Original subtitles

(upbeat music)

- The nude is the most enduring subject in art.

For more than 20,000 years, images of the naked human body

have been at the very center of a long and complex saga.

It's hard to understand any of the major developments in art

without an understanding of the key role

played by changing depictions of naked men and women.

In this series, I'm going to explore

the ongoing significance of the nude,

what it tells us about various civilizations,

and what it tells us about ourselves

and the world in which we live.

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Today, nudity in art seems sexy because for most of us,

nudity is associated with sex.

But that's not always been the case.

In the past, the function of art

and artist changes dramatically.

And in order to understand nude images,

we need to look at them very carefully.

Sometimes they have a symbolically religious function.

They evoke gods or ancestors or fertility,

or sometimes even a way of warding off evil.

And the first example of this

can be dated back to the Stone Age.

The origins of the nude in art as we now understand it

was only revealed about a hundred years ago

in the Austrian town of Willendorf

where this curious female figure was uncovered.

She's from the paleolithic period,

so she's at least 25,000 years old.

There's no facial details,

but what we notice are voluptuous breasts

where her hands point to them, and in fact,

her arms seem to be resting on the top,

and a distended stomach that could show that she's pregnant.

Apart from that, there's very little else known about her.

There are other figures like this that have been discovered

from the paleolithic period all over the world.

But for various reasons,

this piece has assumed a huge power.

It currently resides in the Natural History Museum

in Vienna, but the British Museum have a copy

that they use for educational purposes,

and it's that, that I'm holding now.

There's all sorts of speculation

about what it might've been used for.

The image of fertility is very powerful,

and others have said that she's a goddess.

There's also interesting speculation

that it might well have been made by a woman,

that this presents a woman's eye view of the female body,

which if it's true is a really neat twist

on what's otherwise a male-dominated history of art.

She's a very mysterious object.

And she comes from a time

when the very story of art itself begins.

And in some ways, the history of the nude in art

can be traced to this simple enigmatic, powerful,

crude, but lovingly made little object.

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Over the next 20,000 years,

numerous cultures emerged, the greatest and most influential

as far as Western art, and therefore the nude

is concerned came from Egypt.

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In Egyptian art, much centers on the idea

of preservation for posterity.

That's why human bodies were mummified,

and also why sculptures were deemed to be so important,

as a way of keeping the soul alive through an image.

In fact, one Egyptian word for sculptor

translates as he who keeps alive.

In Egypt itself, nudity was considered pretty abhorrent

and not part of day-to-day life.

Therefore, not a large part of art.

Throughout history, the nude has of course

reflected the society from which it emerged.

The importance of Egypt to our story

lies more with its technique.

In sculpture, relief carving, and painting,

the human form was depicted in a standardized

even formulaic way, almost like painting by numbers,

so the representation could be repeated anywhere.

In Egyptian daily life, only children

appeared naked in public.

Likewise in art, adults remain clothed, with two exceptions.

One, in rare and furtively erotic carvings.

And secondly, in certain sculptures where fishermen,

laborers, and other workers or servants are portrayed naked,

with nudity used as a device to show social inferiority.

Here's another nude statue from around the same period,

highly abstracted and seemingly religious

rather than erotic in function.

It has no real personality or energy or emotion,

but it clearly tells us a lot

about the world in which it was produced.

Around the third millennium BC,

a very significant culture emerged in the Cycladic Islands

in the Aegean basin.

And although their function remains a mystery,

numerous small stone female nude sculptures

were subsequently discovered, like this one.

This one actually dates from about 2,000 years

before the birth of Christ.

But what we see is a work of art in stark contrast

to the Venus of Willendorf.

It's a female figure, but instead of the voluptuous

fertility of the Venus, what we see here

is something much more pared down.

Her face is a simple disk with a protuberance for a nose.

Her breasts are barely emerging bumps.

And her pudendae here is a simply incised triangle.

Turning it round, we see that there's very little detail.

Where the legs end, the back begins.

And it seems to me that this is emphatically a work

that was produced to be viewed from the front.

It's a work that seems to adhere to certain rules.

It's geometric, it's almost a series

of interlocking or simplified shapes.

