For four hundred years, a painter could show a woman completely naked as long as he called her a goddess. The excuse fooled nobody, and almost everyone accepted it. This list follows the nudes that lived by that rule and the few that broke it, from the Renaissance to a police visit in wartime Paris.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (1,000+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
In painting, a nude is a body shown whole, posed and lit to be looked at. Academies made students draw from a live model for years before they could paint one, because a body forgives nothing. A shoulder set too high shows at once.
The harder problem was decency. From the Renaissance to the late 1800s, a naked woman could hang on a wall if she came from myth, the Bible or ancient poetry. Called Venus, she was welcome in a cardinal's bedroom. Painted as a woman from the next street, she drew a sermon.
The twelve paintings here were chosen for what they changed: a pose later painters copied, a rule about who could be shown naked, or a scandal that moved the line. Together they show how long the goddess excuse held.
It broke a rule. A Venus wakes and looks back, or a nude comes with no myth.
It caused a documented scandal. It was mocked, seized, closed or attacked.
It set a model. Its pose, body type or mythic cover came back for generations.
12. Amedeo Modigliani, Reclining Nude (1917)
An elbow runs off the left edge of the canvas and the legs run off the right, so the young woman lying naked across a dark red bed fills the picture from side to side. Amedeo Modigliani painted this Reclining Nude in Paris in 1917. He was an Italian who had come to the city in his twenties and never left.
Paris was used to naked women on its walls. Its museums held centuries of them, safely dressed up as goddesses and bathers. What the city expected was a pretext, and Modigliani's model has none. She is a woman on a bed in 1917, arms folded behind her head, and nothing in the picture pretends otherwise.
That December, Berthe Weill gave him the only solo show of his lifetime. She ran a small gallery and had a long habit of backing painters nobody else wanted, and she put one of the nudes in the window, facing the street.
The window drew a crowd on the pavement. Someone complained, and the police came that same evening and ordered the nudes taken down as indecent.
At a Glance
Artist: Amedeo Modigliani (1884 to 1920)
Painted: 1917, Paris
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 60.6 × 92.7 cm (23.9 × 36.5 in)
Where to see it: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
11. Bronzino, Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time (about 1545)
A boy leans in to kiss a naked woman on the mouth, and the woman is his mother. In An Allegory with Venus and Cupid, which Agnolo Bronzino painted in Florence around 1545, a crowd of figures closes in around the pair. One of them, at the left edge, may be the face of a disease.