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The Bather of Valpinçon (The Great Bather)

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, 1808

oil on canvas, 146 × 97.5 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris

Just as there is a fundamental difference in the use of the words naked and nude, the unclothed body can evoke a feeling of delight or shame, serving as a symbol of contradictory concepts – Beauty and Indecency. This distinction is explored by Kenneth Clark at the beginning of his famous book The Nude. Earlier still, Paul Valéry devoted a special section of his essay on Degas to this subject.

Doryphorus (Spear Carrier)

c. 440 BC

marble copy after a Greek original by Polykleitos

Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples

It is that which provides grounds for separating depictions of the nude body as a special genre. Deriving from the Ancient World’s cult of the beautiful body and celebrated by the artists of the Renaissance, the nude became an inseparable element of works belonging to various genres. Here there is a whole range of gradations – from the sanctified nude of Christ in His Passion to the extremely free nakedness of nymphs, satyrs and other mythological figures.

Barberini Faun

c. 200 BC

marble copy after a Hellenic original

h. 215 cm

Glyptotek, Munich

This indicates that for a long time the nude was required to be placed in a subject-genre context, outside of which it was perceived as something shameful. The evolution of European painting provides a good demonstration of how the bounds of the possible were expanded and the degree of aesthetic risk in this region decreased. If the word nude might sound odd when used in reference to the noble bareness of Poussin’s characters, it is entirely acceptable for Boucher’s unclothed figures.

David

Donatello, c. 1430

bronze, h. 185 cm

Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence

The relative autonomy in the depictions of the bare body, which can be taken as a sign of the formation of a specific genre, is a fairly late phenomenon. Théodore Géricault’s Study of a Male Model, for example (Pushkin Museum) is of particular value. It is indubitably a preparatory work, a study of the naked body, and its ancillary character is evident, but a view in retrospective changes the meaning and value of depiction, since today we see this model as one of the future characters in the drama acted out on the Raft of the Medusa.

The Birth of Venus

Sandro Botticelli, 1484–1486

tempera on canvas, 180 × 280 cm

Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

The hand of the twenty-year-old Géricault possesses the power of a genius. The energetic chiaroscuro moulding endows the painting with sculptural qualities, but a superb sense of rhythm harmonizes the illusion of volume with flatness. An expressive contrast to Géricault’s study is provided by Thomas Couture’s Little Bather (The Hermitage Museum). The motivation for the nude is of no fundamental significance (the painting has also been called Girl in a Garden), since the girl incarnates sinless beauty and naïveté.

David

Michelangelo, 1501–1504

marble, h. 410 cm

Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence

Eloquent testimony to the maturity of the genre comes with Renoir’s magnificent Nude in the Pushkin Museum collection. It seems that all the merits of French taste in painting are reflected in this image of a gloriously flourishing nude. With the elusive combination of natural stance and pose, Renoir achieved just as subtle an effect as with the richness of his palette. The artist’s brush revels in the delights of the nude with that immediacy, which is possible only in the spontaneous relations between painter and model.

Self-Portrait

Albrecht Dürer, c. 1503

Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris

At the same time, Nude signals the fact that the model is already the sovereign heroine of the painting. In this context it is worth recalling that, according to his own words, Degas was representing honest women, who when naked were only engaged in their own affairs. It’s as if they were seen through the keyhole. Degas’s models are indeed entirely independent. His image of nudity is self-sufficient in terms of subject and aesthetics.

Ignudi

Michelangelo, c. 1508

ceiling of the Sistine Chapel

Vatican Museums, Rome

His celebrated series of nudes – bathing, washing, drying themselves – represent a whole world of intimate feminine daily existence. Yet for all the life-like naturalness of his motifs, the expression “daily existence” does not prove entirely correct, as the bodily motions of his nude women find their source of inspiration in the ancient Venus. Was that not what prompted Renoir to compare one of them with a fragment of the Parthenon?

Sleeping Venus

Giorgione, c. 1508–1510

oil on canvas, 108.5 × 175 cm

Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden

Of course, we are not talking here of any kind of mythological associations, but about an unconditional precision of line, classical clarity of form and the special effect of pastel with its “foamy” texture, reminding us how the goddess surged into the world. It is a well-known fact that Degas practiced photography. He was attracted by the unpremeditated composition of the snapshot – a quality that he so valued in art.

Nymph of the Spring

Lucas Cranach the Elder, c. 1530–1534

oil on wood, 75 × 120 cm

Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid

“He composes scenes,” Yakov Tugendhold wrote about Degas. “He arranges figures and draws out types in a way which only the camera could do. But look more attentively at his ‘snap-shots’ and you will see in them a profound deliberation and an intent with regard to colour. Using a Japanese compositional device, Degas narrows the frame of his characters, placing a hand holding a fan or the sounding-board of a violin in the foreground.

Venus of Urbino

Titian, 1538

oil on canvas, 119 × 165 cm

Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

In this unexpected element of composition, however, one senses not a clever trick, but a profound, penetrative knowledge of the chance fabric of life.” This applies in full measure to Degas’s nudes. Cézanne’s Bathers are also associated with a whole series of variations on a theme. Cézanne was no less concerned than Degas at the loss of the form’s integrity and in the nude he sought the possibility of reviving Poussin in the open air.

