Gaudenzio Marconi (1841-1885)

Gaudenzio Marconi (1841-1885), Italian photographer. His photographs were intended to be used by art students. From the start photography’s status as an art form was a subject of debate and disagreement but there were major artists who used such photographic studies as supplements to the use of live models. Whether these photographic studies qualify as art works is perhaps also debatable but clearly they were very much in the style of fashionable painting of the era.

Are they art or erotica? It’s fair to say that they were intended as art, and function as well in that capacity as the paintings of the average second-tier painter. There is of course something about photography that makes nudity seem more graphic. Partly it’s because photographs showed things that painters tended to be coy about showing, such as female pubic hair. Which made nude photographs more shocking, especially to those who were uncomfortable with the idea that women had genitals. So photography did have a tendency to make nudity seem somehow less respectable.

And when you look at a painting of a nude you can perhaps convince yourself that you’re looking at an allegorical figure or the goddess Venus. Photographs make it a bit more obvious that one is looking at an actual nude woman. Naked goddesses are one thing, but a photograph of an actual naked woman is something else.

Photography forced people to ask themselves whether they really thought that the naked female body was obscene. For some people the answer was yes.

Gaudenzio Marconi, Female nude with pictorial backdrop 1870-1879

Gaudenzio Marconi, Nude Study

Gaudenzio Marconi, Nudo accademico femminile con violino

Gaudenzio Marconi, Nudo femminile, circa 1870

Gaudenzio Marconi, Nudes and cherubs (putti)

Gaudenzio Marconi, Nude Study