Nude Naked Venus
Uncovering the realities of the Nude
The critic John Berger argues that the Nude is a convention; to be Nude is to become an object. To be Naked is to be without disguise, free of the patriarchal conventions of western society. The Nude gives across a feeling of the fact the body has been re-formed and idealised whereas if a Naked character has been poised comfortably and not crudely then it gives an impression of reality and truth. Our main example being that I believe Olympia sits comfortably in her element; she has not been posed or dressed up falsely as are Titian's and Giorgione's Venus. She is showing the audience that this is what she is and what she does.
Interestingly, Titian's ‘Venus of Urbino', since it was painted in the 14th century, has been understood to be a classic Venetian Nude yet why have we just assumed that she is not as corrupt or tantalisingly erotic as Manet's Olympia? Scholars today have attempted to ‘rescue' the Nude from the domain of pornography by reading it as an allegory or as a marriage picture designed to bring luck to the new couple. However contemporary letters indicate that it was enjoyed by its male owners as a lascivious and arousing image of female beauty. In ‘A Tramp Abroad', Mark Twain infamously referred to ‘Venus of Urbino' as ‘Titian's Beast' and stated that it was ‘the foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses'. He was particularly disgusted by the ‘attitude of one of her arms and hand' as it calls attention to the commodity for sale. We can also see underlying erotic implications made by Giorgione's Sleeping Venus's raised arm and the placement of her left hand on her groin. Tom Lubbock states that ‘The Venetian nudes of Giorgione and Titian are openly playing with themselves…the nude is the main way that European painting does sex.'
When viewing Cabanel's ‘Birth of Venus', I immediately could sense the provocative and erotic overtones. With her arms thrown back above her head, she passively and suggestively looks, as does Olympia, towards the viewer and makes no attempt to cover herself up. ‘She twists herself into a passive receptacle of the male spectator's sexual wishes', so why was this painting accepted by the salon in 1863? By using a classical subject and the old master theme of the reclining Nude, Cabanel was cleverly able to mask its true content. To the male imagination she is ‘sexually available' and ‘only a more blatant and vulgar cousin of Titan's Venus'.
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