Painting the human body, especially female nudes, has remained a favourite model for the artists since the primitive age. While choosing a model for the art, the artist of various fields do it for many purposes. The painters choosing human bodies as their models keep certain theories in their minds. Take the case of the radiating paintings of Venus. The nude paintings of Venus, the Goddess of love, personify love and harmony. In many a paintings she is shown with Mars, the God of war. The idea behind such depiction is to show the effort of love and the sense of harmony to restraint the impulse leading us to war. The purpose of the artist here is to pacify the warmonger living within us. By selecting the female nude as model for their art-pieces, the artists desire to connect themselves with the viewers emotionally. The painters wish convey the exact feeling they encounter while looking at the nude object. During the ancient time, whether it may be the paintings of Venus or work done on the alters of churches, the artists' primary motive remained the adoration of the beauty of human body, especially of the female body.
But by selecting the body of, mostly as the base for depiction of their art, the painters always encounter difficulties attached with the complexity and stigma attached with figurative painting in general and painting women in particular.
The master painter have tried depicting stories, mainly mythological through such paintings. Once we know the story depicted through the painting, the imagination that a painter had in mind becomes identified or clearer to our minds. After that the details of a paintings function as written words in a book.
The artists of the western countries, mainly European, seem unusually preoccupied with the painting of nude persons, women and men alike. They have made the human body an important, a key building block of their art. In Eastern countries, barring India, the nude paintings are still a taboo.
In modern time, the subject of 'Painting The Nude' has undergone a gradual liberation from academic constraints. However there were master painters in past, too, who painted both male and female nude figures and adorned the beauty of the human bodies.
