Story of female nude is laid bare

IMAGES of the naked female body are as old as art itself - cave paintings and figurines date from about 24,000BC - but the way in which women's bodies are portrayed has changed dramatically through the centuries.

Those like the "Venus" of Willendorf stress the pregnant female body - they have tiny featureless heads, and large maternal breasts and bellies. They celebrate woman as the primary source of life, not, as can be the case more often these days, as an object of male pleasure.

A more recognisable female nude appears in ancient Greece - where motherhood and sexual desire were divided between different divinities. Aphrodite, goddess of sexuality, was shown as a beautiful woman with no body hair. This became the template for later depictions of Venus, her Roman name. But as the Roman empire gave way to medieval Christendom such images were forgotten or suppressed. Christianity had a huge effect on the nude - because of its negative attitude to sexuality generally and women in particular. The Church held women responsible for original sin (eating the apple in Eden); so in medieval art, Venus is always chastely clothed.

However, as the Renaissance got going at the start of the 15th century, spectacular male and female nudes based on classical models began to dominate the arts again. This went hand in hand with the revival of Plato - daringly, philosophers argued that sexual love could be a path to divine love, since God created the human body in his own image.

Titian's luscious Venus Rising - the centrepiece of a new show at the National Gallery of Scotland - is one of the most perfect of these images -Venus as a living, soft, human woman. All the painter's skill goes to make the hair silky, the skin alive, the sea shining: the erotic and the divine meshed perfectly together.

It is the erotic, though, that dominated the later Renaissance - fashionable aristocrats like the French king's mistress, Diane de Poitiers, could have themselves depicted with bare breasts and jewellery. This sort of unclassical image is the real ancestor of today's airbrushed Playmate.

By 1600 things were changing again. The Flemish artist Spranger created nudes with pubic hair - a landmark moment. And Rembrandt followed Titian's lead, producing fleshier nudes, based on close observation of real, imperfect women.

Still a nude with a recognisable head remained shocking. When Pauline Bonaparte commissioned Canova to sculpt her as a reclining Venus, contemporaries jeered at the mismatch between the idealised marble body and the princess's head on top. It's the sort of thing celebrities have more recently found happening to them against their will through computer technology and the internet. In the 19th century, Manet's painting of two women picnicking naked was scandalous because they were accompanied by two men in modern dress - making it impossible to read the image as a classical scene. These were the first naked, as opposed to nude, women in art, and so identified as prostitutes.

Manet's later Olympia in the pose of Venus made this even clearer - Olympia was a well-known courtesan. Her image spoke directly about conditions in the new industrial cities, where many women found themselves working as prostitutes.

The image of a real naked woman then cannot be seen as a "Venus": she has to be seen as a specific human, baring herself for the (male) viewer.

By 1900, there was a roaring trade in photographs of this kind and many early experiments in moving images used the scenario of the voyeur: these were popular saucy entertainments, with titles like What The Butler Saw, not a million miles from the tone of the modern tabloid. Mainstream cinema was also quick to appreciate the huge sales potential of sex on screen; stars from Theda Bara to Jane Russell shown in eye-poppingly scanty attire: new Venuses for the 20th century.

By the 1950s, the image of the naked (or near-naked) woman was everywhere, selling cars, soap and soup, soft-core in Playboy, hard-core in imported porn. Feminists protested that these images degraded women, presenting the female body as a consumable object of fantasy. As the vast landscape of internet porn-sites demonstrates, they had a point.

At the same time, our culture experienced a sea-change in attitudes to women and their images: some positive (it's OK to breastfeed in public), others less so.

In the last decade, the phenomenon of "lads" magazines, openly focused on soft-core nudity, marked a sort of high-water point of the backlash against feminism.

It raises again the troubling question of how and why the mass-media encourages men to see real women as if they were consumable images. In this sense, maybe the most revelatory work in the gallery's new show is by Jane Brettle.

Her photographs show famous nudes as artworks undergoing restoration; images which compel us to recognise the nude as an artificial construction, and so unravel its confusion with living women.

• Venus Rising is at the National Gallery of Scotland until May 28, admission free. Dr Louise Milne is a lecturer is visual culture and critical theory at Edinburgh College of Art and lecturer in critical theory at Napier University. She will give a talk, the Symbolism and Meaning of the Female Nude, on May 5 at the Hawthornden Lecture Theatre at the Weston Link at 12.45pm