Nudity in Art
The nude body is as natural as one's first breath, and as profoundly beautiful as anything in nature. It is something to be celebrated, revered and enjoyed as part of a healthy life and spirit.
Whatever your size, shape, age or disfigurement, you are beautiful and a wonder to behold. We at Body Casting Sydney are in awe of the uniqueness of each and everyone one of us. You are one of a kind. Although there are billions of human beings, there is only one of you. You are your body and it is worthy.
The Greek masters attached great importance to the naked body because it expressed their sense of human wholeness, of spirit and body as one. In the Middle Ages Christian dogma, together with the denunciations of the pleasures of the senses and the condemnation of woman, transformed the body from an image of divine perfection to an object of shame. The Greek proud heroic body became the humiliated body of Adam or Eve, huddled with the consciousness of sin. In the Renaissance, thinkers and artists rediscovered the beauty and dignity of the human body, believed to be the visible externalisation of spirit.
Nudes have been the subject of the art masters such as Michelangelo, Titian, Rembrandt, Manet, and Picasso. The nude in art is a living language of visual expression. Wrapping the human form in shame alienates us from our own bodies. Paradoxically, we live in a culture obsessed with engineering the perfect figure: through relentlessly working out at the gym, tummy-tucks, acid peels, face-lifts and extreme diets. Shame and obsession both deny the reality of the imperfect, yet still beautiful in its imperfections, human body. We know some vital connection is broken when 14 year olds look in the mirror and see their skeletal bodies as too fat. Perhaps art offers us a chance to break through the process of alienation, to see once more the grace and truth of the real body—weighed by age, swollen with pregnancy, bent, sagging, flawed—a body through which we see the spirit in all its pain and joy.
Excerpt "Full of Grace and Truth" by Svetlana Mintcheva
"The true essence of art is beauty, joined with the sensuality of the nude, is often confused with vulgarity. Nudity is always disquieting, instigating and surprising. So the artist, both in painting and in sculpture, in dancing or in photography, discovers in the nude a profound link with the pureness of being. Sensuality stimulates creativity in every sense. Sensuality also evokes love, passion and the creation of man. This is why nudity moves us so profoundly."
Quote by Ariano Cavalcanti de Paula
670 Nude Masterpieces by the Greatest Artists of Art History (Painters, Sculptors and Photographers).
More about the history of life casting
