Yet Vitali’s favorite subject, the bather, boasts, like others, high caliber ascendants in the history of visual representation1. Once the depositary of erotic and sensual fantasies, as well as a vehicle for classical and biblical stories of the origins, the bather, especially if a woman, was a central figure in the evolving image of the nude. Venus, Diana, Betsabea and Susanna, as well as several allegorical figures and innumerable nameless nymphs, have populated the painters’ canvas, from Titian to Boucher, from Botticelli to Ingres.[…]
Strutting at the edge of the water or rising magnificently from the waves, the bather […] represented the topos of an essential femininity which, regardless of culture and society, nestled in the immortal waters of time or in the spaces without rules of heaven. The ones who deprived the bathers of their classical grace and their timeless connotations and permanently inserted them in the social and sexual circuits of contemporary life were the Realist Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet, the former in Les bagneuses of 1853, in which the portrayed figures clearly revealed their social class, the latter in Le déjeuner sur l’herbe of 1863, with the iconoclastic juxtaposition of female nudes and men in modern clothes. The idealized figures of traditional oil painting had already disappeared.[…]
Just as Realist painters were transforming the bather from a pre-packaged mythical figure to a historical protagonist, naturalist travelers and plein-air protagonists followed the footsteps of tourists and vacationers towards the leisure places that were flourishing along the banks of the Seine and towards the newly designed holiday resorts that were sprouting on the Italian, French and English coasts. It was there that beach and sea lovers revealed themselves to painters as modern creatures, produced by fashion and social conventions in the metropolitan centers of Europe. […]
