Not Naked but Nude

With award season still under way, Scarlett Johansson and Keira Knightley are exchanging ball gowns for birthday suits.

What does it take to get two stars who have absolutely no need to do anything so potentially desperate to take their clothes off for a magazine? First, the magazine has to be Vanity Fair, which persuaded Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johansson to be photographed naked in bed on its cover. Second, tell them they're not naked, but nude.

It was the art historian Kenneth Clark who claimed there is a difference. A naked human body is exposed, vulnerable, embarrassing, he wrote in his 1956 book The Nude. "The word 'nude', on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenceless body, but of a balanced, prosperous and confident body ... "

The women in this picture are not naked - they are nude. They have the gorgeous unreality of Botticelli's Venus, or Lorenzo Ghiberti's Eve, or the 18th-century paintings by Boucher and Fragonard that are its more direct models. These stars' bodies are Art.

Johannson's pose is based on a rococo painting by Boucher of Louise O'Murphy, a mistress of Louis XV, undressed and lying on her front, in what the cataloque of Munich's Alte Pinakothek - its owner -calls "a lascivious position".

Then there's that famous, anonymous French Renaissance painting in the Louvre of Gabrielle d'Estrées and her Sister, in which one aristocratic bather tweaks her sister's nipple.

Under the artful eye of photographer Annie Leibovitz, the actresses posed nude for the cover of Vanity Fair magazine's yearly Hollywood issue, to be released today.
Fashion superstar Tom Ford also appears in the cover photo, although he stuck with a more traditional suit -- one of black fabric.

Ford, the issue's guest art director, said he hadn't planned to become part of his own project, but he stepped in when "Wedding Crashers" star Rachel McAdams backed out.
"She did want to do it, and then when she was on the set I think she felt uncomfortable, and I didn't want to make anybody feel uncomfortable" Ford said Tuesday on ABC's "Good Morning America."