The Naked Truth about Victorian Bodies, Nudes, and Ideals of Beauty: 1850s Daguerreotypes Tell All

Nude Daguerreotypes, Body Hair, Venus, Courbet, Manet, Bougeureau and the Truth of Painting. From the 1850s as well as early photographs reveal almost all 19th century artist's models to have had ample body hair and yet before Manet and Courbet it is almost always left out of the paintings. Courbet's passionate devotion to a deeper realism that rejected centuries of idealism about the nature of beauty resulted in his scrapping many of the time honored conventions of painting. A sense of beauty less concerned with ideals and more with the nature of the human subject emerges. This video explores changes in the representation of Venus as long established painterly conventions give way to a more intimate fulness of de-idealized representation. I discuss nude and erotic Daguerreotypes from the 1850s Gustave Courbet Jules Lefebvre Alexandre Cabanel Théodore Chassériau Édouard Manet Daguerreotypes Underarm Hair Ingres Early Photography Giorgione Titian Lorenzo Lotto Bronzino