The nude is the unclothed human body treated as a subject of art in its own right. It is a body arranged to be looked at, usually calm, balanced and idealized, rather than a person caught without clothes. The Greeks made it a central subject of sculpture, and Botticelli's Birth of Venus, painted around 1485 and kept in the Uffizi in Florence, is one of its best known examples.
The difference between nude and naked was set out by the British art historian Kenneth Clark in his 1956 book The Nude. To be naked, he wrote, is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word carries the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition. The nude, in his words, is a "balanced, prosperous, and confident body." For Clark, the nude is a way of showing the body, and nakedness is simply a state.
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
Clark's calm and confident ideal does not fit the whole history of the nude, starting with the word itself. In the same book, Clark explained that "nude" was forced into English by critics of the early eighteenth century, who wanted to "persuade the artless islanders" that the naked body was at the center of art in every country where art mattered. The word arrived as part of a campaign for an art of the body.
Nor does the first famous nude of a woman fit Clark's calm ideal. In the fourth century BC, the Greek sculptor Praxiteles offered the people of the island of Kos two statues of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, one clothed and one naked, at the same price. According to the Roman writer Pliny the Elder, Kos took the clothed one. The naked one went to Knidos, a Greek city on the coast of what is now Turkey.
The Knidians put their goddess in a shrine open on every side, and the stories told about it afterward describe visitors who were anything but calm.
What You'll Discover
Why Greek men were shown nude long before women.
What happened inside the shrine at Knidos.
What a pope had painted over.
Why women could not draw the nude model.
Why Titian's Venus was safe and Manet's was not.
Who the nude is painted for.