Nude — a human figure or part of the body without clothing.
Since the Middle Ages, the female nude has been an icon for painters. Whether religious and sacred or libertine, they have shown the female body in thousands of ways.
The emaciated figures of this Schiele painting are a reflection of his link between sexuality and death. The distorted form and the sickly colors give this nude a strong sense of eroticism.
Botticelli’s Venus
A masterpiece of Renaissance painting, Botticelli’s Venus is one of the most iconic depictions of female beauty in history. For centuries, her nakedness symbolized the ideal of perfect female beauty. In fact, Venus has become so famous that people have been tempted to paint her on their bodies—an example of “vanity mark” art, where an image becomes so desirable that it is reproduced in other artwork.
Venus appears to be a virgin in this painting, with her hair pushed back and warmed by the breezes of Zephyr. She is surrounded by flowers, which are supposed to represent the virtues of love and fertility. Her pose also suggests modesty, and the bulrushes in her bottom left-hand corner are a reference to sexual modesty—an image that would be particularly meaningful to newlyweds.
The painting was modeled after an ancient statue of the Pudic Venus type, which was in the collection of Lorenzo de’ Medici, the patron of Botticelli’s paintings. This figure was often displayed in the Medici Tribune, and it became an icon of feminine beauty. Botticelli’s Venus was the first nude depiction of a woman in Western art, and it became an important influence on later artists, including Leonardo Da Vinci.
The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston recently hosted an exhibition that showcased several of the paintings Botticelli painted for the Medici family. This was the largest number of his paintings that had been shown together in America, and they included 15 of his works along with several by Fra Fillipo Lippi, a painter with whom Botticelli studied. The exhibit also featured a version of his famous Venus that has been remixed in popular culture—most notably by singer Lady Gaga, who appeared on the cover of her 2010 album Artpop wearing a voluminous wig to mimic the goddess.
Cezanne’s Bathers
Among Cezanne’s many attempts to explore the theme of female nudes in nature, Bathers is one of his most ambitious. The largest of his Bathers paintings and the most formal in composition, it suggests an intense constraint unique to this painting and to Cezanne’s art. The sitters’ postures reproduce drawings made in the artist’s early student days and studies of sculptures in the Louvre. The striding figure on the left of the painting alludes to an 18th-century statue of Diana, while the seated woman on the right resembles the Venus de Milo.
The use of cobalt blue to outline the figures highlights their presence in the landscape while integrating them into their natural surroundings. The rhythmic outlines of the trees evoke a lyrical symbiosis between the figures and the landscape. In this sense, the symbiotic relationship between the Bather and her environment echoes the Herculean path referred to in Zola’s letter, as well as Cezanne’s own struggle to overcome his depression.
In this work, Cezanne sought to impose an order upon the chaotic elements of nature and human activity. The resulting picture is a complex composition whose tensions and ambiguities exemplify the angst that Cezanne felt as a painter.
In contrast to the idyllic scene depicted in Bathers, other landscapes by Cezanne reveal his anxiety and preoccupation with form and structure. His preparatory sketches show that the artist struggled with how to represent a village in this composition, and he experimented with how the figures would relate to each other and the surrounding landscape. Despite the complexity of this work, its serene atmosphere conveys an unhurried moment of relaxation shared by the artist and his sitters.
Courbet’s The Origin of the World
In 1866 Gustave Courbet, a major exponent of realism, shocked his contemporaries with his tough depictions of real life. His painting The Origin of the World shows the female body in close-up, with surgical precision revealing a woman’s genitals, arousing both revulsion and fascination. In doing so he broke with the tradition of idealised female nude, and challenged social taboos.
The painting has been controversial ever since, even when it was first exhibited. Du Camp’s scorn was probably based on the fact that the painting is explicit, and has been described as ‘bordering on pornographic’. The Origin of the World is an oil on canvas, and consists of a close-up of a naked woman lying with her legs spread. Only her thighs, abdomen and part of one breast are visible.
Although the painting’s subject is clearly sexual, it can also be read as a study of form and composition, as well as an exploration of human anatomy. It was painted on the basis of a sketch made by the artist at a private nude gathering. It was commissioned by the Ottoman diplomat Khalil Bey, who wished to add it to his collection of erotic paintings.
According to the head of the prints department at the BNF, Sylvie Aubenas, it is now 99 per cent certain that Courbet’s model for The Origin of the World was a dancer named Constance Queniaux. She was 34 years old when she posed for the portrait, and was the mistress of Khalil Bey. She was also the model for James Whistler’s The White Girl. Aubenas also points out that the elongation of Jo’s thighs, and the way in which they are placed in relation to each other, give the painting a strong sense of movement.
Impressionist painters
One of the few female Impressionist painters, Mary Cassatt, made her mark with nude paintings of women in domestic scenes. She had a very difficult time in the United States where she lived, and she wanted to make a career of painting, so she traveled to Paris to study with Degas and other impressionists. She became known for painting intimate domestic scenes, with women and children as her main focus.
By removing the subject of a woman in nude from the legitimizing contexts of orientalism and mythology, Manet scandalized the bourgeois culture of 1860s Paris. His painting Olympia focuses on a modern female who assertively confronts the viewer. It was the first time that a painting of a nude woman was depicted as such without trying to idealize her form.
This painting was a significant step towards the Impressionist style that would become more radical in later works of Monet and other artists of this movement. This was largely due to the use of a flattened picture plane and an intentional departure from the inherited forms that characterized earlier paintings.
During the Mannerism period of the 16th and 17th centuries, nude paintings gained huge freedom. This was thanks to a movement called form exaggeration that created curves and counter-curves to soften the contours of a figure. The immodest Venus of Agnolo Bronzino is a good example of this trend.
With this work, Cezanne wanted to create a new system of representation that was not based on perspective. He reduced the size of his figures, simplified their shapes, and blended colors in order to highlight the contrast between light and dark areas on a canvas. The result is a stunning and provocative piece that has paved the way for modern abstraction.
Hildegarde Handsaeme
Hildegarde Handsaeme is a talented artist who explores the inner complexities of the feminine form. Her work evokes a sense of timeless beauty and universal appeal. She captures the ethereal essence of the human body and emotion with a delicate balance of form and color.
Born in Kortrijk, she currently lives and works in Terlanen (S.E of Brussels). She is self-taught in the plastic art and her articulate preference for the figure and nature of woman remains a source of inspiration that is utterly inexhaustible. This is clearly reflected in her artistic plastic language that has been recognized a few years ago with the third international prize for painting in Libramont.
She paints mainly women and she follows a harmonic and constructively perfect pattern in her compositions. Even though the figure in itself dominates her paintings she knows how to put it in the right surroundings where nature and cosmos play a symbolic part. She builds with a set of straight lines a mysterial haze of inner feelings on the canvas in a simple but penetrative way. She does not call for hallucinating images but lets herself go with sensitivity guided by an unfailing intuition.
Her unique and recognizable style makes her work instantly identifiable, even rendering a signature unnecessary. This is a rare trait that only the most gifted artists can accomplish. In addition to her renowned paintings, she has been featured in prominent publications such as Resident Magazine NY and the WBM Luxury Guide – Art Collecting.