FREE THE NUDE FIGURE: A VISUAL REFERENCE FOR THE ARTIST PDF Mark Edward Smith | 208 pages | 01 Sep 1998 | Watson-Guptill Publications | 9780823032327 | English | New York, United States Nude (art) - Wikipedia The nudeas a form of visual art that focuses on the unclothed human figure, is an enduring tradition in Western art. Unclothed figures often also play a part in other types of art, such as history paintingincluding allegorical and religious artportraitureor the decorative arts. From prehistory to the earliest civilizations, nude female figures are generally understood to be symbols of fertility or well-being. Japanese prints are one of the few non- western traditions that can be called nudes, but the activity of communal bathing in Japan is portrayed as just another social activity, without the significance placed upon the lack of clothing that exists in the West. Through each era, the nude has reflected changes in cultural attitudes regarding sexuality, gender roles, and social structure. The meaning of any image of the unclothed human body depends upon its being placed in a cultural context. In Western culture, the contexts generally recognized are artpornographyand information. Viewers easily identifying some images as belonging to one category, while others images are ambiguous. The 21st century may have created a fourth category, the commodified nude, which intentionally uses ambiguity to attract attention for commercial purposes. With regard to the distinction between art and pornography, Kenneth Clark noted that sexuality was part of the attraction to the nude as a subject of art, stating "no nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even though it be only the faintest shadow—and if it does not do so it is bad art and false morals". According to Clark, the explicit temple sculptures of tenth-century India "are great works of art because their eroticism is part of their whole philosophy". Great art can contain significant sexual content without being obscene. However, in the United States nudity in art has sometimes been a controversial subject when public funding and display in certain venues brings the work to the attention of the general public. At the same time that any nude may be suspect in the view of many patrons and the public, art critics may reject work that is not cutting edge. The art world has devalued simple beauty and pleasure, although these values are present in art from the past and in some contemporary works. When school groups visit museums, there are inevitable questions that teachers or tour leaders must be prepared to answer. The basic advice is to give matter-of-fact answers emphasizing the differences between art and other images, the universality of the human body, and the values and emotions expressed in the works. The introductory chapter makes though does not originate the often-quoted distinction between the naked body and the nude. This separation of the artistic form from the social and cultural issues remains largely unexamined by The Nude Figure: A Visual Reference for the Artist art historians. One of the defining characteristics of the modern era in art was the blurring of the line between the naked and the nude. This likely first occurred with the painting The Nude Maja by Goya, which in drew the attention of the Spanish Inquisition. Some of the same characteristics were shocking almost 70 years later when Manet exhibited his Olympianot because of religious issues, but because of its modernity. Rather than being a timeless Odalisque that could be safely viewed with detachment, Manet's image was assumed to be of a prostitute of that time, perhaps referencing the male viewers' own sexual practices. Art historian and author Frances Borzello writes that contemporary artists are no longer interested in the ideals and traditions of the past, but confront the viewer with all the sexuality, discomfort and anxiety that the unclothed body may express, perhaps eliminating the distinction between the naked and the nude. When surveying the literature on the nude in art, there are differences between defining nakedness as the complete absence of clothing versus other states of undress. In early Christian art, particularly in references to images of Jesus, partial dress a loincloth was described as nakedness. Babylonian statuette of a goddess Astarte or Ishtar. Nude female figures called Venus figurines are found in the art of the Upper Palaeolithicand in historical times, similar images represent fertility deities. However, her bird-feet and accompanying owls have suggested to some a connection with Lilitu called Lilith in the Biblethough seemingly not the usual demonic Lilitu. Representations of gods and goddesses in Babylonian and Ancient Egyptian art are the precursors of the works of Western antiquity. Non-Western traditions of depicting nudes come from India and Japan, but the nude does not form an important aspect of Chinese art. Temple sculptures and cave paintings, some very explicit, are part of the Hindu tradition of the value