The Figure

The human figure, and particularly the nude, has been a central preoccupation of art since antiquity, evolving from a symbol of fertility and idealized perfection in prehistoric and ancient art to a vehicle for exploring beauty, morality, eroticism, and identity across every subsequent era. Classical Greek sculptors such as Myron and Praxiteles established the nude — especially the athletic male body and, later, the goddess Aphrodite — as an embodiment of harmony, virtue, and idealized form, a tradition intensified by Hellenistic pathos in works like Laocoön and His Sons. Christianity's medieval suppression of nudity, which reduced the body to a marker of sin except in biblical contexts like Adam and Eve, gave way to the Renaissance recovery of classical ideals in Donatello's bronze David and Michelangelo's monumental figures, and the female nude was reintroduced through mythological cover in works such as Botticelli's Birth of Venus. Baroque and Rococo painters emphasized sensuous movement and pleasure, Neoclassicism revived austere classical form, and by the nineteenth century artists like Manet (Olympia, 1863) and Goya (The Nude Maja) began confronting viewers with unidealized, contemporary, and controversially direct depictions of the naked body. Modern and contemporary artists — from Egon Schiele's raw expressionism to Lucian Freud's unflinching flesh and Jenny Saville's monumental, politically charged bodies — have continued to challenge idealization and the historical 'male gaze,' and figurative nude works remain among the very highest achievers at auction, as seen in the record prices commanded by Amedeo Modigliani's reclining nudes.