A History of Women’s Bare Breasts in Western Art

From 23,000 BC to the 21st Century

Nude carvings and paintings have always been a feature of European art. Right from the moment Stone Age hunters learned how to carve rock and ivory or how to shape clay and fire it to produce little statues with surprising detail, the female nude — whether meant to inspire, titillate or just represent how women dressed in that period — has been a constant archetype.

A modern-day observer might be startled as to how much the ideal proportions of women’s bodies have evolved over time and space. And no other body part has been artistically reinterpreted into as many shapes as a woman’s breasts. To begin, we must first take a look at the oldest of them all — nude figurines from the Stone Age.

Stone Age Clay Figurines and Carvings

The oldest European carvings of women, going back over 25,000 years, were always nude and — by today’s standards — corpulently obese. Not only do they depict unclothed women (walking around naked was of course, likely acceptable in those days) but their body proportions would be considered unattractive by todays’ fashion ideals.

The ideal Stone Age female body had heavy, sagging breasts, a rounded, flabby belly and broad childbearing hips. These were the bodies of women who bore and nursed many healthy children, whose breasts were heavy with life-giving milk.

Naturally, some researchers speculate that they might have been carvings of a fertility goddess, others say they were self-portraits made by women, hence the lack of a face (mirrors had not yet been invented) and the large breasts, stomach and hips were carved from the point of view of a woman looking down on herself. Yet others say that they were the equivalent of the pinup magazines and naughty Internet images that we have today.

Minoan Women: The 2nd Millennium BC

Minoan art from Crete depicts the most sophisticated clothing in the ancient Western World. In contrast to the loosely-draped dresses of later Greek and Roman civilisation, Minoan women wore flamboyant flounced skirts in vibrant colours. Their bare breasts were completely exposed by tight, elegantly-fitted bodices.

The women depicted in murals and carvings are either priestesses conducting rituals or ordinary people going about their daily lives. This suggests that women’s breasts were not sexualized at all during this period and that Minoan art simply replicates what women actually wore in real life.

Ancient Greece and Rome

Moving along several thousand years to the Graeco-Roman era — something strange happens. Women’s breasts in all forms of art begin disappearing, hidden underneath draped chitons and himations. Meanwhile, nudity is celebrated in a form that is heroically muscular and male, complete with anatomically-correct penises and their accompaniments.

The only naked breasts in statues are those adorning statues of goddesses and even then a piece of modest drapery or a strategically-placed hand often obscures their genitals. For the first time in history, women’s breasts and genitals begin to be viewed as shameful (unless you were a Goddess, such as Aphrodite!) And with the increasing sense of shame came the accompanying sexualisation.

Concealed bodies, rendered close to a women’s natural proportions, became focal targets of lust and objectification. This new sexualisation of women’s breasts can be linked directly to their concealment in Greek and later Roman art. This trend would be inherited by Europeans in the Dark Ages and beyond. They would continue even to this day, over a millennium and a half later.

The Middle Ages

With the arrival of Christianity, women’s bodies were subject to yet another round of shaming. The Christian values of celibacy and chastity meant that overt displays any kind of nudity was frowned upon. However, in the private world of illuminated manuscripts accessible only to the privileged, nudes both male and female began to appear discretely in miniatures peeking out from among the ornate letters. One exception is the Madonna lactans or the “breastfeeding Madonna”. Here, one exposed breast signified that the Madonna was feeding the infant Jesus.

It was not uncommon for women to nurse their babies in public and exposing one breast was perfectly acceptable (after all, that was what breasts were meant for in the first place). The ideal mediaeval breast shape was “small, white, round like apples, hard, firm, and wide apart”. Also, during this period a slightly swollen belly was considered desirable!

As can be seen from this painting of Agnès Sorel, chief mistress of King Charles VII of France, the ideal woman was frightfully pale-skinned (at least by 21st Century standards) and had a high forehead thanks to the custom of plucking hair from the hairline.

The Renaissance

During the Renaissance, women’s fashions including low-cut dresses with exposed cleavage became common all over Europe. Bodices became more décolleté with large amounts of flesh showing, breasts once again began to be openly sexualised and breast-baring nudes became even more widespread in paintings and statues. The ideal breast shape was now more natural-looking, in contrast to the round, strangely cup-shaped orbs favoured during the mediaeval period.

