The Nude: The Cultural Rhetoric of the Body in the Art of Western Modernity

The Nude explores some of the principal ways that paintings of the nude function in the conflicted terrain of culture and society in Europe and America from the fifteenth through twentieth centuries, as set against questions about human sexuality that emerge around differences of class, gender, age, and race.

Richard Leppert is Morse Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor in the department of cultural studies and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota. His numerous books include Art and the Committed Eye: The Cultural Functions of Imagery, The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body, and, most recently, Essays on Music, an edition of selected essays by Theodore W. Adorno.