The nude is the unclothed human body treated as a subject of art in its own right. It is a body posed and idealized to be looked at, rather than a person caught without clothes.
The tradition starts with Greek statues of gods and athletes. Botticelli's Birth of Venus, painted around 1485 and now in the Uffizi museum in Florence, is one of its best known paintings.
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, with all the embarrassment that comes with it.
A nude, in his words, is a "balanced, prosperous, and confident body." Clark also traced the history of the English word, and that history is less calm than his ideal.
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According to Clark, critics of the early eighteenth century forced "nude" into English to "persuade the artless islanders," meaning their fellow Britons, who had little tradition of painting or carving the body. They wanted them to accept that in every country where art mattered, the naked body stood at its center.
Greek athletes and a naked goddess
The art those critics admired went back to ancient Greece…
What You'll Discover
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.
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