The Nude

This article considers the emergence of the nude in European art 1400-1600. It explains social understandings of nakedness and how this is affected by class, gender and age; and draws a distinction between the "academic" and "erotic" approaches to the naked body, also investigating the use of both male and female life models in the early modern period. Artists considered include Dürer, Titian, MIchelangelo and Rubens.

Wilhelm von Gloeden, a minor German aristocrat, and his cousin, Guglielmo Plüschow —both homosexual, both photographers — succumbed to what historian Robert Aldrich has called "the seduction of the Mediterranean," a mythic construct of southern Italy that was a central theme in homoerotic art and literature from the 1750s to the 1950s. Although Plüschow has been overshadowed by his more famous relative, his work was more transgressive, and as his life demonstrates, he was much more the "sexual outlaw," to borrow the American author John Rechy's locution. This paper compares the lives and work of Gloeden and Plüschow but focuses mainly on the latter. I present biographical detail and cultural history and I discuss the politics of representation as embodied in his (and his cousin's) images of Southern Italian masculinity

À la Renaissance, le nu a connu dans les arts un développement sans précédent. Observe-t-on un phénomène analogue dans la littérature ? Ce livre, en identifiant une variété de nus dans les textes de la Renaissance et en analysant leurs modèles, leurs significations et leurs procédés d’écriture, propose une première synthèse sur le sujet.
Après avoir rappelé les caractéristiques essentielles du nu depuis l’Antiquité, cet ouvrage entend revaloriser la fonction comique de la nudité, aspect minoré par la critique longtemps centrée sur le nu idéal et le mouvement néo-platonicien. En effet, dans la suite de la tradition médiévale, la dérision du corps s’exprime dans la nouvelle en langue italienne, dans l’épigramme latine, mais aussi parfois dans l’élégie ou dans les récits des grandes découvertes, mettant à nu la condition humaine.
Toutefois, si le nu alimente à la Renaissance la satire des mœurs, il n’en continue pas moins de célébrer l’amour et la fécondité : littérature et arts perpétuent la fonction érotique du nu archaïque en l’adaptant aux cadres du mariage chrétien. Enfin, les nouvelles théorisations humanistes du corps, qui ont bouleversé sa figuration en art, ont aussi modifié les codes de sa description littéraire : les recherches sur la symétrie du corps humain, sur l’anatomie ou sur le mouvement n’ont pas manqué de travailler le nu dans la littérature de la Renaissance.

This edited scholarly volume offers a perspective on the history of the genre of the nude in the Middle East and includes contributions written by scholars from several disciplines (art history, history, anthropology). Each chapter provides a distinct perspective on the early days of the fine arts genre of the nude, as its author studies a particular aspect through analysis of artworks and historical documents from the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries. The volume examines a rich body of reproductions of both primary documents and of works of art made by Lebanese, Egyptian, Syrian artists or of anonymous book illustrations from the nineteenth century Ottoman erotic literature.

This essay looks at the role of "touch" in Renoir's paintings of the female body. I argue that Renoir's obsession with the tactile, while certainly an expression of sexual desire, is also connected to the shifting cultural values of the industrial era.

This essay considers the depiction of the secular, erotic female nude in northern European art of the fifteenth century, looking at examples in manuscript, print and panel painting, as well as evidence from contemporary spectacle and bathing culture.  It argues that such imagery was well established in the northern European visual canon, and that it influenced the development of the erotic nude in Venice around 1500,

As eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Russian collectors filled their galleries with painting and sculpture, they followed European precedents in observing the academic hierarchy of genres and paying homage to the work of Old Masters.  This paper will highlight some of the particularities of Russian collections of this period by focusing on a single theme: the female nude. Drawing on recent studies of the art market in St. Petersburg and Moscow, as well as rare primary sources, it will trace the patterns of collecting and display that emerge when this distinctly European subject arrives in Russia.

Peter the Great was the first Russian to form a significant art collection when he imported hundreds of sculptures for palace gardens in and around St. Petersburg in the 1710s. The Roman Venus he acquired for the Summer Garden was so precious that he placed her in a special gallery, open on all sides, and watched over by a guard. Aristocrats followed the tsar’s example as they acquired sculpture and painting to furnish their own palaces. When art collecting spread beyond the elite, however, men who had less exposure to European conventions of depicting and displaying the female form also added nudes to their gardens and galleries. While some conformed to the practices of their highly cultured social superiors, others had expectations of naturalism and believability that shaped their ideas about displaying idealized images of women in their collections.

