Statue of a Male Nude with Hand on Hip c. 1754 - 1765

Hubert Robert made this sketch of a male nude with graphite on paper in France, during the eighteenth century. As a student at the French Academy in Rome, Robert would have been trained to make drawings after the antique, following a curriculum established in the seventeenth century. The artistic conventions of the nude have a long history. In ancient Greece, idealized male nudes were associated with civic virtue and democratic ideals. But by the eighteenth century, the tradition of the nude had become deeply institutionalized, and its use was restricted to a small set of academic genres. If we want to know more about how this drawing functioned within that system, we could look at the archives of the French Academy or examine academic treatises on art. With the help of those resources, we can come to understand the social and institutional conditions that gave shape to this image.