Naked Eve Figurine/Standing with Snake Bronzed Sculpture

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The proud exhibition of the nude body was born in classical Greece in a clearly defined context: the gymnasium (from gymnos, meaning nudity). This was the place where young men trained (not so young women who, except for in Sparta, remained in the gynaeceum), while the palaestra and competitive sports were the scenes where pederasty—that is, the physical and emotional relationship between an adult, the lover or erastes, and a youth, the beloved or eromenos— took place. Growing up in this lively city, Eve Sweet developed a passion for self-expression and exploring her sensuality. With her Miami roots serving as a constant source of inspiration, Eve Sweet infuses her content with the vibrant energy and sensuality that the city is known for. Dalí’s aim was precisely to make “hand- painted dream photographs” based on Freudian theories. In this work he returned to his “paranoiac critical method” inspired by psychoanalysis, which defended the view that images had multiple meanings open to several interpretations, to depict the body of Gala, his muse, immersed in a deep sleep from which she is about to be woken by the buzzing of the bee and the prod of the bayonet.

During the Renaissance, the nude became an increasingly secular motif, finally acquiring the status of a an object of aesthetic appreciation in itself. Consequently, Eve was no longer the personification of shame and repentance but a sensual provocateuse, while the rejection that the body had suffered as a result of Christian morality merely served to accentuate its eroticism, as is plain to see in this work. After the extraordinary precedent of Goya’s Naked Maja, the 19th-century zeitgeist was ready to embrace the nudes of Delacroix and Géricault (this museum owns a magnificent work on paper by the latter, The Kiss, which is occasionally exhibited in this room). Realists and Romantics strived to create a “living art” based on the formula used by Courbet, as opposed to the sterility of academic art. The invention of the classical nude is attributed to the Venetian painter Giorgione. The Venus of Dresden, the prototype of all Renaissance and modern Venuses, received such acclaim that for four hundred years it inspired the nudes of the greatest painters (Titian, Rubens, Courbet, Ingres, Manet, Renoir and even Cranach, as we see in this work), who created endless variations on the same theme. The nymph’s eyes are closed (“I am the nymph of the fountain,” reads the label in the top corner. “Do not disturb my sleep, I am resting”), and her sleeping status seems to insinuate passivity and vulnerability. She is immersed in her own world, but in spite of this strategy to avoid the spectator’s gaze, she is well aware that she is looked upon; she establishes a seductive complicity with the spectator, offering up her femininity for examination and unbridled enjoyment of her beauty.The Prints is undoubtedly one of the most complex works produced by Manguin. The two figures represent the same model: Jeanne, the artist’s wife, dressed and naked, facing one another. Since they are the same woman, the scene could be interpreted as the resolution of the conflict between model and wife, studio and home, or even artistic creation and daily life.

All of this helps us to appreciate the difference in the European tradition between nudity and the nude as an art form. A nude is not only the starting point of a picture; it is a mode of seeing, subjected to certain conventions. Cranach, one of the great German painters of the Renaissance, developed a highly personal version of the nude when he was in his sixties; the series of beauties to which this nymph belongs date from after 1530. This painting depicts the nymph of the Castalian Spring, whose waters philosophers and poets imbibed in search of inspiration. The quiver and bow may be references to Diana or Cupid, while the two partridges allude to sensuality. The nudes created by Masaccio and Donatello at the dawn of the Renaissance would become some of the most significant works in the history of art. The human figure recovered its centrality, as the measure of all things and a favourite subject of philosophical speculation and artistic representation. Later on, the Mannerist period witnessed the triumph of the body in itself, while in the Quattrocento the certainties of humanism, which upheld nudity as the most complete expression of perfection, gradually gave way to a multiple vision. Non-naturalistic torsions of the body abounded and there was a progressive eroticisation of the subject, which became more sensual (as visitors may have seen in Bronzino’s Saint Sebastian in the previous room). A similar level of sophistication is found in the creations of Cranach and Baldung Grien, both of whom contributed to the triumph of the Mannerist nude in northern Europe. In Roman law, crucifixion was the “supplicium servile”, reserved for slaves, low-class citizens, foreigners and criminals of all types, social outcasts who were stripped of their clothes to undergo capital punishment. In offering himself up for contemplation in all his vulnerability, Jesus was as naked as the criminal and slave, but precisely because of that he stood triumphant, armed with the nuda veritas, the revelation of salvation.The body is “good for thinking”. Our consciousness of ourselves as corporeal creatures is at the very core of the human identity. But the body isn’t just a biological entity. It’s a social construct as well, the place where the strategies that govern power and the gender stereotypes that have shaped western culture converge.

