Interpretations of Odalisque in Grisaille

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Workshop, Odalisque in Grisaille, 1824-34, oil on canvas

"De Kooning's drawing, Reclining Nude (Juliet Browner) (c.1938), which hovers between figuration and geometric abstraction, may be seen as a modernized and inverted interpretation of [Ingres's] painting." --De Kooning: A Retrospective by John Elderfield

Similar Works:

Annibale Carracci, ItalyVenus with Satyr and Cupids, 1588

Diego Velazquez, SpainVenus

Appearances of Venus in Art History

Francois Boucher (France)         The Toilet of Venus, 1751
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Adolphe-William Bouguereau (France)The Birth of Venus, 1879

Alexandre Cabanel (France)The Birth of Venus, 1863

Correggio, ItalyVenus, Satyr, and Cupid, 1528Musée du Louvre, Paris

Jean-Auguste Ingres (France)Venus

Jacopo Amigoni (Italy)
Venus and Adonis

Titian, ItalyVenus of Urbino

Pompeo Batoni (Italy) 
  Venus Presenting Aeneas with Armour Forged by Vulcan, 1748

Lorenzo di Credi (Italy)Venus, 1490

More Appearances of Venus

"The Greek Venus"

Aphrodite (So-called Venus)

Praxiteles

Praxiteles is one of the most celebrated of the Attic sculptors, and although very few facts about his life are certain, it is known that he was from Athens and his father, Kephisodotus, was believed to be another renowned Attic sculptor. All of his work is estimated to date from the second half of the 4th century B.C.

Only one of Praxiteles' sculptures still survives, although the authenticity of this piece is doubted by some. However, as a result of his fame and popularity, a great deal of Roman copies of his works were made, many of which have been recovered. His recognition as a great sculptor is clear from the pictures of his sculptures which were engraved on Roman coins, as well as the descriptions given to us by writers such as Pliny the Elder and Pausanias. Praxiteles' school of art was mostly concerned with marble, due to the fine quality of marble from the quarries in Paros at the time. Some of his sculptures were also known to be painted by Nicias, who Praxiteles greatly respected, proclaiming that the best statues were those painted by Nicias.

Praxiteles was highly influential in the development of Greek sculpture, bringing an elegant and sensuous grace to his work. His innovative style was a transformation from the tone set by his predecessors of impressive yet somehow detached sculpture, especially in representations of the gods. Praxiteles overcomes the problem of distancing the viewer by producing a much more humanising view of the gods. Many sculptors from Praxiteles' time chose to use bronze for their sculpture, as it allows greater flexibility in composition due to its tensile strength. However, Praxiteles, although he was skilled in both materials, favoured the use of marble. He points out its advantage over bronze as its ability to resemble the softness and radiance of the skin. The innovations of bronze had allowed sculptors to accurately depict the human anatomy, as well as the responsiveness of the body to various movements or positions. This meant that the sculptures being produced in Praxiteles' time were aiming to create a physically accurate figure. However, Praxiteles was interested in doing more than this; it was his beautiful rendering of surface and texture that made him such a highly praised sculptor.

The subjects of Praxiteles work tend to be the younger gods such as Hermes, Apollo and Aphrodite; he was not as interested in portraying the more dignified, elderly figures such as Zeus or Poseidon. Praxiteles' most famous and admired work was his Aphrodite of Knidos. This piece is especially outstanding as it is the first large scale sculpture of a nude female. Pliny the Elder tells us that Praxiteles was originally commissioned by the island of Kos to make the statue, however when Praxiteles revealed to them his controversial work, they were so shocked by the goddess' nudity that they rejected it. The sculpture was then instead bought by the people of Knidos, for whom it became a great symbol of pride and attracted many tourists to their land. They even refused to sell the piece to King Nicomedes, despite his offer to pay off their enormous city debt. The sculpture was praised so highly by critics that it was said that Praxiteles had brought soul to marble. It was considered a perfect resemblance to Aphrodite, so much so that there was a story that Aphrodite came to see it herself and asked "When did Praxiteles see me naked?". A story also originated about the sculpture, due to a stain on one of her thighs, that a man had hidden himself in the temple until nightfall and then tried to make love to the statue.

