Pretexts for nudity in art
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Before the 1850s and the birth of modern art, artists needed an excuse to depict violence and sexuality in their paintings or engravings. Mythology and martyrology provided an excuse to display these themes. Frequent motifs were depictions of the Christian The Temptation of Saint Anthony, the entire Greco-Roman Venus (mythology) and the The Three Graces.
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Overview
Due to censorship, artists past and present, have to resort to pretexts for displaying the naked human form. With painters of the past, the depiction of historical, mythological, and religious subjects often provided such pretexts for nudity in art, as in the temptation of saint Anthony (Félicien Rops and Hieronymus Bosch, more recently, Salvador Dalí), the massacre of the innocents, the battle of the Lapiths and the centaurs), Leda and the Swan, the three graces, and Venus, who has become a byword for the female nude, tout court.
Over time, secular excuses for showing the undraped human form complemented and, later, supplanted these historical, mythological, and religious pretexts, athleticism being one such excuse, as in Edouard Manet’s Olympia. In the traditional arts, nudity has long since become accepted, but the same is not yet true with regard to more recent artistic media, such as film.
Leda and the Swan
The motif of Leda and the Swan from Greek mythology, in which the Greek god Zeus came to Leda in the form of a swan, was rarely seen in Gothic art, but resurfaced as a classicizing theme, with erotic overtones, in Italian painting and sculpture of the 16th Century.
Judgement of Paris
The Judgement of Paris is a story from Greek mythology, which was one of the events that led up to the Trojan War and (in slightly later versions of the story) to the foundation of Rome. The mytheme of the Judgement of Paris naturally offered artists the opportunity to portray three ideally lovely women, Hera, Athena and Aphrodite, in undress, as a sort of beauty contest.
The Three Graces
On the representation of the Three Graces, Pausanias wrote,
- "Who it was who first represented the Graces naked, whether in sculpture or in painting, I could not discover. During the earlier period, certainly, sculptors and painters alike represented them draped. [...] But later artists, I do not know the reason, have changed the way of portraying them. Certainly to-day sculptors and painters represent Graces naked."
The Temptation of Saint Anthony
Some of the stories of the demons and temptations that Anthony is reported to have faced are perpetuated now mostly in paintings, where they give an opportunity and pretext for artists to depict their more lurid or bizarre fantasies. Emphasis on these stories, however, did not really begin until the Middle Ages, when the psychology of the individual became a greater interest.
The Loves of the Gods
The Loves of the Gods (Italian: Gli Amori Degli Dei) are a subheading of a number of stories in Ovid's Metamorphoses. These stories of Greek gods and goddesses include Apollo and Daphne, Io, Phaethon, Callisto, Apollo and Coronis (The Raven and the Crow), Mercury and Battus, Mercury and Aglauros, and Jupiter and Europa.
Roman Charity
In the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, many famous European artists depicted the scene. Hundreds or possibly thousands of paintings were created, which tell the story. Most outstandingly, Peter Paul Rubens had several versions. Baroque artist Caravaggio also featured the deed (among others) in his work from 1606, The Seven Works of Mercy. Neoclassical depictions tended to be more subdued.
Venus
Venus became a popular subject of painting and sculpture during the Renaissance period in Europe. As a "classical" figure for whom nudity was her natural state, it was socially acceptable to depict her unclothed. As the goddess of sexual healing, a degree of erotic beauty in her presentation was justified, which had an obvious appeal to many artists and their patrons. Over time, "venus" came to refer to any artistic depiction of a nude woman, even when there was no indication that the subject was the goddess.
See also
