Diana the Huntress, Revisited Christian

The Nude in Art

I have just been writing about the genre of Still-life. I surely would have mentioned that in my extensive travels, I used to delight in hearing countless people saying to me that after looking at my fruit still-lifes they would never look at fruit the same way again, but always in the future be aware of the fabulous colours, textures, and even forms of fruit, that they had never really noticed before. The only statement I heard more often than that one was: “Ooh, that looks so good I could eat it!” Whenever I heard that last one I used to smile to myself and think “I hope I can learn to paint Nudes in such a way that even if they don’t say it, most people who see the paintings are thinking it!" Oh alright, not necessarily eating them, but cuddling or hugging them, at least being physically close to them in some way that can be equated with the joys of eating fruit.

I have felt a love of Woman since I was very young. That does not mean I was madly promiscuous or wanted to go to bed with every female I ever met, it just means that I have a profound admiration and respect for the gender I have never considered inferior to us males in the slightest, on the contrary... But that feeling is of and from the Spirit and the intellect. From a purely primitive point of view, I must admit that I, being a Scorpio and quite a physical person, find it a wonderful bonus to life itself that women exist to be hugged, cuddled and nurtured, and to share our deepest physical existence with us. They bring us an incomparable warmth, to a lifetime that is very rarely all rose-petals for most of us. And I feel that in some of the paintings I see of women, I sense the artist feeling as I do, trying to convey those feelings. Of course, she doesn’t have to be naked; Rembrandt I think above all others, managed to convey much of all I have just tried to describe in his amazing (fully dressed) portraits of Saskia and, for me, particularly in those of Hendricjke. It’s just that, like Truth, nakedness gets closer to the bone in some way, there are no frills; this is finally a representation of Woman, rather than necessarily an individual. And so when Rembrandt paints those two wives of his naked, I feel that in fact he does go even deeper than in most of their other portraits. How much he manages to say, from the wonderful painting of Saskia as “ Danae ” to “Hendrickje Bathing in a Stream.”

Hendrickje Bathing in a Stream Rembrandt

Saskia as Danae Rembrandt

Woman as the goddess; woman as the temptress; woman as the friend. Occasionally too, even Woman as the dominant force, as in various images of Diana the Huntress. Woman, a force to be reckoned with. In time, I hope to be able to convey all these things in my own work.

Diana the Huntress Christian

The Executioner Christian

The Gladiator Christian

THE MALE NUDE

While being the Scorpio heterosexual male that I am I have developed a passion for the Female Nude particularly; however, I also appreciate the beauty of the male nude and its potential as a means of expression, and I have certainly enjoyed the occasions on which I have found myself with the very best models imaginable. But interestingly enough, without even thinking about it, I posed them in what I realized later were actually what one could only call “warrior” or “gladiatorial” poses. I just don’t see men as langorously lying around in poses that most show off their beauty. Rather, like most artists in the history of the male nude, I thought of them as muscular, active and powerful creatures and painted them as such.

Ignudi 1 Michelangelo Ignudi 2 Michelangelo

From Michelangelo’s magnificent male nudes on the Sistine Chapel ceiling - just look at those ignudi at the corners of each main panel as well as Adam’s famously perfect figure at the moment of receiving the spark of Life from God. Even crass commercialism hasn’t been able to detract from that incredible achievement, at least not before the so-called restoration of that ceiling. From Michelangelo to Caravaggio and from David to Delacroix, we have been given magnificent male nudes in paint, continuing the ideals of antiquity when the female nude was considered so far from the perfections expressed by the male nude that she was hardly even worth sculpting at all. Happily, all that was made up for however, by our being given heavenly interpretations of the female nude from Botticelli to Titian, and then from Rubens, Ingres, Bouguereau, Courbet and Gerome, amongst many others. All these artists have helped to satisfy what I believe is little less than a craving we have, and so a need as well as a desire, to look upon ourselves in as profound a manner as possible. Partly as a reaction against the very doctrines that were responsible for our recoiling from the nude as an object of sin - either the tempter or the tempted - we developed a need that went beyond the tyranny of dogma and censorship and so in the end defeated it. Art won. But only because of the stealth and cunning of artists like Titian, who managed to create their beautiful works and pull the wool over the ecclesiastical eyes with protestations of innocence from any thoughts of a licentious nature whilst creating their pure virgins and deities from mythology. These virgins were of course their own very secret lovers, whose heavenly gazes up to heaven were no more than a perfect capturing, for all eternity, their orgasms that they were enjoying together in the studio, but for all church purposes gazing at their creator in heaven. Such deception was necessary not only to save the life of the artist but to give his works at least a fair chance of survival. Thank heavens they did, and so we have our glorious culture spread throughout the great museums of the world, more available to us now than ever before, in wonderful books, great filmed documentaries and on the magical awesome Internet. Art, or rather its history, came close to dying, being smothered by the church, but it survived and, we hope, is here to stay.

