Goddesses and courtesans: six centuries of the female body in art
This is a book that many of us might like to have on our coffee tables – beautifully produced, not too heavy and full of pictures of pretty ladies, many of them with no clothes on. Its purpose is to show not only how artists have viewed the female body from the Renaissance to the present but also to explain how this body has been used to express both emotion and the attitudes of the day. Take Hiran Powers’s 1845 marble sculpture of a naked woman in chains, entitled ‘The Greek Slave’. This appeared after Britain had abolished slavery but before the American Civil War had put an end to
