• portrayal by Mannerists

    TITLE: Mannerism
    ...classicism and the idealized naturalism of High Renaissance art as practiced by Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael in the first two decades of the 16th century. In the portrayal of the human nude, the standards of formal complexity had been set by Michelangelo, and the norm of idealized beauty by Raphael. But in the work of these artists’ Mannerist successors, an obsession with style and...
  • work of

    • Bonnard

      TITLE: Pierre Bonnard
    • Freud

      TITLE: Lucian Freud
      Freud’s many studies of the nude make up a major part of his work. For 50 years he posed friends, neighbours, models, and family members in his studio, often as if strewn casually across dilapidated furniture, and confronted their nude flesh with both keen interest and a kind of clinical impassiveness. In this work he typically used a limited tonal range of creamy tans and browns. In studies...
    • Lachaise

      TITLE: Gaston Lachaise
      French-born American sculptor known for his massively proportioned female nudes.
    • Maillol

      TITLE: Aristide Maillol
      French sculptor, painter, and printmaker whose monumental statues of female nudes display a concern for mass and rigorous formal analysis.
    • Manzù

      TITLE: Giacomo Manzù
      ...on religious themes. In 1938 he sculpted the figure of a Roman Catholic cardinal, initiating a series of more than 50 seated or standing cardinals. He also sculpted many tender portrayals of female nudes. Manzù’s most noteworthy work of the war years was Francesca, a seated nude that won the Grand Prix of the Rome Quadriennale in 1942.
    • Pearlstein

      TITLE: Philip Pearlstein
      American painter whose portraits and images of nude models in studio settings reinvigorated the tradition of realist figure painting.
    • Renoir

      TITLE: Pierre-Auguste Renoir: Later years
      SECTION: Later years
      ...still embodied a cheerful attitude toward life. His themes became more personal and intimate, focusing on portraits of his wife, his children, and Gabrielle, his maid, who often also posed for his nude paintings. His still lifes were composed of flowers and fruits from his own garden, and the landscapes were those that surrounded him. The nudes, especially, reflect the serenity that he found...