And Cycladic art, like Egyptian, seems to be the result

of a very carefully calculated or worked out formula.

And also seems to be the result of a rigid,

very ordered society.

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About 500 years before the birth of Christ

comes the crucial moment in the history of the nude,

because Greek traders who've been to Egypt,

who've seen freestanding sculptures,

come back to the Greek islands and start to produce

a brand of art that is much closer to the naturalism

that we would recognize today.

And pieces like this here at the British Museum,

it's a korous, which is Greek for young boy or young man,

from about 475 BC, and perfectly emblematic of that idea.

Now, I'm not saying for a minute

that this is totally naturalistic.

The face in particular is very stylized,

but the body, well, it's almost sublime.

There's a sense of muscle and sinew,

of a dynamic, vibrant, pulsating, living body

buried somewhere close to the surface of the stone itself.

And instead of as the Egyptians had done

of producing stylized images where there are amalgamated

views of a body condensed into one,

what we have here is a body as if seen

from a fixed perspective, but it's a real natural body.

The maleness is crucial.

What this sculpture proclaims and what Greek sculpture

of this period in general proclaimed was the superiority

both of the male, this was a male-dominated society,

and of the Greeks themselves.

Why? What's happening?

Well, Greece at this time, and Athens in particular

was creating the first golden urban age.

In a single century from 500 BC to 400 BC,

Athens gave us democracy, philosophy, history,

science, drama, and art.

To be precise, humanist art.

Unlike the Egyptians, the Greeks

experimented and improvised.

And they created these statements of their own

racial and cultural superiority.

Thucydides talks of nudity as a mark of progress

that distinguishes the modern from the old-fashioned,

the Greek from the non-Greek.

This is crucially important.

For us, nudity is often only acceptable in art,

though discouraged in society at large.

In Greece, male nudity was acceptable, at the gym,

at athletics meetings, and at the baths and so on.

And therefore its portrayal is a reflection

of the society rather than of eroticism.

The Greek city-states were militaristic societies

despite their arts and sciences.

And it was on warfare that their success depended.

Soldiers and their physical prowess were key.

Statues glorified that male militaristic strength

and put it on a pedestal.

We can see that even more clearly with the discus thrower

by the Greek sculptor Myron.

This Roman copy of his original captures the attempts

to depict the man of action,

a sculpture naked and taught with athleticism,

energy, vitality, and dynamism.

It's another example of the developing craft

and technique of the period, five centuries before Christ,

but also a consistent subject matter, to make beautiful,

to glorify a healthy body of a fit young man.

The great philosopher Socrates, himself trained

as a sculptor, said that artists should represent

the workings of the soul by accurately observing

how feelings affect the body in action.

Such statues were then placed in public arenas,

such as gymnasiums, where the male clients,

working out with their dumbbells, could gaze in awe,

and perhaps feel just a little inferior.

- I think inevitably they were a form

of "Men's Health" for their time.

And I think possibly, you know, the man looking

at those images may well have felt slightly insecure

about their kind of ever-growing mid-rift,

post-age of 30 or whatever,

and being inspired to get back there in the gym

or on the running track again maybe.

Because obviously for that culture,

they were idealized body forms.

And anyone looking at them would probably

have compared their own body with those ideals.

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- The rise of the classic male nude in the fifth century BC

brings together a number of elements.

Firstly, it's about the rising self-confidence of an Athens

that's just defeated Persia.

Secondly, it's also about that military force,

and it's certainly true that the musculature

and the modeling of the figures in the fifth century

recall armor, recall the military youth

that had won that victory.

I think there's a very strong way in which the Greeks nudes

of the Classical period do represent a form

of what we might call body fascism, in the sense

that they represented the ideal form of a human being.

And that's very strong in a culture which conceives

of its gods also taking on human form.

So this form of a man also carried with it

the print of a god.

- A fantastic example is Alexander the Great

in the fourth century before Christ,

for the nude had become supremely political.

Man naked, unafraid, perfectly toned, strong,

showing self-mastery, and implying mastery over others.

Nakedness is complete freedom, and so complete power.

Here we see Alexander the Great, the Macedonian king

who conquered all of Greece and Persia,

asserting his personal power, with his portrait head

placed on a semi-nude and godlike body.

