themes in the art of the time.

One of the first production centers of Hellenistic sculpture was Pergamon, whose workshop of sculptors from all over Greece established a style that, starting from a clear Lysipian influence, imprinted a dramatism to their figures that, primarily through the twisting of the body, expressed in an effective way the pain of the characters, as seen in the ''Dying Gaul'' of the Capitoline Museum (230 BC), the '' Ludovisi Gaul'' of the Museo delle Terme (230 BC), ''Menelaus supporting the body of Patroclus'' of the Loggia dei Lanzi (230–200 BC), also called '' Pasquino Group'') or in the ''Marsyas'' of the Conservatory of Rome (230–200 BC). His masterpiece is the '' Laocoön and His Sons'', by Agesander, Athenodorus and Polydorus of Rhodes (2nd century BC), perhaps the best expression of pathos in all history, where the variegated movement, the twisting of the intertwined figures (father, sons and snakes), the exacerbated emotion, the marked muscles of the torso and thighs of the central figure, the dramatic expression of the faces, confer a general sense of latent tragedy, which undoubtedly provokes in the viewer a feeling of terror and despair, of pity for these suffering figures. According to Pliny, the ''Laocoön'' is "the best of all works of painting and sculpture".

Also from the Hellenistic period is the ''Farnese Bull'', by Apollonius and Tauriscus of Tralles, a copy of an earlier work entitled ''The Suffering of Dirce'' (130 BC). It is a dynamic group, of great expressive effect, where on a landscape base are the animals, of great realism, the young, in a somewhat rigid attitude, and the figure of Dirce, with a complex spiral twist of great dramatic effect. Another famous work of the period is the '' Crouching Venus'' of Doidalsas of Bithynia (3rd century BC), highly valued in antiquity and of which numerous copies were made to decorate palaces, gardens and public buildings. Today there are several copies in museums around the world, and several copies or versions have been made in modern art—mainly Renaissance—such as those of Giambologna, Antoine Coysevox and Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, or even in drawing or engraving, such as those of Marcantonio Raimondi and Maarten van Heemskerck. Rubens was also inspired by this figure for several of his works. Equally important was the S''leeping Hermaphrodite'' of Polycles (2nd century BC), whose original bronze was lost, there are several copies made in Roman times, of which one of the most famous is the ''Borghese Hermaphrodite'', found in the Baths of Diocletian in the early seventeenth century and restored by Bernini. There are several copies, some made in modern times, such as the one commissioned by Philip IV of Spain, now in the Prado, which surely influenced Velázquez's Venus at her Mirror.

Rome

With a clear precedent in Etruscan art, Roman art was greatly influenced by Greek art. Thanks to the expansion of the Roman Empire, classical Greco-Roman art reached almost every corner of Europe, North Africa and the Near East, laying the evolutionary foundation for the future art developed in these areas. Although the Romans were very advanced in architecture and engineering, they were not very innovative in the plastic arts. Most Roman statues are copies of Greek works, or are inspired by them. Many of the artists of the Hellenistic world moved to work in Rome, keeping alive the spirit of Greek art. Roman historians despised works of art produced after the classical Greek period, going so far as to claim that after this Greek golden age "art stopped".

The first productions in sculpture were the work of Greek artists who settled in Rome, among them: Apollonius of Athens, author of the ''Belvedere Torso'' (50 BC); Cleomenes, author of the ''Venus de' Medici'' (1st century BC); and Pasiteles, author of the ''Boy with Thorn''. Stephanos, a disciple of Pasiteles, was the author of the ''Athlete of Albani'' (50 BC), a figure that had an enormous success, a fact that is corroborated because 18 copies have reached us, and that originated a variant with another figure, creating a group sometimes identified with ''Mercury and Vulcan'', and others with ''Orestes and Pylades'', of which a copy, called '' Group of San Ildefonso'' (10 BC), is preserved in the Prado, where the two figures are reminiscent of Polyclitus' '' Doriphorus'' and Praxiteles' '' Apollo Saurochthonus''. Other anonymous works stylistically related to Hellenistic Greek art are the ''Boxer at Rest'' from the Museo delle Terme in Rome (100–50 BC) and the ''Hellenistic Prince'' from the same museum (100–50 BC).

