The first life-size nude woman in stone was carved in ancient Athens
Around the fourth century BC, the Athenian sculptor Praxiteles carved Aphrodite of Knidos, the first life-size stone statue of a nude woman anyone knows of. The original has vanished, yet copies and imitations such as the Capitoline Venus kept it alive. Where art draws the line on the naked body has shifted with every era since.
The unclothed body is one of the oldest subjects in art. Prehistoric Venus figurines, often with emphatically carved genitals, show people shaping it long before writing. The Greeks treated male nakedness as heroic and beautiful, sculpting idealised athletes and gods, and it was entirely acceptable for one man to admire another's physique openly. Female nudes followed as the counterpart to that heroic ideal.
Christianity never quite scrubbed away those pagan images, and in the Renaissance classical myths flooded back, giving painters like Botticelli a respectable reason to show Venus rising naked from the sea. Bronzino went further, painting the Genoese admiral Andrea Doria as a muscular, naked Neptune. Francisco Goya's La maja desnuda, from around 1800, is sometimes hailed as the first entirely secular life-size female nude in Western painting, though it originally hung privately beside the older Rokeby Venus by Velázquez, so it was hardly alone.
Photography blurred the categories further, because the same camera could produce fine art, glamour, instruction or erotica. During the First World War, soldiers on both sides treasured Jean Agélou's illegal nude pictures of a model known as Fernande. Male nudes were rarer, although the early bodybuilder Eugen Sandow famously posed as the statue of the Dying Gaul to promote his Greek ideal of physique. In the nineteenth century, Orientalist art and French postcards sexualised women from non-Western cultures, slipping past censors by posing as ethnography, even though many tropical societies had gone partly or fully unclothed with no sexual meaning at all.
Arguments persist because society sorts such images into information, art and pornography, and anything that straddles those boxes invites dispute. Occasionally even a revered masterpiece like Michelangelo's David stirs objections when displayed to schoolchildren.
Source: Depictions of nudity
