Eyeing the Sculptural Nude:
A Short History of Public Response in the Modern Era
by Lynne D. Ambrosini
Possibly there has been no field of art more bedeviled with public incomprehension than that of the modern sculptural nude, especially in America. In 2002, when former Attorney General John Ashcroft ordered curtains to cover a pair of nude allegorical sculptures at the United States Department of Justice, he unwittingly added a new episode to a long-playing drama: "Nude Meets Unprepared Viewers." This now-familiar issue of discomfort with the nude has not always been with us. In Western art, sculptural nudity goes back to early civilizations that predated the ancient Greeks, whose statues of unclothed gods, heroes, and athletes manifested their society's reverence for the beauty of the human body. After the rise of Christianity, Western culture never fully recaptured its earlier serene acceptance of the nude. The era of the fig leaf had begun. Nudes may be intended by their makers as heroic, commemorative, or ideal, but audiences in Europe and America have sometimes found them immodest or immoral.
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