Although the original is lost, a great number of Roman copies were produced, some of which survive and are able to show us what the original was like. Praxiteles uses in this statue the ideas of contrapposto that were first seen in the works of Polykleitos, with the slant of the statue's hips contrasting that of her shoulders. Contrapposto is used to create a sense of equilibrium, but in this case Praxiteles also uses it to further the sensuousness of the figure. The sculpture as a whole has a feeling of serenity and calm, as the goddess is preparing to bathe and modestly covering herself with her right hand. Her head, however, looks sharply to the left, giving us the impression that she has been disturbed. This creates a relationship with the viewer, as though the viewer is glimpsing something they should not. A clear advancement in Praxiteles' use of marble is seen in his creative use of a prop. In order to allow such sweeping composition to the figure, it needs to be supported, but instead of merely propping the figure up, Praxiteles incorporates it into the design. The clothes she has removed hang down from her hand onto the hydria full of her bathing water. Furthermore, the fact that Aphrodite is holding up the drapery, means any sense that it is in fact supporting her is lost. By placing Aphrodite in such an everyday situation, Praxiteles is creating a much more accessible and humanising view of the goddess. The power she holds is not totally ignored though, as it refers to the ceremonial bath of Aphrodite to renew her virginity. Praxiteles blends humanity with divinity perfectly, portraying her divinity without being distanced by grandeur.

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Wilkes

Origin of Venus

The origins of the gods have always been a mystery and the origin of Venus is a particularly difficult case. Malicious tongues say that she came from the countryside. Probably a successor to an ancient mother goddess, she was venerated in what is now Italy as the patroness of gardens and vegetable farming — especially on Veneralia, the feast day of Venus, April. In defence of her reputation, one should add that she lost her earthmess early on. Beginning in the fourth century BC she was equated in Rome with Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, who was the patroness of coquettish young women, of laughter and fun, and of sweet desire and clemency.
Aphrodite's origins are also rather uncertain, and the various legends about her birth contradict one another. These stones agree about one thing, that Aphrodite emerged from the sea. According to the early Greek poet Hesiod, who established the family tree of the Olympian gods, Aphrodite was born of the foam which billowed up around the genitals of her castrated father Uranus, which were cast into the sea by his son Saturn (Cronus), who was responsible for this violent act. Another legend tells us that Aphrodite was born in a bivalve shell. The Italian Humanist poet Angelo Poliziano (Politian), who was an advisor at the Medici court in Florence, elaborated on theseancient tales in his writings:

"And born within (the white
foam),
in rare and joyous acts
a maiden with a heavenly race
by playful zephyrs
is pushed to the shore.
She travels on a sea-shell;
and it seems
that the heavens rejoice."

The zephyrs, blowing a strong wind, steer her "ship" towards the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, where she is greeted by nymphs, who are "surprised by joy at the sight of her" and dress her in a cloak decorated with flowers — for even the goddess of love cannot remain nude forever. The Italian Renaissance painter Allesandro Filipepi, later known as Sandro Botticelli, may well have taken Poliziano's poem as the literary model for his painting The Birth of Venus. Probably commissioned by the Medici family, the painting depicts the goddess as the personification of Love. She is to lead the Florentines, who at the time were growing increasingly enthusiastic about Greek philosophy, back to its loftiest ideals: goodness, truth and beauty.
Today the planet Venus, sometimes called the Evening Star, is not the only reminder of how important the goddess once was. The fifth day of the week also bears her name: "Friday", and the German "Freitag", derive from the name of the Teuton goddess Freya, who was equated with Venus. Friday in Italian, venerdi, and in French,vendredi; respectively have retained much of the original sound of "Venus", and both mean "Venus Day".

History and Definition of Nude

Definition of Nude: An unclothed live model, or a work of art representing a person without clothing.


