The historical evolution of the nude in art runs parallel to the history of art in general, except for small particularities derived from the different acceptance of nudity by the various societies and cultures that have succeeded each other in the world over time. The nude is an artistic genre that consists of the representation in various artistic media (painting, sculpture or, more recently, film and photography) of the naked human body. It is considered one of the academic classifications of works of art. Nudity in art has generally reflected the social standards for aesthetics and morality of the era in which the work was made.
Many cultures tolerate nudity in art to a greater extent than nudity in real life, with different parameters for what is acceptable: for example, even in a museum where nude works are displayed, nudity of the visitor is generally not acceptable. Although it is usually associated with eroticism, the nude can have various interpretations and meanings, from mythology to religion, including anatomical study, or as a representation of beauty and aesthetic ideal of perfection, as in Ancient Greece. The study and artistic representation of the human body has been a constant throughout the history of art, from prehistoric times (Venus of Willendorf) to the present day.
In more recent times, studies on the nude as an artistic genre have focused on semiotic analyses, especially on the relationship between the work and the viewer, as well as on the study of gender relations. Feminism has criticized the nude as an objectual use of the female body and a sign of the patriarchal dominance of Western society.
The nude as an artistic genre has been shaped not only by historical and cultural values but also by evolving theoretical interpretations, particularly regarding the distinctions between "nude" and "naked." While nude and naked are often conflated, they represent distinct concepts in art history.
British art historian Kenneth Clark in his book, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, argued that "to be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition. John Berger later critiqued this distinction in Ways of Seeing, arguing that "a naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude."[4] For Berger, the "nude" reflects a cultural framework that positions the body as an object of display and power dynamics, particularly in relation to gender. Frances Borzello expanded on these ideas in The Naked Nude, introducing the concept of the "naked nude," which combines vulnerability with aesthetic traditions.[5] Some examples that illustrate a "naked nude" includes Chantal Joffe's, Alice Neel's and Lucian Freud's self-portraits; these works highlight the intersection of vulnerability and aesthetic tradition, showcasing the body as both personal and political.
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Ancient Egypt: Nudity in Art and Culture
This is the name given to the artistic creations of the first stage of history, especially the great civilizations of the Near East: Egypt and Mesopotamia. It would also include the first artistic manifestations of most of the peoples and civilizations of all continents. In the first religions, from the Sumerian to the Egyptian, the ancient cult of Mother Earth was related to the new anthropomorphic deities, linking the feminine form with nature, insofar as both are generators of life. Thus, the Egyptian twin gods Geb and Nut represented the earth and the sky, from whose union all the elements were born.
In other cases, the gods are related to cosmological elements, such as the goddess Ishtar with the planet Venus, generally represented naked and winged, with a crescent moon on her head. Other representations of the Mother goddess are usually more or less clothed figures, but with bare breasts, such as the famous Snake Goddess (Heraklion Archaeological Museum), a Minoan statuette from around 1550 BC.
In Egypt, nudity was seen naturally, and abounds in representations of court scenes, especially in dances and scenes of feasts and celebrations. But it is also present in religious themes, and many of their gods represented in anthropomorphic form appear nude or semi-nude in statues and wall paintings. It also appears in the representation of the human being himself, whether pharaoh or slave, military or civil servant, such as the famous Seated Scribe of the Louvre.
Undoubtedly due to the climate, the Egyptians used to wear little clothing, loincloths and skirts for men, and transparent linen dresses for women. This is reflected in the art, from the scenes that show the festivities and ceremonies of the court to the more popular scenes, which show the daily work of peasants, artisans, shepherds, fishermen and other trades.
Likewise, in the war scenes appear the pitiful naked bodies of slaves and captives, treated with the same hieratic style and lack of dynamism typical of Egyptian art, where the law of frontality prevails, the body constrained to rigid static postures and lack of realism. The painting is characterized mainly by presenting figures juxtaposed in superimposed planes, with a hierarchical criterion. The profile canon predominated, which consisted of representing the head and limbs in profile, but the shoulders and eyes from the front.
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Among the works that have come down to us from Ancient Egypt, the nude, partial or complete, is perceptible both in painting and sculpture, whether monumental or in small statuettes, such as the Louvre's Offeror or the British Museum's Girl Playing a Harp; we have statues such as those of Rahotep and Nofret, the King Menkaure (Mycerinus) and queen or Louvre's Lady Touy that, although dressed in linen, the transparency of the fabric shows her nudity; in painting, the murals of the tomb of Nath, accountant of Thutmose IV, or the Tomb of the Physicians in Saqqarah.
On the other hand, in Mesopotamia, geographically and chronologically close to Ancient Egypt, the nude is practically unknown, except for some Assyrian reliefs such as Lion Hunt of Ashurbanipal (British Museum), where the king appears with a naked torso, or some scenes of torture of prisoners, while on the female side we only find the naked breasts of a Chaldean bronze representing a young Canaephora, present in the Louvre.
