L’ETERNO INCANTO DI VENERE

Images of the nude - female in particular - are now a customary spectacle. Few question how it came to this custom now of such frequency from to have worn out the disruptive value it had instead in the past. One may wonder how to such a result came about.

The play answers the possible question by tracing the different stages that have led to the current situation including the social, customary, and in some cases political causes that have accompanied the journey.

With a premise: the need to show nudity has always been there for many different sexual, symbolic, mythical reasons. This is shown first of all by archaic statuary, then by the great statues and frescoes of the Greco-Roman period. They were nudes representing nudity in and of itself but also nudity understood as a symbol of something else, for example a deity such as Venus. Venuses in fact came to be called these figures even though with the famous goddess of love they often had nothing to to do.

Very slowly, as the centuries went by, nudity was freed from the pretexts of its representation: whether mythical, historical or biblical.

From the second half of the 18th century a naked body began to be shown for what it is until the scandal caused by the famous painting (now on display at the Paris Musée d'Orsay) entitled: l'origine du monde.

The topical from occasion to start with is the centenary (1917) of the only solo exhibition he had in his lifetime from Modigliani, dedicated precisely to paintings that became (later) famous.