This study dispels Soviet-era myths about a supposed innate Russian modesty that carried over into artistic tastes. More importantly, it helps to provide a more complete picture of European ideas about collecting and displaying art as they spread to distant cultures.

If art, arguably, has the power to arise feelings of pathos, energy, ecstasy, sensuality and even sexual desire, then the so-called nude form that we find in art must carry some peculiarly unique power and vitality that parallels emotions equal or similar to things that we most value in real life, memories of all the things we wish to do with ourselves as Kenneth Clark says, that is the need to perpetuate ourselves or, simply, our instinctive quest for physical beauty . A great many assumptions underlie this statement which will form the basis of the subsequent discussion regarding the aesthetic value of the nude in art, the unique aesthetic experience that it entails and most importantly, the problematic over a number of moral, social or political questions that it raises, comparisons and distinctions which must be drawn, in order to justify its significance in art but, also, in our culture and everyday life.

Grave’s poem "The naked and the nude" and Kenneth Clark’s treatment of the two terms in his monumental work "The nude" give, with an utmost economy and simplicity, the theoretical, moral and intellectual framework for the study of such a broad topic as that of the nude in art. In what follows, I will attempt to develop my thesis in two main thematic entities which overlap sometimes. Firstly, I will try to develop a brief history of the nude as an art form and its aesthetic value, with special reference to the Greek antecedent and the subsequent reception, exploitation and transformation of the inherited Greek image in later European traditions in the Medieval Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment up to the 19th century. Goya’s “Nude Maja” will have the final say in the discussion, being a landmark of Modernism. In the meantime, I will try to explain and analyse the key role in the changing depictions of the image of the nude over its long history with paradigms from different periods and art movements.

Entendemos el espacio corporal como una encrucijada discursiva, que nos llega cruzado por una pluralidad de discursos de orden diverso-la psicología, la medicina, la sociología, la filosofía, la religión, el arte...-cuyo conocimiento del cuerpo despliega estrategias de (re)presentación vinculadas al saber/poder.

PAINTING & DRAWING THE NUDE:
a search for a realism for the body through phenomenology & fine art practice
Karen Wallis 2002
Abstract
The thesis presents the findings of a practice-based research project in fine art, supported by
a study of specific philosophical discourses. The practical element, in painting, drawing and
installation, examines the possibility of re-presenting the painted nude in a manner that avoids
a possessive gaze. Informing the practice is a parallel investigation into the nature of Realism
in painting. The illustrated dissertation is supported by a CD-ROM of moving images.
Part 1 is an introduction: which outlines the research questions, explains the origins of the
project in my own practice as an artist and teacher, and presents the methodology for the
research. The latter looks in particular at my use of reflexivity and the relationship between
practice and theory, seen as two individual lines of investigation that are mutually
interdependent.
Part 2 is a text that traces the journey made during the research. It begins by questioning the
problematic position of the naked model in the life room, that is indicative of the relationship
between the image of the nude and the viewer of the painting. Using myself as the model in
my own fine art practice, and informed by the writing of primarily Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot, the project develops into a dual investigation. One
strand is a practical search for strategies to represent a nude that can be perceived by the
viewer as an-other person. By employing Brechtian methods, as defined by Walter Benjamin
on Epic Theatre, the work develops into site specific or site sensitive drawing and painting,
installed outside a designated art environment. The other strand is an attempt to situate a
realism defined in terms of the viewer, rather than as a stylistic school or approach to painting.
This aesthetic concern finds that Realism as an ‘event’ cannot be reduced to a fixed theoretical
position, but lies between concepts such as the Kantian Beautiful and Sublime, or the ‘here’
and the there is (il y a) according to Levinas, and between genres such as portraiture and
narrative painting, or the portrayal of the naked and the clothed.
Part 3 is a commentary on the whole project, which reflects on the positive nature of
indeterminate findings, and looks at issues for further investigation. The research indicates that
an open and challenging approach to the nude in painting can now be taken, which could
influence more general concerns of the perception of body. The primary issue remaining is the
need to reintegrate both practical and aesthetic findings back into the environments of
contemporary fine art and art education.