of sexuality, and as in many warm climates partial or complete nudity was common in everyday life. Japan had a tradition of mixed communal bathing that existed until recently, and was often portrayed in woodcut prints. In the early twentieth century, artists in the Arab world used nudity in works that addressed their emergence from colonialism into a modern world. Bathing woman caKitagawa Utamaro. Painillustration for The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran Nudity in Greek life was the exception in the ancient world. What had begun as an male initiation rite in the eighth century BCE became a "costume" in the Classical period. Complete nudity separated the civilized Greeks from The Nude Figure: A Visual Reference for the Artist "barbarians" including Hebrews, Etruscans, and Gauls. The earliest Greek sculpturefrom the early The Nude Figure: A Visual Reference for the Artist Age Cycladic civilization consists mainly of stylized male figures who are presumably nude. This is certainly the case for the kourosa large standing figure of a male nude that was the mainstay of Archaic Greek sculpture. The first realistic sculptures of nude males, the kouroi depict nude youths who stand rigidly posed with one foot forward. By the 5th century BCE, Greek sculptors' mastery of anatomy resulted in greater The Nude Figure: A Visual Reference for the Artist and more varied poses. An important innovation was contrapposto —the asymmetrical posture of a figure standing with one leg bearing the body's weight and the other relaxed. An early example of this is Polykleitos ' sculpture Doryphoros ca. The Greek goddesses were initially sculpted with drapery rather than nude. The first free-standing, life-sized sculpture of an entirely nude woman was the Aphrodite of Cnidus created ca. In the convention of heroic nuditygods and heroes were shown nude, while ordinary mortals were less likely to be so, though athletes and warriors in combat were often depicted nude. The Greek goddess Aphrodite was a deity whom the Greeks preferred to see clothed. In the mid-fourth century BCE, the sculptor Praxiteles made a nude Aphroditecalled the Knidian, which established a new tradition for the female nude, having idealized proportions based on mathematical ratios as were the nude male statues. The nudes of Greco-Roman art are conceptually perfected ideal persons, each one a vision of health, youth, geometric clarity, and organic The Nude Figure: A Visual Reference for the Artist. His emphasis on idealization points up an essential issue: seductive and appealing as nudes in art may be, they are meant to stir the mind as well as the passions. Hermes bearing the infant Dionysusby Praxiteles. Hermespossibly by Lysippos. Christian attitudes cast doubt on the value of the human body, and the Christian emphasis on chastity and celibacy further discouraged depictions of nakedness, even in the few surviving Early Medieval survivals of secular art. Completely unclothed figures are rare in medieval art, the notable exceptions being Adam and Eve as recorded in the Book of Genesis and the damned in Last Judgement The Nude Figure: A Visual Reference for the Artist anticipating the Sistine Chapel renderings. With these exceptions, the ideal forms of Greco-Roman nudes became largely lost, transformed into symbols of shame and sin, weakness and defenselessness. The Nursing Madonna and naked "Penitent Mary Magdalene"as well as the infant Jesuswhose penis was sometimes emphasized for theological reasons, are other exceptions with elements of nudity in medieval religious art. By the late medieval period female nudes intended to be attractive edged back into art, especially in the relatively private medium of the illuminated manuscriptand in classical contexts such as the Signs of the Zodiac and illustrations to Ovid. The shape of the female "Gothic nude" was very different from the classical ideal, with a long body shaped by gentle curves, a narrow chest and high waist, small round breasts, and a prominent bulge at the stomach. The reinvigoration of classical culture in the Renaissance restored the nude to The Nude Figure: A Visual Reference for the Artist. Donatello made two statues of the Biblical hero Davida symbol for the Republic of Florence : his first in marble, — shows a clothed figure, but his second, probably of the s, is the first freestanding statue of a nude since antiquity, [28] several decades before Michelangelo 's massive David — The Nude Figure: A Visual Reference for the Artist in Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling reestablished a tradition of male nudes in depictions of Biblical stories; the subject of the martyrdom of the near-naked Saint Sebastian had already become highly popular. The monumental female nude returned to Western art in with The Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli for the Medici familywho also owned The Nude Figure: A Visual Reference for the Artist classical Venus The Nude Figure: A Visual Reference for the Artist Mediciwhose pose Botticelli adapted.