The 17th and 18th Centuries

During the Baroque era, nudes were just as common as before but this time the female shape was more natural and less idealised in form. Peter Paul Rubens and Rembrandt had a penchant for drawing heavier women with soft, natural breasts.

Low-cut dresses on women were universal, first with the fashionably stiff-petticoated, hoop-skirted and panniered dresses of the Baroque and Rococo period. Then, after the French Revolution, the fashion for cleavage-revealing bodices would continue on the lighter Grecian dresses of the Regency era in England and the First Empire in France.

But very soon, at the dawn of Queen Victoria’s reign, breasts would be covered up again, at least during the day.

The Victorian Era

During the straight-laced Victorian era, bare breasts once again went undercover. Daytime dresses had high necklines and every part of a woman’s body except her head and hands were covered up. Paintings of nude women, bare breasts and all, were allowed so long as they depicted Classical subjects — once again, women’s bosoms were idealised. They appeared as the porcelain-perfect appendages of ancient Roman Goddesses peering out from paintings, as the snow-white endowments of nymphs being pursued by satyrs and fauns. Ephemeral nude statues inspired by this ideal popped up everywhere.

The annual glut of paintings of idealized nude women in the Paris Salon was satirized by Honoré Daumier in an 1864 lithograph with the caption “This year Venuses again…always Venuses!…as if there really were women built like that!”.

While idealised, fantasy images of frolicking nude goddesses and ethereal nymphs were acceptable to an increasingly-conservative Victorian public, paintings of actual naked women were considered shocking. One such painting was Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass) — originally titled Le Bain (The Bath) — a large oil on canvas painting by Édouard Manet created between 1862 and 1863. It depicts a female nude and a scantily-dressed female bather at a picnic with two fully-dressed men in a rural setting. The curves of the female subjects’ bodies were drawn in realistic fashion, devoid of the artificial idealisms of earlier periods.

A couple of decades later ironically enough, a painting of a single woman in a cleavage-revealing dress would cause an uproar in Paris.

In 1884, an American artist exhibited a painting of a well-known socialite at the Paris Salon. The young woman in the painting was wearing a corseted black dress with tiny jeweled straps that revealed a wide expanse of bosom, a plunging neckline along with her arms and shoulders. A partially-exposed bosom during that time was acceptable in intimate environments — balls and formal dinners — but never during the day and certainly never meant to be exhibited in the presence of large numbers of strangers.

Both the artist and the model were humiliated. The artist, none other than the accomplished John Singer Sargent, was forced to leave for London.

Such was the power of a woman revealing too much skin during the Victorian era!

The 20th Century

No mention of the early 20th century can be complete without touching on the invention of the cinema. And during those early years, the first woman to appear completely nude (with her hair artistically arranged to obscure her breasts and genitals) in film was Annette Kellerman.

Fortunately for the actress, audiences of the time had become more open to the idea of nudity on the silver screen, a trend that would continue to expand and become firmly entrenched in Western cinema in the coming decades.

From the 1960s onwards, nudity had become common in all forms of art and increasingly even in modern television, although compared to Europe, North American broadcasting tended to be less lenient with full frontal female nudity. But the female breast would not be hidden for long.

The invention of the Internet and readily-available pornographic materials of all kinds has made nudity more acceptable than ever before, at least within certain contexts. This expansion was aided by one modern innovation in health science — cosmetic surgery.

For the first time in history, female models and artistes of all kinds could have their bodies surgically modified to suit whatever body shape happened to be in vogue.

Yet the irony is that the bare female breast, while considerably freer nowadays than during the Victorian era, remains highly sexualized, especially in North America.

The future

The nude, whether male or female is here to stay in contemporary art and will continue to do so, remaining a fixture for centuries to come. However, time will tell whether or not street fashions will revert to the unapologetically breast-baring styles of the ancient Minoans. Or perhaps bosoms will be covered up once again as social mores evolve with the times.

References:

Alan F. Dixson; Barnaby J. Dixson (2011). “Venus Figurines of the European Paleolithic: Symbols of Fertility or Attractiveness?”. Journal of Anthropology. 2011: 1–11.

Bonfante, Larissa (1989). “Nudity as a Costume in Classical Art”. American Journal of Archaeology. Archaeological Institute of America. 93 (4): 543–570

Eck, Beth A. (2001). “Nudity and Framing: Classifying Art, Pornography, Information, and Ambiguity”. Sociological Forum. 16 (4): 603–32

MOMA (2012). “Naked Before the Camera”. Metropolitan Museum of Art.