WONDER WOMEN: SOFONISBA ANGUISSOLA, LAVINIA FONTANA AND ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI
A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF RENAISSANCE AND BAROQUE SELF-PORTRAIT PAINTING BY FEMALE ARTISTS

by Rosa Lena Reed Robinson

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Master of Arts in Art History at
Studio Art Centers International
Florence, Italy

2017


This  thesis is focused on the self-portrait painting practice by three female artists from the Renaissance and the Baroque periods: Sofonisba Anguissola, Lavinia Fontana, and Artemisia Gentileschi. Chapter I introduces the self-portrait as it developed specific to the Renaissance and in relation to a Greco-Roman classical ideal. The chapter focuses on Renaissance concepts of art and the very role of the artist. Chapter II studies the numerous self-portraits of Sofonisba Anguissola, the first great Renaissance female artist to have an international career. The artist’s self-portraits both became a foundation for those of later female artists and self-consciously expressed the new elite status achieved by this Lombard artist of noble lineage who worked as court portraitist for the Spanish monarchy. Chapter III examines the self-portraits and innovative identity self-portraiture of Lavinia Fontana of Bologna. It is demonstrated how her two early self-portraits built on the precedent established by Sofonisba, and yet, are of somewhat greater iconographic complexity. While in her maturity the artist developed self-portraiture into the identity self-portrait through the subject of Judith and Holofernes. Within her treatments of the theme in some examples she put herself into the figure of Judith and in others into Judith’s maid Abra. Lavinia Fontana’s final masterpiece, the improbable painting Minerva Dressing done at the end of her extensive career was likewise arguably an identity self-portrait. Minerva Dressing constitutes the first female fully nude figure painted by a female artist. Chapter IV focuses on Artemisia Gentileschi. This thesis designates the artist’s Pommersfelden Susanna and the Elders as both Artemisia’s first exact self-portrait and the first female full-length nude self-portrait painted by a female artist. The work is also an identity self-portrait. This chapter continues with a discussion of both versions of Artemisia’s infamous Judith and Holofernes (Capodimonte/Uffizi). Both works are arguably exact self-portrait paintings and identity self-portraits. Artemisia’s Allegory of Painting in London, often referred to as a self-portrait in scholarship, is suggested a perhaps better understood as an ideal identity self-portrait rather than a literal self-representation. The Allegory of Painting is considered together with other attributed self-portraits and portraits of the artist. A major theme in Chapter IV is the transition from literal self-representation to allegorical and ideal portrayal of the self. This thesis suggests that, as the artist’s career advanced, Artemisia Gentileschi did continue to paint both the exact and the ideal self-portrait. Finally, in the Conclusion, the legacy of the self-portraits of the Wonder Women, to adopt a phrase from Giorgio Vasari, is considered in reference to future female artists such as Elisabetta Sirani, Angelica Kauffmann, Elisabeth Vigée Le-Brun and Paula Modersohn-Becker.

Book Reviews of The Renaissance Nude, ed. Thomas Kren (Getty Publications); Jill Burke, The Italian Renaissance Nude (Yale); Patricia Lee Rubin, Seen from Behind: Perspectives on the Male Body and Renaissance Art  (Yale); Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body (Metropolitan Museum).

The review of Like Life is LONGER than the published version

Mit fatto nel academia sind die kaum bekannten Zeichenkonvolute von Filippo Esengren überschrieben, der zwischen 1614 und 1631 in Venedig tätig war. Diese Mappen enthalten eine reiche Auswahl an Aktstudien und erlauben einen Einblick in die Praxis des Zeichnens nach dem lebenden Modell im ersten Drittel des 17. Jahrhunderts. Die Beschriftung der Konvolute verweißt auf die Entstehung dieser Blätter an einer informellen Akademie.
Denn Esengren verkehrte als Antiquar am Mantuaner Hof, gehörte zu dem gelehrten Kreis (der Accademia Desiosi) gemeinsam mit Loredano in Venedig und illustrierte 1615 unter seinem italienischen Name „Ferroverde“ die neue Ausgabe der Immagini de gli Dei  von Vincenzo Cartari. Die nachgestellten Haltungen von lebenden Modellen spiegeln sein breites Wissen der Antike sowie der zeitgenössischen Arbeiten (von Tizian, Palma il Giovane und Alessandro Vittoria) wieder. Darüber hinaus verwendete er bei der Erarbeitung der verschiedenen Körperhaltungen eine in damaliger Zeit wenig nachweisbare Praxis des Abklatsches, die er möglicherweise aus seiner Tätigkeit als Goldschmied übernahm und an seinem Herkunftsort nördlich der Alpen kennenlernte.
In dem Vortrag wird anhand von drei ausgewählten Beispielen die prozesshafte Entstehung dieser Zeichnungen beschrieben. Dabei soll die Transformation der Formen aus anderen Werken in den Zeichnungen nach dem zeitgemäßen Wissensstand thematisiert werden. Auch wenn über Esengren heute kaum noch etwas bekannt ist, wurde sein Wissen von den Teilnehmer der Akademie rezipiert und ist insbesondere in den Gemälden von Alessandro Varotari (gen. Padovanino) wiederzufinden. Die Rolle Esengrens bei diesen Treffen ist weniger als die eines Lehrers, sondern eines Anstifters neben seinen Gleichgesinnten zu betrachten, die von seiner Kennerschaft profitierten. Die Analyse der Aktzeichnungen erlaubt Parallelen zu den zeitgleich in ganz Italien existierenden informellen Akademien zu erkennen.

