by Editor Colin Dixon
Edited and published by Yvette Depaepe, the 29^th of November 2024 

'Genesis' by Silvia Dinca

As an Art Nude photographer, I have been amazed in my travels around Northern Italy over the years of the amount of nudity in Art on frescos and paintings. It is enough to make the owners of meta foam at the mouth in anger. So thought I would take a look at the history of nudity in historical art.

ANCIENT ART

This is the name given to the artistic creations of the first stage of the historical journey, especially the great civilizations of the Near East: Egypt and Mesopotamia. 

In Egypt for example, nudity was seen as natural, especially in dances and scenes of feasts and celebrations. But it is also present in religious theme, and many of their gods are represented nude or semi-nude in statues and wall paintings. It also appears in the representation of the human being himself, whether pharaoh or slave.

ANCIENT GREECE

In Greece the human form was shown in a completely naturalistic way. For the Greeks, the ideal of beauty was the naked male body, which symbolized youth and virility, like the athletes of the Olympic Games, who competed naked.

 Later in the period around the time of Alexander the Great, when Greek culture expanded throughout the eastern Mediterranean, the figures acquired a greater dynamism and movement breaking with the serene balance of the classical period. In contrast to the vital energy of the athletes, there was expression of drama, of suffering, of the battered and deformed, of sick or mutilated bodies. If athletes were victors, in this period man is subdued by fate, or suffers the wrath of the gods.

This theme in Art continued into the Roman period.

RENAISSANCE 15th CENTURY

The Renaissance nude was inspired by classical Greco-Roman models, although with a different function from the one it had in ancient times. In Greece the male nude had exemplified the figure of the hero, whereas in Renaissance Italy the nude has a more aesthetic character. The female nude stood out mainly as it demonstrated their privileged position in society due to religious teachings. Thus, the secularization of the nude was forged, passing from medieval religious themes to more profane depictions of the female form.

Renaissance art recovered the classical nude as an exemplification of ideal beauty, both physical and moral. The nude was the perfect pretext for any composition. At times, the Renaissance representation of the human body was that of nudity for nudity's sake that often denaturalized the very subject of the painting, whether religious or mythological. In the Renaissance the nude ceased to be a source of shame.

BAROQUE 17^th/18^th CENTURY

During the Baroque period, the female nude continued to be the dominate subject as an object of pleasure for aristocratic patrons, where women generally played a subordinate role to men. The big difference in the Baroque period from the Renaissance was the breakdown of Art from mainly religious themes to those which were more political.

20^th CENTURY

In the twentieth century the Nude Art gained more and more prominence, especially thanks to the mass media, which allowed its wider distribution, and became more acceptable in the Art world.

All of the various 20th Century forms of art Cubism, Expressionism, Surrealism etc. have had influence in Nude Art. As with this image from Edvard Munch

Photographic Art Nude still has its challenges in being as accepted as Nude art and many websites still regard it as something that should be hidden. But in the 1X community there are a number of us who believe that Photographic Art Nude is as great as previous periods of history as you can see in the images below.

'Diana' by Dmitry Frizel

'Hang on' by Jan Donckers

'Timida' by Federico Righi

'The Muse' by Ioan Florin

'Reclining Rose' by kenp

Untitled by Hardik Pandya

'Maris' by Zachar Rise

'auf dem Sofa' by Christian Kurz

'balance' by Martin Strauss

'The Red Cape' by Steve Richard

'In Perpatuity' by InTheMoment

'The unexpected creazione di bass player' by Elian Coman

'Angel of the Forest' by RAVI