common paintings
Posted in Uncategorized on 02/24/2010 08:09 pm by admin
I went to a local art museum and I was shocked to see so many paintings from the 13th-18th centuries where the?
women were painted with one breast showing. Does anyone know why this was common practice? Does it mean anything in particular?
Thanks!
it was largely symbolic (maybe feeding or mothering or the like) but because nudity was taboo, most of these paintings were comissioned by men so they could ogle the nudity, but they would could hide their lecherous intent under the guise of the picture being “symbolic”, a bit like buying Playboy for the ‘articles’.
Nude women were painted for the sole purpose of the male gaze. thats pretty much it.
I would suggest reading John Berger’s thesis from the 1972 television series and accompanying published book “Ways of Seeing”.
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/gaze/gaze08.html
from wiki:
In many European societies between the Renaissance and the nineteenth century, breast exposure was more acceptable than it is today, since a woman’s bared legs, ankles, or shoulders were considered to be more risqué than her exposed breasts.
Because aristocratic and upper-class women could maintain youthful-looking bosoms by employing wet nurses to breastfeed their children, the exposed breast could even be a status symbol, and was often displayed as a sign of beauty, wealth, or social position. The bared breast was even seen to invoke associations with the nude sculptures of classical Greece that were exerting a huge influence on art, sculpture, and architecture of the period.
Breast-baring female fashions have been traced to fifteenth-century courtesan Agnès Sorel, mistress to Charles VII of France, whose gowns in the French court sometimes exposed one or both of her breasts. (Jean Fouquet’s portrayal of the Virgin Mary with her left breast uncovered is believed to have taken Sorel as a model.)
Similar fashions became popular in England during the seventeenth century when they were worn by Queen Mary II and by Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I of England, for whom architect Inigo Jones designed a masque costume that fully revealed both of her breasts.
From the Victorian period onward, however, social attitudes shifted to mandate the concealment of women’s breasts. Although a degree of liberalization took place in the later twentieth century, contemporary Western societies still generally take a somewhat unfavorable view of toplessness, with the very term “topless” often carrying the connotation of sexual licentiousness or deliberate defiance of cultural taboo
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