TEMPTATION - LUCIANO GASBARRI

As a genre, the nude is a complex issue to address due to its numerous variants, both formal and aesthetic and iconographic , and there are art historians who consider it one of the most important, if not the most important one in the history of Western art ; according to the Spanish historian, essayist and critic Francisco Calvo Serraller , «nudity is not only an art form, but it is the very explanation - or logic - of Western art: the dramatic point or crossroads between the natural and the heaven, between the ideal and the true, between the carnal and the spiritual, ultimately between the body and the soul» ^[1] . Javier Portús , art curator and conservator of the Prado Museum , also believes that «for centuries the nude has been the art form par excellence present in the West, being able to best express all the other values ​​through colour and pictorial material». ^[2] . Although often associated with eroticism , the nude can actually acquire various interpretations and alternative meanings, from that inherent in mythology and religion , to the study of anatomy or, finally, also - due to its intrinsic qualities - that of the maximum possible representation of the ideal (in the sense of good , as a principle or ethical value to be pursued) of Beauty and aesthetic perfection, as happens for example in the figurative art of ancient Greece . Its representation has varied according to the social and cultural values ​​of each historical era and each population, and just as for the Greeks the body was a source of pride, so for the Jews - and consequently for the subsequent Christianity - it revealed itself instead to be a source of extreme embarrassment, a condition of slaves and the miserable ^[3] . The study and artistic representation of the human body has been a constant throughout the history of art, from prehistory , with the Venus of Willendorf , to name just one of the best-known examples. One of the cultures in which the representation of artistic nudity most proliferated was that of the classical world in Greco-Roman antiquity, where it was quickly conceived as an ideal (as in the heroic nude ), aesthetic but also ethical, of perfection and "absolute beauty"; a concept that endured throughout classicism , largely influencing Western civilization 's perception not only of the nude but also of art as a whole. During the Middle Ages, artistic representation was limited to the most specifically religious and theological themes, based on passages from the Bible , the sacred Christian text ; only in this way could their representation in the various art forms be justified. With the beginning of the Renaissance , starting in the mid- 15th century, the new culture derived from humanism took a direction decidedly marked by an ever-increasing anthropocentrism ; this led to the return of the artistic nude in grand style after long centuries of concealment, thus placing historical-mythological subjects dating back to paganism alongside the usual religious subjects of the previous centuries, especially in the form of allegory . It was then in the 19th century , especially with Impressionism , that the nude began to lose its eminently iconographic character to be represented in its much more simply profane aesthetic qualities: the naked, sensual and self-referential image thus gradually took over. Studies on the nude as an artistic genre have focused on the analysis carried out by semiotics , first of all on the inherent relationship between the work and the spectator, as well as on the study of gender relations; feminism has criticised the use of the nude as an objectification of the form of the female human body which would thus confirm the dominance of patriarchal ideology within Western society. Artists such as Lucian Freud and Jenny Saville have developed a kind of non-idealized nude in an attempt to eliminate the traditional concept of nudity, seeking its essence beyond and outside the idea of ​​beauty and discriminating distinction given by gender identity. Luciano Gasbarri was born in 1940 in Chieti. He was a very popular artist on the Roman art scene in the 1980s and founded the Roman Neo-Impressionism and Unionism movements. He promoted the Pittori del Sole art group and was a student of Giorgio de Chirico. He exhibited his work in cities such as Paris and Miami and received over 200 awards throughout his career.

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