Frontal
nudity

"These pictures are much too provocative and explicit for my taste... I'd rather not see everthing, that would be more appealing !"

I have sometimes been confronted with critics like these in the past, but recently it seems to happen more often that some visitors are shocked or even outraged discovering that many of my pictures do show frontal nudity. Before giving my own statement on this matter, I would like to take you on a short and extremely simplified tour throughout history of art with works displaying genitalia:

Art during the Antiquity knew absolutely no taboo with frontal nudity, it even was the norm, both for religious and secular themes. You could often see erotic or even sexually explicit illustrations as ornaments on consumer goods (see also examples in The Olympic Nude).

The Middle Ages were strongly influenced by the hostility towards the human body imposed by the expanding Christianity, but frontal nudity was still often despicted in biblical or mythological representations.
Renaissance artists recalled the body cult of antique times and so carried the artistic nude to its peak within the Western culture.