Celia Paul cried during her first session modeling for Lucian Freud. “Nudity disarms me,” Paul wrote in his new memoir, Self-Portrait. He described sitting for him as a torturous experience and his sense of supervision as overexertion. “I felt like I was in a doctor or in a hospital, or in a morgue.” At one […]
Mythology was often used as subject matter during the early Renaissance and Mannerist periods because of the ongoing reverence of the Romans and Greeks, and also as a way of escaping the relatively limiting ‘devozione’ (religious matters). As the Roman goddess of love and beauty, the Greek equivalent of Aphrodite, the figure of Venus is […]
Read more Representation of Women in 16th Century Italian Art
Renaissance artists changed the course of Western art history by making the nude the center of artistic practice. The revival of interest in classical antiquity and a new focus on the role of images in Christian worship prompted artists to draw from life, resulting in the development of a new vibrant representation of the human […]
Introduction For contemporary feminists, the role of female nudity in Renaissance Art presents an extraordinary set of ethical contradictions. While formally beautiful, such use of nudity can be seen to reduce women to their sexuality and inherently perpetuate sexist ideals. The analysis of these works opens a discussion on gender politics, identity, eroticism, and the […]