Paintings of Nude
Everybody at least once in a life have seen a breathtaking nude artwork. A masterpiece sculpture of David by Michelangelo or world-known painting The Birth of Venus by Botticelli strongly impresses from the first glance. The idea of showing undressed people was popular centuries ago and it remains the same now.
Nude in the art – from Antiquity to modernity
Displaying naked men and women to show the beauty of human body people started in Antiquity. This was a period when human body was thought to be the peak of natural beauty.
Ancient Greece was the first country to glorify men body, and it was reflected not only in the art. Traditional athletic competitions had a goal to demonstrate how beautiful bodies can be. Making sculptures of naked women and men was dedicated to showing an absolute ideal of physical condition. Search of ideal in everything — politics, economics, philosophy etc. was a key idea of Greek culture in general.
In the Middle Ages strong influence of religious institutes didn't allow to paint naked people — the body was considered as something sinful which had to be hidden – but it was acceptable to depict Bible or mythology scenes. Thank to this we have Creation of Adam by Michelangelo, Venus of Urbino by Titian, Adam and Eve by Albert Durer and other masterpieces of Middle Ages and Renaissance period.
Nude paintings help us to understand how different were the images of beauty and how much they have changed. For example, on The Three Graces by Rubens the painter have displayed three “plus size” women with cellulite, small breasts and bodies which modern society wouldn't call beautiful, but in the 17th century it was an ideal of women's body beauty.
In the 19th and 20th century the global changes in art also influenced at the ways human body appears on paints. For example, at one of the Abstract Impressionism founders Paul Cesanne's work Seven Bathers nude men are depicted as gentle silhouettes while Cubism adept Pablo Picasso paints his famous Young Ladies of Avignon in a traditional for this artistic style way when proportions and shapes are totally different to real.
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