CULTURE The Conversation“No other culture has obsessed
about the naked body and its
sexuality in the way the west
has since the ancient Greeks”
GETTY^ IMAGESour millions to see it. I think that Michelangelo was, in many
ways, trying to recapture some of the sense of the classical
body as being a version of citizenly virtue. But the citizens of
Florence didn’t think that. They threw things at it, and within
a few weeks they had fitted it with a little belt of low-hanging
leaves, in order to disguise its genitals. They remained covered
up till the very end of the 19th century.Can looking at non-western art help us understand why
western art was so fascinated by the nude for so long?
Looking at non-western cultures puts western culture very
much into perspective – and, you might almost say, into its
place. When we were putting the series together, we decided
not to do a complete world tour of naked bodies in art. That’s
not because there aren’t the most amazing representations of
the naked human body in almost every culture you can find
across the planet, but because we felt strongly that there wasn’t
another culture that quite obsessed about
the naked body and its sexuality in the
way that western culture has done since
the ancient Greeks.
In the west, for example, it’s often
assumed that a basic, central part of
training for young artists will be to draw
the naked body. And we wanted to show
that, if you look at other cultures, they’re
not doing that. I think that we in the
west are weirdly fascinated with nudity,
whereas other cultures view the naked
body in a way that is much less sexualised
and much less fetishised.
When you look at a wonderful Yoruba
headdress from Nigeria featuring a naked
female, it’s ver y clear that it’s an object
celebrating community and women’s role
at the centre of the community. That’s
significantly different from most of the
ways in which the west has treated the
female nude. Another of those bigquestions is why the west has gone down this route – and,
again, it’s ver y difficult to say. But asking that question is an
important first step: to show people that, when viewed from
the outside, the path that the west has gone down doesn’t look
so obvious and natural.Your documentary also asks how considering the nude might
make us understand how we see ourselves as humans more
generally. How did you go about exploring that subject?
We wanted to point out that, in the west, we have very strange
boundaries about what we think counts as a ‘nude’, and that
there are lots of other naked bodies that we need to put back
into the category.
In the documentary, for instance, we explore the body of
Jesus. If you think about western urban culture, the place in
which you see the most naked bodies outside of the art gallery
is the church. The figure of the crucified Jesus, while not
absolutely nude, is often effectively naked.
But it still seems slightly odd to talk about
the ‘nude Jesus’, so it was interesting to
explore why such images haven’t become
part of that categor y.
We visited the British Museum with its
former director Neil MacGregor to look at
some amazing Michelangelo drawings, and
he was very clear that the body of Jesus has
been crucial and formative in the way in
which the west thinks about nakedness and
nudity. That’s obvious, in a way, because
Christianity is a religion whose central
paradox is that God made man – and so,
in a sense, you have to explore the extent
to which Jesus was a man and the extent
to which he was a sexual being. There are
some extraordinary drawings in which, not
put too fine a point on it, there’s not much
doubt that Jesus has got an erection. That’s
not smutty; it’s an important way of saying
that yes, Jesus was a man in every sense.“It’s not a new discov-
ery to say that nudes
prompt male desire- people have known
this for centuries”
Hear more of Beard’s thoughts on our
podcast, now out three times a week
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