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.
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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 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.
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
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