Search -
The Female Nude in Western Art: A Biosocial Interpretation
The Female Nude in Western Art A Biosocial Interpretation Author:Allan Mazur There is no ideally erotic female body. Artists at different times and places portray different nubile shapes as desirable. Perfection in one culture may be unattractive in another. — The Greeks produced an ideal female nude in the fourth century BCE. She persisted through the Classical period, her reign ending when Christianity associated nakedn... more »ess with sin. Nudes reemerged in the more permissive Renaissance. Italian masters made their women palpably fleshy, but north of the Alps the ideal female was different, looking like an adolescent girl with a pot belly. These northern and southern types temporarily merged in the French Mannerist School. But Rubens took a new direction, painting fat women who are sexually unappealing today but were intensely erotic to his contemporaries. Artists of the eighteenth century were influenced by Rubens but made their females slenderer, and nudes of the nineteenth century are sufficiently close to modern ideals that many retain their sexually arousing quality. Syracuse University sociologist Allan Mazur traces these changing ideals of the female body.« less