Ironically, however, it wasn't a male nude

that rocked the classical art world, but a female one.

Tucked away in the corner of the Louvre in Paris

is probably the most famous sculpture

of the ancient world, this one, the Aphrodite of Knidos,

produced 350 years before the birth of Christ.

And so famous was it that copies were made

and it was seen all over the ancient world.

Now, we've seen that for the Greeks,

male nudity was no problem.

It was widespread, socially acceptable,

and very much a reflection of the age

in which the art was produced.

But female nudity had a much more moral

and religious problem, and in fact, women and goddesses

were rarely if ever shown fully nude

until about the fourth century BC.

And this is reputedly the first full-length female nude.

It shows the goddess Aphrodite,

and was intended for religious purposes.

But when it was presented to the people

of the Island of Kos, they refused it

because she was fully nude,

and this was deemed to be immoral.

Attitudes to the female nude

were clearly different to those of the male.

In fact, Greek societies held that the female nude

was the male nude incomplete, and therefore inferior.

But this is the beginning of a kind of eroticism

that we can now recognize.

This is a highly idealized view of beauty

and a highly controlled and submissive image

of female sexuality.

The Island of Kos found it too hot to handle,

so another island, Knidos, said we'll have it.

And such was its fame that sailors from all over

the Mediterranean would come and stop off on the island

apparently to see this statue.

She was visible in the round.

She was visible from all angles.

And again, there's a rumor passed down that the caretaker

of the shrine used to open up the back view

so that her splendid buttocks could be seen

from a long way off.

The other reason for the fame or celebrity of this sculpture

is because of the artist who produced it,

a man called Praxiteles, an Athenian by birth,

who in some ways is the father

of classical and modern sculpture.

There are very few named or celebrated or famous artists

in the ancient world, and plenty write of Praxiteles's

legendary skill of being able to turn marble

into something very close to human flesh.

And that's evident here.

Originally, of course, this sculpture would've had a head

and arms, and we know that the model for it

was a woman called Phryne, a courtesan

with whom Praxiteles fell in love.

So not only is this a sculpture that commemorates

the goddess of love, but in some ways it's a monument

to individual artist's love,

and there's a personalized expression to a certain extent.

But in the end we're left with an idealized view of beauty.

And such is Praxiteles's reputation and skill

that in fact the Louvre have a whole room

devoted to his work.

And looking around it, you realize

that the nude is the major vehicle

through which that reputation is spread.

(mystical music)

The most famous classical sculpture now in the world

is this one, the Venus de Milo, here at the Louvre,

and alongside the Mona Lisa, the must-see works

for the millions of visitors

who come to this place every year.

Why is it so famous?

Well, when we first look at it,

there is something that's arresting about it.

There's no doubt it's sensual, that the lessons

of Praxiteles have been learnt, and in fact,

scholars initially thought that this was by Praxiteles.

Then they thought it was the fifth century BC,

then the third, and then maybe the first century BC.

And that's roughly where they've got it now,

but they're still counting.

And that elusiveness I think in some ways

contributes to the sculpture's appeal.

The drapery, which is a symbol I think in Greek art,

very much of skill, is rather beautifully done.

And there's a sense of a live sensual body emerging out.

The face is key, too, it's rather formulaic

in the way that it's produced, as a lot of Greek art was.

But the fact that she has a face in some ways

means that the public can get closer to her.

And those eyes, unlike the Mona Lisa's, which are meant

to follow you all the way around the room,

they stare off into the distance.

So there's always a sense of a woman,

a nude woman that can't quite be possessed.

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So what we're seeing is the eroticization

of the female nude.

For the first time in history,

the nude is becoming more openly and deliberately sexual.

This was accentuated by the painting of some statues,

known to be the faces of what we see

as white marble sculptures, which were boldly colored

with our eyes tinted blue and lips made red.

Bronze statues were likewise altered

and would've had eyes made of bone and glass paste,

simulated eyelashes, lips, and nipples of copper,

and silver teeth.

It's uncertain whether large parts of flesh

would also have been painted.

