Male Nude Art Gallery Throughout History,has male figures with stylized riggings appear in prehistoric cave paintings and petroglyphs, and turn up again as clay figurines in Babylonian erotic art, these early representations of the unclad male body can hardly be described as "male nudes" in a classical sense. The male nude, as commonly understood by art historians, makes its first appearance as the monumental smiling young athlete in Archaic Greek sculpture around 500 BC. This rigidly ceremonial figure evolved into the Apollonian "beautiful youth"a form of fantasy art ín the early Classical period, as we see in marble statue of the Apollo Belvedere and the paintings of Hot naked bodybuilder, type athletic youths on Attic Black-Figure pottery. The Athenian ideal of self-control -- the highest virtue for a man in Plato's day -- was artistically represented on the classical male body by a small unerect penis or "microphallus." A long erect penis or ""macrophallus"" did not signal extreme virility to the Ancient Greeks (as it commonly does today in homoerotic prints or drawings). Rather, it signified a loss of proper manhood, which is why it most commonly appeared between the shaggy legs of drunken satyrs and other frenzied male followers of the wine-god Dionysus. As passionate admirers of Greek art, the Ancient Romans copied these two male body-types in their own art -- as the erotic frescoes that survived the eruption of Vesuvius clearly attest with their numerous scenes of Olympian lovemaking and Bacchanalian orgy. Even Romans also saw the male figures of Apollonian beauty and Dionysian ecstasy in relation to the local cults of fertility so important in the pagan religion of Rome. Christian art in the Middle Ages and Renaissance identified the Apollonian body with its idealized poise and baby-like penis with the body of Adam in a state of innocence. The Dionysian male body with its looming erection, by contrast, was reinterpreted as a sign of the Devil. Demons, such as those Michelangelo painted in his fresco of the Last Judgment in the Vatican, sport macrophalluses with a distinctively Catholic meaning. They function as a reminder of the lustfulness of Adam after the Fall but also as a prophetic sign of the dissolute and disorderly state of the Damned in the Inferno. Though the Church officially condemned and censored the depiction of nudity as a stimulus for what St. Paul called "lust of the eyes,"' it sanctioned the depiction of Adam and Eve (and later, the semi-nude figures of the Crucified Christ and the arrow-wounded Sebastian) as icons for meditation on the perfection of the sinless human state and on the virtues of patience and humility. Later Renaissance artists even dared to show a stiff penis on the corpse of the dead Christ to suggest that his erection foreshadowed his resurrection! Modern commercial art school of thought photography has tended to leach away the cumulative religious and cultural significance of the male nude -- once so easily readable in relation to the deepest ethical and erotic meanings of Western culture -- so that the male body now emerges from beneath its suit of class-branded clothes as a sign of ultimate consumer desirability, as a pop culture artwork commodity chiefly valuable as a means of selling other commodities (such as Hot Male underwear or fragrance). Size matters in the modern iconography of maleness, but in the opposite way to its ancient Greek prototypes. A large Dionysian penis on a muscular hairy body is now a commercial symbol of male privilege and power, while the Apollonian ideal turns up on magazine covers in the not so,original art metrosexual image of David Beckham, usually shirtless, often provocatively posed in his soccer jock shorts or underwear.
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