A gloriously illustrated examination of the origins and development of the nude as an artistic subject in Renaissance Europe Reflecting an era when Europe looked to both the classical past and a global future, this volume explores the emergence and acceptance of the nude as an artistic subject. It engages with the numerous and complex connotations of the human body in more than 250 artworks by the greatest masters of the Renaissance. Paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, illuminated manuscripts, and book illustrations reveal private, sometimes shocking, preoccupations as well as surprising public beliefs—the Age of Humanism from an entirely new perspective. This book presents works by Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, and Martin Schongauer in the north and Donatello, Raphael, and Giorgione in the south; it also introduces names that deserve to be known better. A publication this rich in scholarship could only be produced by a variety of expert scholars; the sixteen contributors are preeminent in their fields and wide-ranging in their knowledge and curiosity. The structure of the volume—essays alternating with shorter texts on individual artworks—permits studies both broad and granular. From the religious to the magical and the poetic to the erotic, encompassing male and female, infancy, youth, and old age, The Renaissance Nude examines in a profound way what it is to be human.

What does it mean to be naked in public? Approaching this question from across the disciplines, this book examines the evolution of female exhibitionism from criminal taboo to prime-time entertainment. Taking an interdisciplinary approach which brings together all fields of popular culture, including literature, media, film and linguistics, Claire Nally and Angela Smith offer an examination of gendered exhibitionism from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. They ask whether bodily exposure provides the liberation it professes to or restricts our most secret selves to the sanitised realm of socially-sanctioned gender roles. From the art of burlesque as a riotous kingdom of the imagination to reality TV which helps women to unearth their 'true' and buried feminine selves, Nally and Smith explore how the critical history and theory of exhibitionism intersects with the wider movement towards gender equality. Examining effects of second-wave feminism to problematise the naked female form, female and gender-transgressive performers from Bette Davis to Dita von Teese are placed in their cultural context. In order to demonstrate that female exhibitionism reamins at the heart of popular culture, this book also examines the works of Peter Ackroyd and the controversial playwright Sarah Kane, uncovering the contradictions behind evolving representations of public exposure. Within a post-feminist framework, the cultural constructions behind the repackaging of female exhibitionism are explored and the prominence of bodily exposure in popular culture examined, along with the implications of those artists who perform gender as a public masquerade. Finally, hit TV shows 'Ladette to Lady' and 'How to Look Good Naked' are interrogated to expose the buried contradictions behind this public unveiling: are women seizing control of their own identity, or is this revelation an illusion? Innovative, unflinching and pertinent, 'Naked Exhibitionism' explores naked bodies in the public gaze and critically reformulates the feminist and cultural debate around the performance of gender.

The history of Western art is saturated with images of the female body. Lynda Nead's The Female Nude was the first book to critically examine this phenomenon from a feminist perspective and ask: how and why did the female nude acquire this status? In a deft and engaging manner, Lynda Nead explores the ways in which acceptable and unacceptable images of the female body are produced, issues which have been reignited by current controversies around the patriarchy, objectification and pornography. Nead brilliantly illustrates the two opposing poles occupied by the female nude in the history of art; at one extreme the visual culmination of enlightenment aesthetics; at the other, spilling over into the degraded and the obscene. What both have in common, however, is the aim of containing the female body. Drawing on examples of art and artists from the classical period to the 1980s, The Female Nude paints a devastating picture of the depiction of the female body and remains as fresh and invigorating today as it was at the time of its first publication. This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Preface by the author.

From the art of the Greeks to that of Renoir and Moore, this work surveys the ever-changing fashions in what has constituted the ideal nude as a basis of humanist form.

The representation of the nude in art remained for many centuries a victory of fiction over fact. Beautiful, handsome, flawless its great success was to distance the unclothed body from any uncomfortably explicit taint of sexuality, eroticism or imperfection. In this newly updated study, Frances Borzello contrasts the civilized, sanitized, perfected nude of Kenneth Clarks classic, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1956), with todays depictions: raw, uncomfortable, both disturbing and intriguing. Grittier and more subtle, depicting variously gendered bodies, the new nude asks awkward questions and behaves provocatively. It is a very naked nude, created to deal with the issues and contradictions that surround the body in our time. Borzello explores the role of the nude in twentieth- and twenty-first-century art, looking at the work of a wide range of international artists creating contemporary nudes. Her fascinating text is complemented by a profusion of well-chosen, unusual and beautifully reproduced illustrations. The story begins with a tale of life, death and resurrection an investigation into how and why the nude has survived and flourished in an art world that prematurely announced its demise. Subsequent chapters take a thematic approach, focusing in turn on Body art and Performance art, the new perspectives of women artists, the nude in painting, portraiture and sculpture and in its most extreme and graphic expressions that intentionally push the boundaries of both art and our comfort zone. The final chapter illustrates radical developments in art and culture over the last decade, focusing in particular on artworks by women, trans artists and artists of colour. Borzello links these works to their art-historical and political predecessors, demonstrating the continually unending capacity of the nude to disrupt traditional hierarchies and gender categories in life and art.

Published under the title Allegro Sensible in Germany, The Art of Nude Photography is already a best-seller throughout Europe. Now available for the first time in English, this beautiful oversized volume presents over 160 duotone images of sensuous and sublime female nudes by up-and-coming photographer Pascal Baetens. According to photographer Jeff Dunas, "Baeten's work reveals energy, a discipline, and a love of his subject. Baeten's photography has that essential 'something' - you either have it, or you don't. You can't learn it. That special 'something' is the ability to truly reach your subject - create a vision, and have complete complicity with the object you are photographing." Includes over 150 sublime examples of this up-and-coming photographer's work.

Smith reveals how images of the nude were used at all levels of Victorian culture, from prestigious high-art paintings through to photographs and popular entertainments; and discusses the many views as to whether these were legitimate forms of representation or, in fact, pornography and an incitement to unregulated sexual activity.

The nude has been interpreted through the vision of artists in countless ways -- the classical splendor of ancient Hellas, the innocence of Botticelli's Venus, the voluptuous women of Rubens, the magnificent sculptures of Michelangelo and Rodin, the modern nudes of Modigliani and Picasso, the famous Muybridge sequence photographs of the human figure in motion.