They may have been left free to show the natural beauty

of the marble, as is so apparent on the Venus de Milo.

She was found in 1820 on the Greek Island of Melos,

that was then being run by the Turks, by a French boat

that was looking for classical sculptures.

And they found her on a pile with a load of others

about to be melted down for limestone.

The arms seemingly had already gone at that stage.

And so that sense of her vulnerability,

the fragmentation of her,

the fact she was saved from obliteration,

I think contributed to the mystery of her and to her fame.

It also gives the work a sense of classical aging.

And for some, it fetishizes or concentrates us

on the torso itself.

Also in the 19th century, the French, an aspiring

imperial nation at that time, wanted a Greek art

to reinforce that sense of the imperial.

The British had just got Elgin's Marbles from the Parthenon.

The French needed classical sculptures.

And so this work was brought back, put here in the Louvre,

which was already the most famous celebrated

and large-scale museum in the world.

And so she became an icon, a symbol of French identity,

and was promoted in that way.

Also given the fact that the great neoclassical sculptor

Auguste Rodin praised her to the hilt

when he first saw her, and subsequently Salvador Dali,

the surrealist maverick, parodied her by producing a work

in wood where her body was a series of drawers.

She then started to gain a sense of notoriety.

And it's that as much as anything else

that makes this work so powerful.

In some ways, this is the nude as a symbol of museum power.

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The Greek Empire waned, to be replaced

by the power of the emerging Roman Empire.

But the idea of Greek art,

and the nude in particular, didn't diminish.

In fact, the Romans were totally enthralled

by the Greek ideal nude and made slavish copies of it.

And as Roman legions went to Gaul, to the Balkans,

to North Africa, all over the Western world in fact,

they took with them Greek nudes to put in public places,

wanting to exploit both images

of male strength and female eroticism.

- The Romans I think adopted Greek culture

for two principal reasons.

Firstly, Greek, and particularly Greek art,

offered them a language which Roman

republican sculpture didn't.

It offered them a language of individual power,

the naked male nude as ruler, as individual, as king.

That was very attractive for Roman emperors,

offering them a way of expressing their power and supremacy.

That really wasn't available in Roman art.

The Romans I think collected Greek sculpture

partly as an expression of their own superiority.

In a sense, it's the way in which American art galleries

collect British or European art,

because it's an expression of American cultural superiority

over an old world, which is partly finished,

but whose use is to be collected

and displayed in the new.

To display Greek sculpture in Rome was partly

to assert Roman superiority over Greece.

Greece was now good for a museum, but it was no longer

politically active or a military threat.

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- Subsequent cultures, often for religious reasons,

considered it a pious duty to smash any statue

of the heathen gods.

The sculptures in our museums are for the most part

only secondhand copies made for travelers and collectors

as souvenirs, and as decorations

for gardens or public baths.

But Roman copies of Greek statues do show us

some of the skill and the amazing naturalism and detail

which we know characterized the original works.

What we also know is that nude art remained

more or less unchanged while the Romans conquered

the Western world and founded their empire.

Most artists who worked in Rome were Greeks,

and most Roman collectors bought works

of the great Greek masters.

Based on their art, there's a common misconception

that the Greeks and Romans fought, ate, and slept naked,

which of course they didn't.

But it's fair to say that their attitudes to nudity

were very different to ours.

Often, however, we miss the point

because we're so influenced by our own definitions

of art, eroticism, and pornography.

Nevertheless, in first and second century Rome,

there was a relaxed attitude to nudity.

There was mixed public bathing, for example.

And these statues, frescoes, mosaics, and paintings

were all around, in public as much as in private.

Some were uncomfortable though with such imagery.

The debate within Roman society about the invasion

of all things Greek provides the first

clearly attested instance in European history

of debates over censorship.

Greek art, it was argued by some,

had a corrupting influence.

The fact that the pro-Greek lobby won the debate

had enormous implications for the course

of European culture, and specifically,

for the nude in Western art.

Images of the ideal nude human body

were widely disseminated throughout the Western world.

They were reflections of and emblems of

Greek and Roman civilizations.

But those classical civilizations were about to be overtaken

by a new force throughout the West,

which was to change everything.

Christianity.

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