![]() Under our knowing postmodern gaze, it is with mixed emotions that we look upon images of nude children which subvert this paradigm. With the waning of Christianity in the West the nude child has come to be seen differently, and, ironically, it is the Christians who now most often look upon the nude child as something shameful and sinister. ![]() This is precisely why the child nude was such a popular art subject with the Victorians they saw each individual as the microcosm of the whole of humanity itself, and children were therefore a representation of pre-Fall Adam and Eve, the earliest incarnation of Man, an idyllic period of time before humans fell out of God’s good graces and became sinners in need of redemption. But nudity-when divorced from the modern context in which it conveys sexual availability-also can call to mind spiritual innocence, especially when the nude figure is a child. We view children as vulnerable anyway, but the unclothed child is seen as even more vulnerable. As is evident on this blog, the image of the nude young girl is an image loaded with cultural baggage and, in some cases, peril for the artist. ![]()
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