Nudes Throughout Artistic History

Nude figures have been featured in art works since around 30 to 25,000 B.C. And throughout the history of art, we can see a lot of artists being inspired and influenced by great talents before them, in one way or another they would carry the style or ideas of those previous artists into their own art and create new masterpieces. One particular example is Édouard Manet’s Olympia from the Realism period, and Yasumasa Morimura’s Futago. The two paintings share great similarities in their composition, but the content and purpose of the paintings, and style wise the two pieces are very different.

For centuries, sexuality and nude figures has been a face of art. Venus of Urbino by Titian and Olympia by Édouard Manet represents the faces of female domination and their ability to lure any men. In this essay we shall talk about the two artists, Manet and Titian, and also compare and contrast between the two painting based on their cultural and structural significance. Manet was born in 1832 in Paris. He was considered as the founder of modern art and a master analyst of visual arts. His artworks were realistic, spontaneous and monumental. Inspite of coming from a privileged family, Manet’s work mostly consisted paintings of the less desirable and the lower class people of Paris. His artworks commonly represented everyday life scenarios

In the Renaissance period women are almost invariably shown as completely passive and as an object for contemplation. The reclining female nude in the Renaissance raises questions of the male gaze more often than any other artistic stereotype. Female nudes were only an open acknowledgement of not only male desire but also the right males had to express that desire. A woman’s feelings when looking at such images of members of their own gender were never discussed or asked until recently.

The main focus of the painting intended by Titian is a nude woman, Venus, looking straightforwardly at the audience. The young woman’s nipples are erect; with her left hand covers her pubic area, the sexuality of this painting is unquestionable. She is completely naked except for the ring on her little finger and the bracelet around her wrist. It is clear that the intention of this painting is to evoke sensual feelings in its audience.

In representing female subjects, both Pablo Picasso’s oil painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) and Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882) manipulate the formal techniques of composition and perspective to create new ways of seeing their subject, emulating their contemporary society’s shifting views of women and the individual. Les Demoiselles depicts five naked prostitutes, flaunting their bodies, and some wearing tribal masks. In comparison, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère represents a female, who may also be a prostitute, tending a bar. The depiction of previously ‘hidden’ female subjects alone was an innovation of the perception of the artist, however, the formal treatment in representing these subjects was an important break from tradition.

Reclining nude female is a common subject matter in art history since the Venetian Renaissance, Titian’s Venus of Urbino painted in 1538 is one of the earliest reclining nude female in painting history. It described a beautiful young female laying on her bed with her sleeping dog, on the back ground is her maids looking for cloth or her in the cassone. Manet’s Olympia that painted in 1865 is a painting with a similar composition, A nude young female who was suggested a prostitute, behind her is her black female maid holding a big bouquet of flower which is possibly from her customer. On the same part of the composition, there is an animal as well, but this time it is a cat. Titian and Manet’s reclining nude female have a same composition and subject matter, however They are very different in art history, both stylistically and culturally.

In the traditional European oil painting, the nude, the principal protagonist (the painter) is never painted, but what does gets painted is a result of what appeals to him sexually. A woman’s body hair and fat dimples are never painted, since it is not sexually appealing to the painter. When a woman is depicted with her lover, her attention is rarely painted as directed towards the male lover if one is present instead it is directed toward the spectator—the painter. Most Renaissance European oil paintings with sexual imagery are frontal, literally or metaphorically. Of course there are exceptions, let’s not dwell. The oil-paintings of this era feature stark nakedness. I chose the paintings that I did of the women that were clothed on purpose, they are still supplying a demand and these women still have makeup on their faces and are wearing very nice clothing which is appealing. Neither one of the paintings of the women have anything unappealing of their face i.e. pimples, warts, unibrows or a mustache. However in the painting of Diogenes he is depicted half naked and you can see his nipple and very defined muscles. Could one say that this artist was interested in men? As “attractive” attributes are depicted? Could I Berger declare that this is a hack work on the men?

