Famous Nude Paintings: 12 That Shaped Western Art
The most famous nude paintings are about far more than nakedness, from beauty and power to shame and the simple question of who is allowed to look.
For five hundred years the nude was the great test of a painter's skill and a mirror of the century's morals.
Here are twelve of the greatest, all now in the public domain.
Watch these twelve in order and you can see the naked body slowly wake up, sit forward and stare back. I have gathered the pictures that made the nude in art beautiful, scandalous and, now and then, a genuine shock.
What is really going on:
The goddess. Nakedness excused as Venus, myth making it respectable.
The gaze. Who looks, who is looked at, and who dares to stare back.
The scandal. Pictures that outraged their day and sometimes still do.
The ideal. Beauty that shifts wildly from full to thin and back again.
If you want more than a list
If you want the detail rather than the summary:
Titian, Sacred and Profane Love, which of the two women is which
Ten women artists you need to know, the names the textbooks skipped
Lady with an Ermine, detail by detail, why she is holding that animal
1. Giorgione, Sleeping Venus (about 1510)
Every reclining nude for the next five hundred years traces back to this one sleeping goddess in a quiet landscape. Giorgione laid Venus out asleep in the open air, at peace and unaware of being watched, and invented a pose the whole of Western art would copy.
He died of the plague before he could finish it.
The young Titian completed the landscape behind her after Giorgione's death, then spent his own life reworking the idea. Later owners even painted over a little Cupid at her feet, rediscovered only by X ray centuries on.
This one sleeping figure set the template for the Venus of Urbino, Goya's Maja and Manet's Olympia alike.
2. Titian, Venus of Urbino (1534)
Titian took Giorgione's sleeping goddess, woke her up, and had her look straight at you. His Venus lies awake on a bed in a Renaissance palace, a small dog asleep at her feet, entirely aware of your presence.
It was almost certainly a wedding picture, a portrait of ideal married love and desire.
Three centuries later the American writer Mark Twain called it the foulest, vilest, obscenest picture the world possesses, which only made people look harder.
The dog stands for fidelity and the maids behind her for household virtue, so the whole thing is respectable and openly erotic at once. Manet would copy the exact pose to set off a scandal.
3. Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus (1485)
This was the first monumental nude of a woman painted in Europe in a thousand years, and it caused no scandal at all because she was a goddess.
Botticelli shows Venus born fully grown from the sea, blown to shore on a giant shell, covering herself with her own long hair.
Myth made the nakedness respectable, even sacred.
Her impossible pose, weight on the wrong foot and neck a touch too long, comes straight from an ancient Greek statue Botticelli was copying. For decades the picture hung ignored in a country villa before the world rediscovered it.
Today her face sells more postcards than almost any other in Florence.
4. Lucas Cranach the Elder, Venus (1532)
A slender, sly Venus stands almost bare but for a large red hat and a gauzy veil that hides nothing. Cranach, court painter to the German Protestant princes, made dozens of these cool, elegant nudes for private studies.
They are erotic and moralizing in the same breath.
A Latin verse often ran alongside them, warning that Venus's pleasures are laced with poison, so the buyer could enjoy the picture and the sermon together.
Cranach ran a busy workshop that turned out these pale goddesses almost like a brand. His northern nudes look nothing like the warm Italian ones, thin and knowing where Titian is full.
5. Peter Paul Rubens, The Three Graces (1635)
If you have ever heard a full figured woman called Rubenesque, this is the painting that named the ideal. Rubens shows the three Graces of myth, soft, heavy and glowing with health, arms linked in a gentle circle.
To him this abundance was the very picture of beauty.
He modeled the woman on the left on his young second wife, Helena, whom he painted again and again with open love. In his day plumpness signaled wealth and good health, the opposite of the thin ideal we chase now.
Rubens kept this picture in his own house until the day he died.
6. Diego Velazquez, The Rokeby Venus (1647)
The only surviving nude by Spain's greatest painter was made in a country where the Inquisition could burn you for such a thing. Velazquez shows Venus from behind, stretched on a bed, her face a soft blur in the mirror a cupid holds up.
He got away with it where lesser painters were prosecuted.
In 1914 a suffragette named Mary Richardson walked into the National Gallery in London and slashed the canvas seven times with a meat cleaver, protesting the arrest of a fellow campaigner.
The wounds were repaired so well you can barely find them today. Richardson said she could not bear the way men gaped at the painted woman while ignoring living ones.
7. Francisco Goya, The Nude Maja (1800)
This was the first life sized female nude in Spanish art to stare frankly out and show her body with no excuse of myth. Goya gave her no goddess wings and no shell, just a real woman reclining on cushions, meeting your eye.
It was a dangerous thing to paint.
Its owner, the powerful minister Godoy, hid it behind a matching Clothed Maja that could slide aside on a pulley to reveal the nude beneath.
When the Inquisition found the pair, Goya was hauled in to explain himself. Who the woman really was is still argued over two centuries later.
8. Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, La Grande Odalisque (1814)
A cool, pale woman reclines and turns to look back over her shoulder, in a picture that treats the body as pure elegant line. Ingres set his nude in an imagined Turkish harem, a subject known as the odalisque, very fashionable in France at the time.
Something about her is quietly impossible.
Critics counted the extra vertebrae, joking she had two or three too many in that long, curving back. Ingres cared nothing for correct bones, only for the beautiful sweep of the line, and stretched her body to get it.
What looked like a blunder in 1814 now reads as an early step toward modern art.
9. Alexandre Cabanel, The Birth of Venus (1863)
In the same year that one nude caused a riot in Paris, this one was showered with praise and bought by the emperor. Cabanel painted a smooth, dreamy Venus drifting on the waves, eyes half closed, entirely unaware of the viewer.
It was everything the official art world adored.
Because she was a mythical goddess lost in her own dream, nobody called it indecent, though it is far more openly seductive than the picture that scandalized everyone.
Napoleon the Third bought it on the spot for his private collection. The lesson was plain, a nude stayed safe only as long as she did not look back.
10. Edouard Manet, Olympia (1863)
The most scandalous nude of the nineteenth century caused an uproar for one simple reason, she looks straight at you and she is no goddess.
Manet painted a real, modern woman, most likely a courtesan, propped on her pillows with a black ribbon at her throat and one hand firmly covering herself.
Shown at the Salon of 1865, it drew such crowds that guards had to protect the canvas from furious visitors.
He borrowed the pose of Titian's respectable Venus, then stripped away every excuse, no myth, no soft dream, just a working woman waiting for a client.
A maid brings her flowers from an admirer, and a black cat bristles at the foot of the bed. Critics howled, yet within a generation Olympia was hailed as the birth of modern painting.
11. Bronzino, Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time (1545)
Venus and her son Cupid kiss a little too tenderly, ringed by strange figures, masks and a screaming face, in one of the coldest and most puzzling nudes ever painted.
Bronzino packed it with hidden meanings that scholars still argue over, from jealousy to the ravages of disease. It is beautiful and deeply uneasy at the same time.
One shrivelled figure in the corner is often read as a sufferer of syphilis, then sweeping through Europe, a warning tucked inside a picture of desire.
It was probably sent by his patron Cosimo de Medici as a gift for the King of France, a puzzle to entertain a clever court. The polish is so perfect the skin looks carved from cold marble.
12. Amedeo Modigliani, Reclining Nude (1917)
When Modigliani hung his warm, glowing nudes in a Paris gallery in 1917, the police shut the show on its opening day for indecency. His women lie stretched across the canvas in long, simple curves, eyeless or half dreaming, unmistakably modern.
The offense was the frank, unidealized body he refused to prettify.
He painted about thirty of these nudes in a single feverish burst, borrowing the old reclining pose but making it raw and immediate. Poor and ill, he died three years later at thirty five, his pregnant partner following him the next day.
In 2015 one of these nudes sold for over one hundred and seventy million dollars, among the most expensive paintings ever.
The galleries that show them
Titian, Venus of Urbino, and Botticelli, The Birth of Venus: the Uffizi, Florence.
Giorgione, Sleeping Venus: the Old Masters Gallery, Dresden.
Diego Velazquez, The Rokeby Venus, and Bronzino, Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time: the National Gallery, London.
Francisco Goya, The Nude Maja, and Rubens, The Three Graces: the Prado, Madrid.
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, La Grande Odalisque, and Edouard Manet, Olympia: the Louvre and the Orsay, Paris.
Alexandre Cabanel, The Birth of Venus: the Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
If these figures pulled you in, keep going:
The secret behind Hopper Soir Bleu, the clown picture that went wrong
The Last Supper, detail by detail, the detail hiding at that table
Six women, one monster, what Picasso did to the women who loved him
Nude paintings, a few quick questions
What is the most famous nude painting? Botticelli's Birth of Venus and Manet's Olympia are the best known, for very different reasons, one a serene goddess, the other a scandal.
Why were nude paintings acceptable? For centuries a nude was allowed only if she was a goddess or a Bible figure, so the myth gave the painter an excuse to show the body.
What is the most explicit famous nude? Courbet's Origin of the World, from 1866, a close view so frank that even today many museums hesitate to reproduce it.
Why did Olympia cause such a scandal? Because she was clearly a real, modern woman looking straight at the viewer, not a distant goddess, which broke every polite rule of the day.
Where can I see famous nude paintings? The Uffizi, the Louvre, the Orsay, the Prado and the National Gallery in London hold the greatest examples.
The body that would not stay silent
You can read five hundred years of shifting attitudes in these twelve bodies. First the nude had to be a goddess, safely asleep or gazing off into a dream.
Then, slowly, she woke up, sat forward and stared back, and that single change from a dreaming goddess to a real woman meeting your eye was enough to start riots.
The scandal was never really the skin. It was the look in her eyes.