![]() ![]() ![]() She is naked as the spectator sees her." In this sense, an imagined (male) spectator is baked into the painting itself, encoding the male-dominated relations of a certain era into the very work of art. ![]() This, as Berger points out, is obviously sexist: while men are endowed with a certain confrontational power, the painted woman "is not naked as she is. In either case, however, their status is determined in response to an imagined viewer: in short, female nudity is always self-aware, and a woman's morality can be inferred from how she appears to respond to being seen naked. Some female nudes are self-consciously modest others are aware of their provocative immodesty as if winking to the spectator. As the tradition of painting female nudes developed, modesty-or lack thereof-became a way of signaling the values or intentions of the women being depicted. The women in these paintings aren't ashamed of their nudity in relation to their surroundings-they appear to be modest in relation to the spectator. ![]() Renaissance art in particular, with its emphasis on biblical stories such as the tale of Adam and Eve, tended to depict naked women (alongside men), privates neatly covered by well-placed fig leaves. One art-historical trope that Berger skillfully unpacks is the "modest" nude female. ![]()
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