As for the Roman production itself, while maintaining the Greek influence, the statues of deified Roman emperors are characteristic, naked like the Greek gods, which although they maintain a certain idealism show a greater study of the natural in terms of the features of their portraits. In a few works we can perceive some stylistic stamp differentiated from the Greek ones, as in the '' Venus of Cyrene'' (Museo delle Terme, Rome), which shows a greater anatomical naturalism than the Greek figures, while maintaining the elegance and sensuality of the Greek female nude. An original thematic innovation was that of the ''Three Graces'', of which there are several copies (Siena, Louvre), almost all datable to the first century. It is an iconographic theme that comes from the group of charites (divinities of beauty) that accompanied Aphrodite, generally represented with three sisters (Euphrosine, Thalia and Aglaea), holding each other by the arms and arranged two of them frontally and the one in the center turned backwards. This theme was very successful during the Renaissance and Baroque periods.

In imperial times the interest in the nude declined, in parallel to the idealizing concept of sculpture, gaining greater relevance realism and detailed description of the details, even the ugliest and most unpleasant, style that had its greatest crystallization in the portrait. Even so, magnificent pieces were produced, such as the statues of Mars and Mercury that decorate the Hadrian's Villa (125), or the ''Apotheosis of Antoninus and Faustina'' that appears on the base of the Column of Antoninus—currently in the Vatican Museum—(161), or even the ''Dioscuri of Montecavallo'', of the Baths of Constantine, in the Piazza del Quirinale in Rome (330).

As for the painting, of which we have received numerous samples thanks mainly to the excavations in Pompeii and Herculaneum, despite their eminently decorative character, they offer great stylistic variety and thematic richness, with an iconography that goes from mythology to the most everyday scenes, including parties, dances and circus shows. Nudity abounds in these scenes, with a clear tendency towards eroticism, which is shown without concealment, as one more facet of life. Among the many scenes that decorate the walls of Pompeii and in which the nude is present, it is worth remembering: ''The Three Graces, Aphrodite Anadyomene, Invocation to Priapus, Cassandra abducted by Ajax, The Dancing Faun, Bacchante surprised by a satyr, The rape of the nymph Iphtima, Hercules recognizing his son Telephus in Arcadia, The centaur Chiron instructing the young Achilles, Perseus freeing Andromeda, The Aldobrandini Wedding'', etc.

Medieval art

The fall of the Western Roman Empire marked the beginning of the Middle Ages in Europe, a period of certain political and social decadence, as the fragmentation of the empire into small states and the social domination of the new military aristocracy meant the feudalization of all the territories previously administered by the imperial bureaucracy. Classical art was reinterpreted by the new dominant cultures, of Germanic origin, while the new religion, Christianity, impregnated most of the medieval artistic production. Medieval art went through several phases, from Paleochristian art, through pre-Romanesque, to Romanesque and Gothic, including Byzantine and Germanic art.

In the Middle Ages, moral theology distinguished four types of nudity: ''nuditas naturalis'', the natural state of the human being; ''nuditas temporalis'', an artificial state imposed by transience, generally linked to poverty; ''nuditas virtualis'', as a symbol of virtue and innocence; and ''nuditas criminalis'', linked to lust and vanity. Another frequent element of nudity in medieval art—especially in the ''Apocalypses'' of the ''Beatus''—was the representation of the dead, as a symbol of the stripping of everything earthly.

Christian theology divided the human being into perishable body and immortal soul, the latter being the only one considered as something precious to be preserved. With the disappearance of the pagan religions, most of the iconographic content related to the nude was lost, which was limited to the few passages in the Holy Scriptures that justified it. In the few cases of representation of the nude are angular and deformed figures, far from the harmonious balance of the classical nude, when they are not deliberately ugly and battered forms, as a sign of the contempt that was felt for the body, which was considered a simple appendage of the soul. In the few representations of female nudes—generally figures of Eve—they are figures with bulging bellies, narrow shoulders and straight legs, although the face is usually worked in a personalized way, which was not the case in antiquity.

The human figure was subjected to a process of stylization, in which the naturalistic description was lost to emphasize the transcendent character and the symbolic language of the Christian religion, in parallel to the loss of perspective and the geometrization of space, resulting in a type of representation where the symbolic content, the message inherent in the image, is more important than the description of reality. The Christian religion, influenced by the Platonic idea of the body as a prison for the soul, lost interest in the study of naturalistic anatomical forms, focusing the representation of the human being on expressiveness.

