Well... we have a thread for exhibiting one's own artistic endeavors, and another for guessing the mystery painting... but inspired by some recent threads I thought I'd start a thread for actually discussing art.
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Inspired by some of the discussions concerning fashion and the nude, I took up reading Sir Kenneth Clark's seminal book, The Nude, once again. Considering the discussions of the representation of women throughout history, I was somewhat surprised with the history of the development of the female nude in Western art.
Professor Clark argues that the NUDE is not merely a genre or subject matter, like a landscape, of still life of fruit, but rather it is also an artistic form with its own formal vocabulary... not unlike the sonnet or the string quartet. The NUDE involves a celebration of the beauty of the human body and in doing so employs certain elements of abstraction... in this it is removed from of different from the mere image of the naked.
By way of example, Clark leads us to look upon the drawings of the medieval architect Villard de Honnecourt. De Honnecourt is admired top this day for his marvelous drawings of buildings, designs, animals, plants, etc...
De Honnecourt employs an elegant simplified linear abstraction whether he is drawing a lobster... or a fly... or a cat licking itself. He is equally adept when it comes to drawing the robed human figure...
The Gothic elements of tense linearity, hooks, and loops perfectly animates the folds and creases of draperies.
But then De Honnecourt made an attempt at drawing what he termed a "nude in the antique classical style"...
The result is painfully ugly... horribly crude... and comic in it pretension toward the classical nude. The problem is that Gothic art was based upon a system of forms... a vocabulary... wholly unsuited and completely foreign to the rendering of the nude.
When speaking of the Nude is art, we commonly think today of the female nude... but in reality the Nude as we know it began in Greece with the male nude. There is no known sculpture of the female nude dating from before the 5th century B.C.... and even then it was rare. The first Greek nude sculpture, excluding the small Cycladic figurines... were the "kouroi" or "Apollos":
These nude male figures were clearly modeled upon the Egyptian images of the figure that predated the "kouroi" of the Greek 6th century by more than a thousand years.
Once the Egyptian artists had attained a certain level of perfection of form and abstraction, their art underwent only the slightest variations from century to century... over entire millennia. In the restless West, however, the evolution was rapid and dynamic. By the early 5th century B.C. we are already confronted with kouroi of far greater sophistication and elegance...
And less than a generation later we are presented with the so-called "Kritios Boy"...
The Kritios Boy represents one of the most important innovations in the history of art. Where the Egyptian figures stood staidly and rigidly for century after century, the Greek sculptor of this masterpiece had the audacity to animate the figure. As he steps forward, his weight and his center of gravity... and thus his entire body shifts with the slightest hint of the "S curve" or contraposto that will be so important to the whole of the nude in Western art.
The sculptor, Polykleitos will build upon the contraposto pose while bringing the next essential element: he will establish "the canon"... the ideal human proportions... based upon mathematical abstractions. His sculpture of the Doryphoros, of "spear bearer" was intended to illustrate his ideals... and has become itself known as "the canon". Polykleitos further stresses the tilt of the contaposto pose leading to the emphasis of the sweep of the line up the one thigh to the torso.
Unfortunately, we are left relying largely upon mediocre Roman or fragmentary Greek copies of Polykleitos' sculpture.
As already stated, there is no known female nude sculpture from the 6th c. B.C. The few vase paintings of the female from the same period are as ugly as the "nudes" of De Honnecourt. Even the idea of a nude Venus... the goddess of love and sex... was thought of as heresy. This was echoed in Greek society. Men habitually wore nothing more than a short cloak and exercised in the nude, while women went about draped from head to foot. There role in the culture was nearly wholly limited to the domestic. The Spartan women were the sole exception, and they scandalized the rest of Greece by showing their thighs during sporting competitions.
We also must remember the institution of what later became derogatorily termed "Greek Love"... the idea so earnestly celebrated in the Odes of Pindar and in the dialogs of Plato, in which the notion is put forth that the love between two young men is nobler and more "natural" than between a man and a woman.
The first known sculpture of the female nude is the so-called Esquiline Venus...
Again... unfortunately, we are forced to rely upon a mediocre Roman copy (or Greek fragments). Still we can gain some insight into the earliest images of the female nude in Western sculpture. Where even the kouroi represent an abstraction... and the "canon" of Polykleitos offers an ideal based upon mathematics and an ideal of perfect proportions, the Esquiline Venus is short and squat with high small breast placed far apart. She is undoubtedly the image of any Greek peasant girl, and immediately calls to mind the ballerinas of Degas.
Plato, in the Symposium, argues that there are two Aphrodites, whom he calls the celestial and the vulgar: Venus Coelestis and Venus Naturalis. His dialog became the justification of the female nude in Western art. For the whole of history, artists have sought relief from and expression of the obsessive, unreasonable nature of physical desire. To give these images a form which ceases to be vulgar only, but aspires to the celestial... the ideal... a celebration of beauty... this has been the aspiration of the female nude in Western art.
By the end of the 5th century, sculptors began to exhibit a mastery of the female figure... but still avoided the heresy of the female nude (while reveling in it) through the invention of the draped nude. It is here, prior to Praxiteles, that we must search to find the female nude in art. Through employing a light, semi-transparent, clinging garment (wet drapery) the artist was able to at once conceal and reveal the body. As Kenneth Clark states, "The section of a limb as it swells and subsides may be delineated precisely or left to the imagination; parts of the body that are plastically satisfying can be emphasized, those less interesting can be concealed; and awkward transitions can be made smooth by the flow of line." The wet drapery is perhaps best known from the masterful figures from the Parthenon (part of the Elgin Marbles).
The representation of the female figure catches up with those of the male in the late 5th/4th century B.C. The so-called Venus Genetrix fully reveals the beauty of the female body through its drapery...
The contraposto pose with the weight resting on one leg while the other is raised as if to move was perfected by Polykleitos for the male nude... but it is the female nude that has gained the most from his innovation. This pose created a perfect contrast between the sweeping arc of one leg as it rushes up the thigh toward the breast with the slow undulating contour of the relaxed leg.
to be continued....
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