Radio Times: Review by:; Laurence Joyce

This excellent series shines the spotlight here on the unclothed male figure, with five revealing glances at the male nude from the ancient world to the present day. First the classicist Edith Hall praises the beauties of statues from Greece and Rome (Man and the arms I sing . . ?), and Partha Mitter and Gabriel Gbadamosi go naked in India and Africa in programmes 2 and 3.

Matthew Sweet follows up with a Victorian peek behind the fig-leaf designed for Michelangelo’s David, and Sarah Kent rounds things off with a compassionate view of the contrasting worlds of Lucian Freud and Robert Mapplethorpe.

About this programme

In the first of a series of essays on the meaning of the male nude in the visual arts, Edith Hall traces her fascination with the subject from Myron's bronze Discobolus to the marble form of Emperor Hadrian's lover Antinous and reflects on the impact they have had on her understanding of what it means to be a classicist.