Naked Authority

The human body, particularly the female body in the nineteenth-century, is central to Western painting. Images such as Delacroix's Liberty on the Barricades and Manet's Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe are so well known that the question of how the gendered body functions in them is often overlooked. In this detailed feminist art-historical study of the body in general and the nude in particular, Marcia Pointon explores the narrative structures of a series of major European and American paintings and other images, mapping her interpretations on the historiography of nineteenth-century painting and employing an innovative theoretical methodology to demonstrate how the visual representation of gendered bodies works to articulate power relations that are to be understood in terms of the symbolic and the psychic as part of the historical.