If you’ve ever received a naked pic from your crush or someone close to you, the way you react is dependent on their intentions. According to research, looking at nudes can trigger a dopamine response in your brain.
The Renaissance painter Botticelli created the first female nude painting without any religious purpose. His Venus gracefully reveals her body and her confidence makes her erotic.
Botticelli
The Renaissance master Botticelli was one of the first to paint nude women with grace and sensuality. His iconic work The Birth of Venus (Nascita di Venere) in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence is a paean to beauty and art. Venus, the Roman goddess of love and fertility, stands on a parapet flanked by her companions the Three Graces, who represent chastity, beauty, and love. She is also surrounded by a fluttering cloud and the woodland nymph Chloris, who metamorphoses into flower-spreading Flora.
While it can be easy to dismiss Botticelli’s women as simply beautiful, their elongated bodies and accentuated curves reveal a deeper level of meaning and significance. For instance, Venus’s aquiline nose reflects her status as the divine embodiment of love. The Three Graces’ chaste nature contrasts with the voluptuousness of the Venus figure, and their elaborate costumes reflect the rich culture of Florence where the painting was painted.
This work influenced later artists to explore the representation of the female nude with greater realism. Gustave Courbet’s controversial and explicit depiction of the female genitalia in Origin of the World sparked outrage and fascination at the time it was first exhibited.
Leda and the Swan, by Rubens, is another masterpiece that illustrates the nude form with skill and realism. The artist’s attention to detail and vibrant color palette bring the ancient myth to life. In the 17th century, when this painting was made, it would have been extremely provocative for a male artist to depict a naked woman, unless she were an ancient goddess.
Manet
With his two paintings, Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe and Olympia, Manet made a revolution in art. Unlike other artists who depicted nude women in exotic and mythological scenes, Manet depicted real women in ordinary circumstances. His paintings caused a great deal of controversy at the time, but later gained acceptance. These paintings were a catalyst for the feminist movement of the 1870s.
Although Manet had studied the works of old Renaissance masters, his painting of a nude woman was not typical for this period. He depicted a realistic subject, and used large noticeable brush strokes that contradicted the usual practice of Renaissance painters. He also used a large canvas size, which was normally reserved for verifiable subjects.
In the painting, a nude woman sits with two fully clothed men and is uninvolved in any erotic script. Her nakedness is not an expression of her own active feelings; it is simply a sign of submission. This was a direct challenge to convention and was a cause for outrage among viewers at the time.
In his work, Manet mocks stereotypes of the female body and undermines the sanctimonious rituals of the art world. The woman in the painting is named Victorine Meurend, who was a model. She is portrayed as a prostitute and challenges the traditional pretexts of representing the female nude. In her pose, she is not a Venus or a nymph but an ordinary woman who looks directly out at the viewer.
Ingres
Ingres was one of the most influential artists of his day. He had a very strong classical background, influenced by the likes of Botticelli and Jacques-Louis David. He aimed at a unity of proportion and light, with colour playing a more subordinate role. He also strove to show the human body in as natural a way as possible, with his male nudes often depicted in heroic contrapposto poses.
His work in female nude painting, however, was more radical. In 1814, he produced the painting La Grande Odalisque. The reclining figure of this odalisque is an indicator of Ingres’ departure from Neoclassicism into Romanticism. The elongated proportions and lack of anatomical realism amplify the sense of sensuality and curvature of the woman’s figure, while the turban, peacock feather fan, hookah pipe and pearls add to her exotic nature.
Despite the fact that this painting shocked the French Salon when it was first sent to them, Ingres considered this canvas to be his masterpiece. He had taken inspiration from several sources, including Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s letters on her experiences at the Turkish Bath. Ingres repeated many aspects of this painting in other works, such as The Walpinson Bather and Odalisque with Slave. These motifs helped him establish the genre of female nude paintings, which he described as “the externalization of feminine eroticism, which combines idealism and sexuality”.
Rococo
During the Renaissance period, Botticelli introduced the nude woman into art by painting the goddess Venus, and her graceful pose has captivated viewers for centuries. She is a symbol of beauty and harmony and was the first female nude to be painted for no religious reason. Her luscious curves also mark a precursor to the Mannerist movement of the 16th and 17th centuries. It is in this period that the female body truly became free of constraints.
Artists such as Antoine Watteau created fanciful paintings that are now known as Rococo. These paintings usually depict a love affair between upper class women and gentlemen, and their evocative motifs of flowers, intricate foliage, and delicate items at the feet of the women symbolize a traditional feminine persona.
Fragonard is another artist that is associated with Rococo, and he was a master of both landscapes and religious paintings. He is also considered the artist of frivolity, and his paintings often depict a nude figure in a scene of frolicking and merriment. His The Shirt Removed, from 1770 is a perfect example of the frivolity that characterizes his works.
The Rococo style influenced artists such as William Hogarth, Thomas Gainsborough, and Swiss-born Angelica Kauffman. In her paintings, she used the fluid brushwork and color palette of Rococo to create a more natural look for the body of her subjects. Her use of serpentine lines was seen as both more organic and aesthetically ideal, and it is believed that her influence paved the way for Impressionist painters such as Monet and Renoir.
Baroque
In the Renaissance, the Venetian master Titian created an erotic portrait of female nudity that challenged the Christian Church’s guarded attitude toward depicting naked women. His painting, Venus of Urbino, established new compositional rules and showed how sexuality could be used to enhance the art experience. However, Titian’s erotic subject was a divine goddess not an ordinary woman.
Despite the church’s antipathy toward nude subjects, Titian’s painting became one of the most famous of its time. Its influence prompted a movement of artists to paint their own interpretations of the female nude. The Flemish Baroque artist Peter Paul Rubens was an important contributor to this movement, with works that incorporated mythological and biblical themes, as well as female nudity.
His work Olympia is a powerful example of his Baroque style, in which the central female figure looks directly at the viewer. Her alabaster white skin and the bareness of her body contrast with a black housemaid, which implicates class issues.
Other important Baroque paintings include Manet’s The Origin of the World and Gustave Courbet’s The Female Vagina. The former provoked censorship when it was first exhibited and challenged the limits of what was considered acceptable, while the latter was more subtle in its depiction of an everyday Parisian woman’s nude body. Impressionist painters such as Edgar Degas and Paul Cezanne also reclaimed the nude form. They used different techniques, removing contours and shading, to convey energy and vitality.
Modern
Over the centuries, the female nude has been one of the most iconic subjects in Western art. It symbolises beauty, desire, reverie and the forbidden. It has also caused scandal, as illustrated by Goya’s “La maja desnuda”, Courbet’s “Origin of the World” or Modigliani’s “Reclining Woman”.
The Renaissance rediscovery of Antiquity and interest in plastic beauty led artists to value the body. They adapted the ideal proportions invented by the Greeks and developed anatomical research to add realistic male musculature. Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man was a major milestone in this development.
In 1970s Poland, women artists challenged this dominant framework of representation through their artistic practices. While some of them were members of the group “Olympia,” others, such as Natalia LL or Ewa Partum, escaped its confines. Their work reveals how even under state-socialist censorship, discussions of women’s sexual emancipation could be openly discussed and debated.
The photographs of Partum were a departure from the obscene, and her use of color was an artistic statement. Her skewed perspective on the model’s position and the way she covered parts of her body were meant to challenge conventional views of the “artistic” nude. She portrayed women as active participants in the photographic process, unlike the passive models of mainstream nude photography. Her work was not intended to be fetishistic, but rather was a feminist statement on the role of women in society.