Although the study of proportion in the human body was lost during the Middle Ages, the human body was the object of a cosmogonic symbolism with mathematical and aesthetic applications: the ''homo quadratus''. Starting from the Platonic corpus, medieval culture considered the world as a great animal—and, therefore, as a human being—while man was conceived as a world, a microcosm within the great cosmos of Creation. This theory related the symbolism of the number four to nature, which in turn was applied to art: there are four cardinal points, four seasons, four phases of the moon, four main winds; and four is the number of man, a theory that goes back to Vitruvius and his conception of man as an ideal square, with the width of his outstretched arms corresponding to his height.

In its beginnings, Christianity—still under a strong Jewish influence—had forbidden not only the nude, but almost any image of a human figure, since it was a transgression of the second commandment, and condemned pagan idols as the abode of demons. The fact that many pagan gods were represented in painting and sculpture in human form, and in many occasions naked, made the primitive Christians identify the nude with pagan idolatry, if not they saw directly a diabolic link. However, the end of paganism and the assimilation of Neoplatonic philosophy by Christian morality led to the acceptance of the body as a receptacle of the spirit, and nudity as a degraded state of the human being, but natural and acceptable. Even so, medieval art completely lost the concept of bodily beauty inherent in classical art, and when it was represented—in the biblical passages that required it, such as Adam and Eve—they were deformed bodies, reduced to basic lines, with minimized sexual attributes, unattractive bodies, devoid of aesthetic qualities. The Gothic period was a timid attempt to remake the human figure, more elaborate and based on more naturalistic premises, but under a certain conventionalism that subjected the forms to a rigidity and a geometrizing structure that subordinated the body to the symbolic aspect of the image, always under the premises of Christian iconography.

The few representations of the nude in medieval art were limited to biblical passages that justified it, such as Adam and Eve in Paradise or the martyrdom and crucifixion of Jesus Christ. The image of Jesus on the cross had two main iconographic transcriptions: that of Christ undressed, called "of Antioch", and that of the Redeemer with a tunic, called "of Jerusalem". However, despite the puritanical and anti-nudity character of early Christianity, it was the naked version that triumphed and was accepted as the canonical version of the theme, especially from the Carolingian period. The suffering of Christ on the cross has always been a theme of great drama, so that in a way linked to the Hellenistic pathos, with images where the nude is a vehicle for an intense expression of suffering, so that the anatomy is shown deformed, unstructured, subjected to the emotional expression of pain. A typical posture is that of Jesus with his head fallen to one side and the body inclined to compensate the position of the body, first seen in the prayer book of Charles the Bald and in the Cross of Gero in the Cologne Cathedral (10th century), and which would later include some small modification, with the body more curved and the knees bent, as in the painted crosses of Cimabue. In northern Europe, however, an even more dramatic image of the crucifixion was imposed, where the anguish reaches authentic levels of paroxysm, as in the ''Isenheim Altarpiece'' by Matthias Grünewald.

Paleo-Christian art transformed numerous classical motifs into Christian scenes: thus, the ancient ''Hermes Moscophorus'' became the image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd, and Orpheus became Christ the benefactor. From the biblical repertoire, apart from Adam and Eve, the prophet Daniel was often depicted naked among the lions, an image preserved in a mural painting in the Giordano Cemetery in Rome (4th century), and in a sarcophagus in the Archbasilica of St. John Lateran.

In Romanesque art, the few nude representations—generally limited to the Genesis passages about Adam and Eve—were of basic lines, where the figure of the woman was barely distinguished from that of the man by the breasts, reduced to two shapeless protuberances. They were crude and schematic figures, preferably showing an attitude of shame, covering their private parts with decorum. This is shown in examples such as the reliefs of the ''Creation'', the ''Fall'' and the ''Expulsion'' of the bronze doors of the Hildesheim Cathedral (), in the ''Adam and Eve'' of the facade of the Modena Cathedral, work of Wiligelmus (), or in the ''Creation of Adam'' and ''Adam and Eve'' ''in the Paradise'' of the Master of Maderuelo (Museo del Prado). In other cases, total or partial nudes can be seen in scenes of martyrdom of saints, such as that of Saint Gabin and Saint Cyprian in Saint-Savin-sur-Gartempe ( Poitou). The same iconographic themes, perhaps treated with greater freedom, can be seen in the illustrated miniature, such as the ''Adam and Eve'' from the ''Virgilian Codex'' ( El Escorial Monastery), or ''The Baptism of Christ'' from the ''Vyšehrad Gospel Book'' (1085, University of Prague).