Even though some artists, as Berger claims, tried to resist this tradition, they couldn’t overcome the cultural tradition of female objectification that has continued to the present. These artists failed to create a different view in culture because of the media and how the perception wouldn’t change in the eyes of men. One famous artist who tried to resist this awful trend was an artist name Rubens. In his portrait of his second wife, the painting named Helene Fourment in a Fur Coat, he tried to portray the same message with a different image.The image is of a women with no other clothing other than a fur coat looking shameful. The middle-aged looking women in the painting was wearing a big brown fur coat. The difference between a regular “nude”

Nudity has been an essential aspect in Western art. After the Renaissance, this is when the nudity was exploited as humans in their natural state. The nude form first was conquered by the ancient Greeks from approximately two thousand five hundred years ago. The Greeks celebrated the human body and cultivated the mastery of the human body through these sculptures of David. Rubens captures the nudity of Venus and makes her seen pure and compelling. When taking a glance at this masterpiece, one is immediately fixated and dragged in, it is a piece that cannot be missed. Ruben’s expression in this piece can be defined as timeless. Historians conclude that besides the magnificent Michelangelo, no other painter had a greater knowledge of the human body and visual power as Rubens. This is how he is able to cultivate these mythological pieces, and incorporate much detail. There is much life in Rubens’ painting, through the vibrant hues and how he depicts Venus and Adonis as these massive creatures. Figures depicted in art are more often nude then one would think. It is seen the human body is at its ideal state when artist depict the figure as nude. It is seemed as heroic because humans are compelled to see how artist illustrate the human body. Hence why the male and female body is the central theme of western art. When thinking about the human form, there is nothing more compelling, which is why the theme is still prominent in modern and contemporary

Sex workers inhabited the public space of Paris throughout the 19th century, their trade widely accepted as disreputable but necessary. When the French poet Charles Baudelaire was asked what art is, his immediate answer was “prostitution.” This proves that throughout history, artists have used prostitutes as models and muses for their artwork. Prostitution and painting go hand in hand. Among the first painters to use female models were Titian and Giorgione, producing Venetian reclining nudes, which appeared as advertisements for the most successful courtesans of Europe. These paintings hung in homes, showing real women as nothing more than an image to be looked at and judged by men. The interest in representing prostitution in art not

One of the issues many Christians have with some fine art is the use of artistic nudity, as modesty is a big part of Christian living today. But nudity today is mostly used for different purposes than it was back then and this has changed our view of it. The Greeks were not trying to create pornographic images as many Christians many interpret them today. Rather, they were just showing humans in their natural form. Anytime they were shown nude, it was usually because they wanted to appear god-like. Athletes were depicted unclothed because that was the way they played and competed. With the exception of chariot races, men competed in events like the Olympics were unclad to be like the gods, since gods were usually shown nude, and to show their

Artist and people viewing the art work have always had a fascination with the female nude. Even when I was a child my attention was captured by the nude art not because I was a kid and I saw a nude lady , but it forced me to wonder more about why the female nude was so amazing as a tool for art and why this is repeated so many times throughout the centuries. One female nude painting in particular was the subject of controversy and exposed the syncretism and or the power of the female nude painting.

In Modernist literature, the artist is the most important occupation that a person can pursue. The artist is the person who is responsible for holding a mirror to the culture of the community. It is thus their responsibility to show that community exactly what the community was truly about, especially if that truth were particularly harsh or ugly. Paris, France is famous for being a location wherein one could indulge in every kind of sin, the more lascivious the better. This aspect of the city is often depicted in literature, but never as an exploration of that lifestyle, but instead as a comment on the true hollowness of such an existence. In the earliest half of the twentieth century, a growing number of people became dissatisfied with the world they had been living in following the First World War. These people became dissatisfied with the government, with their lives, and with the status quo. In the United States, women were abandoning their roles as wives and mothers in attempts to find an individual identity as a single human being. Men and women were finding themselves attracted to members of the same sex and, for the first time in American history, were unashamed to act on their feelings, although they would often have to keep their orientation a secret from the public world for fear of ostracism or violence. This new concept of sexuality and the belief of the artist as modernist critics are all interrelated. This is evident in the books Tropic of

Edgar Degas,one of the most obsessed painters when it comes to the female body in the entire history of art, producing almost six hundred images of ballet dancers alone and many nude works. This book examines these two aspects of the artist's body of work. The majority of works provide an insight to the varied selection of Degas' ballet dancers, on stage ‘Dancers on Stage, ca.1883’ (page 26), at rehearsal ‘The Rehearsal, 1874’(page17) or in their dressing rooms ‘Dancer adjusting her tights, ca.1880’(page 59), and Those of his nudes,washing ‘Woman In a Tub,1884’(page 77) or drying themselves ‘After the bath:Woman drying herself, 1890-95’(page 108) and of a women combing their hair ‘Nude Woman coming her hair,1879-83’( page 88).The variety of

In many works of art throughout history, female breasts have been featured prominently and in the nude. The symbolic meaning credited to the breast was usually associated with fertility and nourishment, both spiritual and physical, and in the wider sense, with life. Eroticism, nourishment, abundance, expression, feminine power, as well as feminine subservience, are different contradicting themes of the breast played out in time.