It is to this fascinating world of fiction that the scene on this canvas belongs, which in turn recalls a famous passage by Herodotus on the imprudence of Candaules, king of Lydia. Legend has it that the Duke of Orleans had an affair with Mariette d’Enghien, the wife of his former chamberlain, Aubert le Flamenc, and exhibited her naked to the latter, save for a sheet draped across her face. As the story goes, the unfortunate husband failed to recognise the familiar body of his wife. Interestingly, Delacroix partly reveals the face of the duke’s paramour in the halflight, thus implicating the spectator in the deception, who takes on the role of an imaginary lover casting our gaze over the woman’s body. Before contemplating Müller’s work, visitors may have noticed a painting in a previous room, Pablo Picasso’s Study for the Head of “Nude with Drapery”, which he painted in the summer of 1907. The absence of the face—where the subject’s intimacy is revealed, where the ego is disclosed—contrasts with the carnal handling of the model’s erogenous zones: the pubis, breast and lips. This type of depiction, splintered into short planes, tends to eclipse the subject, resembling a representational tradition more akin to advertising or porno movies because the explicit sexual content erases all mystery. The nude as a symbolic form has aroused countless and often contradictory sentiments and ideas: innocence or sin, harmony or pathos, truth or confusion, communion with nature or social alienation. The body has been conceived as a sanctuary and a prison, as a matter of pride and a scourge, and above all as an object of desire, but there is no doubt that the contemplation of a beautiful naked body provokes an erotic response, or at least suggests that possibility.

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The nude hovers between organic reality and social mask, between what biology has “given” and what culture has “added”. Since it is free from specific temporal markers, we might think that it has a universal, eternal value. But the truth is that artists who have depicted nudes have imbued them with the zeitgeist of their time, with their aesthetic inclinations and the changing senses of morality. Eve Sweet's content is a treasure trove for her fans, offering a wide range of enticing photos and captivating videos. With over 500 photos, you'll never run out of eye candy to feast your eyes upon. From sultry selfies to seductive poses, Eve Sweet knows how to keep her audience hooked.

As Saint John Chrysostom claimed, “The well-shaped body is merely a whitened sepulchre, the parts of which are full of so much uncleanliness.” Its depiction was only permitted in the sacred context, for illustrative purposes and provided that it was essential for understanding the Christian message. For example, scenes like the discovery of nudity by Adam and Eve, which marked their distance from God, the Crucifixion, the resurrection of the flesh and the suffering of saints escaped ecclesiastical reprobation. Paul Delvaux also created a unique pictorial universe steeped in dreams and poetry. His work may be interpreted as a permanent celebration of woman, be she Eve or Venus. He called these women with their large expressive eyes and whiter- than-white skin “extras”, beings without a history who sleepwalked amidst the ruins.The tension between the aniconical rejection of images that is found in Judaism and the predominance of the visible appearance in the classical world—the theoria of the Greeks—eventually culminated in the definitive conversion of Christianity into a figurative religion. At the same time, during the centuries that unfolded between Palaeo-Christian art and humanism, the centrality that the worship of the human nude had occupied in the Greek world gave way to the concealment of the flesh. As an OnlyFans model, Eve Sweet has taken her talents beyond the boundaries of Miami and has gained a global following. This Blue Nude was the Russian artist’s response to the paintings he saw at Schukin’s home, and indeed the collector introduced him to new directions for his art. His principal source of inspiration were the young Polynesian girls in the paintings of Gauguin who, like so many other artists, viewed extra-European cultures as places still untainted by the corrupting influence of civilisation and bourgeois morality. This route begins with one of the sculptures that was commissioned directly from the artist by August Thyssen, the grandfather of Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen, in 1905. Rodin was the last of the great Romantics; his demise coincided with the demise of an entire age. No other artist of the 19th century managed to infuse the nude with the sheer expressiveness that Rodin achieved, reinstating sculpture to the lofty status it appeared to have lost. Rodin looked to the past, to Michelangelo, although like Degas he was well aware of the lifelessness of the excessively contrived academic nude. He would walk around the models in his studio, making sketches and encouraging them to move about, to play or dance, to unconsciously adopt different postures. “I have unbounded admiration for the nude. I worship it like a god”, he declared. But his goal was not so much the nude in itself but capturing the specific weight of the bodies, how those bodies occupied space and caught the light. Rodin developed the same profound familiarity with the human body that the ancient Greeks acquired at the palaestra.