In Gothic art the nude began to be forged mainly in the Germanic environment, at the beginning of the 13th century. The first independent and life-size figures representing a nude are the ''Adam and Eve'' of the Bamberg Cathedral (), which still look like two columns of rigid and hieratic forms, but treated with a certain air of nobility. At this time the iconographic repertoire was expanded a bit, especially with the incorporation of the Last Judgment, coming from chapters 24 and 25 of St. Matthew—until then most of the scenes of the biblical story represented in the cathedral reliefs ended with the Apocalypse. The scene of the resurrection of the flesh contemplated that the bodies were naked, while being reborn souls should be represented according to parameters of perfect beauty, so the artists looked again at the works of classical Greco-Roman art, emerging treatises such as the ''Speculum'' of Vincent de Beauvais, which contained instructions for artists based on ancient classical treatises. Studies of the natural began again, and there is data indicating that some artists went to public baths to study the body in more detail, as evidenced in the ''Last Judgment'' of the Bourges Cathedral, with more naturalistic forms, reminiscent of the figures of the sarcophagi of antiquity. In this work, the woman in the center has more feminine forms, and her posture in '' contrapposto'' has a certain Polyletian air, although her forms are stylized and not very sensual, with small and separated breasts, flat belly and reduced hips.

Little by little the Gothic nude was gaining in naturalness and anatomical precision, while the thematic repertoire was expanding and the use of the nude figure in all areas of art was spreading, not only in sculpture and miniatures, but also in reredos, stained glass, choir stalls, gold and silver work, etc. Some of the new themes represented were St. Jerome and other ascetics, stripped of everything material by virtue of their renunciation of earthly goods, or female figures such as Mary Magdalene and Mary of Egypt. Sometimes the serpent that tempted Eve in Paradise or the dragon defeated by St. George are also represented in naked human form. Greater sensuality was given to certain female figures of the Old Testament, such as Bathsheba, Susanna, Judith, Delilah and Salome. Sometimes the Virgin Mary was even allowed to show a breast by virtue of nursing the infant Jesus, as in Jean Fouquet's ''The Virgin and Child'' (1450, also called ''Madonna of the Red Angels'').

At the beginning of the 14th century, the façade of the Orvieto Cathedral, the work of Lorenzo Maitani, where he deployed a large series of nudes that seems to show a personal interest of the artist in the subject, since he chose all the themes that justify it: the ''Creation'', the ''Fall of Man'', the ''Last Judgment''. His ''Eve rising from Adam's side'' is undoubtedly inspired by the ancient sarcophagi of nereids, and shows for the first time a certain idealism, a conception of the body as a receptacle of the soul and, as such, worthy of consideration. The ''Last Judgment'', on the other hand, seems to be of Nordic inspiration, in a variegated scene reminiscent of battle sarcophagi or ancient scenes of dying Gauls.

In the 15th century the nude had a greater diffusion, framed in the fashionable current of the time, the so called "international Gothic", which emerged between France, Burgundy and the Netherlands around the year 1400. One of its first exponents was '' The Very Rich Hours of the Duke of Berry'' by the Limbourg brothers (1416), where a scene from ''The Fall and the Expulsion from Paradise'' shows the evolution of Eve from the naturalness of life in Eden to the shame of sin and the expulsion from Paradise, where she takes the form of a Venus pudica that is covered with a fig leaf. Her elongated, bulbous form, with small breasts and bulging belly, became the prototype of the Gothic female nude, which would last for two hundred years. This can be seen in figures such as the ''Eve'' of the '' Ghent Altarpiece'' by Jan van Eyck, in the ''Adam and Eve'' by Hugo van der Goes and in that by Rogier van der Weyden, or in other female figures such as the ''Vanity'' by Hans Memling or the ''Judith'' by Conrad Meit, where the modest medieval attitude that related the nude as something shameful is giving way to more sensual, more provocative, more carnally human figures. In Spain, the first timid attempts at nudes emerged, far from any sensuality, serious, contained, such as the ''Descent of Christ into Limbo'' by Bartolomé Bermejo, the ''Martyrdom of Saint Catherine'' by Fernando Gallego, the figure of Saint Tecla in the High Altarpiece of the Tarragona Cathedral, by Pere Johan (1429), or ''The Slaughter of Saint Cucufate'' (1504–1507), by Ayne Bru

HOME


Content is Copyleft
Website design, code, and AI is Copyrighted (c) 2014-2017 by Stephen Payne


Consider donating to Wikimedia



As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases