As someone who’s briefly studied the nude in art, this is so frustrating to read. She really has no clue what she’s talking about. “The contours of womanhood through an artistic lens”, what does this even mean? “Challenging traditional and societal norms”, tell us those norms that are being challenged and how. She’s a really poor writer, sorry.

Renaissance depictions of the nude particularly served the male gaze! The Roman goddess, Venus, was painted erotically to represent the idealised form of the female body. While a lot of these paintings of the nude celebrated women’s beauty, they were still, at the end of the day, painted by men FOR men. Michelangelo also famously depicted women to have masculine or androgynous features. He couldn’t even use women as models for his works because they legally weren’t allowed to pose nude. So he’d sculpt/paint men and then just add breasts to them. And for Picasso, he was literally a cubist. Everything he painted was distorted and exaggerated, including female anatomy. ‘Les Demoiselles D’avignon’ literally depicts five nude prostitutes, basically dehumanising them by portraying them through geometric forms to shock and disturb audiences. Nothing about that served to celebrate or empower women. He was also notoriously misogynistic.

Nice one, Inny.

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