The nude human figure is the oldest subject in art. Before portraiture, before landscape, before abstraction — there was the body. It appears on cave walls in the Dordogne, carved into limestone figurines 35,000 years ago, modeled in clay long before anyone thought to fire it. If you want to understand Western art, you don’t start with a biography of Picasso or a tour of the Uffizi. You start with the question: why have artists been obsessed with the unclothed human form for so long — and what does that obsession reveal about the cultures that made it?
The answer changes depending on who you ask, and when. That’s precisely what makes it interesting.
Ancient Greece: The Body as Moral Argument
The ancient Greeks were not the first people to depict nudity, but they were the first to make it a statement. In most ancient cultures — Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Near East — undress signified defeat, shame, or ritual vulnerability. Not in Greece. There, the naked athlete competing at Olympia or Nemea was a figure of triumph. He embodied arete: virtue, excellence, the highest expression of human potential. The Greek word for a naked person is gymnos, from which we get “gymnasium” — a place where you trained your body in the nude, because physical excellence and intellectual excellence were the same project.
This is why Greek sculpture is full of idealized male bodies. The kouros — the standing male nude that proliferated between 700 and 480 BCE — wasn’t portraiture. It was philosophy made marble. When the sculptor Polykleitos carved his Doryphoros (Spear-Bearer) around 450 BCE, he published alongside it a theoretical text called the Canon, arguing that perfect beauty could be expressed through mathematical ratios in the human form. Art and intellectual rigor were the same project too.
The female nude arrived later, and differently. The great turning point was Praxiteles’ Aphrodite of Knidos, carved around 350 BCE — the first full-scale female nude in Greek sculpture, and scandalous enough that the city of Kos reportedly rejected it. Knidos accepted it. Tourists traveled from across the Mediterranean just to see it. The figure of the goddess surprised at her bath, one hand raised in a gesture of modesty or revelation, established a visual language that would echo for 2,400 years: the reclining nude, the Venus surprised, the woman simultaneously exposed and self-contained. She is still, in some form, the subject of a thousand Renaissance and Baroque paintings.
The Renaissance: Rediscovering the Classical Body
After the Middle Ages — roughly a thousand years during which the nude in Western art retreated almost entirely into religious allegory (the suffering Christ, the damned soul, Adam and Eve in shame) — the Italian Renaissance made a radical argument: the human body was sacred because it was human. The old Greek synthesis came roaring back, now filtered through Christian humanism.
Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (c. 1484–1486) is so familiar now that it’s hard to see how strange it was. Here was a pagan goddess, depicted not in the margins of a manuscript but as the glorious centerpiece of a large-scale painting commissioned for a Medici villa. The nude was not shameful. It was divine. The body was the temple. Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling pushed this logic to its limit: Adam, the first man, receives the spark of life from God in a state of complete undress, and nobody in the 16th century thought this was inappropriate.
Leonardo da Vinci dissected corpses in secret to understand the body’s engineering. Raphael composed figures in motion with an eye trained on Roman sculpture. Titian draped his Venuses in golden light and made them look directly at the viewer, refusing the coy modesty of classical tradition. The Renaissance nude was confident, learned, and idealized — but it was also, increasingly, about looking. The gaze had entered the frame.
The 19th Century: When the Nude Became Dangerous
For roughly three centuries — through the Baroque, Rococo, and Neoclassical periods — the nude functioned within a stable social contract: if you gave a naked body a mythological name, placed it in an allegorical setting, and painted it with enough academic polish, it was fine. It was art. The real and the ideal stayed safely separated.
Édouard Manet blew that contract apart in 1865. When he exhibited Olympia at the Paris Salon — a work depicting a clearly modern woman, naked, reclining on a bed, staring at the viewer with complete indifference — the critics lost their minds. Not because she was nude, but because she wasn’t Venus. She was a real woman. She was probably a sex worker. She had a Black maid. She was looking back at you, and she didn’t care what you thought. The same critics who had stood before acres of pink mythological nudes declared Olympia disgusting and morally offensive.
The discomfort was the point. Manet had stripped away the mythological alibi that had always allowed the male gaze to operate without accountability. His nude was a person, not a goddess — and that changed everything. The Impressionists, the Post-Impressionists, the Fauves, the Expressionists: they all inherited the problem Manet had posed. The body was a site of meaning, not just decoration. It carried class, race, gender, power. You couldn’t pretend otherwise anymore.
The 20th Century and Beyond: The Body as Statement
By the time Egon Schiele was arrested in 1912 for creating “immoral” drawings of the nude figure, the old academic consensus had shattered into a thousand competing arguments. For Schiele, the tortured, angular nude was a map of psychological states — anxiety, desire, isolation. For Pablo Picasso, the fractured bodies of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) forced Western viewers to confront their own aesthetic assumptions by juxtaposing European nude conventions with African and Iberian mask forms. For the Surrealists, the body was the unconscious made visible.
The second half of the 20th century brought performance art, body art, and feminist art criticism — each of which asked new questions about who the nude is for, who gets to make it, and on whose terms it is seen. Artists like Carolee Schneemann and Yoko Ono used their own bodies as medium. The Guerrilla Girls asked, famously: “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?” The question had an answer, and the answer was damning.
None of this made the nude less interesting. If anything, it made the subject more contested — and therefore more alive. Today, the nude appears in painting, sculpture, photography, video, performance, and digital work, carrying the full weight of art history on its shoulders while navigating the new contradictions of social media censorship and algorithmic modesty. Instagram will remove a 500-year-old Titian. The conversation about what the nude means — who it belongs to, what it does, whose gaze it serves — has never been more urgent.
Why This History Matters Now
There’s a through-line from the Venus of Willendorf (carved roughly 25,000 years ago) to a life drawing session happening in Los Angeles tonight. The nude is not a niche subject or a bohemian provocation — it is the central subject of Western visual culture, the lens through which every generation has worked out its ideas about beauty, power, desire, mortality, and what it means to be human in a body.
Understanding this history doesn’t sanitize the subject. It deepens it. When you see a figure drawing model take a pose, you are participating in a tradition that runs through ancient Athens, Renaissance Florence, 19th-century Paris, and every studio and atelier that refused to pretend the human form was something to be ashamed of. That’s not a small thing.
If this history resonates with you — if you believe nude art deserves serious, respectful venues where it can be made and experienced with the attention it has always demanded — we’d love to have you involved. NALA is building something in Los Angeles that belongs to this long tradition. Get involved →
Image: Lorenzo Lotto, Venus and Cupid, 1520s. Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (CC0 Public Domain). The painting shows the Roman goddess of love — a direct descendant of the Greek Aphrodite tradition established by Praxiteles — in an allegory of marriage and fertility.