page_title: Depictions of nudity
section_title: Nudity in art
hierarchical_section_title: Depictions of nudity / Nudity in art
context_page_description: Depictions of nudity include visual representations of nudity throughout history, in disciplines including the arts and sciences. Nudity is restricted in most societies, but some depictions of nudity may serve a recognized social function. Clothing also serves as a significant part of interpersonal communication, and a lack of clothing in public is expected to have a social context. In Western societies, the three contexts that are easily recognized by a majority of individuals are art, pornography, and information or science. Any image not easily fitting into one of these categories may be misinterpreted, leading to disputes.
context_section_description: Nudity in art – painting, sculpture and more recently photography – has generally reflected social standards of the time in aesthetics and modesty/morality. At all times in human history, the human body has been one of the principal subjects for artists. It has been represented in paintings and statues since prehistory. Both male and female nude depictions were common in antiquity, especially in ancient Greece. Depictions of the naked body have often been used in symbolic ways, as an extended metaphor for complex and multifaceted concepts. The Roman goddess Venus, whose functions encompassed love, beauty, sex, fertility and prosperity, was central to many religious festivals in ancient Rome, and was venerated under numerous cult titles. The Romans adapted the myths and iconography of her Greek counterpart, Aphrodite, in their art and literature.
  In the later classical tradition of the West, Venus was one of the most widely depicted deities of Greco-Roman mythology as the embodiment of love and sexuality. In ancient Rome, she embodied love, beauty, enticement, seduction, and persuasive female charm among the community of immortal gods; in Latin orthography, her name is indistinguishable from the noun venus ("sexual love" and "sexual desire"), from which it derives.
  Venus has been described both as perhaps "the most original creation of the Roman pantheon" and "an ill-defined and assimilative" native goddess, combined "with a strange and exotic Aphrodite." Her cults may symbolize the genuine charm and seduction of the divine by mortals, in contrast to the formal, contractual relations between most members of Rome's official pantheon and the state, and the unofficial, illicit manipulation of divine forces through magic.
  Mythological tales and stories from the Greek and Roman mythology depicting naked gods were often used as theme for the different paintings, like the scene where the two Leucippides, Leucippus daughters are abducted by Castor and Pollux. Leucippus, son of Gorgophone and Perieres, was the father of Phoebe and Hilaeira, and also of Arsinoe, mother (in some versions of the myth) of Asclepius, and Eriopis (daughter by Apollo) by his wife Philodice, daughter of Inachus.
  Castor and Pollux abducted and married Phoebe and Hilaeira, the daughters of Leucippus. In return, Idas and Lynceus, nephews of Leucippus and rival suitors, killed Castor. Polydeuces was granted immortality by Zeus, and further persuaded Zeus to share his gift with Castor.
  A myth is a sacred narrative explaining how the world and humankind assumed their present form. The myth can be defined as an "ideology in narrative form." Myths may arise as either truthful depictions or overelaborated accounts of historical events, as allegory for or personification of natural phenomena, or as an explanation of ritual. They are used to convey religious or idealized experience, to establish behavioral models, and to teach.
  Beside gods and goddesses the depiction of athletes and competitors and the winners of the antique competitions and Olympics were often depicted in antiquity. The bronze statue of a young athlete, found in the sea near Marathon (Attic coast), a work of the Praxiteles school, (ca. 340-330 B.C.) is only one of many examples. In Classical Greece and Rome, public nakedness was accepted in the context of public bathing or athletics. The Greek word gymnasium means "a place to be naked." Athletes commonly competed nude, but many city-states allowed no female participants at those events, Sparta being a notable exception.
  The mythological themes were often used as the painter's subjects not only in the antiquity but they remained an archetypal topic during the centuries and a genre of painting with mythological subjects developed were these themes were used and reused as subjects of the artists. One example of the antique mythological themes is Danaë from Greek mythology, the mother of Perseus, who is usually depicted nude meeting her lover, depicting the scene when Zeus came to her in the form of golden rain or in the form of a shower of gold and im
caption: The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus by Rubens
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