Nude

Nude is a subject in art. The gallery holds 171 works in this subject in art, including works by Thomas Eakins, Jean Baptiste Camille Corot and Lorenzo Lotto.

The nude—visual art devoted to the unclothed human figure—is one of the most enduring traditions in Western art, and, as the critic Kenneth Clark argued in his influential study *The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form* (1956), less a subject than an art form in its own right. Clark drew a famous distinction between the merely *naked* body—deprived of clothes, vulnerable, embarrassed—and the *nude*, a body "re-formed" into balanced, idealized perfection. That ideal was effectively invented by the Greeks. From the fifth century BC, sculptors such as Polykleitos, whose *Doryphoros* embodied a canon of harmonious proportion, and later Praxiteles, whose *Aphrodite of Knidos* pioneered the female nude, treated the body as something to be celebrated and a vehicle for abstract ideas of order, virtue, and divinity.

After a long medieval period in which Christian culture largely confined nudity to Adam and Eve or the damned, the nude returned to the center of art with the Renaissance and its rediscovery of antiquity. Botticelli's *The Birth of Venus* (c. 1485) revived the classical goddess, while Titian's *Venus of Urbino* (1538) established the reclining female nude as a compositional model that would be echoed for centuries. Venetian painters in particular—including Lorenzo Lotto, whose *Venus and Cupid* survives here—wedded sensuous color to mythological pretext, the device by which the erotic could be made respectable.

The nude became the cornerstone of academic training, where drawing from the live model and the study of antique sculpture were foundational. In the nineteenth century its conventions were both perfected and challenged. Ingres pursued an idealized, linear sensuality in works like the *Grande Odalisque* (1814), and Jean-Léon Gérôme cloaked frank eroticism in mythological narrative, as in his *Pygmalion and Galatea* (c. 1890), held here. Against this polish, Gustave Courbet's unidealized realism—seen in *The Source*, *The Young Bather*, and *The Woman in the Waves*—scandalized critics by painting nudes as ordinary, fleshly women rather than goddesses; Corot's *Bacchante by the Sea* offered a gentler, lyrical counterpoint.

The decisive rupture came with Édouard Manet's *Olympia* (1863), which recast Titian's Venus as a self-possessed contemporary courtesan and provoked an outcry at the 1865 Salon. By stripping away mythological alibi, Manet opened the way to the modern nude pursued by Degas, Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso, whose *Les Demoiselles d'Avignon* (1907) shattered the classical body altogether—confirming the nude as a perennial site where each era restates its idea of beauty, truth, and the human form.