Head Of A Girl, Alois Erdtelt. (1851-1911)

Night and Her Daughter Sleep 1902 Mary L. Macomber Born: Fall River, Massachusetts 1861 Died: Boston, Massachusetts 1916

Charles Courtney Curran

Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau) by John Singer Sargent, 1883–84 (detail)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

John Singer Sargent created this portrait with the intention of turning it into the highlight of his professional career but was instead met with unprecedented criticism when he first exhibited it in public. The reason behind this was the fact that the sitter was visibly wearing make-up (notice the red lips and the difference of colour between the sitter’s ear and her skin), a device widely used by contemporary actresses and prostitutes. Make-up was seen as an artifice reserved for women of ill repute and for a high society woman to be represented in an official portrait wearing it was considered scandalous at best. The sitter for this painting refused to buy it due to the negative comments that it had received and it thus ended up staying in Sargent’s studio for years.

Ambroise Frédeau, The Blessed Guillaume de Toulouse Tormented by Demons ( 1657 )

John Everett Millais - Joan of Arc (1865)

Franz Von Stuck

Allo specchio, Giacomo-Grosso. Italian (1860 - 1938)

Roberto Ferri, The Ritual, 2016.

Diadumenè (1885, revised 1893). Sir Edward John Poynter (British, 1836-1919). Oil on canvas.

Diadumenè, derived from the Esquiline Venus and named after the Diadumenos of Polyclitus, originally exhibited at the RA in 1885 as a nude, inspired a debate regarding the nude in art. Poynter, despite his strong stance against his critics, was compelled to add drapery. The small bronze statue in the background echoes Diadumenè’s pose, but its still undraped state is a reminder of Poynter’s original intentions for the work.

Roberto Ferri