This article examines Poser nue (2011), a critical commentary about the female nude by Nancy Huston alongside sketches of male nudes, couples, flowers and assorted body parts by her partner Guy Oberson. The article first examines Huston's presentation of nude models' and sex-workers' experience of nudity, which offers an intersectional study of modeling and victimization, and emphasizes the importance of mind and body as well as gender difference when it comes to desire and artistic creation. The essay ends with Oberson's more fluid portrayals of people and plants, and concludes that this clash of sorts between words and images is ultimately a lesson in love and art—that difference should be treasured as well as renegotiated.

Early (from 2018) undergrad piece on visual arts: discussing the language and arguments used in the discourse surrounding 'artistic nudity' and 'pornography', with reference to two traditional British art historians: Roger Scruton and Kenneth Clark.

Este artículo reconstruye, a partir de los cartelones sobrevivientes y de los grabados y de las notas aparecidas en periódicos italianos, ingleses y norteamericanos, parte de la historia de la Compañía Keller y el aspecto de los tableaux vivants que componían el Caín y Abel que la compañía exhibió en noviembre de 1865 en el Teatro Municipal de Santiago. La elección de las referencias pictóricas y escultóricas de los cuadros vivientes, el entusiasmo y los silencios de la prensa, las suspicacias morales y artísticas que despertaron sus poses plásticas, nos permiten atisbar desde un lugar al mismo tiempo periférico y global, varios de los nudos que conformaron el epicentro de la discusión sobre las artes durante el siglo XIX. Arrojan luces, además, sobre los modos en que la cultura popular se apropió de la historia del arte y las formas poco convencionales de difusión del arte europeo en países sudamericanos.

Abstract: This article reconstructs, from surviving posters, engravings, and Italian, English and American press articles, the history of the Keller Troupe, its tableaux vivants’ shows, and the Cain y Abel piece they presented in November 1865 in Santiago’s Municipal Theater. The choice of the pictorial and sculptural references of the living pictures, the enthusiasm and silence of the press, and the moral and artistic suspicions that aroused their plastic poses, allow us to glimpse from a place at the same time peripheral and global, several of the knots that formed the epicenter of the discussion about the arts during the nineteenth century. They also shed light on the ways in which popular culture appropriated art history and the unconventional ways of disseminating European art in South American countries.

O desenho de nu feminino em Cutileiro é uma sociologia de erotização pelas funções de uma fenomenologia de olhar variável. A mão do desenhador identifica o gesto do corpo e capta-o no devir do instante e da urgência. Neste quadro intencional, o artigo analisa as relações gráficas operacionais através de três pares de factores envolvidos no desenhar. A “temática e a figura” explora as identidades do corpo e do género. A “técnica e o grafismo” estuda a geometria do contorno e as variabilidades do traço. O “volume e a pose” trata da posição, do movimento e da gravidade nos desvios da proporção humana.

The Cutileiro’s female nude drawing is an erotization sociology through the functions of a variable gaze phenomenology. The draughtsperson hand identifies the gesture of the body and captures it in the transformation of instant and urgency. In this intentional framework, the paper analyses the operating graphical interfaces through three pairs of factors involved in to draw. The “theme and figure” explores the identities of the body and the gender. The “technic and graphics” studies the outline geometry and trace variability. The “volume and pose” deals with the position, motion and gravity on deviations of human proportion.

