13 Nudes That Changed Western Art History

It was rare to see a painted full-length nude in Sandro Botticelli’s day. Those that existed in Renaissance Italy usually showed something bad happening—Christ crucified, Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden, or sinful naked people in a Last Judgment scene. Botticelli flipped the script, creating a nearly life-size nude illustrating the mythological story of Venus being born from sea foam, flanked by Zephyr and Chloris. Adopting an ancient Greek Venus pudica pose, Botticelli’s Venus is modest but unashamed in this grand humanistic celebration of the beauty of her form.

If Botticelli inspired a shift toward a more humanistic approach to the nude, Leonardo da Vinci helped lead the charge toward more scientific depictions of the human form. In his iconic diagrammatic drawing Vitruvian Man, Da Vinci visualized a concept of human proportions based on an ancient architectural text by Vitruvius, which stated that a perfect circle and square could be drawn using the navel of an outstretched figure as the center. This would mean, for instance, that a man’s height was nearly equal to his arm span. With these and other calculations, thinkers like Da Vinci strove to understand ideal proportions in a combination of science and art.

Italian Mannerist artist Lavinia Fontana, considered one of the first Western women to paint professionally (outside a convent or court), changed what was considered acceptable subject matter for female painters. In an era when women were expected to limit themselves to painting portraits and religious scenes, Fontana daringly created nude Venuses and Minervas—including this Minerva Dressing, which is the first known female nude painted by a woman. As the human nude was considered a pinnacle of artistic achievement, it asserted Fontana’s capabilities and paved a path of greater artistic freedom for the women who followed her.

Why was Édouard Manet’s Olympia rehung high up and out of reach when it debuted at the 1865 Paris Salon, and why did some viewers try to pierce this canvas with umbrellas? Because Manet took the idealized and classical female nude and morphed it into something contemporary and profane. The composition references art history, resembling ancient Roman depictions of Venus and the reclining female nude in works such as Titian’s Venus of Urbino and Goya’s Maja desnuda—but Manet transformed her into a prostitute and gave her a typical courtesan name. Here, we are not gazing upon a passive woman; Olympia stares confrontationally at us, as though we might be her next patron.

Auguste Rodin was looking around his studio one day and found a cracked clay torso that he’d made two decades earlier. He decided to cast it in bronze and then mount it atop legs he’d fashioned for another sculpture entirely, the unexpected (and not quite anatomically correct) combination suggesting a vigorous stride forward. This headless, armless man broke with the established sculptural tradition of full-figure nudes and helped create a new style of fragmented and roughly textured sculptures. It thus cleared a path for modernist works such as Matisse’s Serf, Giacometti’s Homme qui marche, and Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space.

In May 1906, German modernist artist Paula Modersohn-Becker faced a mirror to study her own unclothed body and painted the first known female nude self-portrait. In rendering herself, Modersohn-Becker eliminated the power play that often existed between a male artist and his model and also broke from the tradition of women being painted for the male gaze. Thirty years old at the time the painting was made, the artist wasn’t actually pregnant, even though she looks it; we see, instead, the fecund power of her creativity (which, sadly, was cut short when the artist died post-childbirth the following year).

In his monumental canvas that spawned the birth of Cubism, Picasso reinvented not only Western painting but also the female nude. Gone were naturalism, illusionistic perspective, chiaroscuro, and traditional conventions of beauty; in this grouping of five sex workers on Barcelona’s infamous Avignon Street, Picasso brought flattened planes, sharp edges, and an angular approach to the human form. The shock value of the scandalous subject matter was rivaled only by the jarring style in which it was painted, as Picasso fractured the picture plane and introduced non-Western influences such as African, Iberian, and Oceanic masks. No wonder he waited nine years to publicly show this painting.

“You’ve tried to find her, And you’ve looked in vain; Up the picture and down again, You’ve tried to fashion her of broken bits, And you’ve worked yourself into seventeen fits,” went a poem published in American Art News on the occasion of the 1913 Armory Show, where Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 notoriously made its American debut. This unconventional nude was shocking because he fragmented the figure into geometric shapes. Possibly inspired by the chronophotography of   Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey, Duchamp turned the female nude into something almost industrial. Pushing the limits even further, he made a No. 3 of this painting (a photographic enlargement that he reworked with graphite and ink) and a miniature fourth version for Carrie Stettheimer’s dollhouse, and he included replicas in his Boite-en-valise portable museums—treating the work as a sort of Duchampian readymade.

There’s no allegory or backstory in the roughly 26 large-scale, reclining female nudes that Amedeo Modigliani painted between 1916 and 1919. Inspired by art history but stripped of any context, they look like distant cousins of Renaissance Venuses and other idealized women but stand apart with their raw carnality (and pubic hair, which made them appear quasi-pornographic to viewers at the time). They were so dangerously sensual, in fact, that when they debuted in Paris at Galerie Berthe Weill in December 1917, the police arrived to remove one of them from the gallery window.

Between 1925 and 1930, German Dada artist Hannah Höch created a photomontage series titled “From an Ethnographic Museum.” Evocative of fashion spreads in glossy magazines, these collages rendered idealized feminine beauty uncanny by creating hybrid figures that combined a Caucasian female body with a non-Western head (usually cut from photos of ethnographic specimens or African tribal objects brought home by German colonizers). The resulting images force viewers to confront the way we fetishize and objectify both the female form and these types of objects.

When he wasn’t trademarking the color International Klein Blue, postwar French artist Yves Klein practiced judo and became interested in the markings left on the mat after a judo fighter fell. In 1958, attempting to translate this phenomenon into painting, he instructed a nude model to apply blue paint to herself and roll across a sheet of paper. This led, in 1960, to his “Anthropometry” series, in which he used nude women as “living brushes” during performances in front of live audiences, while his Monotone Symphony played in the background and blue cocktails were served. Though these works have been criticized for reducing women to instruments, the “Anthropometry” works eliminated the intermediary between the female form and its appearance on paper or canvas and innovatively expressed the nude body as color, as opposed to line or form.

Like Yves Klein, Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta used the nude body as an instrument for creating artworks, but with female agency. Her best-known project is her “Silueta”series of more than 200 “earth-body works” in which she photographed imprints or outlines of her own body in a natural setting. Frustrated with the limitations of painting, she saw these works as a way of connecting emotionally with the earth and returning to the maternal source. The traces of her absent nude body can be seen as a metaphor for her absence from her homeland, as Mendieta was forced to leave her native Cuba without her parents at the age of 12.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s orientalist painting Grande Odalisque (1814) reimagined the reclining nude—a traditional theme in Western art—as an “odalisque,” a French terms taken from the Turkish word for domestic servant but taken by Western Europeans to mean an enslaved concubine. The decidedly different version that contemporary artist Mickalene Thomas created as a portrait of Maya, one of her first models, is an bejeweled image of the Black queer nude as feminine power. In this painting and others, Thomas turns her photographs and archival sources (such as the Black American magazine Jet) into monumental works endowed with disco-era glamor that fight against gender and beauty norms.