King Menkaure (Mycerinus) and queen
Ancient Greece: The Ideal of Beauty
The main artistic manifestations that have marked the evolution of Western art were developed in Greece. After the beginnings of the Minoan and Mycenaean cultures, Greek art developed in three periods: archaic, classical and hellenistic. Characterized by naturalism and the use of reason in measurements and proportions, and with an aesthetic sense inspired by nature, Greek art was the starting point for the art developed on the European continent.[14]
The high point of Greek art occurred in the so called Age of Pericles, where art enjoyed great splendor, generating a style of interpreting reality: artists were based on nature according to proportions and rules (κανών, canon) that allowed the capture of that reality by the viewer, resorting if necessary to foreshortening.
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Greece was the first place where the human body was represented in a naturalistic way, far from the hieratism and schematization of previous cultures. Greek culture was humanistic, the human being was the main object of study of their philosophy and art, since their religion was more mythological than an object of worship. 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.
The Greek nude was both naturalistic and idealized: naturalistic in terms of the faithful representation of the parts of the body, but idealized in terms of the search for harmonious and balanced proportions, rejecting a more realistic type of representation that would show the imperfections of the body or the wrinkles of age.
The Greeks attached great importance to the naked body, of which they were proud, since it was not only the reflection of good physical health, but also the recipient of virtue and honesty, as well as a component of social advancement, as opposed to the inhibitions of other less civilized peoples. For the Greeks, nudity was an expression of integrity, nothing related to the human being as a whole could be eluded or isolated. They related body and spirit, which for them were indissolubly united, in such a way that even their religiosity materialized in anthropomorphic gods.
In the Greek male nude, it is essential to capture the energy, the vital force, which they transcribed through two types of virile nudes: the athlete and the hero. The first exponent of the male nude is a type of figures representing athletes, gods or mythological heroes, called kouros (kouroi in plural), belonging to the Archaic period (7th century-5th century BC)-their female variant is the kore (korai in plural), which, however, they used to represent dressed.
The kouros is characterized by the hieratic posture, where frontality predominates, with the feet on the ground and the left leg forward, arms close to the body and hands closed, and the head of cubic shape, with a long mane and basic facial features, highlighting its characteristic smile, called "archaic smile". The first examples date back to the 7th century BC, from places such as Delos, Naxos and Samos, generally appearing in tombs and places of worship. Later they spread to Attica and the Peloponnese, where they became more naturalistic, with descriptive features and greater interest in modeling. Subsequently, the nude underwent a slow but steady evolution from the rigid, geometric forms of the kouroi to the soft, naturalistic lines of the classical period (the severe style, developed between 490 BC and 450 BC).
Evolution of Nude Representation in Greek Sculpture
The following table summarizes the evolution of nude representation in Greek sculpture:
| Period | Characteristics | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Archaic Period (7th-5th century BC) | Hieratic posture, frontality, geometric forms, "archaic smile" | Kouros figures from Delos, Naxos, and Samos |
| Classical Period (5th century BC) | Greater naturalness, movement, introduction of contrapposto | Apollo of Piombino, Ephebe of Kritios, Tyrannicides Group |
| Later Classical Period | More slender and muscular figures, action over moral expression | Ephebe of Antikythera, Athlete with Strigil of Ephesus |
Acropolis Moschophoros, c. 570 BC
Modern Interpretations and Controversies
From the 1930s until the early 1970s, Egyptian women enjoyed greater personal freedom in terms of wearing western style garments, including bathing suits. In Egypt’s recent history, students of fine arts were trained to draw portraits through the use of nude models.
However, the representation of nudity in art has also faced significant challenges and controversies. In November 2011, 20-year-old Egyptian Alia Mahdy posted a nude photograph of herself on her blog Diary of a Rebel. She was wearing nothing but black stockings, red leather shoes, and a flower in her hair. The photograph had 1.5 million hits within a week. Alia’s act of digital disruption was part of a wider series of political and artistic activities that took place on the internet during Egypt’s so called ‘Arab Spring.’ The 2011 revolution was replete with reminders of the body as the ultimate political medium.
But unlike thousands of postings by Egyptian women in 2011 calling for social and political change that found widespread popular support, Alia’s act was met with repudiation by all of Egypt’s political groups. Alia’s desire to make her naked body visible to the world was seen as subversive, unauthentic and an assault on the values and culture of the nation and the region. Alia’s pose in the photograph is revealing. She looks directly at the camera, her posture is upright and her eyes have a defiant expression.
Despite widespread condemnation of her actions, the political implications of her act were not lost on her audiences, even whilst people repudiated them. One critic said “You claim to be Egyptian; how did you dare [do what you did] when you hold the Egyptian nationality and carry the Arab identity” (S. Zaki, 2011). Abdo Wazen (2011), a columnist in the pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat placed her artwork within the broader context of embodied protest that marked the Arab revolutions: “Alia is another Mohammad Bouazizi, but instead of burning her own body, she burnt our eyes and made us blind in the broad daylight of revolutions.” Eventually, facing physical intimidation and death threats, Alia was forced to seek political refuge in Scandinavia. In one photo, yellow rectangles cover parts of her body. Elmahdy argued on the blog that publishing the photo was an expression of freedom.
