The Female Body and the Gaze in Art History

Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

In 1975, Mulvey published her essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. In it, she examines how Hollywood cinema of the Golden Age generates visual pleasure. Drawing on Sigmund Freud’s concept of scopophilia—that is, the pleasure derived from looking at others—she describes cinema as a space in which viewers experience pleasure through the gaze. In this context, men and women are assigned different roles. Drawing on psychoanalytic theories, she describes the gaze as a central component of cinematic perception. Whilst male characters usually appear as active subjects who direct the gaze and drive the plot forward, female characters are primarily looked at and staged as objects of visual and sexual desire. The audience is thereby led to identify with the male perspective. In this way, a visual order emerges in which the man is positioned as the subject of the gaze and the woman as its object. She formulates the famous contrast as: ‘woman as image, man as bearer of the gaze’.

The Art History of the Female Body

A similar tension can also be observed in historical depictions of the female nude. Numerous nude female figurines from the Early Palaeolithic have survived, which are often interpreted as symbols of fertility or femininity. In ancient Greece, the female body appeared primarily in the form of goddesses, nymphs and muses as the embodiment of beauty and divine power. In contrast to the already widespread heroic male nude, it remained, for the most part, veiled. Praxiteles’ Aphrodite of Cnidus, created in the 4th century BC, was one of the first monumental sculptures of a completely nude female figure and, at the same time, a landmark work in the history of ancient art. The sculpture caused a sensation and became the starting point for a long tradition of nude depictions of Aphrodite and Venus. In Roman art, this gave rise, amongst other things, to the iconographic type of the modest Venus, Venus pudica. 

In late antiquity and the Middle Ages, which were shaped by Christianity, the female body came increasingly under religious and moral scrutiny. In monotheism, the sacred representation of the feminine shifted increasingly towards the cult of the Virgin Mary, whose icons adhered to strict theological doctrines regarding imagery. The Virgin Mary embodies an ideal of purity and chastity, whilst female nudity was associated with sin, sexuality and shame, as seen, for example, in depictions of Eve and the Fall of Man. 

During the Renaissance and the Baroque period, ancient notions of beauty and harmony returned in depictions of the female body. Revealing depictions are now found primarily in the context of mythology and eroticism and are increasingly directed at the viewer’s gaze. Works such as Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus or Titian’s Venus of Urbino present the naked body less as a religious problem and more as an aesthetic and erotic motif. 

Gustave Courbet’s *L’Origine du monde* from 1866 marks a radical break with this idealisation. Instead of depicting a mythological figure or goddess, Courbet presents an anonymous and fragmented body that itself becomes the object of the gaze. Artists such as Matisse and Picasso increasingly broke away from traditional notions of beauty and experimented with form and perspective. At the same time, the female nude in the modern era remained closely linked to notions of desire and availability.

Between the Gaze and Self-Determination

Gaze as Critique, Medium, Inspiration and Resistance

Today, women artists are more visible and numerous in the art world than ever before, and yet structural and social barriers persist. Female artists have been present throughout many eras, yet they have had to fight for access to training and the freedom to practise independently, and in art history they have often – if at all – been categorised as craftswomen, assistants, models or muses. The history of the female body is thus also a history of its external determination, which continues to this day in art-historical research. 

And this brings us back to the male gaze: it is neither present in every image nor exclusively tied to male artists. It can be employed consciously, subverted ironically or rejected entirely. Such theories are therefore relevant not only for film or art analysis, but also for us as viewers and art lovers. They sharpen our own perspective and help us to become more aware of the notions of the body, gender and desire conveyed in images, and how these shape our own way of seeing.