Exquisite Arts Magazine Vol 7: Fall Issue- Oct/2017 | Page 51

REALLY OFFENSIVE?
the Greeks, such gruesome representation of anyone,
the gods or mortals of Athens wasn’t just unappealing,
but also to be frowned upon. when the nude image or sculpture is made with the
objective of arousal.
Nudity in Greece antiquity was the perfect way to
disassociate through creative means from the realities
of commotions and wars that plagued them back then.
Nude art was the perfect way of bringing to be a wholly
new aesthetic world. Whether it’s the three-inch figure
of the Trojan War hero, Ajax, in a sexually aroused
state, Diego Velázquez's Rokeby Venus painting, the
life-size marble of the Sleeping Hermaphroditus,
Correggio's Danaё, Francisco de Goya's La maja
desnuda, Michelangelo's David or Kerri-Anne
Mesner's life drawings, all of which span over a
thousand years, nude art has always been with us and a
topic as dividing as the delicate, artistic measures of
symmetry in these pieces of art. NUDITY IS TO HUMAN
NUDE ART HAS ITS PLACE HIGHLY COMPLEX IN DEPTH
Is nudity in art really offensive? From the beginning of
time if the accounts of the Bible are anything to go by,
man and woman were begotten brazenly naked. In that
state they were considered by God to be perfect. We
were probably created to remain nude and live that way
without shame. The little matter of offense comes in In art, naked images and figures are a reflection of a
highly complex depth of formal ideas, cultural norms
and philosophical concerns. The modern artistic
innovation of the nude followed the time of the
renaissance when man was at perhaps his most
philosophically intelligent, discovering, creating,
From birth, man comes into the world without clothes
and no human can claim to be clean if she or he took a
bath in her pajamas or tuxedo. Apart from the
mysterious divine conception of Jesus by Mary, no
other human being alive or dead can claim to have been
born by parents who did not display their nude or some
of it. Nakedness and being human goes together. The
complexity of the human body has always awe-inspired
artists, common folk to children learning and
questioning things. Kids are always asking what a
particular part of the body is, what its work is and why
it has to be covered. But, nudity is way complex and
critical than this.
Page 50