ABSTRACT
For Western painting over the past several centuries, the nude male body has presented a host of problems that intersect with but are distinct from those attached to the nude female body. Regarding the painted nude generally, and the male nude especially, the viewer's interest is overdetermined to the extent that what the nude makes visible is the usually invisible site of deepest social and personal concern. Why so, especially for the male nude? The answer hinges in large part on the presumed audience, which in most instances concerning painted nudes of both sexes before the twentieth century was explicitly, if not exclusively, male. To be sure, women saw such images, though their access was sometimes more limited by comparison to that of men, but most nudes were not painted either by or for women. In ecclesiastical painting, the representation of Saint Sebastian exemplifies how the male nude defines the paradoxes.
