Nude

Nude is an art genre. The gallery holds 3,594 works in this genre, including works by Titian, Thomas Eakins and Paolo Veronese.

The nude is the art genre whose primary subject is the unclothed human body, but as the critic Kenneth Clark argued in his classic study *The Nude* (1956), it is less a subject than a form invented by the Greeks in the fifth century BC. Sculptors such as Polykleitos treated the naked male body as a problem of ideal proportion: his bronze Doryphoros ("Spear-Bearer") embodied a written treatise, the *Canon*, that set mathematical rules for the perfect figure. For the Greeks heroic male nudity signalled civilisation itself, distinguishing them from clothed "barbarians." In the fourth century BC Praxiteles' Aphrodite of Knidos introduced the monumental female nude, establishing a goddess-centred tradition that endured for two millennia.

Clark drew a famous distinction between the *naked*—the body merely deprived of clothes, with its attendant embarrassment—and the *nude*, the body re-formed into balanced, confident ideal beauty. The genre's defining techniques follow from this: contrapposto and the gentle S-curve, harmonious proportion, idealisation over literal transcription, and recurring conventions such as the *Venus pudica*, in which the figure modestly shields breast and groin.

After centuries of medieval reticence, the Renaissance revived the nude on mythological and allegorical pretexts that made it respectable. Giorgione's *Sleeping Venus* (c. 1510) defined the reclining female nude, which his Venetian colleague Titian made overtly sensual and self-aware in the *Venus of Urbino* (1538). Titian returned to the theme repeatedly, as in *Venus with a Mirror* (c. 1555), whose pose echoes antique statues like the Capitoline Venus, while Lorenzo Lotto's *Venus and Cupid* wove the nude into nuptial allegory.

The nineteenth century made the nude the cornerstone of academic painting, sanctioned by classical or biblical subject matter—Jean-Léon Gérôme's *Pygmalion and Galatea* and Corot's bathing figures and *Bacchante by the Sea* exemplify the polished Salon manner. Yet realism pushed against idealisation: Goya's *Nude Maja* (c. 1800) and Courbet's frank *Young Bather* declined to ennoble the body. The rupture came with Manet's *Olympia*, painted in 1863 and shown at the 1865 Salon, which replaced the timeless goddess with a modern Parisian courtesan staring boldly back—an affront that reframed the nude for modern art and opened the way to Impressionism and beyond.