INTRODUCTION
This is not an historical survey of the female nude. Although such a history might place particular artists and images within a range of social and artistic contexts, ultimately it would still leave the category of the female nude intact, perpetuating its existence as a discrete area of art historical study, its boundaries defined by its subject matter and medium. The reader who comes to this book expecting a survey of art will therefore be surprised by certain exclusions and inclusions. A number of artists who are conventionally associated with the female nude are passed over in silence, whereas other work is considered which is undoubtedly less familiar within the canon of art history. The book is rather an attempt to examine the female nude as a means of gaining access to a much wider (and, I would argue, far more significant) range of issues concerning the female body and cultural value, representation, feminism and cultural politics, and the definition and regulation of the obscene.

Anyone who examines the history of western art must be struck by the prevalence of images of the female body. More than any other subject, the female nude connotes 'Art'. The framed image of a female body, hung on the wall of an art gallery, is shorthand for art more generally; it is an icon of western culture, a symbol of civilization and accomplishment. But how and why did the female nude acquire this status? And how does the image of the female body displayed in the gallery relate to other images of the female body produced within mass culture? These are the types of questions that are addressed in the following pages.

During the time that I have worked on this project, I have frequently been overwhelmed by the vastness of the subject and have longed for a topic with clear and limited historical parameters. The material covered in this book ranges from Plato to postmodernism, but in spite of the difficulties implicit in dealing with such a broad historical scope, I have always felt committed to addressing the more general philosophical issues raised by the female nude, as well as to introducing, at various points in the text, specific historical case-studies. Part of this commitment to more general and theoretical argument lies in the fact that, up to this time, feminist art history has not yet produced a wide-ranging examination of the meanings, values and assumptions that have been and continue to be propagated by the female nude within patriarchal culture. Although there has recently been a number of fascinating feminist studies of particular artists or works, 1 these studies are relatively atomized and it is still possible to work within a period in the absence of any critical framework for discussing visual representations of the female body. As a result, a book such as Kenneth Clark's The Nude has managed to attain an astonishingly extended life, without meeting any serious or sustained challenge to its critical premises. To formulate a feminist history of the female nude has thus been to rely on isolated historical studies, or texts that are produced from within the same patriarchal culture from which the images themselves may emanate. The aims of this book are thus twofold: to set up a general theoretical framework for further historical study of the female nude and to elaborate and specify this argument through the discussion of specific historical cases.

There is a theme that runs throughout this book; at various points it becomes more explicit, but it is always present as an underlying structure. The theme is frames and framing. The text is divided into three main parts which offer different frameworks for examining the visual representation of the female body. Part I is called 'Theorizing the Female Nude' and is an attempt to establish a general theoretical framework. The claim of this book is that the female nude is not simply one subject among a whole range of subjects that artists have chosen to depict within the history of art; rather, it should be recognized as a particularly significant motif within western art and aesthetics. The representation of the female body within the forms and frames of high art is a metaphor for the value and significance of art generally. It symbolizes the transformation of the base matter of nature into the elevated forms of culture and the spirit. The female nude can thus be understood as a means of containing femininity and female sexuality. If, as will be argued in Part I, the female body has been regarded as unformed, undifferentiated matter, then the procedures and conventions of high art are one way of controlling this unruly body and placing it within the securing boundaries of aesthetic discourse.

The female nude not only proposes particular definitions of the female body, but also sets in place specific norms of viewing and viewers. The Enlightenment ideal of the contemplative viewing of an art object works to reinforce the unity and integrity of the viewing subject and sets up an opposition between the perfection of art and the disruption and incompletion of non-art, or obscenity. The obscene body is the body without borders or containment and obscenity is representation that moves and arouses the viewer rather than bringing about stillness and wholeness. The representation of the female body can therefore be seen as a discourse on the subject and is at the core of the history of western aesthetics...