Following the fall of former president Hosni Mubarak in early February, Islamists have gained influence as they are suddenly free to operate openly without persecution from government authorities. User Ali Hagras tweeted, “let's just hope Salafi sheikhs don't get word of this. Editor's note: Al-Masry Al-Youm English Edition removed the nude sketch previously on display with this story in response to several readers' complaints.
Alia’s photograph, and the spectacular controversy it gave rise to, made me think. It made me think about what agency truly means, what people want (female) agency to look like and how this differs across time and space. As I watched these Egyptians weaving in and out of traffic, whizzing across uneven pavements and laughing together, men and women, children and teenagers, I was struck that this was one of the few contexts I had encountered in Egypt where gender didn’t seem to matter. Like Alia, they were forging a public space for themselves by sharing their bodies, their art and their freedom.
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The Arab Nude: Art, Awakening, and Modernity
In her pathbreaking 2010 article “Necessary Nudes: Hadatha and Mu‘asara in the Lives of Modern Lebanese,” Kirsten Scheid contends that, contrary to common assumption, artists in Mandate-era Beirut were producing nudes in the beaux arts academic style, a practice that “became an index and instrument of modernizing” (22). However, rather than “revisiting these forgotten Nudes” to offer a corrective to their assumed absence, Scheid explores the production and prevalence of this absence narrative (22).
As a tool of tathqif (culturing), this art form enabled male artists to exhibit their admittance into the modern, cosmopolitan world-a consequence of their discipline and rigorous training-while simultaneously displaying their commitment to leading their nation on its path to progress and liberation.
Six years after its publication, Scheid’s essay became the impetus for The Arab Nude: The Artist as Awakener, a 2016 exhibition and conference at the American University in Beirut (AUB), cocurated by Scheid and Octavian Esanu. The edited volume under review, Art, Awakening, and Modernity in the Middle East: The Arab Nude, is a compilation of papers first delivered at that conference.
The contributions are focused primarily on the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nahda (renaissance) in Lebanon and Egypt, except for the final piece, which extends to Iraq after the US invasion. The essays are not limited to the study of the nude as an art historical tradition; they consider also a range of representations of the denuded body, including images from erotica and the practice of nudism, and they explore linguistic as well as visual articulations through different disciplinary approaches.
Departing from Kenneth Clark’s infamous 1956 distinction between “nakedness” and “nudity”-the former a source of weakness and vulnerability and the latter “an ideal type”-Esanu’s introduction frames the nude as a Foucauldian “instrument of disciplinary power and a mechanism of self-mastering” within the project of Arab modernity (7). As such it becomes a “nodal point” through which new nahda conceptions of gender, sexuality, class, and religion converge and can be read.
As a “tool of modernization,” production of the nude intersects with the development of other technologies of modernity; several of the chapters in this volume address the establishment of both private and state-sponsored press industries and the subsequent evolution of new forms of writing.
Art, Awakening, and Modernity in the Middle East: The Arab Nude
Nudity in the Ottoman Press and Beyond
In her essay “Early Representations of Nudity in the Ottoman Press: A Look at Nineteenth-Century Ottoman and Arabic Erotic Literature,” art historian Hala Auji presents the volume’s most rigorous engagement with Scheid’s notion of tathqif as it pertains to the emergence and education of an effendi (gentleman) class. While nudes (in the beaux arts sense) do not appear in the Arabic press until the early twentieth century, erotica had been in wide circulation in the Ottoman world for the previous hundred years (45).
Auji demonstrates, however, that such publications were not simply “pornography in the modern-day understanding of the term”; their varied purposes ranged from the medical to the scientific, from the literary to the moral and religious (48). Collectively such texts reveal “society’s changing views on gender, beauty, and sexuality as well as on the nude, specifically female, form” (48).
With a similar focus on innovations in publishing, librarian and researcher Hala Bizri’s article, “The Nudism of Sheikh Fouad Hobeiche,” introduces readers to the self-proclaimed “Messenger of Nudism” who used his periodical al-Makshuf (The revealed) and his publishing house, Dar al-Makshuf, to spread his philosophy in 1930s Lebanon. For Hobeiche, nudism was a way of life-a religion, almost-that promoted physical and spiritual well-being and the liberation of the individual and, ultimately, the nation.
In the remaining two texts, Elka M. Correa-Calleja and Nadia Radwan focus on the appearance of the nude as an expression of nationalist and anti-colonial struggles in the works of Egypt’s first generation of modern artists, al-ruwwad (pioneers). While Correa-Calleja focuses on the development of sculptor Mahmud Mukhtar’s work, Radwan offers a survey of how these artists painted nudes in ways that both challenged and reproduced Orientalists’ images of Egyptian women.
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