Female nude  

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""Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?" (1989) was an awareness campaign by the American feminist group the Guerrilla Girls; who, after counting all male artists, female artists, male nudes and female nudes at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, condemned the limited number of female artists found in that institute."--Sholem Stein

"Very few active, strong, psychologically engaging, heroic female nudes and I know of no female counterparts to The Thinker, the Pollaiuolo engraving, or David. To make this point vivid, try the thought experiment of imagining a work like Ingres’s Turkish Bath with men rather than women, or Pollaiuolo’s Battle with women rather than men. The results, I think you’ll find, will seem so foreign as to border on the absurd."--"What's Wrong with the Female Nude?" (2012) Anne W. Eaton

"The incident [vandalism of the Rokeby Venus] has come to symbolize a particular perception of feminist attitudes towards the female nude; in a sense, it has come to represent a specific stereotypical image of feminism more generally." --The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity, and Sexuality (1992), p.35, Lynda Nead.


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Kunstformen der Natur (1904) by Ernst Haeckel
Kunstformen der Natur (1904) by Ernst Haeckel

The female nude is an enduring theme in the history of art and especially erotic art. Venus, the Roman goddess of love has acquired in visual art the status of synonym for any female nude.




The Greek goddesses were initially sculpted with drapery rather than nude. The first free-standing, life-sized sculpture of an entirely nude woman was the Aphrodite of Cnidus created ca. 360–340 BCE by Praxiteles. The female nude became much more common in the later Hellenistic period.

Rarely seen during the Middle Ages, the female nude reappeared in Italy in the 15th century. Subsequently, eroticism became more emphatic in paintings such as Giorgione's Sleeping Venus (ca. 1510), which situated the reclining nude in an idyllic landscape, and Titian's Danaë series (ca. 1553–1556). These works inspired countless reclining female nudes for centuries afterwards. The annual glut of paintings of idealized nude women in the 19th-century Paris Salon was satirized by Honoré Daumier in This Year, Venuses Again... Always Venuses! (1864).

In the 19th century the Orientalism movement added another reclining female nude to the possible subjects of European paintings, the odalisque, a slave or harem girl. One of the most famous was "The Grande Odalisque" painted by Ingres in 1814.

Venus Caelestis and Venus Naturalis

Venus Caelestis and Venus Naturalis

As per Plato's Symposium there are two kinds of Aphrodites (Latin: Venuses), the Aphrodite Ourania (Latin: Venus Caelestis), literarly the heavenly love goddess, corresponding to a love of body and soul and the Aphrodite Pandemos (Latin: Venus Naturalis), literally, the "Venus of the people," corresponding to physical love.

By the late 5th century BC, philosophers separated Aphrodite into two separate goddesses, not individuated in cult: Aphrodite Ourania (Latin Venus Caelestis), born from the sea foam after Cronus castrated Ouranos, and Aphrodite Pandemos (Latin Venus Naturalis), the common Aphrodite "of all the folk," born from Zeus and Dione. Among the neo-Platonists and eventually their Christian interpreters, Aphrodite Ourania figures as the celestial Aphrodite, representing the love of body and soul, while Aphrodite Pandemos is associated with mere physical love. The representation of Aphrodite Ouranos, with a foot resting on a tortoise, was read later as emblematic of discretion in conjugal love; the image is credited to Phidias, in a chryselephantine sculpture made for Elis, of which we have only a passing remark by Pausanias.

Thus, according to the character Pausanias in Plato's Symposium, Aphrodite is two goddesses, one older the other younger. The older, Urania, is the "heavenly" daughter of Ouranos, and inspires homosexual male (and more specifically, ephebic) love/eros; the younger is named Pandemos, the daughter of Zeus and Dione, and all love for women comes from her. Pandemos is the common Aphrodite. The speech of Pausanias distinguishes two manifestations of Aphrodite, represented by the two stories: Aphrodite Ourania ("heavenly" Aphrodite), and Aphrodite Pandemos ("Common" Aphrodite).

Venus vs. Nini

Venus vs. Nini

The Venus and Nini are two terms of art to denote the female nude. They are illustrated here by the Venus (Giorgione) vs. Venus of Urbino (1538) by Titian.

The difference is in their gaze, Giorgione's Venus looks away with her eyes closed, Titian's Venus, painted 28 years later, looks the spectator straight in the eye.

The locale is different too. Giorgione's Venus is set in a pastoral environment, Titian's Venus is in a house.

Giorgione's Venus conjures a mythical being which never really wears any clothes because she lives in a fictional universe, Titian's Venus is your girlfriend, or the model you get intimate with or the call girl who has received you.

Both are female nudes but with regards to the differences enumerated above art critics label the first kind Venus and the second Nini. Idealization vs. homeliness. Remoteness vs. proximity. Hard-to-get vs. available.

Female body shape

female body shape

Female body shape, i.e. the body shape of a woman, has a bearing on a wide range of human activities, and there are and have been widely different body ideals of it in different cultures over history. The female figure is usually narrower at the waist than at the chest and hips, and usually has one of four basic shapes — banana, pear, apple or hourglass. The chest, waist and hips are called inflection points, and the ratios of their circumferences define these basic shapes. Body shape depends on skeletal structure and the distribution of fat in the body.

Some of these body shapes normally occur only in women, although some endocrine conditions or deliberate use of female hormones, such as by transsexuals, can produce them in male bodies. As with most physical traits, there is a wide range of normal female body shapes.

Venus Pudica

Venus Pudica

The Venus Pudica (modest Venus) type is a Venus statue or painting typified by the Aphrodite of Cnidus.

Venus usually covers her breasts with her right hand, and her groin with her left hand. The name pudica refers to pudor, a sense of modesty or shame.

Variants of the Venus Pudica (suggesting an action to cover the breasts) are the Venus de' Medici or the Capitoline Venus.

Eve is usually depicted as a Venus Pudica, such as in Prudence by Giovanni Pisano.

Nude female/dressed male

Nude female/dressed male

The nude female/dressed male motif (as explored first of all in the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, but also in Cranach's versions of The Judgment of Paris, The Lunch on the Grass [1] by Edouard Manet, Attempting the Impossible [2]by Magritte and Phryné before the Areopagus [3] by Jean-Léon Gérôme) is a trope of eroticism.

The American writer Eve Babitz gained notoriety by posing nude with a dressed Marcel Duchamp in 1963, at the Pasadena Art Museum[4].

Some works

See also

nudity (art), male nudity, history of nude depictions, ideal beauty

External links

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