Why is it that in ancient art they portray nudity most of the time?

i believe i heard somewhere that back then people thought nudity was a beautiful thing hence them having so many art pieces containing nudity

Because Levi jeans and T-shirts had yet to be invented…

lol…

WTF, I just nearly fell out of this cheap plastic chair…

laughing !!

I agree with irishtomboy on this one, because not only do they think that the body is beautiful but they did not mind or get “aroused” when seeing a person nude. This is because not only in art, but in society, the people were nude which they later got used to seeing people around naked all the time. Date back to the Cleopatra Era, she is sometimes depicted as nude because of her beauty but men weren’t as excited when seeing a woman’s breast in public as they do now days.

they believed that the body was a temple and they thought it should be proclaimed openly, and it was more formal and stuff, just more elegant and different. Like right now Abstract art is really in but in 50 years it will be crazy and people wil be asking similar questions to the one you have.

The naked body is natural and beautiful so naturally, artists would want to portray them. It was not as big of a deal as of yet. It was seen as art. I do believe there is a large difference in pornographic nudity and artistic nudity. The art you see don’t so much arouse you as allow you to appreciate the beauty of the human body, where as nudity that you see nowadays, well, bring forth a different kind of appreciation.

Ancient greeks believed their body is a temple. It is the absolute form of perfection, nature’s best creation. So they saw the human body as beautiful, graceful, and they wanted to express that trough art by showing the bare, nude body as nature created it. But, in spite the “the human body id perfect” belief, beauty has always had it’s norms.Norms or canons change in time. The first ancient greek canon for the ideal proportion of the body was 1/7 [the body’s height would be 7 times the lenght of the head, height including the head, of course]. Some time later, the canon was changed to 1/8, making the ideal man taller and giving him more grace. But the typical ideal body in ancient greek art was the athletic body. During the middle ages and Renaissance, the ideal women were kind of fat but yet fragile women, and for men it was kind of feminine men.

But then, nudity was considered taboo, sexuality was opressed more and more, and so nudity became worthy of shame not grace.