Il nudo maschile

Speranz

Edward Lucie-Smith.

"By Jacques-Louis David's time, art had already become far more secular -- his most typical male nudes occur in paintings which excite the viewer not to religious contemplation but to heroic virtue."

"The relationship to classical art -- Greek sculpture -- is still present. In fact, it is stronger and more self-conscious than ever. But there is also a tendency to treat Greco-Roman myth and legend as a source of moral instruction fully on the level of scripture."

"The nudity of Jacques-Louis David's figures is usually to be seen as a guarantee of moral purity."

"The heroic element in David's "Leonidas", though as visible to us as the same quality in the Sistine Ceiling, was from the artist's viewpoint a purely accidental by-product."

"And David's contemporary audiences, like Michelangelo's, may have experienced this eroticism subliminally, but was protected from a more conscious awareness by the strenght of the artistic and social conventions which structured reactions to 'history paintings' of this type."