Norm Quotes Mike: An Obvious Oversight

After posting the last entry about Rockwell's Rosie the Riveter one of my students pointed out on facebook that he has directly borrowed from Michelangelo's "The Prophet Isaiah" from the Sistine Ceiling.  Good eye Logan!

But did you know that Raphael grabbed the pose from Michelangelo first?  The story goes that when the ceiling was still under wraps in 1511 the architect and painter Donato Bramante snuck Raphael into the chapel to sneak a peek.  Raphael's "School of Athens" still in progress at the time, he is said to have scraped off the fresco to start it over again inspired by Michelangelo's style.  His figure of Heraclitus is said to be modeled after his rival Michelangelo who hated Raphael as a plagiarist.   

Does the Female Nude Really Dominate Art History?

Recently I was having a discussion with a very close friend about why Western Art has become a politically incorrect area of focus.  "Well it is true that there have been a disproportionate number of female nudes in art history." she said, which I accepted, assuming she was probably right.  But later that night I tested the hypothesis.

Titian, Bacchus and Ariadne, 1520-23, National Gallery, London 176 x 191 cm

Yes, I know that one isolated sample is not conclusive, but my business is painting not statistics.  I just thought you might want to know the results of my own experiment.

I began with the first page of H.W. Janson's History of Art, probably the most referenced art historical source, counting every clearly distinguishable nude male torso and female torso, excluding babies.

Out of 361 torsos distinguishable to me as male or female, here is what I found:

Nude male torsos:  240
Nude female torsos:  121

That's almost twice as many males as females.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Le Grande Odalisque. 1814. Oil on canvas. Louvre, Paris, France.

In both genders an effort was usually made to hide or obscure the loins in frontal poses, in fact more than I supposed.  There were a few exceptions in which no attempt was made which I also numbered:

Males:  51
Females:  18

A scene from Genesis on the Sistine Ceiling fresoes by Michelangelo, 1508-1512

Only two images in the book could be definitively classified as a"female nude" in subject matter.  How many female nudes can the average person without an art degree even recall by name?  So where does the notion come from that Art History is so obsessed with the female nude?  I have my own opinions, but they are less interesting to me than the fact that the assumption appears to be untrue. Maybe if I picked another book I'd find different results, but...I don't have time!  I expect a survey of modern art would yield different results considering the likes of Picasso, Gaugin, Modigliani, and Matisse.