Basic History: The nude is classic, timeless, elemental, primal, and universal. Because we are all creatures of our own nakedness, it is the subject of ultimate empathy. And yet in the hands of an artist, that fleeting, imperfect, and fragile package that carries all of our souls gains a noble immortality and perfection that transcends its mere physicality.


More Information: As social attitudes about artistic nudity have changed, this has sometimes led to conflict over art that no longer conforms to prevailing standards. For example, the Roman Catholic Church once organized the so-called fig-leaf campaign to cover nudity in art, starting from the works of Renaissance artist Michelangelo.

The nude has become an enduring genre of representational art, especially painting, sculpture, and photography. It depicts people without clothes on, usually with stylistic and staging conventions that distinguish the artistic elements (such as innocence, or similar theatrical/artistic elements) of being nude with the more provocative state of being naked. A nude figure is one, such as a goddess or a man in ancient Greece, for whom the lack of clothing is its usual condition, so that there is no sexual suggestiveness presumed. A naked figure is one, such as a contemporary prostitute or a businessman, who usually wears clothing, such that their lack of it in this scene implies sexual activity or suggestiveness. The latter were rare in European art from the Medieval period until the latter half of the 1800s; in the interim, a work featuring an unclothed woman would routinely identify her as "Venus" or another Greco-Roman goddess, to justify her nudity.

Related to Above Excerpt

Since the Renaissance, the nude has remained an essential focus of Western art. Whether embracing or refashioningclassical ideals, artists from the seventeenth century to the present have privileged the nude form and made it an endlessly compelling means of creative expression. 

In Baroque art, the continuing fascination with classical antiquity pressed artists to renew their approach to the nude and the antique tradition. Thus Hendrick Goltzius' remarkable view of the Hercules Farnese from behind and below (17.37.59) alters the muscular texture of a revered ancient statue, while Andrea Sacchi's portrait of Marcantonio Pasqualini (1981.317), a highly esteemed singer of his day, inflates the status of the sitter by including two nudes representing the mythic musicians Apollo and Marsyas. Other nudes help to heighten the drama of narrative works, such as Guercino's painting of Samson captured (1984.459.2), in which the decision to represent the hero as the lone nude, muscular but powerless in the midst of armed adversaries, highlights his present weakness as well as his former strength. The female nude took on fresh meaning in the art of Rubens, who with evident delight painted women of generous figure and radiant flesh (37.162). The Baroque taste for allegories based on classical metaphors also favored undraped figures, which were used to personify concepts such as the Graces and Truth.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as esteem for classical culture ran high, so too did the prestige of the nude. The academies of the period directed young artists to develop their skills by drawing the naked form of ancient sculpture as well as live models, and many successful artists continued such exercises long after their student days (1985.112.1; 1972.118.226a,b). Nudes are ubiquitous in the ambitious history paintings of the period as well as sculpture and decorative schemes. Proponents of the Neoclassical style made nudes closely based on ancient examples, like Canova's Perseus (67.110), which repeats the pose and body type of the widely admired Apollo Belvedere. Artists associated with the Romantic movement assumed a freer attitude to the nude and to antique subject matter more generally. Camille Corot, for instance, included mythological tales in some of his landscapes; an early example (1975.1.162) represents the woodland spring where the goddess Diana among bathing nymphs prepares to punish Actaeon for catching sight of her naked. So as not to offend nineteenth-century morals, artists tended to depict naked figures within contexts removed from the everyday, such as mythology or the imagined Orient, and yet the careful constraints imposed on the nude somehow heighten its eroticism, as in Alexandre Cabanel's Birth of Venus (94.24.1). 

When academic ideals faced challenges in the later nineteenth century, the delicate status of the nude was quickly exposed and subverted. Édotard Manet shocked the public of his time by painting nude women in contemporary situations in his Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe and Olympia (1863 and 1865; both Musée d'Orsay, Paris), and Gustave Courbet earned bitter criticism for portraying in his Woman with a Parrot (29.100.57) a naked prostitute without vestige of goddess or nymph. In sculpture, artists sought new proportions and narrative coherence for the male nude as well as the female. Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux pointed to the dramatic contrast between powerful physique and desperate situation in his group of nudes representing Ugolino with his sons (67.250), and Auguste Rodin challenged classical canons of idealization in his expressively distorted Adam (11.173.1). 

