Mary Beard's Shock of the Nude

There are an awful lot of naked bodies in Western art.

And they are often causing trouble, even now.

Whether it's demonstrating against sexual violence...

We're here to stop rape! We're here to stop rape!

...or a case of concealment to preserve diplomatic relations...

Boxed up so as not to offend,

ancient nude statues in Rome's Capitoline Museum

were covered up during a visit by Iran's president.

...or simply being taken down...

An art gallery in Manchester

has removed a Victorian painting of naked, adolescent girls.

...the nude stands on some of the deepest fault lines running

through society now,

speaking directly to issues of men and women,

gender and sex.

Actually, that's nothing new.

For centuries, naked bodies, especially female ones,

have been wrapped in high-minded talk of

beauty and the ennobling effects of art.

But I don't think you can talk about the nude

unless you also talk about male desire.

In this, the first of a pair of programmes on the naked

body in Western art, I'll be looking at how, for so long,

men got away with it!

Just in this gallery, there's loads of female breasts,

just a particular concatenation of them here.

And we'll be looking at how women artists have tried to tackle

this tradition head on.

Seeing you from behind, in your stripper shoes,

you look quite vulnerable.

I wasn't really prepared for how powerful this thing

of being a naked woman... is.

Rest assured, I'll also be sizing up

how artists have seen naked men...

...getting a grip on works from the ancient past...

I think that's perfect!

...as well as today.

Oh, blimey.

And I'll be try my hand at a bit

of reconstructive surgery

of some VERY private parts.

Ah!

Don't expect a straightforward history of the nude

in these programmes.

I'm going to be exploring the problems, the anxieties

and the scandals surrounding the image of the naked body,

ever since the ancient Greeks.

I'll be asking quite why Western art

has been so obsessed with nudity.

I hope

that after this, you'll never look at a nude painting or sculpture

in quite the same way again.

I'm starting my deep dive into the history of the nude

in an Aladdin's cave of sculpture.

It's full of replicas from all periods, but the one I'm here to see

goes back to an ancient Greek city on the coast of the Mediterranean,

and I've been thinking and talking about her for almost 50 years.

It may not stand out now,

but actually, it has been one of the most contentious

nudes in Western art.

The statue of the goddess Aphrodite, if we're talking Greek,

or Venus to the Romans.

We rather coyly tend to call her the Goddess of Love,

but I think Goddess of Sex would be a better title.

This one goes back 2,500 years

to a sculpture by the Greek artist Praxiteles,

and that sculpture is particularly famous

because it's supposed to be the very first sculpture,

full-size, of a naked woman in the Greek world

and probably in the West.

She wasn't an instant success.

The town she was first offered to said "no, thanks".

She's now known as the Aphrodite of Knidos

after the city who said yes.

A canny move, as she soon became a tourist attraction and was riffed

on by sculptors over and over again.

The original is long gone, but reconstructions, including

pristine versions of how it once might have looked,

are still in demand.

The big point, though, is quite how controversial it was.

In the 4th century BC, this was shockingly new.

It was close to unacceptable.

But there are signs that Praxiteles has been pretty careful

about how he presents the goddess to us.

She's not blatantly exposing herself.

I think the giveaway is this water pot and this towel -

or perhaps her clothing - that she's holding in her hand.

We have to imagine we've just come across her by chance

as she's getting ready for or finishing her bath,

and she modestly covers herself up.

Praxiteles is giving us a kind of alibi

for looking at the naked deity.

The first large-scale representation of the naked female form

amounted to a revolution in art.

Frustratingly, we have no idea of why it happened when it did.

But we do know that the many sculptors who followed and imitated

Praxiteles in the classical world, all of the men, I'm sure,

adopted similar pretexts for displaying the woman

or goddess as both demure and naked,

giving every viewer an excuse for gawping at her.

When centuries later,

male art-lovers from the Renaissance onwards

praised the achievements of the ancients,

they were captivated by these coy Venuses.

But not everyone was always entirely seduced by her charms.

You can see this very clearly

with another ancient statue, now known

as the Venus de Medici, after the family who once owned her,

and a highlight of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

For centuries, she's resided in the room known as the Tribuna,

where the most special masterpieces were displayed.

Visitors now are not allowed beyond the door,

but I've been given permission to pad about in my socks.

She's pretty clearly a version of

or descended from

that first female nude by Praxiteles.

It's true that she doesn't have her bathing equipment -

she's got a little dolphin here instead - but she is covering

herself up, modestly, as if she's been surprised.

Although some cynics say that she's actually pointing

to the bits that matter.

Now, she called forth the most extravagant praise from visitors,

both male and female, in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Travellers wrote in their diaries about how many times

they'd visited her

or how long they had spent looking at her,

and others scrutinised her bodily parts

as if she was almost like a race horse.

The art historian Johann Winckelmann looked at her navel, said

it was really a bit deep.

Others thought her ankles a bit thick.

But scratch the surface, and you find certain anxieties.

In particular, they have a sense that those expressions

of great, erotic desire for this statue

might somehow be undermining their elite

art appreciation.

It's almost as if they felt they were being dragged down by her,

to the base level of the common herd.

No wonder that some of them called her

a dangerous goddess.

And dangerous these female nudes certainly were.

Praxiteles's first version set the tone.

It was even said that one young man made love to her marble form,

then went mad and threw himself off a cliff.

In fact, throughout history, desire has shaped the way we see

and respond to the nude.

You can't really escape it.

One important twist on this came in Renaissance Italy,

with the creation of what is now another of the greatest hits

of the Uffizi,

a painting by Titian,

Venice's most celebrated 16th-century artist.

It's called the Venus of Urbino,

after its first known owner, the Duke of Urbino.

Though there's no evidence that either he or Titian actually

gave her the title, Venus.

In contrast to those ancient statues, this lady looks

like she's definitely been expecting us,

and though her pose is familiar now,

this is one of the very first reclining nudes in Western art.

But there's more to her than that.

In a way, she looks a bit like a classical Greek nude

turned on her side.

In which case, that hand is really in a gesture of modesty.

But quite a lot of people have looked at this painting

and seen it as a bit less innocent than that.

They've wondered if she wasn't actually playing with herself.

Some critics have seen this as a painting

celebrating a marriage,

which would make the naked woman an idealised version

of the bride.

But, in that case,

isn't the hand still a problem?

Well, it isn't,

if it reflects popular 16th-century scientific views

about fertility,

which claimed that female orgasm aided conception

and so, the production of children.

But, for me, it's hard to forget that this is a naked woman

painted by a male painter for a male buyer

or commissioner.

You have to imagine him standing here, meeting her gaze,

probably titillated by whatever the hand is doing.

It's hard, really, not to see this painting, like so many other

similar European nudes,

as one of a passive, naked woman

being the object of an erotic male gaze.

But the idea of paintings like this being the expression

of a male viewer's fantasy raises another problem.

Where does it leave a female artist

or female viewer, like me?

Let me just say that I enjoy this painting

in a slightly subversive way.

In MY fantasies,

I'm with this naked lady,

and we're both giggling

at those blokes who are leering at us.

There is, though, an extra layer of intriguing complexity here.

If it was male desire that fashioned the female nude,

there have always been male artists