Naked Authority: The Body in Western Painting, 1830-1908

The human body, and in recent times particularly the female body, is central to western painting. Images such as Delacroix's Liberty on the Barricades and Manet's Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe are so well known that the question of how the gendered body functions in them is often overlooked. In this detailed feminist study of the body in general and the nude in particular, Marcia Pointon explores the narrative structure of a series of images to demonstrate how power relations may be articulated by visual representations of the gendered body.Pointon, Marcia is the author of 'Naked Authority: The Body in Western Painting, 1830-1908' with ISBN 9780521409995 and ISBN 0521409993.