Amidst a society that objectified the female nude, women began to take control artistically. Realist painters aimed to depict women from their daily lives, not just goddesses or nymphs.
This revolution started with a Renaissance icon: Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. The image shocked the audience, as it showed a naked woman in her natural state.
Symbolism
The female body has always been a major theme in art. From being a symbol of fertility and beauty to becoming a topic of controversy and even censorship, the depiction of nude women has been through an interesting journey throughout history.
In ancient Greek and Roman art, painters and sculptors praised the beauty of the female body. Their idealized representations of female beauty, characterized by mathematical proportion and balance, helped to establish a standard of beauty that has lasted for centuries.
However, as the Christian religion began to dominate art in Europe, a new type of depiction emerged. Artists started to explore human impulses, such as seduction and the world of dreams, through sensual nude figures, often erotic in nature. This new genre of art sparked a debate that resulted in a number of works being censored by the church.
The emergence of this new genre of art was supported by the new science of anatomy, which helped artists to understand how the human body worked. By observing the bodies of their models, artists were able to accurately capture not just a realistic appearance but also how the muscles and joints moved together. This increased understanding of the human body enabled artists to create more lifelike representations of the female form, resulting in works such as Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Titian’s Venus of Urbino.
While many of these erotic nude sculptures and paintings may seem sexy, they were not meant to be sex objects. It was believed that these depictions of goddesses were simply magical charms to ward off evil spirits, and it is not uncommon for scholars to argue whether or not they actually represent the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar.
In the early 20th century, artists such as Otto Dix, Schiele and Marc Chagall began to portray a different side of the nude woman. While the sexy aspect of these images is undeniable, the women depicted in their paintings are emaciated and sickly. The way that these bodies are presented evokes the idea of death, and their lack of movement conveys a sense of paralysis.
Purity
In a culture that encourages purity, girls are taught that their value is derived from the sex organ inside their vagina and that men want their body parts for sexual pleasure. This narrative teaches women to hide their bodies, to be afraid of men and not to hang out with them, to avoid places where men often are, to avoid masturbating and to cover themselves when they go out because a man could see their body and then rape them. Purity culture also teaches that a woman’s clitoris is a “trick” that men use to satisfy their sexual desires, so they should not expose it or allow it to be exposed. This view of the clitoris is a major contributing factor to the fact that fifty percent of American women cannot accurately label their clitoral hoods.
Many young people grow up taking purity pledges in their youth groups and their churches, and they may still be under the influence of this culture even into adulthood. They are taught that any sexual thoughts or desires are evil, so they try to pray them away and suppress them. This can lead to depression, loneliness and anxiety. It can also leave the person feeling as if they are not worthy of any kind of intimacy.
One of the biggest problems with this view is that it assumes that all men are rapists. It teaches that if women have sex, they will lose their virginity. This leaves women and girls fearful of sex even after they get married, and it also leaves them in a very bad place when they start a relationship with a man.
Another issue with purity culture is that it doesn’t teach people how to be healthy in the whole sense of health. It doesn’t encourage exercise or good eating habits, it doesn’t promote emotional intelligence and empathy, it doesn’t discuss mental illness and addictions, and it doesn’t discuss how to take care of the environment or our bodies. It’s a very incomplete and harmful message.
It’s a toxic culture, and it needs to be replaced with a more holistic view of health that includes all aspects of the human experience. It’s time to reject purity culture and replace it with a message that is rooted in Christ that celebrates the gifts of the human body, understands that sex is not evil and delights in the beauty of committed and sexual love.
Reflecting the Passage of Time and Mortality
The nude woman has been an ideal for artists since the Renaissance of the 1400s, inspired by a revival of interest in classical Greek and Roman art that focused on bodily proportions and heroic physiques. Its sensual appeal made some observers uncomfortable, but this was not new; representations of beautiful bodies have always evoked conflicting responses: admiration, curiosity, desire, and, occasionally, shame and revulsion.
For example, Fra Bartolommeo’s depiction of a nude Saint Sebastian scandalized the Florentine church with its alluring beauty, so it was removed from the altarpiece and shown only to select audiences in handheld prayer books. Even so, nudity was a regular feature of Renaissance artworks, whether as a purely decorative element or in paintings of religious subjects that emphasized the human body’s vulnerability to death and decay.
As artists explored ways to represent the nude body, they began to use it to convey more complex and sophisticated ideas about human beings. A reclining nude Venus staring at her reflection in a mirror in Velazquez’s The Toilet of Venus, for example, reflects vanity and lust, while also expressing a sense of the ephemerality of physical beauty. This ambivalence is a hallmark of the Renaissance, and it has lasted into our own time.
Today, images of naked women are found in all sorts of places, from ad campaigns to street banners. The artist Judy Chicago’s most recent body of work, for example, meditates on the extinction of entire species with its bold images of nude older women that evoke feelings of sadness and awe.
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Identity
Artists often used the female nude to convey cultural ideas about sex, fertility, morality, beauty standards and gender ideals. Artworks depicting the female nude could also be used to communicate religious or mythological themes. In addition, artists often used their representations of the female nude as erotic objects offered to the presumed viewer’s gaze and sexual fantasies.
For example, the Woman of Willendorf and the reclining Venus from the fifth century BCE both function as erotic objects that appeal to a man’s desire for a sensual and spiritual experience. In contrast, the statue of the naked Lapith woman struggling to escape centaurs in fifth-century Athens conveys a sense of pathos and vulnerability.
Female nude figures are also important for examining questions of identity and the relationship between the body, nature, and culture. The rotund form of the female nude can be used to evoke ideas about power, strength, fertility and longevity.
In the ancient world, the female nude was a symbol of fertility and the goddesses of love, beauty, and desire. In fact, the first human sculpture to portray a nude woman was the Near Eastern fertility goddess Ishtar or Aphrodite. Unlike male athletic figures, the figures of these women were based on mathematical proportions and displayed an idealized beauty that was thought to promote good health.
The female nude came to occupy a central role in Greek and Roman art and was used as a vehicle to express civic virtues. The depiction of the nude was an integral part of a series of moral lessons that began with Adam and Eve discovering their nakedness in the Garden of Eden, and then led to the warnings against sexual impropriety in classical art.
After the feminist art movement of the 1960s and 1970s, women artists began to use their representations of the female nude to challenge stereotypes, expose double standards, and demand equality. Many of these artists analyzed their works through the lens of influential scholarship, such as that of John Berger and Laura Mulvey.
Today, artists continue to make powerful statements through the use of the female nude. Photographs by Laura Aguilar feature large nude bodies set within natural landscapes to explore issues of identity, isolation and community. Shirin Neshat’s work, such as the photographs in her “Women of Allah” series, uses the female nude to challenge stereotypes about Muslim women as passive and submissive.