If you think of some of the greatest works of art in history, you’ll see that many of them depict male nudity in different ways: Michelangelo’s David, da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, Rodin’s The Thinker, Egon Schiele’s self-portraits, and even Robert Mapplethorpe’s nude photography show the wide spectrum of beauty in the male body. However, according to the Musée d’Orsay, only a few years ago, in 2012, the Leopold Museum in Vienna became the first museum in history to hold an exhibition dedicated to the appreciation of male nudity. This makes me wonder, why is it that we as a society are still reluctant to admire a man’s body or qualify it as beautiful? Why and when did an epitome of beauty turn instead into an object of shame? Perhaps it is because of the implicit vulnerability of a bare body, and standards of masculinity, especially from the nineteenth century onwards, have equalled vulnerability with weakness. But as we’re about to see, masculine beauty and nudity can also equal power, perfection, eroticism, and even self-love.
Lucian Freud, Man with Leg Up (1992)
Fabian Chairéz, Morena (2015)
The most established ideals of beauty can be traced back to the principles of ancient Greek and Roman art, especially the sculptures. In these cultures, the male body was admired. The ideal man was athletic and muscular, so gods and demigods, the epitome of perfection, were depicted with that type of body. This ideal made a comeback in the Italian Renaissance, not only with paintings that alluded to Greek and Roman myths, but also in religious art because, in a similar sense, the saints and Biblical figures had become the new symbol of perfection, both spiritual and physical.
Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam (1508-1512)
David LaChapelle, Would-Be Martyr and 72 Virgins (2008)
After an era of experimentation in the history of art, the ideals of Greek and Roman art were adopted once more by the Neoclassical painters of the eighteenth century. However, in this period, men didn’t look as strong and athletic as they did in the previous eras. Now, they had a different type of beauty. They had delicate bodies, barely-there muscles, and pale skin that showed they were almost never in the sun. This style represented the typical gentleman of the time: a wealthy man who didn’t do any physical work and liked to take care of his overall look. Although painters of this era were inspired by mythical themes, the figures in their paintings represented a type of beauty that was worlds away from the Renaissance ideal.
Nicolas Guy Brenet, Sleeping Endymion (1756)
Egon Schiele, Nude self-portrait (1916)
As you may have guessed, after a while, there was another “revolution” in the world of art and the beauty standards of those times. In 1848, an English group of painters rebelled against the Royal Academy’s promotion of Raphael as a model for artists to follow and founded the group of the Pre-Raphaelites. This movement gained strength in the 1860s, and the way they showed male beauty was through their connection with nature. They wanted to depict a “more natural” kind of beauty, so they made their paintings as realistic as possible, to the point that some of them even look like photographs.
Camille Félix Bellanger, Abel (1874-1875)
Kehinde Wiley, Death of Abel Study (2008)
The closer we get to our times, the more variety we find in depictions of masculine beauty. Over the years, artists have questioned how we see beauty, even how this ideal is often centered on a single type of man. In the twentieth century, our ideas about beauty and perfection went through a major shift, which fortunately has started to change our view of the world too. On the one hand, we have painters such as Egon Schiele, whose erotic approach to the human body made us realize that a body’s “imperfection” and rawness can be beautiful too. On the other hand, the world started to embrace new artists who depicted other forms of masculine beauty.
Fabián Chairéz, from El jardín de las delicias, (2015)
Lars Deike, Self-love (2013)
The human body is worthy of admiration. That’s why it keeps reappearing and taking over works of art, always in different shapes and forms. Even though masculine beauty tends to be ignored, it has gained an important place in the art world, both honoring the body and defying the standards imposed on it by society. These paintings show men can be graceful and elegant, strong yet delicate, imperfect yet beautiful. Now, let’s hope that the new ways and portrayals of masculine beauty we see in the future are even more diverse.
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