A 500-year history of reclining nudes

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Before the sixteenth century women were painted demurely clad in sheer gowns (below). Boticelli progressed a long way in his painting of the Birth of Venus (right) although he portrayed her very discretely. A reclining nude would have been considered going too far.	The Birth of Venus 1485 (detail)
Allessandro Boticelli Venus and Mars 1483
However, from 1500, painters gained enough acceptance to paint reclining nudes as long as they were associated with classical themes. Most were of Venus. It took another 400 years for the paintings to escape this classical license and even then was often painful for the artist. Manet's Olympia was roundly condemned even as late as 1863. The following paintings are in time sequence. The markets for painting.

1500
Giorgione - Sleeping Venus 1510	Bernardino Licinio - Venus turned away 1510
Lucas Cranach the Elder - Nymph & Fountain 1518	Palma Vecchio - Venus & Cupid in a Landscape 1524
Tiziano Vecellio (Titian) - Venus 1538	Rubens - Angelica and the Hermit 1626 - 1628
Nicholas Poussin - Sleeping Venus and Ciupid 1630	Rembrandt - Danae 1636
Diego Velasquez -Venus at her Mirror 1644	Francoise Boucher - Louise O'Murphy 1750
1800
Francisco de Goya - La Maja Desnuda 1797-1800	Francisco de Goya - La Maja vestida 1800-1803
The above paintings perhaps illustrate the public approach to nudes, if they were not in a classic or allegorical setting. At the turn of the 18th century Goya was forced to clothe the painting of his lover in the face of public outcry.
Ingres - La Grande Odalisque - 1814	Ingres - Venus with her slave circa 1820
Eugene Delacroix - Odalisque - 1845	Gustave Courbet - 1858
Gustave Courbet - 1858	Manet - Olympia 1863
Lawrence Alma-Tadema - The Tepidarium 1881	Pierre Auguste Renoir - about 1890
Pierre Auguste Renoir - 1890	Arthur Hacker - Playa and Philomenon 1897
Henri Toulouse-Lautrec - recling nude 1897 7	Gustave Brisgand (1880-1950)- reclining nude
1900
At the beginning of the 20th century paintings of women became franker, The painters painted their models as they saw them and the inhibition against the mons suddenly disappeared. After all, Greek pottery had shown the penis before Christ and Michaelangelo's David had a penis back in 1500. Women never had a mons until Courbets's suppressed painting at the end of the 19th century.
Zinaida Serebriakova 1884 - 1967 - nude	Egon Schiele - Female nude 1910
Amedeo Modigliani - 1917	Egon Schiele - reclining woman 1917
Tamara de Limpicka - 1925	Eugene Delacroix - nude reclining ona divan 1926
Matisse - the Blue Nude 1928	Pablo Picasso - nude in armchair 1929
Paul Delvaux - Nymphs 1938	Dimitri I Shmelev - Nude Study 1957
Voronov - nu 1968	Douglas Higgins (UK) - circa 1990
2000
After 2000 it appears that artists are torn between those returning to the classical muse and those inventing new minimalist styles. We need to wait a little longer to see what this century brings.
David Furr - Venus (Petta Longstaff) 2004	Bich Ngoc (Vietnam) Nude 6 2005
Sue Seidler-May (Australia) - 2005	Nagornov - Sleeping Venus 2005
	a photograph after the Velazquez Venus
Painted in workshops for the tourist (China) 2005	André Maier - Venus at her Mirror
The story isn't finished of course so it will be interesting to note what emerges in the future when the art of painting competes with digital graphics and photography. Furthermore, we may even be a population who is not content to wander around art galleries.
	Linda - Denver Art Museum (photo by John Graham)
The earliest of these paintings are in public domain by virtue of being over 100-years old, while those from 1900 on are shown as non-commercial publciity for their painters.