Although the classical tradition lost its cultural supremacy in the twentieth century, the appeal of the nude remains strong in modern and contemporary art. The rejection of academic manners in pursuit of a new form of truth reduced the appeal of Venus but promoted the unadorned nudes of private life. The innocent bathers of Renoir's late career (1975.1.199), Degas' artless-looking scenes of women washing and dressing (29.100.41), and Balthus' straightforward girl looking in the mirror (1975.1.155) are formally unlike the idealized nudes of earlier art, yet in their undisguised humanity they are kin to the nudes of antiquity.
Slideshow of Images Referenced Above




Gallery of Nude Masterpieces through Art History

Contrapposto

David

Contrapposto, (Italian: “opposite”), in the visual arts, a sculptural scheme, originated by the ancient Greeks, in which the standing human figure is poised such that the weight rests on one leg (called the engaged leg), freeing the other leg, which is bent at the knee. With the weight shift, the hips, shoulders, and head tilt, suggesting relaxation with the subtle internal organic movement that denotes life. Contrapposto may be used for draped as well as nude figures. The Greeks invented this formula in the early 5th century bc as an alternative to the stiffly static pose—in which the weight is distributed equally on both legs—that had dominated Greek figure sculpture in earlier periods. There is a clear development from the “Critius Boy” of the 5th century, whose leg is bent while his torso remains erect, to the completely relaxed 4th-century “Hermes Carrying the Infant Dionysus” by Praxiteles. The rhythmic ease of the contrapposto pose vastly enlarged the expressive possibilities of figure sculpture.

Gothic sculpture occasionally retained the idea of a supporting and a bent leg, transforming it so that the figure appeared to rise from, rather than rest heavily upon, the ground. Italian Renaissance artists such as Donatello and Andrea del Verrocchio revived the classical formula, giving it the name contrapposto, which suggests the action and reaction of the various parts of the figure, and enriching the conception by scientific anatomical study. Michelangelo introduced a tension of masses by pushing one forward and another back—thrusting an arm forward over a receding leg, for instance. The “David,” which exemplifies his method, deeply influenced Gian Lorenzo Bernini and other Baroque sculptors. In modern times, contrapposto has been used for naturalistic representations of the relaxed standing figure, as in Aristide Maillol’s “Venus with a Necklace” (c. 1918–28).
http://www.britannica.com

Contrapposto is an Italian term used in the visual arts to describe a human figure standing with most of its weight on one foot so that its shoulders and arms twist off-axis from the hips and legs. This gives the figure a more dynamic, or alternatively relaxed appearance. It can also encompass thetension as a figure changes from resting on a given leg to walking or running upon it (so-called ponderation). Contrapposto is less emphasized than the more sinuous S Curve.

Contrapposto has been used since the dawn of classical western sculpture. According to the canon of the Classical Greek Sculptor Polykleitos in the fourth century B.C., it is one of the most important characteristics of his figurative works and those of his successors, Lysippos, Skopas, etc. The Polykletian statues for example Discophoros (discus-bearer) and Doryphoros(spear-bearer) are idealized athletic young men with the divine sense, and captured in contrapposto. In these works, the pelvis is no longer axial with the vertical statue as in the archaic style of earlier Greek sculpture until theEphebe-statue of Kritios ca. 480 B.C.

Contrapposto can be clearly seen in the Roman copies of the statues ofHermes and Heracles. A famous example is the marble statue of Hermes with the infant Dionysus in Olympia by Praxiteles. It can also be seen in the Roman copies of Polyclitus' amazon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrapposto

Venus with a Necklace

Auguste Rodin, The Age of Bronze, 1877, plaster  

Eugene Amaury-Duval
(France), Venus

Sandro Botticelli, Birth of Venus, c. 1485, tempera on canvas

*The Nudes series by Wilkes effectively uses Contrapposto.

Fine Art Photographs - Nudes

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