Nudes

“I wished to suggest by means of a simple nude, a certain long-lost barbaric luxury.”

Gauguin

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.