One of the cultures where the artistic representation of the nude proliferated the most was Ancient Greece, where it was conceived as an ideal of perfection and absolute beauty, a concept that has endured in classical art until today, and largely conditioning the perception of Western society towards the nude and art in general. The study and artistic representation of the human body has been a constant throughout the history of art, from prehistoric times ( Venus of Willendorf) to the present day. Its representation has varied according to the social and cultural values of each era and each people, and just as for the Greeks the body was a source of pride, for the Jews-and therefore for Christianity-it was a source of shame, it was the condition of slaves and the miserable. Īlthough it is usually associated with eroticism, the nude can have various interpretations and meanings, from mythology to religion, including anatomical study, or as a representation of beauty and aesthetic ideal of perfection, as in Ancient Greece. As a genre, the nude is a complex subject to approach because of its many variants, both formal, aesthetic and iconographic, and some art historians consider it the most important subject in the history of Western art. Many cultures tolerate nudity in art to a greater extent than nudity in real life, with different parameters for what is acceptable: for example, even in a museum where nude works are displayed, nudity of the visitor is generally not acceptable. Nudity in art has generally reflected the social standards for aesthetics and morality of the era in which the work was made. It is considered one of the academic classifications of works of art. The nude is an artistic genre that consists of the representation in various artistic media (painting, sculpture or, more recently, film and photography) of the naked human body. The historical evolution of the nude in art runs parallel to the history of art in general, except for small particularities derived from the different acceptance of nudity by the various societies and cultures that have succeeded each other in the world over time. Come and discover the incredible diversity of contemporary nude painting on SINGULART.David (1501–1504), by Michelangelo, Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence. Painter Michael Alford takes an approach similar to that of classical painting, creating nude oil paintings of female nudes, languidly laying on beds or couches. At SINGULART, we represent a great variety of artists who, in their own way, revisit this historical genre: the German painter Bernard Simunovic realizes stylized and graphic paintings of contemporary nudes, inspired by the portraits of Picasso or Matisse. Many contemporary artists are still inspired by the theme of the nude in painting.
The painter, Manet and the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century would break these traditional conventions by creating nude paintings of the people around them or courtesans, to make nude painting an accepted genre to be exhibited in the largest museums around the world.
Nevertheless, until the nineteenth century, nudity in art was only acceptable if it served to represent a mythological or divine subject artists were not able to paint the naked body of an ordinary person, for fear of being judged as indecent and scandalous.
The nude painting became a genre in itself in the 18th century, which gave it a greater integrity: nude painting ceases to be a practical exercise for artists, to study the subject of their paintings. Throughout the Middle Ages the nude painting was rejected, because of associations to the sins of the flesh, whereas the nude painting took centre stage during the Renaissance in the fifteenth century.
The representation of the nude in works of art was, at the time, a very common practice, artists would idealize the body of their models to create a vision of perfect beauty. It was in ancient Greece that the representation of the nude in art was glorified: the bodily perfection of the gods and the divine could be seen in the statues and the frescoes. Nude painting is an age old artistic tradition from prehistoric times to the present day.
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