Carlo Franza
The
nude in art among Eros, love and soundness of the body goes with the history
of man since ancient times.
The famous poet Paul Valery, in 1934, wrote that “only till few years ago, the
physician, the painter and the client of brothels were the only mortals that
knew the nude, according to each case “. And around the matter he's even more
clear when 
he writes
that “the nude didn't have but two meanings for minds: sometimes the symbol
of beauty, sometimes that of the obscene “. Today ideologies are those that
inscribe in body, modulate it, and whose behaviours change contours, poses,
gestures. The male nude nourishes of a sort of stereotypes. It's enough to observe
the art photography, beginning from Mapplethorpe, to highlight the icons establishing
a norm, the stereotypes, called ideals, and find the essence of the male in
the curve of the gluteus, in the more or less powerful opening of a shoulder,
in the rigid and flexuous line of the back, in the elongated or covered by living
muscles thigh. The Greek ideal of the male beauty, passing also by Winckelmann,
that Lavater related to the lean and shapely physical proportions, the correctness
of the moral behaviour, brought itself to that homosexual and deep narcissist
gratification from which it arose, put mainly in light during the Age of Enlightenment.
But the body and its nude grow within the limit of the superimposition of the
beautiful and the conform to, also thanks to the relativity from which nothing
escapes. Georg L. Mosse author of a basic text as “The image of man “ (Einaudi,
1997) is, asserts that the ideal features of masculinity have consolidated for
the first time in the second half of the XVIII century. All that following the
traces of the physiognomy and 
anthropology
that give back to man a beauty virtuous ideal, recovered from the classic precepts
that lay the foundation of modern virility, attaching to it a dynamic mission,
operative and powerful, notwithstanding the vicissitudes spread along centuries,
including the ones concerning dandies and feminists. The history of art gives
us back linearly the normative ideal of the male body and its beauty, countering
the Diadumeno of Policleto with the Old Man, the Ephebe of Ancitera, the Roman
Niobide, Plinio attributed to Scopa or Prassitele, the Apossimeno of Lisippo,
to quote someone, with the David of Michelangelo; till the contemporaneous artists,
some of them young, who, about the body and nude topics, take as the subject
the misery of the physicalness with its grotesque fluids and sewage. According
to this last key to read it must be interpreted the last works of Paul McCarthy,
Mike Kelly, Charles Ray, Kiki Smith, all of them wanted by the art critic Jeffrey
Deitch in his 1991 exposition, entitled “Post Human”. But let's not stop here,
not to go beyond the topic at point, that is the nude; in case transgression
must be proposed again, as our intent is, in other paper. The interest for nude
establishes as the sense of the limit, lives in that threshold where it has
been supported along centuries convention and scandal, aggressiveness and violence,
Eros and pornography. But there's more if Paul Valery tracks down attentions
to the “Venus of Urbino” of Tiziano, nowadays placed at the Uffizi. He says:
“It can be well sensed that for Tiziano, when
he puts his pure fleshes Venus, languidly crouched over the purple in the plenitude
of her perfection as a goddess and as a painted thing too, painting was caressing,
joining two voluptuousness into a sublime gesture, where the possession of oneself
and the mastery of one's own means, and the possession of the belle with all
senses, fuse “. From here to the detailed assertion of the great historian of
the English art, 
Kenneth
Clark, the pace is short if he asserts that in no country the body-nude of a
woman has ever been idealized and offered to the audience contemplation as in
Italy. While in Italy during the Renaissance the lied down body of a woman is
already a convention, other European cultures find it hard to understand, as
it is to read in the attempts of Durer, who with his curiosity and horror
gets
, after many circles and diagrams to transform that crushed body into a feminine
nude. Eros and love give artists a different measure of nude and still today
it causes surprise how the feminine nude has become in Italy and only in Italy
the selected and conventional object of art, at the light of the fact that
the rediscovering of the Greek ancientness in the Cinquecento could and 
must
have adopted the male body as ideal. The 
feminine
ideality, taking place from ancientness until the Italian pictorial art brings
the nude to make itself connatural with the idyllic landscape (see Giorgione)
or rich interiors (see Tiziano). Commitments of families and courts, dynasties
and princes' courts bring the feminine portrayal in the west to the mythological
repertories of erotic recall, with Jupiter, father of all the gods that makes
pregnant girls and nymphs, and unarmed beauties, prone and supine. In the
modern struggle of the nude we find Manet and Picasso, anti-academic. The,
Olympia of Manet, presented at the Salon of Paris in 1865 and that had an
awful reception. The paint as we will see is iconographically linked to its 
model,
the Venus of Urbino by Tiziano, from which it takes several elements. The
most intriguing lunge that brings the ideal nude to its knees is “Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon” by Pablo Picasso, that made a strong impression over the friends
themselves of the artist that saw it in the studio. The “Demoiselles” mixes
masculine and feminine elements, white and black , opens to the new world,
that of the 'different'. Picasso was already aware that the respectable point
of the nude was in the female model-artist relationship, in being he a voyeur,
and indeed some great painters have portrayed the loved woman, seizing her
naked, without veils, obscene and erotic and idealizing, starting from the
nudes of Tiziano, from the Bethsabea at bathe by Rembrandt with her flabby
belly and the Helene Fourment of Rubens with the pellicle slipping away from
shoulders and the legs a little wide apart, till Guttuso and Grosz. The artist,
especially in this century, has given the nude, masculine and feminine, and
ostentation beyond any rule. Male muscle and feminine curves have already
invaded the every day imaginary.
Mensile di scienza medica e attualita`