style="font-size:15px;"> Eloquent testimony to the maturity of the genre comes with Renoir’s magnificent Nude in the Pushkin Museum collection. It seems that all the merits of French taste in painting are reflected in this image of a gloriously flourishing nude. With the elusive combination of natural stance and pose, Renoir achieved just as subtle an effect as with the richness of his palette. The artist’s brush revels in the delights of the nude with that immediacy, which is possible only in the spontaneous relations between painter and model.
Self-Portrait
Albrecht Dürer, c. 1503
Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris
At the same time, Nude signals the fact that the model is already the sovereign heroine of the painting. In this context it is worth recalling that, according to his own words, Degas was representing honest women, who when naked were only engaged in their own affairs. It’s as if they were seen through the keyhole. Degas’s models are indeed entirely independent. His image of nudity is self-sufficient in terms of subject and aesthetics.
Ignudi
Michelangelo, c. 1508
ceiling of the Sistine Chapel
Vatican Museums, Rome
His celebrated series of nudes – bathing, washing, drying themselves – represent a whole world of intimate feminine daily existence. Yet for all the life-like naturalness of his motifs, the expression “daily existence” does not prove entirely correct, as the bodily motions of his nude women find their source of inspiration in the ancient Venus. Was that not what prompted Renoir to compare one of them with a fragment of the Parthenon?
Sleeping Venus
Giorgione, c. 1508–1510
oil on canvas, 108.5 × 175 cm
Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden
Of course, we are not talking here of any kind of mythological associations, but about an unconditional precision of line, classical clarity of form and the special effect of pastel with its “foamy” texture, reminding us how the goddess surged into the world. It is a well-known fact that Degas practiced photography. He was attracted by the unpremeditated composition of the snapshot – a quality that he so valued in art.
Nymph of the Spring
Lucas Cranach the Elder, c. 1530–1534
oil on wood, 75 × 120 cm
Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid
“He composes scenes,” Yakov Tugendhold wrote about Degas. “He arranges figures and draws out types in a way which only the camera could do. But look more attentively at his ‘snap-shots’ and you will see in them a profound deliberation and an intent with regard to colour. Using a Japanese compositional device, Degas narrows the frame of his characters, placing a hand holding a fan or the sounding-board of a violin in the foreground.
Venus of Urbino
Titian, 1538
oil on canvas, 119 × 165 cm
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence
In this unexpected element of composition, however, one senses not a clever trick, but a profound, penetrative knowledge of the chance fabric of life.” This applies in full measure to Degas’s nudes. Cézanne’s Bathers are also associated with a whole series of variations on a theme. Cézanne was no less concerned than Degas at the loss of the form’s integrity and in the nude he sought the possibility of reviving Poussin in the open air.
Eva Prima Pandora
Jean Cousin, c. 1550
oil on canvas, 97 × 150 cm
Musée du Louvre, Paris
He was interested not in the character of the body as such, but in the arrangement of figures striving to attain their rhythmic and chromatic harmony with a landscape.
In Picasso’s interpretation, the theme of the nude underwent some unexpected metamorphoses. Girl on a Ball does perhaps have a certain allegorical subtext (Fortune and Valour), but the basic idea of its form is revealed by the highly expressive contrast of two forms of nudity – insuperable male power and flexible girlish fragility.
Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife
Tintoretto, c. 1555
oil on canvas, 54 × 117 cm
Prado Museum, Madrid
It is difficult to believe that the Dance of the Veils was painted only two years later. Here the naked body is filled with the energy of form, as if in revolt against itself. A short time later, Picasso, like a true “dêmiourgos”, began to create a new universe, in which nude figures are perceived as Cubist prototypes of mankind. An accelerated move from the classic to the archaic – that is the paradoxical logic of these metamorphoses.
Gabrielle d’Estrées and One of Her Sisters
Anonymous, c. 1595
oil on canvas, 96 × 125 cm
Musée du Louvre, Paris
Georges Rouault’s composition entitled Filles – a grotesque image of perverse nudity – forms a staggering contrast to the hedonism rooted in the aesthetic of the genre. This is no longer a nude, but naked flesh. The sense of drama inherent in Rouault’s perception of the world comes out in formal hyperbole and anticipates the stylistic trends of Expressionism. At the same time, the artist was not averse to producing other images of nudity – Bathing in a Lake.
Amor Victorious
Caravaggio, 1602–1603
oil on canvas, 156 × 113 cm
Staatliche Museen, Berlin
Matisse once confessed that if he met a woman like one of his creations in the street he would run a mile. “I answered to someone who said that I did not see women as I represented them by telling him that if I would see such women in the street I would be terrified. I do not create women, I create paintings,” the artist explained. Perceived from that point of view, the nude frees itself
