One of her hands hides a breast, but the other remains visible. To avoid censorship, Botticelli folds Venus’ long hair over her genitalia. Nothing like it had been seen before in Europe! It is an almost life-size female nude, measuring 172.5 by 278.5 centimetres, and is a representation of Venus who gracefully reveals her body.

In 1485, Botticelli became the first artist to paint a female nude without a religious reason. Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man is a typical example of the anatomical research of the artists of the time. They took up the ideal body invented by the Greeks, yet added a more realistic male musculature. Artists painted the human body using live models while respecting proportions.

During this period, the rediscovery of Antiquity and an interest in plastic beauty led artists to value the nude itself, which became a key source of inspiration. Renaissance: Revealing the bodyįrom the Renaissance era onwards, nude paintings began to lose their iconographic character and became valued solely for their aesthetic and sensual qualities. The difference in the representation of the nude, idealized for one and realistic for the other, highlights the condition of man before and after committing the first sin. Conversely, in Masaccio’s, Adam and Eve are being terrorized. Masolino’s Eden is idyllic, Adam and Eve are beautiful and bright. It is interesting to compare these two frescoes. These naked bodies, although visually very close to profane nudes, are in fact in service of the sacred. They are often represented in their simplest form, with snakes or leaves covering their genitals. The biblical figures Adam and Eve are synonymous with nudity and sin. For instance, naked characters are found on the tympanums of churches alluding to the Underworld. Nude paintings were thus represented for iconographic reasons. It referred to the mortal and imperfect condition of man. Contemporarily, art was mainly for religious purposes, with the nude being considered sinful. The Church commissioned artists to paint frescoes, sculptures and paintings to decorate their churches and religious manuscripts.

In the Middle Ages, the Church used the nude to show the vulnerability of man, aware of the importance of the image in teaching religion to the illiterate. Middle Ages and Pre-Renaissance: The Sacred Nude

Let Artsper take you on the journey of a brief history of the women nude painting through art… 1. Beyond the subject represented, the painters create imagery of the human body, often very personal and sometimes even against the artistic rules of their time. Over the centuries and across movements, nude paintings have created an aesthetic of the body and beauty. And it is often the nude paintings that cause scandal in art. The body is a fantastic source of inspiration for an artist because it is simultaneously the embodiment of beauty, desire, reverie and the forbidden. The nude genre can be assimilated to a large number of pictorial subjects, the most famous including Matisse and Ingres’ “odalisques”, Renoir’s and Cézanne’s “bathers” or the “Olympia” of Manet and Magritte. We can take as an example Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, Courbet’s The Origin of the World or Modigliani’s Reclining Nude. In fact, among the paintings that have marked history, many are nude paintings of bodies, more specifically naked woman. Representing the human body has been one of the major themes throughout art history since prehistoric times.

Artful nudes