The Nude

The Nude

One of the greatest of all works of art history - The most richly illustrated edition ever

Art historian, author and presenter of the hugely influential series Civilisation, Kenneth Clark possessed a profound knowledge and appreciation of art, and the ability to communicate it. The Nude is considered his best book. In this classic work he shows how, through the centuries, the depiction of the human body has remained the pinnacle of Western art. Clark was the first art historian to consider the distinction between the ‘naked’ and the ‘nude’. In his now-famous definition, the former implies a huddled and defenceless body, while the latter is a balanced and confident form that has been, for centuries, of central importance in Western art. The ‘nude’ is, he explains, not just a subject but an art form, invented by the greeks in the 5th century BC, ‘just as opera is an art form invented in 17th-century italy’. It shows the human body as a serious subject of contemplation: often idealised, yet real, and arousing feelings varying from desire to pathos and awe.

From the striding, athletic kouroi of ancient greece to the sculptures of Henry Moore, Clark leads us through over 2,000 years of Western art. The Greeks were the first to use the nude to celebrate the divinity of man, whether by portraying strength and harmony (Apollo) or beauty and desire (Aphrodite). During the Middle ages, the human body was no longer considered worthy of celebration. But in 15th- and 16th-century Italy, it came gloriously to the fore again. The great artists of the renaissance such as Giorgione, Titian, Correggio, Botticelli and Raphael – ‘the supreme master of Venus’ – reinvented the female nudes of classical antiquity, frequently by breaking with convention, as when Titian showed his Venus of Urbino in a contemporary domestic setting. Meanwhile the greek apollos were reborn as the titanic male nudes of Michelangelo. From Velásquez’s Rokeby Venus to rubens’s Three Graces and Boucher’s Diana Bathing, mythology provided rich inspiration in the later renaissance and the 18th century. Later, as classical principles were discarded, the nude still survived, and Matisse’s Blue Nude and Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon represent the starting point of 20th-century art’s fascination with the subject.

The Nude illuminates its subject’s different associations through the centuries, from ‘energy’ – as seen in the glorious flying Zephyrs in Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus and Spartan Girls by Degas – to ‘Pathos’, exemplified by Michelangelo’s Pietà and the Deposition by Rubens. It explains why, despite the Christian horror of nakedness, the undraped figure of Christ was finally accepted as a symbol of Christianity. We also learn why Greek sculptures of the female nude are extremely rare in the 5th century BC, why Manet’s paintings of Olympia and Déjeuner sur l’herbe were considered so shocking, and why renoir’s honeymoon trip to rome and Naples so profoundly influenced his art. The vividness of Clark’s prose is astonishing, whether he is describing the greek ideal where ‘physical beauty is one with strength, grace, gentleness and benevolence’, likening the torso of Michelangelo’s David to ‘the groundswell of some distant storm’, or talking of how, in gothic art, ‘the bulb-like women and root-like men seem to have been dragged out of the protective darkness in which the human body had lain muffled for a thousand years.’ He understands the relationship between historical circumstance and individual genius and describes both with equal insight. In doing so, he gives us a new way of seeing art.

In this new Folio edition, 180 integrated illustrations include paintings and sculptures by Praxiteles, Cimabue, Leonardo da vinci, botticelli, Pisanello, Michelangelo, grünewald, Dürer, Cranach, Watteau, Boucher, Ingres, David, Degas, Cézanne and Picasso, among many others. as well as Clark’s own notes, a full bibliography and index, there is a newly commissioned introduction by Charles Saumarez Smith, director of the National Gallery – a post that Clark held for 12 years. Saumarez Smith describes how the book took shape over the decades of Clark’s distinguished career, and praises his unique gifts both as a critic and a communicator: ‘throughout The Nude, one is very conscious of travelling in the company of someone of remarkably wide and humane learning, but always lightly worn.’