Female Nude in Baroque Art

Following the Renaissance, Europe’s 17th to 18th–century Baroque period is defined by ornate, fanciful imagery and continued elevation of Classical art. The Baroque female nude was not spared from intricacies that exceeded those of its Renaissance predecessors. While the Renaissance figure is often soft and round, womanly Baroque forms display deep lines that emphasize muscles or rolls in skin. Those deep lines transfer to the unnaturally wrinkly, overly-folded cloth with which the Baroque painter lightly covered his or her nude. Compare, for example, Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1534) to Rebrandt’s Danaë (1636), or the figures in Correggio’s Leda and the Swan (c. 1532) to Boucher’s The Four Seasons, Summer (1755).