Resumen de Art History Reviewed IX: Kenneth Clark's 'The Nude. A Study of Ideal Art', 1956
The writer revisits Kenneth Clark's 1956 book The Nude. A study of Ideal Art. This was the first book on a subject central to the history of art which was both accessible to a broad audience and made a serious contribution to scholarship. The real story Clark tells is that of the survival of the human body as the central subject for art since classical antiquity. He considers the history of art as a diaspora of classical prototypes, against which swarmed an “alternative convention.” From today's perspective, the absence of any account of technology is the book's most problematic blind spot, yet the faith that Clark kept in the human body, at a time when political appropriation and technological intervention seemed to have destroyed any vestige of classical unity, has been answered by more recent art, in which the body remains central.
