Beyond face values reviews Portraits: A History — and shares some amusing art history:
For example, until the 19th century the only permissible way an artist could paint a naked female portrait was for the sitter to pretend to be a goddess. Even Rubens’s blatant celebration of the sexiness of his young second wife was rendered respectable by deriving her pose from an ancient statue of Venus. Diane de Poitiers, posing starkers as the virgin goddess Diana, must be the cheekiest. She was both widowed and the mistress of Henry II at the time.It was Goya who broke the convention with his Naked Maja, “the first purely profane, life-sized female nude in Western art”. The picture was commissioned by a Spanish politician for his secret erotic collection, only gossip identifying the subject as the Duchess of Alba — a slur which so rankled with her family that 150 years later, in 1945, the duke had his ancestor’s remains exhumed, unfortunately to no conclusive proof.