Eva Prima Pandora

Jean Cousin, c. 1550

oil on canvas, 97 × 150 cm

Musée du Louvre, Paris

He was interested not in the character of the body as such, but in the arrangement of figures striving to attain their rhythmic and chromatic harmony with a landscape.

In Picasso’s interpretation, the theme of the nude underwent some unexpected metamorphoses. Girl on a Ball does perhaps have a certain allegorical subtext (Fortune and Valour), but the basic idea of its form is revealed by the highly expressive contrast of two forms of nudity – insuperable male power and flexible girlish fragility.

Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife

Tintoretto, c. 1555

oil on canvas, 54 × 117 cm

Prado Museum, Madrid

It is difficult to believe that the Dance of the Veils was painted only two years later. Here the naked body is filled with the energy of form, as if in revolt against itself. A short time later, Picasso, like a true “dêmiourgos”, began to create a new universe, in which nude figures are perceived as Cubist prototypes of mankind. An accelerated move from the classic to the archaic – that is the paradoxical logic of these metamorphoses.

Gabrielle d’Estrées and One of Her Sisters

Anonymous, c. 1595

oil on canvas, 96 × 125 cm

Musée du Louvre, Paris

Georges Rouault’s composition entitled Filles – a grotesque image of perverse nudity – forms a staggering contrast to the hedonism rooted in the aesthetic of the genre. This is no longer a nude, but naked flesh. The sense of drama inherent in Rouault’s perception of the world comes out in formal hyperbole and anticipates the stylistic trends of Expressionism. At the same time, the artist was not averse to producing other images of nudity – Bathing in a Lake.

Amor Victorious

Caravaggio, 1602–1603

oil on canvas, 156 × 113 cm

Staatliche Museen, Berlin

Matisse once confessed that if he met a woman like one of his creations in the street he would run a mile. “I answered to someone who said that I did not see women as I represented them by telling him that if I would see such women in the street I would be terrified. I do not create women, I create paintings,” the artist explained. Perceived from that point of view, the nude frees itself from subject and genre motivations and becomes a formal function of the painterly work.

Cleopatra

Artemisia Gentileschi, c. 1610–1612

oil on canvas, 118 × 181 cm

Amadeo Morandotti, Milan

The body is stripped of all coverings preventing it from being regarded as a form of pure expression. The human body merges with the very structure of the painting.

Every brushstroke has its own temperature, which depends on proximity to or distance from the instinctive. Some manuscripts are close to it and others are far from it. A drawing by Pascin or Geiger expresses the delirium of Dionysian passion much more vividly than a drawing by Bellmer or Bayros.

Jupiter and Callisto

Peter Paul Rubens, 1613

oil on canvas, 126.5 × 187 cm

Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Cassel

There are feverish drawings vibrating with energy and there is also a flow of the line that congeals it all in place. Pascin and Bellmer should be considered studies in contrast. Both penetrate the most chaotic and mixed up spheres of eroticism. Yet, where Bellmer safeguards himself with the cold flame of intellect and a disciplined stroke almost reminiscent of the precise cut of a surgeon, Pascin smolders and burns in the depicted object.

Venus and Adonis

Peter Paul Rubens, c. 1614

oil on wood, 83 × 90.5 cm

The Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

His eroticism is not cerebral; it is seated in the tips of his fingers. Pascin’s erotic moments evaporate like the fragrance of a morbid perfume. The erotic character of a work of art is more likely determined by its manner of execution than its subject. The passionate style dominates. The dialectic of erotic art banishes what it evokes. That which has been placed under taboos is violated in fantasy.

The Union of Earth and Water

Peter Paul Rubens, c. 1618

oil on canvas, 222.5 × 180.5 cm

The Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

The artist attacks social norms but also yields to them at the same time. Because it can only be enjoyed via the detour of sensitivity and the powers of imagination, the threatening aspect of sexuality is tempered. It is not experienced but channelled through artistic creativity. Thus, the civilizing process is the final winner after all, which – in the name of reason – transforms the human form from an untamed body of lust into a disciplined body of work, through the chronic powers of sexuality.

Satyr and Nymph

Nicolas Poussin, c. 1630

oil on canvas, 77.5 × 62.5 cm

Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow

“Art,” said Freud, “is an indirect way for dreams to become reality.” This is relevant to the artist, for whom eroticism is one of the most powerful drives for creativity. The same conflicts that push other individuals into neurosis here constitute the driving force of art. Aesthetic creativity offers an imaginary gratification of those unconscious forces that are fulfilled by being substituted with creativity. Aristotle’s understanding of the cathartic, of the purifying and salutary role of art is here illustrated: a healing of the passions through passion.

Angelica and Medoro

Jacques Blanchard, early 1630s

oil on canvas, 121.6 × 175.9 cm

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Sensuality is said to be present in any art, even if its subject is not always of a sexual nature. That means any art is erotic art. “The birth of art in general,” writes Eduard Fuchs, the old master of the history of erotic art, “also signifies in particular the birth of erotic art. This, however, proves nothing more than the fact that eroticism as such is the primary root of all art.“ The claim in bourgeois aesthetics that great art can inspire detachment at best is one Fuchs considers a prejudice of moralism.

Drunken Hercules

Peter Paul Rubens, 1634

oil on wood, 220 × 200 cm

Gemäldegalerie, Dresden