The beauty - or otherwise - of the human figure has been interpreted through the vision of artists from ancient times to date. In fact it has always been the major theme in Western Art. The period that most interests me, and my article will be focused on, dates from the fifteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century. From the ancients - the Greeks and Romans primarily, whose art was sculpture - ideals of beauty were based on the belief that beauty could be measured in mathematical terms. Much later, when the Renaissance occurred, Michelangelo believed that too, as did Ingres later still. From the fifth century BC to 19th century France, artists really believed that beauty existed in the human form largely as a matter of proportions. It was each artist’s personal genius that would then colour that form, sometimes even in spite of the artist himself who was working on a given set of conscious principles, while his subconscious was giving us the truly greatest aspects of his art.

The essence of Art for me is that the nature of a subject is different from an artist’s interpretation of it. An artist can take the nude, for example, and through his interpretation of his personal reaction to that subject, give us his Art. I believe that it is the relative depth of the artist’s response to the subject, in this case the Nude, that will govern the beauty or otherwise of his work. Michelangelo was literally in physical love with the bodies that he painted, not just because of his being influenced by the principles of antiquity that considered that true perfection of form could only be found in the male body, but because Michelangelo was homosexual. Ostensibly, he only created his great works - reluctantly, as he only wished to sculpt - for the church,. In reality he painted them because he was in physical love with them as he was in Spiritual love with a God he saw as having created them in the first place. I feel sure that any vision of such a god shown to us in his work was Michelangelo’s personal vision, the very energy of those ignudi proves it to me; he just paid lip service to the church that paid him enough to keep him alive and gave him hope and the chance to create his greatest works of genius.

La Maja Desnuda (The Naked Maja) Goya

CENSORSHIP OF THE NUDE

Most artists loathed the binding chains of censorship, a power held by the church since the beginnings of Christianity that included a period in which Art was controlled completely by the Inquisition. Unimaginable as it is today, an artist would risk torture and death - literally - if he just happened to paint a nude with the wrong expression, or in a pose that any member of that unpardonable group of men deemed too lascivious, and if he couldn’t then come up with a good enough excuse connecting that unfortunate work with either a religious or a mythological precedent. If any comparison can be made between, say, a hanging or a beheading, then it could be said that the Spanish branch of the Inquisition was reputed to be the worst, the most cruel. Even Francesco de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) ran foul of them and was nearly executed for painting what today is universally regarded as one of the world’s greatest masterpieces, his “Naked Maja.” Unfortunately, this work is one of those few in the oeuvre of the Nude which really has to be seen in the original, to fully appreciate its true greatness and erotic qualities. In spite of the clumsy drawing, which places the head at least an inch out of alignment with the body, still I consider this to be one of the four greatest nudes ever painted. No reproduction can capture the living breathing quality of this openly inviting girl, a superb piece of painting, breaking and transcending the boundaries of technical demands, as the greatest Art sometimes does.

In an automatic reaction to ecclesiastic tyranny, from the Renaissance onwards artists ceaselessly pushed the boundaries of censorship, as well as experimenting with techniques in their ceaseless search for ways of trying to express a form of beauty almost beyond words and paint. The nude is perhaps the most demanding of all the genres because of its infinite possibilities and its Spiritual content, by virtue of being human combined with our attitude towards it (mostly female nudes) as (mostly) males. Given all these circumstances, it is little short of a miracle that so many truly great nudes were created, and furthermore that so many of them actually survived.

The Turkish Bath Ingres

Pushing those boundaries, it wasn’t long before a few nudes started to appear that escaped the shackles of convention - “high art” it was called - and dared to contain a sexual element. Titian and Correggio were the first courageous innovators, with their trembling Danaes awaiting penetration from Zeus in the disguise of a shower of gold. Ingres later gives us the first hints of lesbianism in his “Turkish Bath,” and the Orientalists were quick to follow suit. That modest hand, that had protected her most private parts from our eyes (and even more from our minds!) suddenly started having the appearance of movement, and a rhythmic movement at that. Was it possible that Woman, after all the pain man had caused her, was finally causing herself pleasure?

As has been seen, in Art as in life, all things are possible.

The Nude in Art, Part Two

Anthony Christian

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