This article deals with the case of an early female (semi)nude by a French sculptress, shown exceptionally early at a Dutch exhibition: the Living Masters in The Hague in 1866, even if it was not mentioned in the catalogue. The artist, Marie-Louise Lefèvre-Deumier, then temporarily lived in The Hague but was from Paris, where it was then more customary to exhibit nudes, except for women. The discussed case concerns such an exception, particularly for the Netherlands, where it was not yet evident in 1866 to exhibit nudity, let alone by a woman. Yet
it seems that little or no fuss was made when Lefèvre-Deumier showed her Diana in The Hague. In this text, explanations are sought for both its early presentation, and the lack of controversy it aroused. That fact that it only concerned a small statuette, that conformed to the classical sculpture tradition, that it was not mentioned in the catalogue, and that the sculptress had a respectable reputation, might all have played a role. Moreover, judging from two (other) known semi-nude
marble statues from the same sculptor (Glycera and Morning Star), it is argued that the statuette shown in The Hague, representing the chaste Diana, must have held an acceptable balance between prudery and sensuality. This in contrast to
Edouards Manet’s contemporary (Olympia), thus showing the double moral as concerned to sexuality in the arts of the 1860’s, in Paris as well as the Netherlands.

16 June 2018. London Stadium. Beyoncé and Jay-Z revealed the premiere of the music video Apeshit. Filmed inside the Louvre Museum in Paris, Beyoncé's sexual desirability powerfully dialogues with Western canons of high art that have dehumanized or erased the black female body. Dominant tropes have historically associated the black female body with the realm of nature saddled with an animalistic hypersexuality. With this timely release, Apeshit engages with the growing current debate about the ethic of representation of the black subject in European museums. Here, I argue that Beyoncé transcends the tension between nature and culture into a syncretic language to subvert a dominant imperialistic gaze. Drawing on black feminist theories and art history, a formal analysis traces the genealogy and stylistic expression of this vocabulary to understand its political implications. Findings pinpoint how Beyoncé laces past and present, the regal nakedness of her African heritage and Western conventions of the nude to convey the complexity, sensuality, and humanity of black women-thus drawing a critical reimagining of museal practices and enriching the collective imaginary at large.

Naked Politics: Nudity, Political Action, and the Rhetoric of the Body by Brett Lunceford, examines the rhetorical power of the unclothed body as it relates to protest and political action. This study explores what the disrobed body communicates, and how others are invited to make sense of this display. The actions examined range from grassroots protests to those of professionalized social movement organizations. Specifically, Lunceford examines PETA and the use of chained women and the Running of the Nudes; lactivists, or women engaging in public breastfeeding as protest action in both online and physical space; the World Naked Bike Ride’s worldwide protest against oil dependency and attempt to raise awareness of the vulnerability of cyclists; and a contest held on College Humor that invited women to write their preferred presidential candidate on their exposed breasts and send the picture to them to post on the site. Although these actions may seem to have little in common beyond their use of body exposure, they all share the notions that something can happen when you take your clothes off and that the act of disrobing can have social and political consequences. Moreover, these groups illustrate the often paradoxical views of the exposed body—by both the participants and the observers—and how such bodies operate in the public sphere. Even when the voice is silent, the body still speaks; Naked Politics considers what is being said.

Berlin 2018.
Habil.-Schrift TU Dresden 2015.
Akademische Aktstudien widmen sich dem vornehmsten Gegenstand der Kunst überhaupt: dem menschlichen Körper in Ruhe und Bewegung. Diese grundlegende und normstiftende Kunstpraxis der Frühen Neuzeit macht die Autorin mittels umfangreichem Material aus Rom, Paris und dem deutschsprachigen Raum in fünf Werkgruppen zugänglich. Die Forschungsarbeit beinhaltet die zentralen Themenkreise der Theorie der akademischen Aktstudie: die Künstlerausbildung, die Theorie der Nachahmung von Kunst und Natur, die experimentelle Praxis im Aktsaal, die Transformation akademischer Vorbilder, die zeichnerische Illusion von Lebendigkeit, das zeitgenössische Idealbild des Menschen, die Simulation von Bewegung in der Pose sowie die Bedeutung der Posen für die Kunstpraxis der Zeit.

E' una lettura dell'opera di Guaguin fatta in controtendenza rispetto alle letture post-colonial e gender, perché dimostra che l'artista era perfettamente consapevole delle contraddizioni insite nel sogno esotico, contraddizioni che infatti trovano posto nei suoi dipinti.