Language of the Nude

This was an interesting exhibit...
It was pretty cool to see real drawings done by some pretty famous artists.
Seeing drawings that old was more amusing than the drawings themselves.  I valued them based on their old age.  Even though there were only a few I actually liked, I still enjoyed them because I had never seen drawings that old up close without looking online or in books.
It's amazing that they managed to survive for this long.
I feel like these weren't the best representations of the art made during those times,
but it is understandable that they were the only ones we were able to get an exhibition of since I'm sure they are all pretty valuable.  The fact that the drawings have been through many wars and traveled so far is pretty fascinating.
It's interesting that the master artists were the ones that set the rules and decided what was acceptable in terms of realism.  The funny thing is that their idea of realism wasn't even based on reality, since they used males as models for female drawings.  The use of male models might be the reason why the women still look so masculine in many of the drawings.  I noticed that the difference between the earlier works and the more recent ones was manly found in the poses.  The older ones seemed more faint and relaxed and the new ones seemed more expressive and action oriented.
These drawings also depicted the ideal human bodies of their time because many of the drawings were not realistic with today's standards.  This might be way off topic, but it reminds me of beauty magazines today and how all the representations of beauty we see are airbrushed.  Even the "beautiful" people today are completely airbrushed, and even though we know this, we still accept them in the photos as representation of the ideal.
The medium of representing beauty has changed over the years, but it seems that altering reality while keeping things "realistic" has continued to be the trend.
:)